Tuesday, December 02, 2003

Posted here Tuesday, December 02, 2003 at 9:15:09 PM     Review article on Gore Vidal. Vidal's posthumous intimacy with his subject has not affected his personal judgment, reflected only in the last sentence of the novel when he places in the mouth of John Hay, Lincoln's personal secretary, the chilling conviction "that Lincoln, in some mysterious fashion, had willed his own murder as a form of atonement for the great and terrible thing that he had done by giving so bloody and absolute a rebirth to his nation." The novel has only subliminally prepared us for a Lincoln whose achievement was as terrible as it was great. But this, I think, had already become Vidal's own view, excluded from any direct statement of it by his novelist's faithfulness to his characters. He has no hesitation in expressing it in essays. Lincoln, he wrote in these pages in 1993, "preserved the Union by destroying it." ..He does not say why he esteems Jefferson and not Jackson, but probably for the same reason that he thinks Lincoln's salvation of the Union a terrible thing. Jefferson was an early proponent of the right of a state to nullify acts of the United States Congress, the right that Jackson temporarily defeated and Lincoln destroyed. In essays and speeches over the past twenty or thirty years Vidal has rung the changes on the little good the despotic government Lincoln made possible has done at home and the messes it has made abroad. His view, reiterated continually, is that our government, however popularly elected, represents only the large corporations that control it, as they control the media, through which they persuade the voters to support only two parties, conservative and reactionary. Wars fill their coffers, so at their behest the government levies heavy taxes for the purpose of waging unprovoked and undeclared wars: Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace lists almost two hundred from 1945 to 2001. Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and FDR took the central power Lincoln had created and used it to build a global empire. FDR deliberately instigated the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor so that he could bring an unwilling people into the Second World War. When the Japanese signaled their willingness to surrender, Truman hurried to drop the bomb on them in order to secure our power in Asia. Truman and his secretary of state, Dean Acheson, then turned the United States at home into a security state with the National Security Act of 1947 and the Security Council Memorandum number 68 of 1950. Vidal is enlisting himself on the side of the Founding Fathers, identifying himself with the popular esteem of them. He intends, I think, nothing controversial in his account, either of men or of events. But the recital of the Founders' views and achievements offers him the opportunity to invite his readers to recognize the present violation of everything they stood for. And that indeed is the apparent purpose of the book. ********

The values of the middle class under threat. Posted here Tuesday, December 02, 2003 at 2:54:26 PM     and from the preceding This excerpt from the introduction to the libertarian Cato Institute's Handbook for Congress in the 1990s is typical: The "bourgeois virtues" of work, thrift, sobriety, prudence, fidelity, self-reliance, and a concern for one's reputation developed and endured in part because they are the virtues necessary for survival and progress in a world where wealth must be produced and people are responsible for their own flourishing. Government can't do much to instill these virtues in people, but it can do much to undermine them. Comment: the rational would work except that the "bourgeoisie" which now means salaried employees, are working harder for less inn a squeeze between technology and third world competition. As the B values cease to work to support families, and increasing approach a non-rewarding treadmill existence, the work ethic will come apart. In much of our history people held on because the middle class was expanding, and middle class status was increasingly rewarding.     and The protective blanket of the welfare state has become widely perceived as smothering the vigorous virtues—initiative, diligence, commitment, fair play, and enthusiasm —in the name of charity, patience, kindness, and sympathy. From increasing the age of retirement to narrowing the criteria of disability, from tax credits for the working poor to competitive bidding on social service contracts, the norms and values that frame the design of social welfare policies for the enabling state, in all its renditions, tend to celebrate economic productivity and private responsibility over social protection and public aid comment: if the middle class were a constant percentage of the whole, or increasing, this might work. But what happens when it is shrinking, when instead of one chair per round of musical chairs two are taken out of the game?  The virtue argument is too limtied, avoids the reality of who suffers, and is made to order to maintain the flow of cash to the already much better off. Also, the programs described, support through corporations, is already away of taking cash tax from everybody and feeding it in to the corporate sector, thereby supporting larger organizations. and But Gilbert admits that he may be overstating the case. Direct social spending in such countries as Germany, Sweden, Italy, the Netherlands, and Denmark remains around 30 percent of GDP, compared to only 17 percent of GDP in the US.[4] Even in Britain, it is about 10 percent higher than in the US. comment: yet the pressure is on every country to cut these numbers to stay competitive. Given that employment is also falling, among older and the youngest workers, we can expect the armies of the unemployed become a nudge towards armies of war. Note the need for critical thinking to able to move at least three steps, else it is just mouthing static opinions. Change and secondary consequnces are crucial to understand. and But as the economists Marilyn Moon and Cristina Boccuti point out in a study for the Urban Institute, spending by private insurers per person has risen 20 percent faster than spending by Medicare since 1970. In a market as complex as health care, with information both scarce and hard to decipher for the average consumer, some regulation and standardization is often useful. ..But the experiment, as Gilbert points out, also took place in a strong job market. Moreover, a large proportion of those who left the welfare rolls still live at or near official poverty levels. In short, welfare reform needs itself to be reformed, as Amitai Etzioni writes in a foreword to Gilbert's book, because it has gone too far: Throwing mental patients, alcoholics, mothers with small children, or anyone else onto the streets and cutting off their benefits is not compatible with treating all people as ends in themselves. Note the idea that eating people as ends is still viable language. But does it carry any weight? For those who take a tougher view, the discipine is wrth it in creating a life, which is a form of treating people as ends, not just as recipients, but as producers. The circle of cause is in fact not easy. Tax deductions for corporate pension and health care benefits alone result in lost federal tax revenues of $200 billion a year. But only about 16 percent of workers with earnings in the bottom quintile of the nation—the lowest 20 percent—receive pension benefits, and only 24 percent receive health benefits. By contrast, some 50 percent of workers in the third quintile receive pension benefits and 60 percent health benefits. In the top quintile, roughly 70 percent of workers receive pension and health benefits. In a decreasingly active economy, with more aged, and less middle class, rethinking this problem is critical. The solution may require totaly new approaches. Otherwise we will see a larger part of the population suffereing more deeply over time. ********

Cost of drugs as percentage of budget for the benefit of...? Posted here Tuesday, December 02, 2003 at 2:41:05 PM     from the previous article on health care Out-of-pocket costs are expected to rise from $644 a year in 2000 to $1,454 in 2006. Even with $400 billion, the new legislation will reimburse only about one third of the beneficiaries' total out-of-pocket drug costs,[1] and the program will not even begin until 2006. The current bill will also make it possible to impose a limit on future increases in Medicare expenditures and create tax-free savings plans for individuals to pay for private services. If we think of each person having a budget, in part from personal funds and in part from the government, then we see that the percentage that could go for drugs could rise. There is no principled basis for limiting the increase of that percentage, which means other costs must go down (talking in percentages). This is a general problem of limitless goods driven by technical research and amrketing with the aim of taking a larger proportion of the total budget as profit in one's own sector. But there are a number of sectors that want to impoase this logic. What to do? How to manage it? It clearly is not a"market" but a government subsidized market, taking tax dollars from al and putting them into high profit margin uses for the apparent benefit of the  medicare patients but realy fueling the drug companies. ********

From the New York Review of Books Posted here Tuesday, December 02, 2003 at 1:03:29 PM     Health for Sale By Jeff Madrick Over the last twenty-five years, the attitude that government is often more an impediment to economic growth and social justice than a necessity has taken an ever-deeper hold in America. It is fair to say that a battle to determine the future of America's traditional welfare state is now underway. A Tract for the Times By Edmund S. Morgan In essays and speeches over the past twenty or thirty years Gore Vidal has rung the changes on the little good the despotic government Lincoln made possible has done at home and the messes it has made abroad. His view, reiterated continually, is that our government, however popularly elected, represents only the large corporations that control it, as they control the media, through which they persuade the voters to support only two parties, conservative and reactionary. ********

Bergen on Bush and Mylroie Posted here Tuesday, December 02, 2003 at 9:10:31 AM     About sources for Bush belief.. In the Washington Monthly Until this point, there was nothing controversial about Mylroie's career. This would change with the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, the first act of international terrorism within the United States, which would launch Mylroie on a quixotic quest to prove that Saddam's regime was the most important source of terrorism directed against this country. She laid out her case in Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America, a book published by AEI in 2000 which makes it clear that Mylroie and the neocon hawks worked hand in glove to push her theory that Iraq was behind the '93 Trade Center bombing. Its acknowledgements fulsomely thanked John Bolton and the staff of AEI for their assistance, while Richard Perle glowingly blurbed the book as "splendid and wholly convincing." Lewis "Scooter" Libby, now Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, is thanked for his "generous and timely assistance." And it appears that Paul Wolfowitz himself was instrumental in the genesis of Study of Revenge: His then-wife is credited with having "fundamentally shaped the book," while of Wolfowitz, she says: "At critical times, he provided crucial support for a project that is inherently difficult." None of which was out of the ordinary, except for this: Mylroie became enamored of her theory that Saddam was the mastermind of a vast anti-U.S. terrorist conspiracy in the face of virtually all evidence and expert opinion to the contrary. In what amounts to the discovery of a unified field theory of terrorism, Mylroie believes that Saddam was not only behind the '93 Trade Center attack, but also every anti-American terrorist incident of the past decade, from the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania to the leveling of the federal building in Oklahoma City to September 11 itself. She is, in short, a crackpot, which would not be significant if she were merely advising say, Lyndon LaRouche. But her neocon friends who went on to run the war in Iraq believed her theories, bringing her on as a consultant at the Pentagon, and they seem to continue to entertain her eccentric belief that Saddam is the fount of the entire shadow war against America. ********