Where Is the Afghanistan Debate?
When public support slips, TV packs in war boosters
With new polls showing the American public becoming increasingly critical of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, the Sunday morning network talkshows turned primarily to Pentagon officials and war boosters to discuss the issue, continuing the media marginalization of critics of the escalation of the war (Extra!, 4/09).
The most recent ABC/Washington Post poll (8/13-17/09) found that 51 percent of respondents believe the war is not worth fighting–the first time that position has received majority support. Just 24 percent supported sending more troops to Afghanistan, while 45 percent think the level of troops should be decreased.
Why bar women from playing baseball? Baeball officials have never even bothered to explain.
By Dick Meister
Dick Meister, a San Francisco-based freelance columnist, has covered labor and political issues for a half-century as a reporter, editor, author and commentator.
Another season of professional baseball is upon us, another season of a sport that’s billed as the “National Pastime,” yet bars half the population
– the female half – from the playing field.
Major and minor league teams, as well as most amateur and semi-professional clubs, have kept the game largely what it has been since its beginnings: a chewing, spitting, macho game reserved for men. Women are allowed to watch, but only rarely have they been allowed to come out of the stands and play.
Major League Baseball made it official in 1952, when teams were banned from signing major or minor league contracts with women.
The mayor’s leaked memo puts the city treasury at risk, possibly violates the law, and promotes his gubernatorial ambitions at the expense of sound city policy
Click here to read Sarah Phelan’s story in this week’s Guardian titled, Restoring the sanctuary.
EDITORIAL At the heart of the conflict over Sup. David Campos’ recent sanctuary legislation is a basic issue of civil rights: Should a young San Francisco immigrant arrested by the local police be treated as innocent until proven guilty — or should that person face deportation, even if the arrest is bogus and no formal charges are ever filed?
All Campos wants to do is establish that an arrest is not a conviction — and, as anyone who works with youth or immigrants in the city knows, thousands of innocent people are picked up by the police every year, sometimes because of simple mistakes, more often because the local cops have a propensity to arrest young people of color in disproportionate numbers.
A Q and A audio interview with co-producers Leslie and Andrew Cockburn on their remarkable new documentary, “American Casino,” opening Friday (Aug. 21) at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco for a two week run.
Leslie Cockburn, the widely respected investigative reporter and filmmaker, began work on “American Casino” in January 2008 when she and her husband Andrew recognized the signs of an emerging financial collapse from the subprime meltdown.
They spent the next 12 months filming the terrible effect of the accelerating disaster and have produced in my view one of the very best accounts of how and why $12 million trillion dollars vanished in the American Casino.
The reason the film is so good is because the Cockburn team were working with great freedom as independent filmmakers and they are both superb reporters who know how to put an investigative story together clearly and with impact and authority. You really don’t feel you understand the collapse until you’ve seen this documentary.
Leslie, who was born and raised in San Francisco, was among the first women to graduate from Yale. She went on to produce many award-winning stories for PBS, CBS and ABC news, including “From the Killing Fields” for the ABC News documentary show Peter Jennings Reports. She conceived and co-produced “The Peacemaker,” a thriller starring George Clooney and Nicole Kidman about a planned terrorist attack on New York City.
Andrew is a member of the famous Cockburn journalism family that count father Claud, two brothers Patrick and Alex, two nieces and Leslie. He has produced journalism in many forms including books, newspaper and magazine articles and “The Red Army,” a 198l film on the Russian military that debunked the widely held opinion at that time that the Russian military machine was equal to the U.S. military. In l998, he and brother Patrick published the book, “Out of the Ashes, the Resurrection of Saddam Hussein.” When Hussein found out about the book, he decreed that anyone caught selling it would be hanged. In l987, Andrew and Leslie began their collaboration by producing documentaries for PBS Frontline.
Andrew claims he is not shocked by the financial disasters he researched in “American Casino.” His father covered the l929 Crash as a correspondent for the London Times and Andrew grew up listening to the stories.
“American Casino” opens Friday night with a showing at 7:30 and 9:30 p.m. at the Roxie Theater, 3117 16th st., followed by Q and A sessions by Leslie and Claud. The show plays Saturday night at 7:30 and 9:30 p.m. with Q and A sessions. The move runs for the next two weeks. The Q and A sessions will be a special treat, as the audio interview above demonstrates.
Garamendi has an unmatched history of intensive work on the most pernicious problems that Congress is now wrestling with. And he is a strong advocate for single payer health care.
Garamendi for Congress
EDITORIAL The Sept. 1 special election to replace Ellen Tauscher (who has taken a post with the Obama administration) in the East Bay’s Congressional District 10 includes a large field with several great candidates. In fact, any of the top half-dozen or so Democratic Party candidates would be an improvement on Tauscher, a member of the Blue Dog Coalition who supported the Iraq War.
All these top candidates are good on the issues, including requiring a strong public option in health care reform (most go even further and support single-payer), ending the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, withdrawing troops from Iraq and developing an exit strategy for Afghanistan, achieving marriage equality, limiting federal drug and immigration raids, reforming Wall Street, and developing a sustainable energy policy that addresses climate change.
B3: Thom Hartman, on his Air America radio talk show, summed up his health care proposal in one line: From birth to death, everyone in the U.S. should be covered by Medicare. It’s the best one line proposal I’ve heard to date.
Below is his longer version about Medicare in the form of an open letter to President Obama.
I understand you’re thinking of dumping your “public option” because of all the demagoguery by Sarah Palin and Dick Armey and Newt Gingrich and their crowd on right-wing radio and Fox. Fine. Good idea, in fact.
Instead, let’s make it simple. Please let us buy into Medicare.
It would be so easy. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel with this so-called “public option” that’s a whole new program from the ground up. Medicare already exists. It works. Some people will like it, others won’t – just like the Post Office versus FedEx analogy you’re so comfortable with.
Just pass a simple bill – it could probably be just a few lines, like when Medicare was expanded to include disabled people – that says that any American citizen can buy into the program at a rate to be set by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) which reflects the actual cost for us to buy into it.
California incarcerates 170,000 people in facilities designed for less than half that number.
EDITORIAL A panel of federal judges has ordered the release of 44,000 California prisoners, sending politicians of both parties scrambling for cover and throwing a crucial issue into the heart of the Democratic campaign for governor.
And so far, both major candidates are ducking, badly.
The state prison system is a mess; any sane person knows that. California incarcerates 170,000 people in facilities designed for less than half that number. Sick inmates don’t get to see doctors; mentally ill or drug-addicted inmates often get no treatment at all. It’s so bad that a federal monitor appointed by the courts has demanded that the state spend $8 billion building new medical facilities for prisoners.
The gentleman’s agreement between Fox and MSNBC illustrates the corrosive effect on media of corporate ownership
(FAIR is a media reform group called Fairness & Accuracy in Media)
In the wake of an August 1 expose in the New York Times, an agreement reportedly reached by executives at the parent companies of Fox News Channel and MSNBC to rein in the networks’ two stars’ criticism of each other seems to have fallen apart. The behind-the-scenes deal-making, though, still illustrates the corrosive effect on media of corporate ownership.
The alleged deal concerned MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann and Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly. Olbermann seemed to deny any arrangement limiting his speech, and criticized Fox and O’Reilly right after the Times story was published (8/3/09). O’Reilly, in turn, resumed his criticism of GE on his August 5 show. But many questions remain about the nature of the deal.
Here is our monthly installment of Joseph E. Stiglitz’s Unconventional Economic Wisdom column from the Project Syndicate news series. Stiglitz is a professor of economics at Columbia University, and recipient of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics, is co-author, with Linda Bilmes, of The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Costs of the Iraq Conflict.
Stimulate or Die
By Joseph E. Stiglitz
NEW YORK – As the green shoots of economic recovery that many people spied this spring have turned brown, questions are being raised as to whether the policy of jump-starting the economy through a massive fiscal stimulus has failed. Has Keynesian economics been proven wrong now that it has been put to the test?
That question, however, would make sense only if Keynesian economics had really been tried. Indeed, what is needed now is another dose of fiscal stimulus. If that does not happen, we can look forward to an even longer period in which the economy operates below capacity, with high unemployment.
What do Green Acres, the Roseann Barr show, and the governor’s mansion have in common?
A pig named Arnold.
(From the weekend answering machine of Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, back in action after helping deliver one of the worst budgets in California history.) B3
State law requires PG&E to pay claims for economic damage caused by system failures.
EDITORIAL The electricity that San Franciscans buy from Pacific Gas and Electric Co. isn’t just expensive — it’s unreliable. That’s what figures from the California Public Utilities Commission show (see “The blackout factor, page 8). In fact, PG&E has more blackouts than any of the public power agencies in the Bay Area.
That has a significant impact on local businesses — but neither City Hall nor the small business community is paying much attention to a multimillion dollar problem.
During the worst days of the California energy crisis, rolling blackouts were a regular event, and the press and public talked constantly about the impact of power outages on businesses and the economy. Now that the worst of that crisis is over, many blackouts get no news media attention at all. But the problem is still serious: reliable power is critical to most business in the Bay Area, and even short-term outages can hit the bottom line.
In the end, the Republicans largely carried the day because they had all the power and could block any budget deal, refuse to raise taxes, and don’t really care if the state goes bankrupt
EDITORIAL David Dayen, a political blogger at Calitics, had the best line on the California budget crisis.
“Whoever cares the least about the outcome wins,” he wrote July 20. “If you don’t care whether children get health care, whether the elderly, blind and disabled die in their homes, whether prisoners rot in modified Public Storage units, whether students get educated … you have a very good chance of getting a budget that reflects that.”
In the end, the Republicans largely carried the day because they had all the power: they could block any budget deal, they refused to raise any taxes, and they don’t really care if the state goes bankrupt. In fact, Gov. Schwarzenegger was happy to draw the crisis out as long as necessary — it helped his poll rating.
B3: President Obama and his Democratic allies had the strategy all wrong on health care. They took single payer health care off the table at the beginning. They replaced it with a public policy option, which is okay in theory, but they have put no real punch or argument behind it. And they have left the insurance companies in the center of the “reform” package. So when Obama went on television last night, he laid out the health care ills eloquently but he refused to explain how they would be cured by taking single payer off the table and keeping the companies front and center that made the mess in the first place. And now, with single payer out and the public policy option fading, what does Obama have left? Keep the pressure on. Click here to read this week’s Guardian article, Bitter medicine:Health care reform groups fear the cure may be worse than the disease.
I like the way that the media reform group Fairness and Accuracy in the Media (FAIR) is calling on the media and the citizenry to keep the pressure on.
Keep up the pressure for a media debate on healthcare reform that includes single-payer! We’ve surpassed our goal of 10,000 signatures on our petition for an open debate on healthcare reform. Help us reach 15,000 signatures–please forward this email widely, and use the “Share” button on the petition page to share it through social networking sites such as Facebook.
Demand that media open the debate on healthcare reform
Many Americans and healthcare workers see single-payer national health insurance as the most sensible tool for fixing America’s broken healthcare system, yet single-payer is being kept off the table by the corporate media.
There’s too much at stake here to accept an industry-backed plan masquerading as reform
EDITORIAL It’s hard to imagine a better time for real, lasting health care reform. A popular president with a reform mandate has made it a top priority. The Democrats control both houses of Congress, with enough votes in the Senate to block a filibuster. Medical costs are soaring, driving individuals and businesses into bankruptcy. Even some big corporate executives, who recognize that the United States can’t compete in the global economy when companies have to spend so much on employee health insurance, are starting to come around.
So why is the bill working its way through Congress so incredibly weak?
One reason: the private insurance industry is still calling the shots.
In fact, from the very beginning, private insurers were involved in the policy discussions. Nancy Ann DeParle, President Obama’s senior health policy advisor and the White House point person on reform, brought the industry into the room on day one. Sen. Max Baucus of Montana, who heads the Finance Committee that is now considering the bill, received more contributions from the insurance industry than any other Democrat in the Senate.
And as long as the needs of an industry that makes profits by denying medical coverage to sick people matter more than the needs of the American people, there’s not going to be a decent reform bill.
Media eulogies for Walter Cronkite — including from progressive commentators — rarely talk about his coverage of the Vietnam War before 1968. This obit omit is essential to the myth of Cronkite as a courageous truth-teller.
But facts are facts, and history is history — including what Cronkite actually did as TV’s most influential journalist during the first years of the Vietnam War. Despite all the posthumous praise for Cronkite’s February 1968 telecast that dubbed the war “a stalemate,” the facts of history show that the broadcast came only after Cronkite’s protracted support for the war.
In 1965, reporting from Vietnam, Cronkite dramatized the murderous war effort with enthusiasm. “B-57s — the British call them Canberra jets — we’re using them very effectively here in this war in Vietnam to dive-bomb the Vietcong in these jungles beyond Da Nang here,” he reported, standing in front of a plane. Cronkite then turned to a U.S. Air Force officer next to him and said: “Colonel, what’s our mission we’re about to embark on?”
This city desperately needs aggressive enforcement of the political reform laws.
EDITORIAL The San Francisco Ethics Commission is a serious mess, and if Director John St. Croix can’t turn things around — quickly — he needs to resign and make room for someone who can.
Ethics has badly damaged its reputation in recent years by hounding small-time violators from grassroots campaigns and ignoring the major players who cheat and game the system as a matter of practice. A couple of festering examples:
In 2004, then-Ethics Director Ginny Vida and Deputy Director Mabel Ng ordered the staff to destroy public records that pointed to malfeasance on the part of the Newsom for Mayor campaign. The records — which the Newsom campaign sent to the commission by mistake — suggested that the newly-elected mayor was illegally diverting money from his inaugural committee to pay off his campaign debt.
Dick Meister, a San Francisco-based freelance columnist, has covered labor and political issues for a half-century as a reporter, editor, author and commentator.
Those seeking to guarantee workers the unfettered right to unionize have a compelling new example of how it can be done: An agreement reached in June by representatives of organized labor and the Catholic health care system.
It wasn’t easily reached. It took more than a decade of dialogue and sometimes hostile confrontations as union organizers tried to win collective bargaining rights for the 600,000 workers in the Catholic Church’s 600 hospitals and 1,200 other health care facilities across the nation.
Fixing PG&E’s blackout problem: State law requires PG&E to pay claims for economic damage caused by system failures
Guardian Editorial
EDITORIAL The electricity that San Franciscans buy from Pacific Gas and Electric Co. isn’t just expensive — it’s unreliable. That’s what figures from the California Public Utilities Commission show (see story below). In fact, PG&E has more blackouts than any of the public power agencies in the Bay Area.
That has a significant impact on local businesses — but neither City Hall nor the small business community is paying much attention to a multimillion dollar problem. Click here to continue reading editorial.
The blackout factor: PG&E’s poor reliability record costs businesses millions By Megan Rawlins
Noel Birbeck makes signs. In a low, nondescript building tucked into a south of Market side street, a printing machine spits out personal greetings and corporate messages in all colors, shapes, and sizes.
Until the power goes out.
“We print things that are up to 50 feet long,” said Birbeck, the business manager of Budget Signs. “If the power goes out at foot 35, we have to start the printing process all over and throw out all that time and money that went into the initial printing.” Click here to continue reading.
The only new revenue in the budget comes from fee increases on Muni, public parks, after-school programs and the like.Meanwhile, Oakland is fighting its budget deficit with progressive taxes.
EDITORIAL In the end, Mayor Gavin Newsom got his way. The San Francisco supervisors made some significant changes to the budget and saved some $40 million worth of programs that the mayor wanted to cut or privatize, but the Newsom for governor ads will still be able to proclaim that the mayor solved his city’s budget problem without raising taxes or cutting police and firefighters.
Instead, this fall some 1,500 city employees are slated to be laid off, 400 of them in the Department of Public Health. Many recreation directors will get pink slips. Human services will lose at least 100 people. Nonprofit service providers will see much of their city funding disappear. The money to pay for public financing of the upcoming supervisorial and mayoral races is gone. Newsom’s pet (and expensive) 311 service will still be open 24 hours a day (with a lot of the money coming from Muni).
Celebrating the 4th in Canadian territory settled by pro-British “Loyalists” who fled the U.S. after the Revolutionary War
By Dick Meister
The Fourth of July, as we all know, is Independence Day. Hurray for George
Washington and the revolutionaries, down with King George and the British.
That sort of thing.
But have you ever wondered what it’s like on the other side? Have you ever
celebrated the Fourth across the border in Canada, in that territory settled
by pro-British “Loyalists” who fled the United States after the
Revolutionary War? It is a most peculiar experience for one accustomed to
the American way of viewing the events of 1776.
The good old days in Rock Rapids, Iowa, the Fourth of July, l940-53
By Bruce B. Brugmann
(Note: In July of l972, when the Guardian was short a Fourth of July story, I sat down and cranked out this one for the front page on my trusty Royal Typewriter. I now reprint it each year on the Bruce blog, with some San Francisco updates and postscripts.)
Back where I come from, a small town beneath a tall standpipe in northwestern Iowa, the Fourth of July was the best day of a long, hot summer.
The Fourth came after YMCA camp and Scout camp and church camp, but before the older boys had to worry about getting into shape for football. It was welcome relief from the scalding, 100-degree heat in a town without a swimming pool and whose swimming holes at Scout Island were usually dried up by early July. But best of all, it had the kind of excitement that began building weeks in advance.
Scott Hauge, founder and president of Small Business California, and Christopher White, of the Bay Area Innovative Alliiance, are sounding the alarm on behalf of small business.
Next week, Congress is scheduled to vote on reauthorization of the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, which directs $2.2 billion annually in federal grants to small technology businesses across the country.
The problem, according to Hauge and White, is that the House bill contains a provision which changes the definition of small business to include subsidiaries of multinational corporations and companies that are majority-owned by multi-billion venture capital funds and other large financial institutions, including foreign financial institutions.
Click here to read their statement. They recommend that people call Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s office and Rep. Jackie Speie’s office to oppose the changes and keep the original SBIR small business eligibility criteria in place.
Here is our monthly installment of Joseph E. Stiglitz’s Unconventional Economic Wisdom column from the Project Syndicate news series. Stiglitz is a professor of economics at Columbia University, and recipient of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics, is co-author, with Linda Bilmes, of The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Costs of the Iraq Conflict.
The UN Takes Charge
By Joseph E. Stiglitz
NEW YORK – While discussions about economic “green shoots” continue unabated in the United States, in many countries, and especially in the developing world, matters are getting worse. The downturn in the US began with a failure in the financial system, which quickly was translated into a slowdown in the real economy. But, in the developing world, it is just the opposite: a decline in exports, reduced remittances, lower foreign direct investment, and precipitous falls in capital flows have led to economic weakening. As a result, even countries with good regulatory systems are now confronting problems in their financial sectors.
On June 23, a United Nations conference focusing on the global economic crisis and its impact on developing countries reached a consensus both about the causes of the downturn and why it was affecting developing countries so badly. It outlined some of the measures that should be considered and established a working group to explore the way forward, possibly under the guidance of a newly established expert group.
