The Great Experiment

In condemning Bill Kristol and the neocons for their foreign policy failures during the Bush/Cheney administration, BooMan sounds a warning to liberals.

Putin's actions in Ukraine do pose a challenge to progressives, who must begin to think carefully about America's proper posture in the world. Where we move back, other powers may move in, and often with unfortunate and destabilizing results.

Whether we like it or not, he's right. For the last 60 years, the United States has either dominated global affairs or shared that stage during the Cold War with the Soviet Union. To simply decry that kind of hegemony is not enough. We have to be realistic about the alternatives.

In order to do that we have to discard the notion that the only form of power is military dominance. Whether its the U.S. in Viet Nam/Iraq or Russia in Afghanistan - we've learned the hard way that military dominance doesn't work.

I thought of that last night when I watched the movie Mandela: The Long Walk to Freedom. As the white South African government initially responded to peaceful protests with violence, I thought to myself, "when are people finally going to realize that doesn't work?" It took another 30 years and too many lives, but black South Africans finally prevailed in their quest to rid the country of apartheid.

Throughout the movie, Mandela and members of the ANC made the point that one individual alone did not have the power to change things - but that as 2..3...4...5... came together, they had the power to prevail.

That, my friends, is the lesson we all need to learn - the power of partnership.

At this moment in history, we might only have a couple more years in which the United States is led by someone who understands this.

...human history has often been a record of nations and tribes -- and, yes, religions -- subjugating one another in pursuit of their own interests. Yet in this new age, such attitudes are self-defeating. Given our interdependence, any world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will inevitably fail. So whatever we think of the past, we must not be prisoners to it. Our problems must be dealt with through partnership; our progress must be shared.

As we watch President Obama try to harness that power of partnership to deal with what is happening in the Ukraine, or Iran, or Syria, we are watching a Great Experiment at work (the one originally envisioned by FDR). Can the nations of the world come together to deal with these challenges via partnership rather than letting them escalate into military confrontations where the elites of the world send their people to die as they play out their power games?

We know that the neocons haven't learned this lesson. But what about American progressives? Do we see the Great Experiment at play and recognize what is at stake? Or are we too enamored with our cynicism to see what's going on?

"A Concise History of Black-White Relations in the U.S."

Given the recent revival of old tropes like "lazy black men" and "happy slaves," I think its time to review some U.S. history. We can do that concisely in six frames.

Nuff said.

Danny Boy

Melancholy can be simply extraordinary.

Obamacare's cost control secret...competition

Most of us know that Obamacare bears zero resemblance to how it is often characterized by conservatives - as a government takeover of healthcare. The majority of people in this country will see no change in how they are insured - via private plans offered by their employer. But for those on the individual market, there is now the option of buying private plans through the health care marketplace (exchanges) with the possibility of government subsidies.

But who knew that those exchanges would actually cause an increase in the free market concept known as "competition?" That's pretty much what this Kaiser Family Foundation research suggests. They only looked at seven states who have set up their own exchanges (as opposed to participating in the federal exchange) and have released their data. But its fascinating.

Lets take a look at my home state - Minnesota. Here is the breakdown of market share for individuals prior to the exchanges compared to now.

Blue Cross/Blue Shield has lost 35% of the individual market due to the exchanges and PreferredOne has gained 55%. As someone who recently shopped for and purchased health insurance on this exchange, I can tell you that PreferredOne was offering significantly lower premiums than the other plans. Medica (my previous insurer) also lost 13% of the market. Theirs were some of the most expensive plans on the exchange.

Another state with interesting results is Nevada.

Clearly UnitedHealthGroup and WellPoint are the biggest losers there. But look who picked up the slack...Nevada Health Co-op. That is the result of an Obamacare provision that was pretty much ignored - the Consumer Operated and Oriented Plan Program in which the federal government provided loans for the development of qualified nonprofit insurers to compete on the exchanges. While the results have been mixed, Nevada is not the only state where this program is succeeding.

In Maine, the insurer that has enrolled the most Obamacare customers isn’t the state’s well-established Blue Cross Blue Shield plan, owned by WellPoint Inc. It’s WellPoint’s only rival: Maine Community Health Options, a startup that didn’t exist three years ago.

The newcomer, funded primarily by taxpayer money lent under the U.S. health-care law, has won about 80 percent of the market so far in Maine’s new insurance exchange, exceeding its own expectations, said Kevin Lewis, the chief executive officer.

Obamacare opponents predicted early on that insurance co-ops created by the law would fail, and that much of the $2.1 billion they were loaned to get started would be lost. Instead, the 23 co-ops that now exist nationally have enrolled about 300,000 people in health plans by combining low premiums with a certain homespun appeal, according to company executives.

The critique we hear about Obamacare from the left most often is that it was nothing but a giveaway to the big insurance companies. But combined with the information above, take a look at some of this data taken from the Kaiser report:

California - WellPoint has lost 17% of the individual market.
New York - WellPoint has lost 10% of the individual market and UnitedHealth has lost 18%.

The percentages in those large states represent lots of people that are finding a better deal by shopping on the exchanges. You can be sure that companies like WellPoint are noticing and will be working to bring down their costs in the future.

The truth is - Obamacare is just getting started. As more states experiment and learn from results like this, we'll be seeing a lot more of this kind of good news.

No commentary required 3/16/14

I haven't done one of these in a while, but today I ran across two commentaries that are some of the best I've read in a long time. As someone who enjoys writing, I am humbled and can't help but think: "when I grow up, I want to write just like that." So I'm hoping that you won't miss them:

First of all, there's Timothy Egan with Paul Ryan's Irish Amnesia.

...you can’t help noticing the deep historic irony that finds a Tea Party favorite and descendant of famine Irish using the same language that English Tories used to justify indifference to an epic tragedy...

Ryan boasts of the Gaelic half of his ancestry, on his father’s side. “I come from Irish peasants who came over during the potato famine,” he said last year during a forum on immigration.

BUT with a head still stuffed with college-boy mush from Ayn Rand, he apparently never did any reading about the times that prompted his ancestors to sail away from the suffering sod. Centuries of British rule that attempted to strip the Irish of their language, their religion and their land had produced a wretched peasant class, subsisting on potatoes. When blight wiped out the potatoes, at least a million Irish died — one in eight people.

Next up is Hunter at Daily Kos with The damnation of the happy slave. This is a long one in which he eviscerates James Bownan's critique of the movie Twelve Years a Slave (which, among other things, suggests that the movie is lacking because it doesn't portray "happy slaves"). But Hunter goes beyond that to make a wider point.

You are probably wondering, right now, why I have taken you on this long slog. Why I have spent perhaps more words critiquing the critique than the critique itself contains. Why any of us should give a damn.

Here is the reason. We need to stop being, to be blunt, stupid.

We need to stop praising people for the ability to say stupid things smartly. We need to stop elevating "opinions" that are, in fact, only better-manicured presentations of crass, much sillier suppositions from which all of the non-embarrassing people have moved on...

...finding a story about slavery grating because it did not portray happy slaves is, truly, among the dankest crevices in the cave of stupid discredited arguments. Whether you present it with pomp or merely drool it out the side of your mouth, it is the same supposition.

There is SO much more to both of these articles. So I hope you'll go read them in their entirety.

In the meantime, thanks to a comment by "anonymous" in the previous post, please enjoy this one by the PS22 Chorus. How can you not LOVE this?!!!

How we defeated the teapublicans in Minnesota

Just like many light blue/swing states, Minnesota was bombarded by the teapublican craze in 2010. Once the midterm elections were over, our state legislature was pure red. Lucky for us, the governor's race was a three-way contest. And so our Democratic nominee - Mark Dayton - squeaked out a win. That made all the difference.

Two things happened next:

1. Dayton battled the Republican legislature's attempts to reduce taxes on the wealthy and gut the rest of the budget. Perhaps you'll remember that we had a government shut-down of our own. The result of Dayton's efforts is that last month the state projected a $1.23 billion budget surplus and our unemployment rate is 4.7%.
2. Secondly, our Governor also battled the Republican legislature's efforts to gerry-mander the 2010 redistricting - sending it to neutral courts to be decided. 

Then, in the 2012 election, the state legislature turned blue once again.

As a result of all this, Minnesota set up its own health care exchange (troubled initially, but getting MUCH better) and expanded Medicaid under Obamacare.  Last year marriage equality came to the state - not as a result of a court ruling, but because it was passed by the legislature. Finally, we've had no voting restrictions, stand your ground laws, right to work laws, or curbs on reproductive freedom.

All of that happened because Democrats won the state governor's race by four tenths of a point in 2010. Think about THAT!

In a few months there are 36 governorships up for grabs - many involving unpopular Republicans in blue/swing states.  Anyone who thinks their vote doesn't matter should simply compare what is happening in Minnesota to our sister state of Wisconsin - where Gov. Scott Walker has been in charge for the last four years. And then get involved. It matters!!!

Dancing on the Clouds

Growing up my father was a pilot (not commercial) so we spent quite a bit of time as a family in small airplanes. I remember looking out the window down on the clouds and asking my mother if we could get out and play on them. Of course she told me that wasn't possible, but I didn't believe her. So I kept on imagining. That's one of the things I think about when I look at the new picture I just posted up above.

(The song is actually Dance of the Lambs by harpist Kim Robertson)