Remember When

If you are old enough to remember when your job was a given and the ability to pay your mortgage was not in question, then you are old enough to vote. I ask you to consider the State of the Nation prior to the 2000 elections. Bill Clinton brought prosperity to the United States of America – we had jobs and the middle-class supported the manufacturing of American products and paid the bulk of the taxes in support of our government. President Clinton even left a 1.3 trillion surplus to his successor!

Compare those days under Clinton with eight years of George Bush, the 43^rd. Eight years of runaway spending for two wars, one of which was based on pure unadultered lies! Tax cuts that benefitted the rich! Budgets that hid the cost of the war in Iraq with the condonement of a then, Republican led Congress. The deregulation of Wall Street saw the collapse of major banks, requiring drastic tactics to keep this country afloat. Tax laws that rewarded those companies out-sourcing our jobs became the accepted thing to do!

You have been warned of the foreign money that is being used by unscrupulous groups to finance the campaigns of Republican candidates for office. If we allow these despicable acts to change the way our legislators are elected, we will have none to blame save ourselves. Give this President the tools to combat these irregularities in election laws. Remember that it was a Republican appointed Chief Justice that changed a precedence regarding finance campaign laws. Never before has the Supreme Court been so bold as to contradict precedence by a misinterpretation of the Constitution!

I now remind you of the turn-around that has been accomplished by a Democratic Congress led by a Democratic President. Sure money has been spent, but aren’t we better off as a result of it? Remember when we were losing seven hundred thousand jobs every month due to the policies of ‘Bush 43' and a Republican led Congress – I do? It is a fact, Bush the 43^rd, spent more of our taxes without a return, then any other President in the history of our government – eight trillion dollars.

Much has been accomplished by President Obama, and a Democratic Congress, in just two years; think of what can be accomplished if this president were to work with majorities in both houses of Congress for the next two years. We have a national insurance policy that will enable all of us to receive the medical care that we justly deserve and need. We have withdrawn our troops from the sovereign grounds of Iraq at great cost of life and limb, a cost that can be directly attributed to ill-advised decisions on the part of a Republican president. We have reined in the reckless acts of Wall Street and arrested the degradation of our banks and economy, but there is more to be done. We have a duty to reform the immigration laws, create more jobs, and most of all – Stop the out-sourcing of American jobs to foreign nations whom we know are now trying to buy our election processes.

Don’t allow the return of yesteryear – give your support to our President and Democratic lawmakers up for election

In a democracy, silence is not golden; it is condonance in the face of injustices; it is fear, where the thought of reprisal fosters control – Rodney A. Davis

The Audacity of Dopes

A few days ago a friend sent me an e-mail with an attachment proclaiming that Obama was forcing Health Care reform on us and that we should all sign some form letter protesting his decision to force this down our throats. I read the e-mail’s full contents and came away thinking that this individual must have been off the planet during the previous President’s administration.

I, first of all, am indignant that this individual would dare to presume that Bush ‘Jr.’ had nothing to do with the present state of affairs – financial, economically, and politically – that the United States finds itself in right now. I mean, he started two wars and left them for someone else to resolve – coupled with that is the mounting debt of those two wars… 2.7 trillion and rising! He gave the rich a ten year tax cut that is going to cost us 2.4 trillion by the time it expires in 2010. He oversaw the worse collapse in our economy since the Great Depression of 1939 and you have the audacity to send me an e-mail saying that the present President is forcing something horrible on you! This President that has done more in eight months than Bush did it eight years hogwash!

How anyone can make the effort to demean the reduction of the cost of Health Care in America is beyond me. Considering that we are the most advanced industrial State on the ‘PLANET’, we sure have a hard way of showing it with a life-expectancy that is behind countries like Costa Rica and Cuba – Third-World countries! You want to bitch to me that the President is forcing you to have a better life than most countries that you turn your nose up to for their level of poverty! Are you just plain ignorant, or what? What is even more astounding is that these countries that have better life-expectancies actually have some form of government subsidized health care for all of their people – go figure! Even Mexico is better than the United States considering that it is a Third World country with a life-expectancy of 76.1 years!

These protestors are concerned that abortions will be funded by this Health Care reform bill. The effort to fight this bill for reasons unfounded anywhere in the document is ludicrous, but there they are fighting to rescind a law that has had precedence for over thirty years. The practice of abstinence 'was favored' over sexual education, over teaching our kids to deal with peer pressure, and over being responsible for providing our kids with the means to prevent pregnancies when we know that they are sexually active.

What will even the most rudimentary form of Health Care reform do… it will reduce cost through fraud detection, force competition between companies within the insurance industry, and reduce the needless request to order more test to confirm a diagnosis that can be done with less spending. Hospitals that have realized these basic principles are currently doing better with less in every aspect of medicine. Patients are recovering faster, mortality rates are down, and overall performance of these hospitals has improved tremendously.

The biggest problem with getting a better life-expectancy for Americans is providing the ignorant with sound reputable information that shows that if you implement a legislative law that is not influenced by the industry you are trying to regulate, you will be able to deliver as promised. Consider that the anti-trust exemption that has been granted the Insurance industry is actually hindering any chance to regulate the cost of Health Care – removing this exemption will force insurance companies to compete. Right now, each insurance company has an appointed area in which it operates and no other insurance company can venture into that area – hence, no competition and prices remained fixed at higher than normal levels with regard to the insured; bet you didn't know that?

As Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) explained at the hearing, the health insurance industry — unlike any other private industry in the country — is allowed to engage in price fixing, bid rigging and market allocation, all of which would violate the law if any other sort of company did it.

If you think that fighting Health Care reform is the sensible thing to do, then you deserve exactly what you will receive if we don’t pass a strong Health Care Bill. All anyone can ask is that you take a serious look at what you are fighting against and the people that are supporting you in this effort. Ignorance of the facts is not an excuse!

The One Big Thing George W. Bush Did Right

Robert Creamer Political organizer and strategist

Posted January 15, 2009, Huffington Post | 08:54 AM (EST)

History will record that George W. Bush made one critically important contribution to our country -- and to the entire world. He and his administration provided unquestionable proof of the bankruptcy of radical-conservative ideology, and set the stage for a qualitatively different progressive era in American politics.

History is not linear. It is not gradual or evolutionary. Human progress proceeds in fits and starts like a volcano, where pressure gradually builds over years and then erupts with enormous power.

Very often those explosions of progress -- periods when we expand the realm of democratic values, human dignity, economic opportunity and optimism -- are precipitated by periods of domination by the forces of privilege, inequality and selfishness.

By assuring that all of the fruits of the growth of productivity in our economy went to the wealthiest 2% of our population, the Bush administration set the stage for the current economic collapse.

By actually putting into practice the Neo-Conservative theories of pre-emptive war and unilateralism, George W. Bush demonstrated their failure more persuasively than could the most articulate progressive critic.

By abandoning our historic commitment to due process and sinking into the dark world of torture, George W. Bush and his partner Dick Cheney isolated themselves from the growing worldwide commitment to human rights.

A brilliant new book by Democratic strategist and author Mike Lux documents the other periods in our history when conservative domination led to progressive renewal. The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, describes the five "big change" moments in American history since the American Revolution: the Bill of Rights, the ending of slavery, the Progressive Era, the New Deal and the civil rights movement.

He argues that big changes have never occurred gradually -- nor have they been spread randomly over our history. Rather, they have been concentrated in these periods of "big change." In each, a cascade of progressive innovation took place over a short period of time, after years of right wing opposition.

Lux writes:

Progressives invented the American ideal and inspired the American Revolution. Conservatives, then known as Tories, opposed it. Since then, every major advancement in American freedom, democracy, social justice, and economic opportunity has been fostered, fought for, and won by progressives against conservative resistance. Now who's anti-American?

We've already seen previews of the new progressive era, but the curtain will really go up next Tuesday when Barack Obama is inaugurated the 44th President of the United States. The next few years could be a transformational period -- if we all make it so.

As for Bush, he will be remembered as the man who set the stage. He has played the Hoover to Obama's Roosevelt, the James Buchanan to Obama's Lincoln.

Lux's study also makes something else absolutely clear. In American history, the pendulum has not swung inevitably back and forth between conservative and progressive periods with some form of historic equivalency. Instead, the changes emerging from periods of progressive success, once made, remain a permanent feature of our society.

Conservatives fought against the ending of slavery, women's suffrage, Social Security, collective bargaining, Medicare, and the end of segregation. After the progressive period that brought them to life was done, a conservative backlash often tried to limit the scope of these important advances -- with Jim Crow, assaults on Labor, or attempts to privatize Social Security. But conservatives have never been successful at eliminating them.

Once enacted, progressive change is hard to dislodge. That's because progressive change is progress. Progressive values are the most adaptive trait human beings have yet created to ensure our success and survival on this small planet.

The Right battled for decades to take complete control of the levers of power in Washington. The election of George W. Bush finally gave them the ability to combine the power of the presidency with their control of Congress to make their program the law of the land.

Ironically, their very success may assure that George W. Bush is remembered as the president whose failures created the conditions we needed to craft a new bottom-up economy, to pass universal health care and to create new international institutions that bring us closer to a world where we no longer rely on war to resolve our differences.

Of course nothing is inevitable. We cannot afford to squander the opportunity that history and George W. Bush have provided us. It is time for all of us to report for duty in the battle to turn this historic opportunity into the next great period of progress in America.

Robert Creamer is a long time political organizer and strategist and author of the recent book: Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, available on Amazon.com.