Politics as Usual

Well, so much for a supermajority. After the Republican victory in Massachusetts today, the Healthcare bill looks to be in trouble. According to a NY Times article, this leaves the Democrats with two options: find support from Republicans, or try to pass the Senate bill as is in the House. It will be interesting to see where this ends up. While I'm disheartened at the potential loss of healthcare reform power, I am unsurprised that the Republicans rallied and shifted the momentum. Any time that one political party is in the driver's seat the other party has the advantage of playing the blame game and portraying the political scene as one of threat to the country. The perception of threat and culpability for all current woes is a powerful motivator for voters, and that was displayed today.
I think that this has less to do with political scapegoating and tactics as it does with the structure of the system itself. In a two-party system, there is a tendency to find an equilibrium point, and the self-correcting nature of politics through the mechanisms of blame and fear is inherent in the structure. This has positive and negative consequences, including moderate positions on issues, balanced discussions, but also an inability to make sweeping changes when there is no immediate threat of danger. Healthcare and government regulation of business and the environment are two areas where we are failing to deal with slowly growing problems that will have (and are having) serious implications for our economic and ecological wellbeing.
I'm afraid that it will either take a squeeze through the house of representatives or crippling compromises to get the healthcare bill through now, and neither one will be any help to President Obama in this politically precarious time. Best of luck to you, Mr. President.

"Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee?"

I'm just reading about the Obama administration's intention to charge banks that were allocated funds through the bailout bill $50 billion or so over the next ten years, if not more. This seems like a thinly-veiled politically-motivated mistake to me. Maybe I'm missing some big part of the logic, but as I understand it, the banks were forced to take the money in the first place, so not only did the government require that the chosen banks be a part of the bailout, but now they're charging fees based on the fact that the banks took the money! Another problem is that the banks have already paid back the money (with interest) that they were given in the bailout. According to a NY times article, "the administration is justifying the levy by arguing that banks were responsible for causing the financial crisis in the first place." This is also based on a misunderstanding of the causes of the crisis. Not only are the causes widespread and complicated, but the government itself is implicated in the building of the asset bubble. Examples include the Federal Reserve policies of easy money, regulatory failures related to complex financial derivatives, and their encouragement of Fanny and Freddie to make imprudent loans.
Finally, to have these narrow-minded and judgemental pronouncements come at a time when the news dominating the financial-political sphere is about high executive bonuses indicates that the move is pandering to a populist political fad rather than appealing to sound logial or moral principles. I'm fairly disappointed by Obama's push for this, though if understood in the light of some of the other battles that he's fighting, I can grant some leeway if it helps him get healthcare legislation pushed through.

Healthcare Thoughts

I just watched an interesting Frontline documentary about the healthcare systems around the world, and it reminds me of the cultural assumptions that underlie every policy choice we face in America. We see free primary and secondary education as essential for our citizens, but health care as something that is up to each individual to find and afford. I know this parallel is drawn a lot, but I can't get over it! The assumption must be that if individuals aren't responsible for their own health care, then the government will be, and they will be corrupt and inefficient at it. What is absent from this logic is the fact that individuals do not choose their own healthcare in the US as it is. Individuals are constrained by social, economic, geographic, and political realities, while the diverse interests in the healthcare industry are able to profit from divided consumer power. By charging the individual with finding their own healthcare, we have given insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and hospitals the motivation to pander to the healthy and rich, rather than the sick and poor.
We claim moral objectivity by trusting in individual choice despite the fact that individual choice is constrained by resources that are allocated by factors other than need or even merit. Does Bill Gates deserve to make hundreds of thousands of times the amount that an office worker, construction worker, or goverment employee makes? Did he work harder? Perhaps harder than some, but certainly not by a factor of 100,000. What is really going on is that we reward people for being the right person with the right idea in the right place at the right time. This, we claim, is the secret to motivation and innovation, but the majority of those factors are determined not by work ethic or entrepreneurship, but by birth, socioeconomic status, and luck. Is that really what we want as a moral base for our economic and healthcare system? I hope not.

Great Video/Photojournalism

I've been looking through some of John D. McHugh's work for The Guardian, and he has some amazing photographs and video of what's going on in the tribal areas of Afghanistan right now. Check it out!