Several Items: Medicare, Haiti, Taxes, Tea Baggers

by Dollars and Sense

While Blogger continues to screw up our blog, and until we can migrate to WordPress, I may start posting multiple items in one post to save myself the trouble of all the work-arounds I need to do otherwise. Here are some items that I've been meaning to post this week:

• Our last post was about Obama's bad choices for his debt commission—people who want to loot Social Security. But there is apparently some good news: We have it on good authority—my sister, who is a physician assistant and medical director at a network of rural health centers in West Virginia—that Obama's pick to head the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services, Donald Berwick, is a very good choice. She said she was "giddy" when she heard the news. Berwick is a professor at Harvard Med School and also heads the Institute for Healthcare Improvement in Cambridge, Mass.


• Second item, by Ruth Messinger, at Huffington Post (hat-tip to TM): Bill Clinton issuing a mea culpa about the effects of his trade policies on Haiti. Ugh. Here's a sample:
  

  As many of us have been paying close attention to the long-awaited passage of health care reform last week, it was easy to miss something else that was absolutely extraordinary. Former President Bill Clinton said at a recent Senate hearing that he regrets the impact in Haiti of the free trade policies that became a hallmark of his presidency.
  

  "It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked. It was a mistake," Clinton said this month. "I had to live everyday with the consequences of the loss of capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people because of what I did; nobody else."

  
  Read the full article. (On this topic see our recent article by Marie Kennedy and Chris Tilly, Haiti's Fault Lines: Made in the U.S.A.)


• Third item: Glenn Greenwald article from Salon, via Common Dreams: Mike McConnell, the WaPo, and the Dangers of Sleazy Corporatism, about the executive vice president of Booz Allen Hamilton, creepy defense/intelligence/security contractor that figures prominently in one of the features in our current issue, Synergy in Security, by Tom Barry. Hat-tip to Mike P. (Incidentally, if you live in the Boston area, you hear that Booz Allen is an underwriter for one of our local public radio stations, WBUR. Maybe they fund NPR across the country? Another reason not to listen.)


• Fourth: new web gizmos and charts: from the National Priorities Project, an Interactive Tax Chart Tool in anticpation of Tax Day 2010 (speaking of which--is everyone ready to go out on Tax Day to interact with, and counter, the Tea Baggers? More on this below...); and the Wall Street Bailout Cost table, which is a project of the Real Economy Project, which is a project of the Center for Media and Democracy. Seriously, this table is really useful, and I commend them for putting it together--we tried last year to put together something similar, and found it nearly impossible to keep it up to date.


• Last but not least: A nice blog post by Mark Engler: (Over)Counting the Tea Parties. Mark, occasional D&S author and Left Forum pal, manages to pin down some ideas about the Tea Baggers (as I prefer to call them, as a sly homage to a term from John Waters' film Pecker) that I'd had but hadn't been able to quantify as he does here. On this topic, though: on Wednesday I was lucky enough to meet Medea Benjamin of CodePink. She was speaking at Encuentro 5, the fabulous left meeting space in Boston's Chinatown. One of the main reasons I stopped by was to (finally) give her a copy of our Economic Crisis Reader, since she appears on the cover, with Timothy Geithner (she's on the left, holding the sign that says "GIVE US OUR $ BACK"). (We picked pink for the cover in honor of CodePink.) But I was thrilled to hear her talk--she really has her head screwed on right about left activism. Besides her incredible optimism, what impressed me most about her was that she said she's been going to as many Tea Bagger events as she can, and that she takes the time to talk to the folks there, find out where they're coming from. Of course many of the views they have are wacky or repellent, but she said (as I've suspected) that many of them have views that aren't so far from folks on the left. So: I urge people to get out there with signs and open minds on April 15th to talk to the Tea Baggers and show them that there's a left alternative. (In Boston the big Tea Bagger day will be April 14; apparently Sarah Palin will be stopping by the Boston Common (right outside the D&S offices--coincidence?--for a rally on her way to the big national Tea Bagger tax day protest in D.C. on the 15th. Come one come all!

—CS

Labels: bailout, Donald Berwick, Haiti, Sarah Palin, Tea Baggers

 

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4/02/2010 02:46:00 PM