This is a great blog entry by David Rees, the cartoonist who does Get Your War On. The whole thing is a long overdue slam on Christopher Hitchens.

I apologize in advance for the screen real estate this is going to eat, but I have never looked into how you create cuts or jumps with this software. This article hits on three of my five pet peeves/favorite topics.

Bad for the Country
By Paul Krugman
The New York Times

Friday 25 November 2005

“What was good for our country,” a former president of General Motors once declared, “was good for General Motors, and vice versa.” GM, which has been losing billions, has announced that it will eliminate 30,000 jobs. Is what’s bad for General Motors bad for America?

In this case, yes.

Most commentary about GM’s troubles is resigned: pundits may regret the decline of a once-dominant company, but they don’t think anything can or should be done about it. And commentary from some conservatives has an unmistakable tone of satisfaction, a sense that uppity workers who joined a union and made demands are getting what they deserve.

We shouldn’t be so complacent. I won’t defend the many bad decisions of GM’s management, or every demand made by the United Automobile Workers. But job losses at General Motors are part of the broader weakness of US manufacturing, especially the part of US manufacturing that offers workers decent wages and benefits. And some of that weakness reflects two big distortions in our economy: a dysfunctional health care system and an unsustainable trade deficit.

According to A. T. Kearney, last year General Motors spent $1,500 per vehicle on health care. By contrast, Toyota spent only $201 per vehicle in North America, and $97 in Japan. If the United States had national health insurance, GM would be in much better shape than it is.

Wouldn’t taxpayer-financed health insurance amount to a subsidy to the auto industry? Not really. Because most Americans believe that their fellow citizens are entitled to health care, and because our political system acts, however imperfectly, on that belief, tying health insurance to employment distorts the economy: it systematically discourages the creation of good jobs, the type of jobs that come with good benefits. And somebody ends up paying for health care anyway.

In fact, many of the health care expenses GM will save by slashing employment will simply be pushed off onto taxpayers. Some former GM families will end up receiving Medicaid. Others will receive uncompensated care - for example, at emergency rooms - which ends up being paid for either by taxpayers or by those with insurance.

Moreover, GM’s health care costs are so high in part because of the inefficiency of America’s fragmented health care system. We spend far more per person on medical care than countries with national health insurance, while getting worse results.

About the trade deficit: These days the United States imports far more than it exports. Last year the trade deficit exceeded $600 billion. The flip side of the trade deficit is a reorientation of our economy away from industries that export or compete with imports, especially manufacturing, to industries that are insulated from foreign competition, such as housing. Since 2000, we’ve lost about three million jobs in manufacturing, while membership in the National Association of Realtors has risen 50 percent.

The trade deficit isn’t sustainable. We can run huge deficits for the time being, because foreigners - in particular, foreign governments - are willing to lend us huge sums. But one of these days the easy credit will come to an end, and the United States will have to start paying its way in the world economy.

To do that, we’ll have to reorient our economy back toward producing things we can export or use to replace imports. And that will mean pulling a lot of workers back into manufacturing. So the rapid downsizing of manufacturing since 2000 - of which GM’s job cuts are a symptom - amounts to dismantling a sector we’ll just have to rebuild a few years from now.

I don’t want to attribute all of GM’s problems to our distorted economy. One of the plants GM plans to close is in Canada, which has national health insurance and ran a trade surplus last year. But the distortions in our economy clearly make GM’s problems worse.

Dealing with our trade deficit is a tricky issue I’ll have to address another time. But GM’s woes are yet another reminder of the urgent need to fix our health care system. It’s long past time to move to a national system that would reduce cost, diminish the burden on employers who try to do the right thing and relieve working American families from the fear of lost coverage. Fixing health care would be good for General Motors, and good for the country.

This article talks about an interesting development in the U.S. House of Representatives over the last year. The so-called purple Democrats–generally moderate to conservative Democrats from conservative districts– have largely stopped voting with the GOP. This has forced the GOP leadership to lean more on their moderates which does give those moderates some leverage within the caucus. In spite of Grover Norquists’s comments in the article, I think this is exactly the kind of strategy the House Democrats should be following. Incumbents are almost always re-elected. It’s genuine news when one isn’t. With the president’s low approval ratings, the scandals plaguing the GOP leadership, and the general political environment in the country right now, it’s a great time to put some pressure on the moderate Republicans. Make them defend lavish giveaways for the rich while working families have seen a sixth straight year of drops in income, while gas and heating fuel prices are up, health insurance costs are up, and jobs aren’t being created.

The layoffs at GM really break my heart. The beginning of this story really nails it. It’s not the final nail in the coffin, but clearly nearly 100 years of progressive reform in this country is coming to naught. This really is the end of the blue collar middle class.

An online friend, someone who I respect quite a bit suggested that this is the sort of thing that should start a populist revolt in the rust belt. I don’t think it will. In fact, I think we’re more than 20 years past the point where the industrial working class had any hope of saving themselves. 1984 was where we could have stopped it. Don’t give Reagan a second term after he helped gut the U.S. auto industry, steel industry, and helped corporations bash unions all over the country. Instead, half the people he was kicking in the face admired his “tough guy” image so much that they tried to kiss his boots while they were down there. The larger working class as a whole won’t revolt because they don’t vote, can’t vote, or are so convinced that the Democrats are gonna hand the U.S. over to the Soviets, er, excuse me, Al Quaeda or that we might let gays live like human beings that they’ll put up with whatever the Red State nation wants.

The only way to save the simple, but secure and somewhat comfortable lifestyle that the working class and progressives spent 100 years try to create is to thoroughly restructure our trade relations. They need to move every bit as far in a “protectionist” mode as they’ve moved into a free trade mode over recent decades. We need to pull out of NAFTA and GATT. We need to erect high tariffs against anyone who isn’t paying their workers a living wage, etc and even then we need much higher tariffs on everyone else than we currently have against anyone. Let the Japanese, Germans, Koreans, or whoever sell as many cars in the U.S. as they want, so long as they build them here with UAW labor. Let the same go for GM, Daimler-Chrysler, and Ford: make it so that cars made in Mexico either provide a living wage with safe conditions or the tariffs will kill them when they bring them back over the border. Apply this model to steel, consumer electronics, etc, and you’ll have a much more prosperous nation with much better distribution of wealth.

It’s a damn shame that the only somewhat major figure in American politics talking about this stuff is Pat Buchanan. I don’t wanna have to send the women to the kitchen and the Jews to Israel to get this done.

Halliburton really deserves some kind of corporate death penalty. They should be dissolved and their corporate offices demolished so that no foul corporate weed ever grows there again. Salon.com has an article on the crap that Halliburton and its subsidiaries were doing in the gulf coast Katrina clean-up effort. Truthout has the article mirrored if you don’t want to get a salon day pass.

I’m guessing Disney must own The Sound of Music. So far, about half of Good Morning America has been devoted to “the 40th anniversary” of it. They had Julie Andrews and all of the kids reunited and they sang a song together. The outside Times Square audience is packed full of people in costume. I can’t imagine any network giving this kind of promotion time to something they don’t own.

Man, morning TV is kind of strange. I normally get maybe 10-15 minutes of The Today Show in the morning. I just watched a brief segment with an 11 year old girl who paints kind of odd, tacky paintings, but with really marvelous skill, who writes poetry, plays a couple of instruments and speaks 4 languages. And now I’m watching an interview with Ellen Pompeo who is the title character in Grey’s Anatomy. They’re bringing her chocolate cake at 8:30 in the morning because yesterday was her birthday. All so odd.

It looks like it was a good night for the Democrats, winning tight governor’s races in Virginia and New Jersey. Ahhhnold’s ballot initiatives lost in California. I’m hoping to have time in the next couple of days to dig into things a bit more deeply. I’m particularly interested in finding out more about whether the Ds can hold onto Corzine’s senate seat. We had to dig Frank Lautenberg up to hold onto the other NJ senate seat. I’m not sure what the bench is like up there. I’m also interested in seeing the overall results once we get past those three high profile races.

Super busy day ahead, though, so I may not get to look into any of this stuff until tonight.

On the off chance that any of you have a Republican or conservative Democrat as your congresscritter, please call them and ask them not to vote for the current budget bill.

The House is scheduled to begin debate tomorrow on its budget bill, which includes $54 billion in cuts. On the table are cuts of $9.5 billion in Medicaid - by requiring co-pays for pregnant women and children for the first time; $8 billion in foster care, child support enforcement, and aid to the disabled; and $844 million in the Food Stamps Program, which would prevent 300,000 people from receiving food stamps. Forty thousand children would be cut from reduced-price school lunches. Lawmakers intend to follow these with a further cut of $70 billion in taxes that will primarily benefit the top 3% of taxpayers. The message from Congress is that in response to Hurricane Katrina, we’re going to cut services for the poor, cut taxes for the rich, and increase deficits for our children and grandchildren.

These plans for deep cuts to social supports, paid for by tax cuts for the wealthiest, are contrary to the national priorities we need to protect our most vulnerable citizens. We need strong moral leadership in Congress, especially during this time of war, record deficits, rising poverty and hunger, and natural disasters. Cutting food stamps and health care that meet the basic needs of poor families is an outrage. Cutting social services to pay for further tax cuts for the rich is a moral travesty that violates biblical priorities. The House leadership seems to be saying they literally want to take food from the mouths of children to make rich people richer. If this ideology and politics of rich over poor prevails and our leaders fail to govern from a set of moral values, then the religious community must conclude that compassionate conservatism is dead.

This is the sort of thing that may well drive me out of politics someday. In 2000, the media didn’t have much choice but to cover the fucked up election. Of course, they covered it in such a way as to make it look like it was only Florida that widespread voting irregularites. They also did a good job of making it all a funny ha-ha joke. In Ohio, the margin was large enough that they weren’t forced to cover it. In fact, it really seemed as if the media were in on the “it looks like democracy. close enough. move on” cover up. There’s been damn little reporting in the TV news media about the very well founded allegations coming from Black Box Voting and others. There’s been almost no coverage of the cozy relationship between the people making these machines and the GOP.

It used to be only on my worst days that I feared that I’d never see an honest election in this country again. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I”m convinced of it, but I often feel like it would take a democratic landslide to actually get our candidate elected.

Fortune is running an article that ought to send a shiver down the spine of anyone who’s ever read Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. The fact that Rumsfeld is going to profit from the bird flu scare should be no surprise to anyone. This is how our own emerging kleptocracy works.

I actually find it far more creepy that what might be the most politically connected bio-tech firm in the country is called Gilead Sciences and is owned and run by a bunch of republicans.