Author Archives: Margie Burns

DFA calls for rejecting health care bill

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Below is the message being circulated by Democracy for America, Gov. Howard Dean’s netroots organizing group, over the signature of Jim Dean. I dearly hope that the predictions expressed are too pessimistic. But they make a lot of sense.
[message follows]


I’ll get straight to the point.

If Democrats remove the choice of a public option, they can’t force Americans to buy health insurance.

Here’s
the deal, Senate leaders are all over Washington claiming they finally
have a healthcare reform bill they can pass, as long as they remove the
public option. After all, they say, even without a public option, the
bill still “covers 30 million more Americans.” The problem is that’s
not really true.

What they are actually talking about is
something called the “individual mandate.” That’s a section of the law
that requires every single American buy health insurance or break the
law and face penalties and fines. So, the bill doesn’t
actually “cover” 30 million more Americans — instead it makes them
criminals if they don’t buy insurance from the same companies that got
us into this mess.

A public option would have
provided the competition needed to drive down costs and improve
coverage. It would have kept insurance companies honest by providing an
affordable alternative Americans can trust. That’s why, without a
public option, this bill is almost a trillion dollar taxpayer giveaway
to insurance companies.

We must act fast. Both Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid and Democratic Senators need to hear from you. Please stop whatever else you are doing and make the calls right now.

Senator Harry Reid
DC: (202) 224-3542
Carson City: (775) 882-7343
Las Vegas: (702) 388-5020
Reno: (775) 686-5750

Call your Democratic Senator too — Senate Switchboard: (202) 224-3121 

REPORT YOUR CALL AND TELL US HOW IT WENT

Without
the choice of a public option, forcing Americans to buy health
insurance isn’t just bad policy, it’s political disaster for Democrats
— a ticking time-bomb for years to come.

Does anyone think Republicans won’t use this against Democrats in 2010?

What
about in 2014 after the mandate goes into effect and the press reports
all the horror stories of Americans forced to choose between paying
their monthly health insurance bill to Aetna or paying rent?

The mandate is toxic and Democrats will own it. By the 2016 presidential election, is there any wonder how this will play out for Democrats?

CALL SENATOR HARRY REID NOW AT (202) 224-3542 THEN REPORT YOUR CALL HERE

The message is simple: No public option? No Mandate!

Thank you for everything you do,

-Jim

Jim Dean, Chair
Democracy for America

Bravo, Please keep your ‘real housewives’ away from D.C.

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Open letter to Bravo:

 –Bravo, please stay away from D.C.

Unreal

Dear Bravo, I’m begging you, in all earnestness–please keep your ‘real’ housewives out of Washington, D.C., the nation’s capital, the metro area I have lived in since 1982. I have reared a child here, a young adult whose character puts to shame many of the pseudo-independents and phonies who rail against “Washington.” That word real in your title is bad enough in itself: any word that beggars the term ‘misnomer’ is putting too much power in human hands. The term “housewives” does not do much for the twenty-first century, either, not for people who defend homemakers and not for people who like the idea of a career, not for anyone anywhere on the political spectrum. Even the show’s title is a minor calamity; the show itself would be a local disaster. It already is.

U.S. Capitol at night

Maybe I should confess up top—well, near the top anyway—that I have never watched an episode of Real Housewives. There’s a reason for that: I have been force-fed enough promotions for the show in its various locations—CA, Atlanta, wherever—to add up to the length of an episode, and seeing the promos is enough for me, more than enough. From everything I can glean—and this is from you, you understand, from your very own cable presentations designed to entice viewers—the ‘real housewives’ are a bunch of over-painted loudmouths.

I have yet to hear, even secondhand, that they have done anything much for humanity, done anything for this country, done anything for the world; that they have any talent or skills unrelated to using so much hairspray that they deserve to have a hole in the ozone layer named after them.

 

Truckloads of complexion-destroying makeup, yes; gallons of hair dye, yes; women’s clothes that suggest someone at Bravo hung onto a warehouse left over from the Eighties, check. Creepy rudeness, uninteresting conflict, bumptiousness that challenges any notion of humankind as the last word (to date) in evolution. This is the way a reasonably popular cable channel wants to present women?

 

Why?

 

Top Chef dvd

As you may have figured out, Bravo, there’s a reason why I even know this stuff in spite of being so revolted at the concept of Real Housewives that I have promised myself never to watch it. Here it is: One of my guilty pleasures is watching Top Chef. Speaking of a Bravo program, Top Chef could use the skills of the phenomenal Tyra Banks, of whom I am a fan. If only some of the female contestants on Top Chef could get a pep talk from Ms. Banks, we might have a less unbalanced competition in some ways. I intend to watch tonight’s cookdown—I admit it—partly because I enjoy the vicarious cooking experience on the show, and partly because I’m curious to see who will come out ahead. The Big Question awaits answer as always: Which will the show send home first—The Woman, or The Southerner?

 

The Southerner

But I digress, as Tom Lehrer would say. Back to your disaster program, the single worst thing about watching a show like Top Chef is being subjected to promos for Real Housewives. Do I really deserve that?

I don’t mind entertainment; I’m for it. I’m not even against reality shows, as long as they involve talent and skill. The existing reality shows that do involve talent and skill—cooking, singing (American Idol), dancing (Dancing with the Stars)—trump the ‘reality’ shows that involve an unskilled ensemble of non-actors who are also non-writers, every time. The latter seem to be mainly an excuse to put on a television series of sorts that stiffs writers.

Maybe that’s their purpose.

Striking writers

Seriously, I’m begging you: Send the ‘housewives’ home.

I would never say that about real housewives, of course.

[Note: Sure enough, the woman lost out first, then the southerner. Last men standing, an uninteresting sibling rivalry.]

[This article, deleted by the system among hundreds of articles and blog posts in summer 2011, is re-posted using archives and Word files.]

Reporting on GOP without mentioning Ron Paul, reporting police deaths emphasizing Mike Huckabee

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A lengthy front-pager devoted to the divisions within the GOP in this morning’s Washington Post omitted any mention of Ron Paul. This in spite of the fact that the article notes an increase in percentage of GOPers identifying themselves as ‘very conservative’ fiscally, up from a couple of years ago. Rep. Paul (R-Tex.), with whom I often disagree though not over the Iraq war–which he opposed–is also arguably the congress member singly most responsible for a strong possibility of greater transparency in the Federal Reserve. The Fed may soon be audited; high time.

In more political news, or at least that’s the way it is being presented, numerous media outlets are reporting that four police officers shot in Washington state were killed by a former Arkansas convict whose sentence was commuted by Gov. Huckabee. Huffington Post is playing up the Huckabee angle bigtime.

This is the kind of thing that makes ordinary people despise reporters. See, it’s not enough of a news story, apparently, that four police sitting in a coffee shop were slain. You have to find the ‘hook,’ and the hook in this instance is IT’S PAYBACK FOR WILLIE HORTON!

PAYBACK TIME! PAYBACK TIME!

In no way is this post to be misunderstood as defending or exonerating the infamous Bush Sr campaign in 1988. The Willie Horton attacks on Michael Dukakis–a World War II veteran, btw–were smarmy, bigoted, meanminded and vile. ‘Selfish’ and ‘petty’ would be lavish praise. Those attacks were ‘framed’ by the late Lee Atwater, whose cronies included Marvin P. Bush, youngest Bush brother, and were entirely of a piece with the attacks on John McCain in the 2000 primaries, when rumors circulated behind the scenes intimated that the McCains’ adopted daughter was actually his illegitimate child from a mixed-race liaison. What with one thing and another, this blindly vile, cowardly and calculating attack worked to stop McCain in South Carolina–to the everlasting shame of the news media, which never got around to airing them adequately and thus dispatching them in 2000.

The attacks on Dukakis also would not have worked without the complicity of large media outlets. To put it simply, the Willie Horton campaign against Dukakis was enabled by the news media at the time, which never gave Dukakis a fair chance.

And now the same kind of people–that is, reporters with the same caliber of objectivity and fairness, the same sense of proportion, the same ability to look beyond the moment to the big picture–are boosting ‘Huckabee’ as the lede in a story about gunning down police.

We are indeed stuck in difficult economic times, and our newspapers and other large media outlets are in sore straits, mainly the fault of their own management. This kind of presentation is part of the reciprocal cause and effect between bad times and bad press work. It’s ‘power’ that matters, when times get bad among reporters. The grisliest ‘ordinary’ crimes hardly get reported–cf. those hideous murders of poor and substance-troubled women in Cleveland, Ohio–while anything with a political hook gets massive play. In this instance it’s not because Mike Huckabee has been prominent in the headlines recently; it’s because anything connected, however remotely, with Who Will Win in 2012 has the aura of ‘power’ in the newsroom.

Thus do newspapers drive away readers, while their web sites post newspaper articles that mainly serve as caddies–comment threads–for the most predictably ill-natured, vengeful and ignorant comments imaginable.


Trains, books, and anti-union propaganda

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Trains, books and anti-union propaganda

In an OpEd News interview with Joan Brunwasser I referred to some antique anti-union propaganda I ran across. Here are more specifics.

The book series itself was titled THE BOYS’ STORY OF THE RAILROAD SERIES, published early 20th century by The Page Company (which, like the vast majority of early U.S. publishers, no longer exists). The books are obviously designed to inspire, or to play upon, kids’—or at least boys’—love of railroads and trains. They also are obviously designed to instruct boys how to become rail employees.

Titles:

THE YOUNG SECTION-HAND; Or, The Adventures of Allen West. “The whole range of section railroading is covered in the story,” said the Chicago Post at the time. At 278 pages, it should have been. (The Chicago Post, like hundreds of other formerly competing city dailies, no longer exists.)

THE YOUNG TRAIN DISPATCHER.

THE YOUNG TRAIN MASTER. “It is a book that can be unreservedly commended to anyone who loves a good, wholesome, thrilling, informing yarn,” said the Passaic News. (The Passaic News, like hundreds of other small newspapers, is gone.)

THE YOUNG APPRENTICE; Or, Allan West’s Chum. This one got a blurb from the Baltimore Sun: “The story is intensely interesting.” (The Sun still exists but is owned by the Tribune Company, parent of the Chicago Tribune.)

Author Burton E. Stevenson seems to have been relatively successful with his Allen West, since this staunchly anti-union protagonist turns up again. The spelling of young Allen’s name changes, however.

Several of Burton Stevenson’s books are available as free e-books, although the railroad series seems not to have turned up on the list yet.

The Page Company published a number of these small series by its stable of authors. There are two titles by author Lucy M. Blanchard—CARITA, AND HOW SHE BECAME A PATRIOTIC AMERICAN; and CARITA’S NEW WORLD.

Author Herschel Williams penned THE MERRYMAKERS SERIES, about a family enjoying life around the country. See for example THE MERRYMAKERS IN CHICAGO:

Blurb:

“The Merrymakers who had such a splendid Christmas vacation in New York, enjoy another rollicking good time,–a summer vacation in Chicago. While brother Ned, the young newspaper reporter, “covers” the Republican national convention in Chicago, Carl, the oldest of the four sightseeing Merrymakers, decides that he wants to own a department store some day, and incidentally learns all the steps he must take from being an errand boy to a merchant magnate.”

 

Et cetera.

Michael Moore’s movie makes a hit

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Michael Moore movie a hit

  –Moore has done what the press should have done.

 

Seeing Michael Moore

TARP money and hush money

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TARP money and hush money

The steady stream of reports is becoming a torrent: Notwithstanding abundant evidence of shortcomings in-house and public revulsion on the street, firm after firm that benefited from taxpayer bailouts and other public funding is now—again–setting aside enormous funds for executive bonuses.

AIG

This morning’s Wall Street Journal reports that AIG—American International Group, is holding off on planned bonuses for executives, including $235 million specifically for its troubled financial products unit. Outrage over the planned bonuses, almost dwarfed by the bonuses contemplated at other financial firms, is leading to congressional oversight. The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and numerous other metropolitan dailies are carrying the story of this quarter’s round of bonus revelations.

Yesterday Morgan Stanley was reported as setting aside $3.9 billion for payouts–in spite of posting losses of $159 million for the second quarter of 2009–an increase of 26 % over compensation from a year ago. That would be 72 percent of Morgan Stanley’s net revenues.

Last week Goldman Sachs reported setting aside $6.65 billion for executive compensation. Unlike Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs reported whopping profits for the quarter. Still, the amounts involved were enough to strengthen demand for a “say-on-pay” law in Congress, with Goldman, which repaid $10 billion to the U.S. Treasury, as Exhibit A in a general picture of shamelessness among Wall Street tortfeasors.

Meanwhile, J. P. Morgan Chase, Citigroup and Bank of America also posted windfall earnings—all financial giants bailed out by Lilliputian taxpayers. Citigroup is also among banks planning multi-year bonuses for executive recruiting.

The week before, AIG asked administration approval for retention bonuses, including bonuses for the financial products unit largely responsible for the troubled mortgage-backed derivatives commerce involved in the financial crisis.

Needless to say, all these bonuses come at a time when millions of ordinary people face job loss, foreclosure or bankruptcy, or at best diminished income from the general business downturn. Also, the companies involved are battling demands for greater oversight from the feds, going so far as to ramp up their lobbying—paying for the lobbying, while keeping the purse strings tight in their lending–to prevent more effective oversight. Financial companies are also fighting off demands for greater transparency from their shareholders—whose stock losses in their 401(k)s helped get the Wall Street no-strings-attached bailout passed in Congress, last fall, even under the outgoing and discredited Bush administration. And not only have stock prices suffered, but shareholders for the most part are not exactly being sweetened with increased dividends.

You really do have to wonder why some of the biggest financial entities on Wall Street would be so much more willing to send away their own shareholders angry, and to anger the public, than to send away some of their top management angry.

There ought to be a law . . .

Reforms are being contemplated by Congress, and some reform legislation will undoubtedly pass. In the interim, we do have law enforcement. The phrase “hush money” may be slang, but it is defined in Black’s Law Dictionary as “A bribe to suppress the dissemination of certain information; a payment to secure silence.”

Modest Proposal: Extend Medicare to 18-to-26 age group

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A modest proposal: Expand Medicare to
college-age young adults

 

Even after Michael Moore

Senator Graham, please stop using Quaker language to ramp up hostilities

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Call this an open letter to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who yesterday on This Week with George Stephanopoulos called on President Obama to step up hostility against the Iranian regime. He also called the president, who endures more personal attacks daily than Graham is showing much awareness of, “timid” and “passive.”

The kicker is that Sen. Graham employed the old Quaker expression “Speak truth to power” to convey his rhetorical bellicosities.

I myself was a Quaker for years, although I left my meeting several years ago–a local Religious Society of Friends meeting, here in the Maryland suburbs of D.C. In my opinion, Graham is wittingly or unwittingly engaging in something offensive to people of conscience. It is no more appropriate for Mr. Graham to lift one of the oldest Quaker expressions, and to 180 its message to boost hostilities, than it would be for him to use the Mormon temple as backdrop for an open-bar party, etc.

Anyway, the “speak truth to power” phrase is not applicable to the United States government vis-a-vis the Iranian government in the first place. Speaking truth to power is David versus Goliath, the self-exhortation the weak give themselves in positions where they are materially powerless, the self-reminder that in the worst circumstances they may voice something that will live after them. The U.S. government is not the weak facing the strong here. That may be the position of some of the protestors in Iran. But it would be morally presumptuous for a comfortable U.S. senator to exhort Iranian protestors to go out into the streets and die for their cause, whatever their cause is. Besides, the Iranian regime is hearing all kinds of speech.  

The very vagueness of these pseudo-spiritual exhortations by some of our GOP spokesmen should be a clue to the media outlets that give them a platform their ersatz message has hardly earned. What exactly are they recommending, after all? –parachuting American soldiers into Tehran? Invasion? (Not yet.) It is a measure of the limitlessness of presumption that some rightwingers can–even given their track record re Iraq, the Palestinians, Afghanistan–presume to put themselves forward at this juncture, just for the narrow political objective of undermining a measured response to Iranian violence by a U.S. president. Further demonstration, if proof were needed: They figure that every war ultimately benefits them. Crisis benefits them. Violence benefits them. So the political talking points get trotted out–whatever talking points make crisis worse–that’s the ticket.

What would be best and safest for this country and for the world would be a peaceful transfer of power in Iran. The Iranian people have the best hopes and wishes of the majority of the U.S. public in that regard. But that message could be conveyed much more effectively, and constructively, if the individuals most culpable for getting this country into war in the Middle East would pipe down.

One thing all this irrational exuberance (for bloodshed) signals is a continuing lack of transparency and accountability in the corporate news media. When media outlets stand to profit–materially–from actions and policies they support, the public should have access to that information in order to make an informed judgment.

Scrutinizing ‘the Internet’ when they should scrutinize the NRA

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The right to bear arms already—if your gun is already drawn

Targeting the Internet versus scrutinizing the NRA:

Following up on last night’s post—

We’re not off to a good start. In the aftermath of rising gun sales and recent fatal shootings including the killing of security guard Stephen Tyrone Johns by James von Brunn at the Holocaust Memorial Museum yesterday, we need to let the sunshine in on U.S. firearms trafficking and the political insolence of the gun lobby.

Stephen Tyrone Johns

A quick run-down on how those issues are surfacing in major newspapers today:

  • The New York Times: number of times today that the National Rifle Association and/or the NRA is mentioned: 0. One article about James von Brunn’s shooting at the museum. At least the Times doesn’t blame it on the internet.
  • The Washington Post: number of times today the Post mentions the National Rifle Association or NRA: 2. One mention comes in a politics report handicapping the Virginia governor’s race; the other appears in the obituary of an NRA member. Number of times today the Post brings up the Internet in connection with violence: 3. Number of times the Post brings up the NRA, the gun industry,  firearms trafficking, or firearms in connection with violence: 0. (“Firearms” is, however, a keyword for indexing articles about the shooting and Mr. Johns’ death in the Lexis-Nexis database.)
  • Los Angeles Times: number of times today that the LATimes mentions the National Rifle Association/NRA: 0. The LATimes does not blame the internet in connection with von Brunn.
  • Chicago Tribune: Well, things are looking up. Of articles on the museum shooting in the Tribune, one article mentions that convicted felons are not supposed to be allowed to own firearms.
  • Baltimore Sun: The Sun being owned by the Tribune, the above-mentioned article from the Trib appears in the Sun. Local reporting details well von Brunn’s decades-long history as a troubled and violent personality.
  • Number of times all major U.S. newspapers, combined, raise the question how such a troubled person—with a felony conviction for attempting a “citizen’s arrest” of the Federal Reserve Board in the 1980s and a short stint in county jail for assaulting a sheriff back in the 1960s—could obtain firearms: 0.

One newspaper article today, in this generously resourced nation of ours, does bring up the issue of firearms in connection with von Brunn’s actions—to argue that gun control is futile. A gun advocate writing for the Examiner, owned by conservative billionaire Philip Anschutz, reportedly considering buying the Boston Globe from the Times company, argues that what von Brunn was doing is illegal already:

“Item #1: As a convicted felon, von Brunn could not legally own a firearm, so when he carried what has been described as a “long rifle” or a “long gun”, he was already in violation of that particular statute.

   Item #2: It is illegal in Washington, D.C. to trot around with a gun, and illegal everywhere to enter a federal building with a firearm.

   Item #3: It is illegal to criminally assault someone with a firearm, yet that is exactly what the suspect did Wednesday.”

Ergo, laws do not work. So we should not have them.

 

As the argument continues,

“When is the last time anyone heard of a mass shooting at a gun range, gun show or an NRA convention? Never? Well, DUH! There’s a reason for that. As exemplified by last month’s NRA gathering in Phoenix, AZ, there was a definite armed presence; a gunman would have been met with a fusillade.”

The author seems not to connect the fact that guards at the museum were armed, although to do him justice he does mention the fact:

“This is all the more reason why law-abiding American citizens should be allowed to exercise their right to keep and bear arms virtually anywhere. Placing restrictions on legal concealed or open carry has been proven time and again to provide a risk-free working environment for lunatics bent on harming a lot of innocent people. Gun-free zones are killing fields for madmen.

   Of course, the museum is not exactly a gun-free zone. Security officers, including Officer Stephen Tyrone Johns, who was fatally wounded, are armed. This incident happened very fast, Metro Police Chief Kathy Lanier said the suspect opened fire immediately when he entered the doorway of the museum. It is not clear whether Johns was able to engage and exchange shots or whether one of the other guards shot the suspect.”

 

So the difference between the museum—not, as the writer points out, “a gun-free zone”—and “a gun range, gun show or an NRA convention” is what? Not the presence on the scene of guns. No. The difference must be the sheer number of guns on the scene, sufficient to be a deterrent presumably, although that word is not used. But this gunman was clearly suicidal as well as homicidal, broke and in debt, barely able to make ends meet. The tragic events look like what police call “suicide by cop,” varied only slightly to become suicide by armed security guard.

Or is the difference that the guns at the museum were not already drawn? “This incident happened very fast.” In other words, as news reports indicate, von Brunn fired before the guards had time to draw their guns. Clearly guns being fired at a gun range are already drawn. But are the guns at “a gun show or an NRA convention” also already drawn? New news, if so.

von Brunn


Along these lines—Come to think of it, it would be illuminating to know what precautions the NRA takes when it fires someone.

 

[Editorial disclaimer: This article, deleted by the system among hundreds of articles and blog posts in summer 2011, is re-posted using archives and Word files.]

Fitzgerald tried to get Obama, came up with

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Fitzgerald tried to get Obama, came up with