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Americans need to face a hard fact: we almost certainly dodged another Great Depression by a hair’s breadth thanks to the combined efforts of Bush Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, the Obama administration and the much maligned Democratically-controlled Congress. But the fallout from the near economic collapse and financial meltdown is likely to endure for years and not months. The problems are deep and widespread, global and not merely national in scope

Whilst our government is not entirely helpless in the face of this recession, neither does it have in its bag of tricks a silver bullet or a magic wand to make it disappear. Unaccustomed as they are to an unemployment rate near 10%, Americans are unlikely to see a dramatic improvement any time soon no matter which party rules in the White House or congress.

In Europe, the harsh consequences of recession-induced joblessness is ameliorated significantly by a substantial social safety net that provides a livable income, retraining opportunities and housing assistance.  America’s Swiss-cheese version offers few such protections. The fact is Americans are just a pink-slip away from personal catastrophe, where a job lost can mean no health insurance (although thanks to Democrats that will change by 2014) and perhaps homelessness for themselves and even their children.

On NPR recently I listened to some bright spark from one of the right-wing think tanks explain why extending unemployment benefits is a disincentive to those who have been unemployed longer than a few months to search vigorously for a job – this despite credible estimates that there are five job seekers to every available job in the market. Is $300 a week a fortune to people who were earning $50K just year ago? Not on the planet most of us live on, that’s for sure. He went on to suggest more of the unemployed should be willing to uproot their families and move; or be prepared to take a job at McDonald’s at minimum wage, as though you can support a family that way.

Appalling, outrageous and shameful though it may be, this is the prevailing view on the right and among congressional Republicans. It highlights the extent to which most Republicans are completely out of touch with the way most Americans live, and lack any ability to empathize with those in distress.

So it does matter which party steers us through the hard times and best prepares the country to take advantage of the global recovery when it does come. And that, ladies and gentlemen, would be the Democrats.

American families that are hurting need help not platitudes. Yes, they need jobs. But these do not grow on trees nor appear on government demand. In the short term unemployed Americans need government assistance to ensure they have basic financial assistance, can keep a roof over their family’s heads and for re-training where that is feasible.

And as the economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman endlessly preaches, we also need to take advantage of the low cost of government borrowing to invest heavily in our human resources through increased spending in education, and on needed infrastructure improvements.   To cut spending now on these essential engines to our future prosperity as states struggle to balance their books is myopic and idiotic.

As for the deficit, we don’t need lessons on fiscal rectitude from a party that:

1. Drove us into two wars (and botched both of them),
2. Turned a budget surplus into a deficit quicker than you can say “Bush tax cuts for the rich,”
3. Passed into law an unfunded Medicare drug benefit to pander to and keep seniors in their political column,
4. Calls for fiscal austerity, but still wants extend Bush’s tax cuts for the rich even though their expiration would add hundreds of billions of dollars to the treasury,
5. Wants more spending on an already bloated Pentagon budget and on border fences with Mexico, and finally,
6. Whose deregulatory zeal got us into this mess in the first place.

Dick Cheney was wrong; deficits do matter – but not now.

I understand that Americans are unhappy with the Obama administration and congress for not fixing the economy. The fact is there are no easy answers or quick fixes to our economic doldrums, and much depends on what happens outside of our shores and beyond our control.  The impulse to hold someone, anyone, responsible for what ails us is strong.

Yet to elect more Republicans, a party bereft of ideas and only able to obstruct and impede government, is to invite paralysis to our policy making machinery and the infliction of more pain on those Americans who need our help in these times.  Please, let’s not cut off our noses to spite our faces in November.

Ever since Democrats passed the stimulus bill in early 2009, Republicans in congress have attempted to portray themselves as born-again deficit hawks, eschewing their profligate ways during the George W Bush years.  Fortunately, this fiction has not survived the question of what to do about the Bush tax cuts for the rich which are due to expire.

The Obama administration intends to let them expire, thereby saving the treasury some $697 billion over 10 years.  GOP leaders, however, support an extension of all the Bush tax cuts because (and they even manage to say this with a straight face) they don’t add to the deficit at all since they stimulate the economy and actually pay for themselves.  This nonsense has been disproved so many times you’d think even Republicans would be embarrassed to trot it out again; but it does highlight, in addition to a certain obtuseness, their hypocrisy on the deficit.  According to the GOP, extending unemployment benefits to those hit hardest by this recession must be paid for with offsetting cuts elsewhere in the budget, but the rule shouldn’t apply to tax cuts on the wealthiest Americans least touched by the downturn. Sweet!

McConnell and others in the GOP explain the difference in terms of their opposition to government spending adding to the deficit, but this hardly concerned them when they were passing the Medicare drug benefit or appropriations for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – none of which were offset with spending cuts elsewhere.  Even now when pressed to identify specific and significant cuts to government spending in programs such as Medicare or Social Security or the defence budget, GOP spokespeople dodge and weave and obfuscate shamelessly without ever giving a straight answer.  Indeed, if you listen to them in other contexts, they insist not enough is being spent on things like border security.

This incoherence is fundamental to today’s national Republican Party and is guided by an essential right-wing conviction:  that an unfettered free market is paramount, and that government has no business and is essentially ineffective in all but a few areas such as national security.  The party therefore has no incentive to make government work efficiently or effectively either when they are in power or in opposition, since this would undermine their guiding principal.  This explains, for example, the utter incompetence of the Bush years when the GOP controlled both the White House and the congress, and the intransigence of today’s congressional Republicans as they strive to thwart any and all initiatives of the Obama administration.  For Republicans gridlock is good.

Voters should remember this as they go to the polls this fall.  By any reasonable standard, the Obama administration and congressional Democrats have accomplished a great deal in the last two years, virtually all of which I happen to believe, will be to the long term benefit of the country.  In the short term, the stimulus really did soften the blow of this deepest of economic downturns.  Yet the number of jobless is still way too high and Americans are feeling unsettled and grumpy; Democrats, unfairly or no, are likely to feel the brunt of their ire.  Republicans will benefit simply by being the party out of power. But a party as bereft of ideas as the GOP and whose policies and ideological devotion to deregulation largely caused the mess in the first place should not be rewarded with increased power and influence.  That is simply a recipe for prolonged national pain.

The good news, potentially, was the release last week of new national standards for math and reading by a panel of experts convened by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. I say potentially because the standards have to be accepted and adopted by individual states, two of which (Texas and Alaska) have already refused to participate in the process.

The bad news is that to get to this point, it has taken us exactly ten years since the last effort, initiated by President George H Bush (America 2000)  continued under Bill Clinton (Goals 2000) and killed by George W Bush, who replaced it with the disastrous No Child Left Behind.  Where his predecessors’ efforts focused, in part, on encouraging all states to adopt rigorous educational standards while providing federally funded but independent reviews and assessments of the results, Junior’s NCLB has had the opposite effect. Its perverse incentives actually encouraged states to dumb-down their standards, and the tests that stem from them, so as to show illusory improvements in performance. Conversely, states that maintained high standards, such as Massachusetts, have been punished by NCLB.

The pace of reform in this country since ‘A Nation At Risk’ was released during the Reagan years makes a snail look like a sprinter.  It really is enough to make you want to scream in frustration. 

The issue of standards is a case in point. How can anybody actually think that it makes sense to have fifty different sets of standards to determine the appropriate reading level of our ninth-graders, or what our sixth-graders should know in math? Yet the move to national standards has been bitterly resisted, primarily by Republicans in congress who have clung to the manifestly erroneous belief that all educational decisions were best left to individual states and local school districts.  If states were competent to handle it alone, we wouldn’t be lagging most advanced countries in the educational performance of our children 25 years after ‘Nation at Risk’ sounded the warning bell.

It’s heartening that a bipartisan consensus among the nation’s governors has prompted this very significant and long overdue step which could have enormous future benefits for our children. Rigorous national standards will, hopefully, lead to common if not identical curriculum and tests, and a measure of coherence may yet emerge from the patchwork quilt that is the American K-12 education system. 

 That’s definitely worth a loud cheer.

One of the loudest complaints about the Democratic-controlled congress is that it has done little for and is out of touch with ordinary Americans, particularly during these trying economic times.  The facts suggest otherwise.

First, congress passed and President Obama signed the much maligned but nevertheless effective stimulus bill that provided a much needed fiscal boost to the economy at a critical time in the form of aid to states, tax cuts, unemployment payments, funding for green energy and other worthy projects.  The bill was, alas, oversold by the Obama administration but there is no question that it saved between one and two million jobs that would otherwise have been lost, and ameliorated the need for Draconian cuts by state governments suddenly faced with enormous budget deficits.

Second, about a year ago Obama signed a bill that afforded consumers more protection from the predatory practices of the credit card industry.

Third, in April Obama signed into law the most far reaching reform of health-care since Medicare and in so doing significantly strengthened America’s tattered social safety net.

And last but not least, congress is on the verge of passing significant financial reform legislation that takes a giant step towards curbing the sort of practices by banks and investment houses that nearly drove our economy into another Depression.

They have done this in the face of vociferous opposition from the powerful industries involved.  Each of these bills benefited ordinary, hard working Americans and, in the cases of the credit card bill of rights, health reform and the regulation of the financial industry, did so at the expense of Big Business or the wealthiest Americans.  Now that’s a change.  And second, they moved forward against the obstructionist opposition of a GOP only too willing to do the heavy lifting for the financial and medical insurance industries.  Does anyone think it’s a coincidence, for example, that political PAC money contributions from the financial industry are flowing away from Democrats, despite the fact that they control Congress and the White House, and to the Republicans?

It has been less than eighteen months since the Democrats took control in Washington.  In that time they have confounded conventional wisdom and the usual Washington cynicism to pass legislation that makes the lives of ordinary Americans more secure.  And they have accomplished this over the objections of powerful business interests who have been used to getting their own way.

Obama and congressional Democrats may be fairly faulted on some issues from both left and right; but not fighting for ordinary Americans isn’t one of them.

Since President Obama’s inauguration in January 2009, the administration and Democrats in Congress have arguably:

Saved the United States economy from a meltdown which could easily have become a depression; given a new lease on life to the US automobile manufacturing industry whose collapse would have been disastrous to Michigan in particular and the Mid-West in general; put into law health-care legislation which fills a crucial hole in the nation’s frayed social safety net and taken a giant step towards ending the shame of being the only advanced country that doesn’t offer universal coverage to its citizens. And with luck, Congress will, by summer, pass an overhaul of the financial regulatory system which will be the most significant and far reaching in a generation to protect us from the sort of catastrophe that befell the nation at the end of the Bush administration.  Assuming, that is, the GOP hasn’t found a way to block it.

The Democrats’ reward for this impressive record of accomplishment from the American electorate will, at best, be a much reduced majority in both houses of Congress or, very possibly, the loss of one or both to the Republicans.  These are the same Republicans who have given the word “obstructionism” a whole new meaning and dimension; the same Republicans who have repeatedly put what they perceive as their political interests ahead of those of the country.

Yes the deficit is dangerously high and attributable in part to TARP and the 2009 stimulus bill. Yet most economists agree that the government couldn’t stand by and do nothing in the face of the sort of deep and destructive recession Obama inherited from the Bush administration. The $787 billion stimulus, passed with just one Republican vote in the Senate, gave a much needed boost to the economy and saved hard pressed states from devastating cuts to teachers, police and other critical public servants. And TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) which, in any case was passed at the end of the Bush administration, has been used wisely to prevent a disintegration of our financial system.

As for the health-care legislation, once Americans have penetrated the smokescreen of misinformation generated by the GOP, they will come to realize that at a time when money talks and Big Business rules, Democrats showed great political bravery and determination in striking a telling blow for ordinary, hardworking people who feel, and usually are, powerless in this political environment. The health care bill will ensure that wealth flows, just for a change, from the affluent to the benefit of those less well off in our society. 

Yet Americans see none of this.  Still grumpy because the economy remains weak, we will mindlessly punish those whom we blame for not fixing now what hasn’t had time to be mended; and reward those who did more than anyone to put us into the mess in the first place and have done nothing constructive to get us out of it. And as a bonus we will ensure political gridlock in which little that is useful can get done.

Where’s the sense or the justice in that?

The accepted wisdom is that passing the amended Democratic health care bill will be an albatross around the necks of the party as it moves forward into the fall mid-term elections and beyond.  Republicans gleefully point to polls which suggest they will benefit from the electorate’s opposition to the bill and their own improved prospects for picking up seats in both the United States Senate and the House.

In the short term they may be right, but it’s not at all clear that health care will play much of a role in any losses sustained by the Democrats in the fall except with the GOP’s own base and some disaffected independents.  The electorate is generally grumpy with the state of the economy, primarily unemployment, and the size of the deficit.  The fact that the Democrats deserve credit rather than electoral punishment for the steps both the administration and Congress have taken to prevent a deeper recession, and to stimulate the economy through fiscal measures that were necessary but inevitably resulted in a higher deficit is, unfortunately, lost on many voters.

In the longer term, however, I am convinced that as Americans come to actually learn what’s in the health bill and see the benefits not only to the uninsured but to those who already have insurance or Medicare (the most fervent opponents to the bill), they will come to embrace it as they did Medicare and Social Security – two other additions to the social safety net that most congressional Republicans opposed.

I also think it’s why the GOP has mounted such a bitter opposition to the bill.  If they believed their own rhetoric one would think they would welcome passage of a bill which, according to every Fox News right-wing mouthpiece and Republican politician who’s given an opportunity to blab on-air, will mean Democratic Armageddon.  But they don’t and the reason may be that they fear that it will be a long term boost to both Obama and Democrats in general for the 2012 elections, and to their own detriment.

The misinformation and sound-bites have served the right well in what has been less a debate than a frenzy of vitriol and misleading talking points by the GOP and its Fox News cheerleaders.  Oh, and let’s not forget the Tea Baggers.

However, once the bill passes this campaign of obfuscation and misrepresentation will be much harder to sustain effectively, and the beneficial elements of the bill will start to speak for themselves.  In this situation Democrats will, in time, gain a strong advantage as the party of can-do and of positive, pro-active policy prescriptions in contrast to the GOP as the party of “NO-can-do.”

If Democrats can find the courage and the will to pass health care insurance reform, whether through parliamentary maneuvers or a straight vote, not only will the country have much reason to be thankful but also, I believe, the Democratic Party.

During the previous administration, Bush and his Republican chorus in Congress and the right-wing punditry exploited the fear and ignorance of most Americans to invade a country that represented no threat to us, establish what amounted to an offshore America gulag for our enemies, real or imagined, and to spy on United States citizens without judicial approval or oversight. 

Today, the GOP and allies are doing it again to stir opposition to the agenda of President Obama and the Democrats as they seek to enact comprehensive health care insurance reform and steer the ship of state in a more moderate and progressive direction.  And it’s clearly working.

Obama’s poll numbers have plummeted and Democrats have lost a senate seat in Massachusetts, of all places, and governorships in Virginia and New Jersey.  Never mind that the two previous Democratic governors in Virginia had been instrumental in making it one of the best administered states in the union.  Or that the seat won by a right-wing Republican with nothing to distinguish him save his abs was previously that of Senator Edward Kennedy, who accomplished so much for his state and his country and whose unrequited dream was universal health coverage for all Americans.

A grumpy and fearful electorate has bought into GOP lies and distortions to blame Obama and the Democrats for not fixing in a year what took the Republicans nearly three decades to break.  Sure, some blame attaches to Democrats who foolishly bought into or lacked the courage to oppose the deregulatory fervor of the right.  But it was the GOP, starting with Reagan and ending with George W Bush, who pushed the idea of the self-regulating free market and the notion that stricter government oversight unnecessarily and perniciously fettered our financial institutions.  We failed to heed the warning of the savings and loan fiasco of the 90’s and the result, in time, was an economic meltdown precipitated by irresponsible banks. 

Yet the GOP has succeeded in painting Obama as a typical big-spending liberal, ignoring the fact that junior Bush added three trillion dollars to the national debt after inheriting a budget surplus from his Democratic predecessor, and that the current deficit is partly the result of the $750 billion TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) passed under the previous administration.  The Obama $787 billion stimulus bill, on the other hand, was a necessary response to the deepest recession since World War II that he inherited and it has helped to ameliorate what would otherwise have been a much worse employment picture.

As for the health care bill, Americans again have been guilty of both woeful ignorance and susceptibility to GOP propaganda.  A Kaiser Foundation tracking poll found that whilst Americans are evenly divided on whether they support the Democratic bills, most have no clue what’s in them.  Furthermore, when told of the bills’ specific key elements, support rises significantly.  

Yet the GOP and the right-wing punditry have managed to convince Americans, falsely, that the Democratic legislation will increase the deficit, raise their taxes, and diminish the quality of their own health insurance whilst raising its cost.

Congressional Republicans may be a despicable bunch but their manipulations of the truth could not succeed without an American electorate too lazy to find out the facts for themselves.

In the wake of the Christmas Day effort by Nigerian citizen Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to destroy an in-flight airliner over Detroit, Republicans are hammering home with renewed vigour the myth that Democrats are weak on national security.  Yet by any reasonable measure the invasion of Iraq by the Bush administration, with the enthusiastic support of congressional Republicans, has proved to be a national security as well as a foreign policy calamity.  And whilst it’s true that many Democrats voted for the Iraq War resolution, there can be no real doubt that the quest to invade Iraq was driven by the Republican Bush administration and its right-wing supporters in the GOP. 

Even setting aside the human and monetary cost, the adverse consequences to America have been severe indeed.  Perhaps the most serious is the fact that our failure to implement and sustain long term security and reconstruction in Afghanistan after driving out the Taliban has enabled the latter to rejuvenate and return as a more formidable enemy; one that we must now commit almost 100,000 troops to combat just when we were getting out from under the crushing Iraq commitment.  And the refusal of General Tommy Franks and then Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to commit American forces such as rangers to the effort to trap and destroy the remnants of al-Qaida in the White Mountains at Tora Bora, which stands as the best opportunity we’ve had to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden, must rank as both a colossal error of judgment and failure of nerve that ensured the terrorist organization’s survival.

Not only did our focus on Iraq divert needed military expertise and resources away from Afghanistan but, as we’ve learned to our cost recently, it also resulted in neglect of countries such as Yemen where branches of al-Qaida have taken root and flourished. 

If invading Iraq had truly been part of the war against al-Qaida rather than a fantasy and hoax peddled subliminally to the American people by the Bush administration and its right-wing cheer leaders at Fox News, maybe it could be forgiven.  But Saddam Hussein was hated by Islamic extremists and he, in turn, hunted them down as ruthlessly as anyone else who potentially threatened his hold on power.  Our invasion of Iraq may have unseated a tyrant but it also replaced an Iraq that represented a bulwark against al-Qaida with one in which a branch of the latter was able to establish and operate with devastating consequences, not least to the Iraqi people.

The Bush administration made other bone-headed decisions in the name of national security: Guantanamo and the secret CIA  prisons in Eastern Europe, torture, electronic domestic surveillance without court supervision to name but a few.  Along with the unprovoked invasion of Iraq they represent a darker America, one that is less than what we aspire to be.

Al-Qaida cannot destroy America but they can inspire a reaction that might change us into something we would hardly recognize.  Dick Cheney and the Republicans started us down that path in the panicked aftermath of 9/11 when what we showed was less strength than fear and weakness. President Obama and most Democrats recognize that in our quest to stay safe from attack we must not surrender what it is that makes us proud to be Americans in the first place.  That would indeed give the victory to al-Qaida.

Let’s get one thing clear:  the failure of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to detonate a bomb on an airliner over Detroit on Christmas Day was not only an extremely good piece of luck for the passengers and crew (who deserve credit for their quick thinking and courage), but also for those charged with security in the United States.  Why?  Because it highlighted flaws in the way in which we analyze and use intelligence information that has been collected on potentially dangerous individuals, and in our screening procedures at airports. 

Yet instead of celebrating our good luck we’ve been treated instead to unseemly hand wringing and finger pointing. The sources for most of this, not unexpectedly, are Republicans and the right-wing punditry.  President Obama has been criticized for his delay in making a statement and for not lending it more urgency by not, presumably, sounding sufficiently breathless.  And of course the GOP lost no time trying to make political hay out of it.  Former vice-president Cheney sounds more and more as though he can’t wait for an al-Qaida attack to succeed so that he can begin an endless round of I-told-you-so interviews on prime-time network TV.  He evidently blames Obama for not reacting in the same panicky mode as he did in the wake of 9/11.

The fact is this near miss is a gold mine of an opportunity to improve our intelligence collection and handling procedures, as well as to tighten security screening practices by, for example, speeding the more widespread introduction of newer technology such as full-body scans.

We seem to be missing a couple of essential lessons from this and past incidents.  The first is that no matter how much we may want it, the government cannot guarantee our safety.  I don’t happen to think that explosives sewn into underwear is necessarily a sign that al-Qaida has increased its effectiveness or ingenuity; quite the contrary.  But the fact remains our human protectors will always be fallible and the efficiency of our technology limited.  Big Daddy cannot always protect us.

The second lesson is that maybe Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano was unwittingly correct when she said that the system worked. Part of the “system” has to be us, the ordinary members of the public.  Just as it was the action of passengers and crew that saved that flight over Detroit, and of others who forced the 9/11 hijackers of United Flight 93 to abort their mission to crash into the White House or the Capitol, so we must all realize that we, too, have a role to play in preventing terrorist attacks from succeeding. 

After all the next attack may not come on an airliner at five thousand feet but on a crowded city bus at ground zero.

With the United States Senate poised to vote on a Democratic healthcare bill, the cacophony of verbal abuse from the right has now been joined by voices from the disillusioned left to make a veritable crescendo of opposition.  Most of these disaffected liberals agree with former Vermont governor Howard Dean that the senate bill is damaged goods and so far from the ideal that it would be better to kill it and start again.

I really like Howard Dean and I agree with him on just about everything he says about health care reform in this country; on this issue, however, he is dead wrong.

First, it ignores the reality of the American system of government. The Democrats need a super majority of 60 votes to pass legislation in the senate.  It would be great if they had 60 liberal Democrats to end debate on the health bill but, instead, they have Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, and other, decidedly more conservative senators such as Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, whose votes were essential in the face of unanimous GOP opposition.  Getting any sort of health insurance reform measure this sweeping to pass in these circumstances is an incredible feat for which Majority Leader Harry Reid deserves enormous credit.

Second, to kill the senate bill now is to sign the death warrant of any reform for another generation.  That much is certain.  Does anyone actually believe that Democrats will pick up seats or even keep all the ones they have now in the Congress in the 2010 mid-terms elections, with a grumpy electorate who have already forgotten just how awful the Republicans were at governing?  To kill the senate bill is to abandon those Americans who have no insurance, or who are under-insured and liable for massive out-of-pocket expenses or who have pre-existing conditions that make it impossible for them to even buy insurance, or who will become sick and be dumped by their insurance company.  This is why we on the left supported health care reform in the first place, to curb the victimization of those most in need by the health insurance industry.  Those people are still out there and they still need us to support this bill.

Finally, flawed though it is the senate bill contains much that is good and useful. It addresses the worst of the insurance industry’s practices mentioned above.  It contains provisions for long term care, and for pilot programmes to research more efficient ways to provide care and obtain better outcomes at lower cost.  And as part of the funding mechanism it slashes Medicare incentive funds paid to private health insurance companies for plans outside the regular programme.

We need to look at this imperfect but very worthwhile senate bill – which will almost certainly be close to the final legislation if anything is to pass – as a beginning framework for a system that can and will be improved over time.  If the insurance companies find new ways to behave badly, they will simply reinforce the case for even more government regulation, or perhaps even a single-payer system.  To use the words of Winston Churchill:  Now this is not the end.  This is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.