Killer Politics Read online

  My friend Tony Bender, an author and columnist, wrote, “The Republicans screamed that it was some kind of indoctrination. Turns out, it was. Obama subversively encouraged them to stay in school and graduate! Well, you know what education does to people, don’t you? Turns them into Democrats!”

  COLLEGE MAKES CENTS

  According to 2006 U.S. Census statistics, college graduates make about $23,000 more a year than high school graduates. Those with advanced degrees make about $80,000, while high school dropouts average less than $20,000. Show those numbers to your kid the next time your kid’s report card comes out. Because income and education are so closely tied together, it stands to reason that those with the financial wherewithal in the first place hold the advantage. Not only can they afford college, but they can afford the best colleges. A student from a working family of less means may not be able to afford college at all, and you can see how that negative cycle is perpetuated—an undereducated head of household earns less, making it less likely that person’s children can afford college.

  The right thing to do is to make education a civil right just like health care. Some European countries subsidize college student living expenses, and I think that should be our long-term goal. It’s worth considering especially for our veterans, who deserve every break we can give them. But we know that won’t happen overnight. President Obama is on the right track with his proposed annual $4,000 tax credit for students in exchange for community service, but it is a small first step.

  As you consider the best education for your children, know that not everyone in this new economy will be wearing suits and ties. There is tremendous opportunity in the trades—plumbing, electrical, construction—because these are good-paying jobs that can’t be shipped overseas. A two-year community college education could open the doors to many things—perhaps even your child’s own business.

  THE STUDENT LOAN TRAP

  Man, it kills me to see so many college graduates looking for a job while huge student loan payments hang over their heads like dark clouds. Too many people fall into the student loan trap. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not against student loans, but anytime you borrow, you need to have your eyes wide open. Watch for sharks!

  It is imperative that we make higher education if not free, then affordable—and that we clean up the seamy world of student loans. Through the Federal Family Education Loan Program, lenders have been collecting generous subsidies for making virtually risk-free loans. This sort of thing never ceases to astonish me. The very financial sectors that preach the virtues of risk-based capitalism want a sure thing from the government.

  The Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2009 could change all that by getting rid of the unscrupulous middlemen and saving taxpayers $87 billion over a decade. The savings would fund a $40 billion increase in Pell Grants, $10 billion in community college upgrades, and $8 billion for early childhood education.

  Many colleges, though, are against this act. Why? The dirty little secret is that some of them are in cahoots with the lenders. In exchange for giving a lender “preferred status,” even if that lender did not offer the best packages, some collage bureaucrats received kickbacks for listing a lender’s student loan offerings as “preferred.” According to the Washington Post, a financial aid director at Johns Hopkins University “accepted more than $130,000 from eight lending industry companies during her tenure, twice as much money as previously disclosed.”

  When you consider all of the evidence—when you do the math—why wouldn’t we want to pass the bill? The argument from Republicans (surprise) is that the bill would cause five thousand layoffs in the private lending sector. Are you kidding me? This is like taking bank robbers off the street—not bankers. Good grief, the financial industry damn near buried the economy; they have screwed middle-class Americans every way you can get screwed. You bailed them out—WE bailed them out with OUR tax dollars—and now we should allow this crooked little game to continue? We need to get our priorities straight. We need to stick up for the students.

  The State of the Four Pillars

  There you have it—the Four Pillars: Defend the Nation, Establish a Sound Fiscal Policy, Feed the Country, and Educate the People. It’s pretty basic. If we do these four things well, we will thrive. If one pillar crumbles, the rest begin to wobble.

  So, how would Professor Schultz grade the state of the pillars today?

  Defend the Nation—C+

  Certainly our intelligence network is better now than it was a decade ago. President Obama’s outreach to other countries has put us on the path to build more coalitions and isolate terrorists and rogue states, and his efforts toward nuclear disarmament have made us safer. His is an enlightened approach—he recognizes that an insular, isolationist approach and a go-it-alone attitude is destined to fail.

  Our soldiers have been valiant, but the Bush administration left our forces overcommitted and undermanned. Our inability to extricate ourselves from Afghanistan and Iraq means less flexibility for our military assets. Despite Dick Cheney’s assertions that the Bush administration made us safer, countries like Iran, North Korea, Russia, and China, understanding our vulnerabilities, were emboldened during the Bush administration. It’s going to take some time to rebuild our military and reassure the world of our strength.

  Internally, we need to examine our role as an arms dealer to the world. And we need to do some serious soul-searching about the potentially intrusive role of technology in our defense plans; if we can’t uphold the Constitution while defending our country, what exactly are we defending?

  Establish a Sound Fiscal Policy—D+

  And that’s an improvement from the F the Obama administration inherited from the Bush administration. TARP and the stimulus package saved this country and world from the much more serious meltdown that could have happened. However, the financial sector of this country still remains predatory in nature, and Congress has not gone far enough to rein it in. The energy and health care industries continue to slowly bleed the life out of the economy. Until those issues and our trade imbalances are brought into check, the country will be on shaky financial footing. I believe the president and some members of Congress are committed to debt reduction. The test is whether the American people are willing to make the necessary sacrifices.

  Feed the Country—B-

  The cost of food in America is remarkably low, and food is abundant. The bad news is, much of it is overprocessed and just plain bad for you. Monopolies also threaten the supply and quality of our food. Here’s a case of the frog in the pot set to boil. We may feel comfortable for now, but eventually the water will boil and it will be a crisis too late for us to avoid. We need to look ahead. It’s imperative that we do all we can to support diversity—small farmers—any way we can, while diminishing the strength of food monopolies.

  Educate the People—C-

  We can do so much better. We talk about a Manhattan Project for this and that, so why not one for education? Our true enduring greatness as a nation rests on our ability to educate a creative, enlightened population. Until every citizen has an equal opportunity to be educated, we will not have succeeded. Education, like health care, should not be “for profit” but available for all as a right of citizenship. The more educated Americans are, the greater we can become.

  CHAPTER THREE

  HEALTH CARE

  Your Inalienable Right

  EXHAUSTED…I WAS DEAD TIRED WHEN I MADE A GUEST APPEARANCE on MSNBC’s Morning Joe show on December 17, 2009. Just a few days before that I had been broadcasting from Kansas City at a free health clinic, seeing something I never thought I would see in America—thousands of good people, most of them the working poor, some of them the struggling middle class, all lined up for health care they could not otherwise afford. The clinics were Keith Olbermann’s idea, and donations from some twenty-five thousand MSNBC viewers made them possible. I spent two days broadcasting from Kansas City. It was emotionally wrenching.

  Strun
g out from traveling, tired, battling one helluva cold, and just plain heartbroken about what I had seen, I told Joe Scarborough’s viewers that morning what I thought about the compromised health care bill on the table that day. Although it improved many things, it contained no public option and, as I saw it, provided no real competition for the insurance companies. “The president never drew a line in the sand…he hasn’t been tough,” I said. “Barack Obama is not listening to his base.”

  Well, somebody was listening to me, because moments later, a remarkable thing happened. One of the president’s closest advisors, David Axelrod, called the show, and we got into it. “Where’s the competition?” I asked. “People in this country right now—the progressives—don’t believe that the White House has stood up to the insurance industry.”

  Axelrod responded, “Ed, let me ask you a question. Why is the insurance industry so vigorously opposing this bill?…We fought for years as progressives for a patient’s bill of rights. Everything that was in that patient’s bill of rights is now enshrined in this legislation. And yet people say, let’s just throw it away [the health care bill], we don’t need it anymore. Why is the insurance industry fighting us so hard?”

  “Respectfully, Mr. Axelrod, I’ll answer your question if you answer mine,” I said. “I’ll answer your question: [The insurance industry has] the money to play a shell game on the American people. They’re creating this facade that [the health care plan you propose] is really bad for them. It’s not, it’s a handout.”

  It is, too. The insurance companies were crying wolf over the Senate health care plan, doing some serious melodrama, and then laughing all the way to the bank. Wall Street sure thought so. Insurance stocks went through the roof! C’mon! Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining.

  The proposed legislation mandated that all Americans must buy insurance from a private company. Yes, those who can’t afford it would get government subsidies, but the bottom line was: The insurance companies would get 31 million new customers and no pesky government insurance option to compete against them. I call that a handout.

  My exchange with Axelrod reflected two things. First of all, it reflected the angst Americans were feeling about all this. Second, on a personal level, it reflected the chill that had developed between the White House and me during the course of the health care debate.

  I carried plenty of water for Barack Obama during the campaign, because I thought he was the right man at the right time, and I still think that. But the White House has developed rabbit ears. They don’t understand that I may be one of the best friends they have, because I am not an enabler. I tell it like it is—at least how I see it—and a lesson I learned long ago is that the best friend you can have is the guy who tells you what you don’t want to hear but need to. You have to be able to differentiate the tough love from an attack.

  One of the most infuriating things about writing this book has been that while I’ve been writing it, the fight for health care reform has been a real-time emotional roller-coaster ride. The public option is in! No, it’s dead! It’s alive! No, it’s been traded for Medicare expansion! And on and on it went. When Scott Brown won the Senate seat Ted Kennedy had held for nearly fifty years, it cost the Democrats their filibuster-proof majority, and threatened to undo the bill.

  Every day, I felt it was my duty to be fully informed on every twist and turn in the legislative process in Washington, so I could fight for health care each afternoon on the radio and each weekday evening on MSNBC. I had a pulpit during a crucial time for health justice in the United States, and I was determined to use it well. I’m a redhead who wears his heart on his sleeve, so all the twists and turns just about did me in sometimes. Some days I felt wrung out!

  Why, I wondered, can’t we come together as a country? Why can’t we do the right thing, which I know it is in our nature to do? Why must we move forward in such excruciating increments?

  None of us, including me, has learned patience. The twenty-four-hour news cycle drives our emotions. But it shouldn’t. This is the age of instant gratification, and we expect our presidents to solve every problem in the first year. That’s insane.

  In light of the fractious nature of Congress, the obstructionist policies of conservatives, and the power of the health care industry, it is clear that the journey to where we need to go with health care will be one measured over decades.

  In my mind there are a few things that ought to be basic human rights in our system. I believe every person has an equal right to a good education. I believe every American has the right to retire from the workplace in dignity, with a reasonable standard of living. And in my heart I know that it is morally bankrupt to base the quality of health care on the size of the recipient’s wallet—to have some insurance company bean counter making a decision that should be left to a patient and the patient’s doctor.

  Reasonable access to health care is a basic civil right.

  That said, the citizen has some responsibilities, too, and we’ll get to that—settle down, righties! As a progressive in this politically correct world, don’t you get tired of feeling like you have to placate archconservatives every few sentences to let them know that, like them, you believe in personal responsibility? Geez! Living under this suffocating Republican influence for so long has us all walking around with our sphincters so tight, if we started eating coal we could crap diamonds.

  The fact of the matter is, there are far more things that unite us as Americans than divide us, and one of them is health care. A 2008 survey commissioned by the Commonwealth Fund reported that 82 percent of more than one thousand surveyed thought the system needed to be overhauled. You think? Other surveys showed a majority of Americans favored a government-run option to compete with private insurers. Meanwhile, the House Republican leader, Representative John Boehner of Ohio, claimed “I’m still trying to find the first American to talk to who is in favor of the public option.” That’s the equivalent of not being able to find your ass with both hands.

  Pre-Obama, the United States spent twice per capita what other developed nations spend on health care. Still, life expectancy in America, at 78.11 years, ranks fiftieth in the world. Canada is eighth with a life expectancy of 81.3. Not a single major industrialized nation with national health care ranks lower than the United States.

  Macau has the longest life expectancy in the world (84.36), and Japan, at number 3, is the highest ranked industrial nation (82.12).

  Meanwhile, U.S. infant mortality is 6.26 per 1,000 births, forty-fifth best, ranking just behind Cuba. Singapore is at the top with a 2.31 infant mortality rate.

  Tell me again that health care in the United States is the best in the world.

  If you’re wondering how Singapore does it, a nationalized health insurance plan there is funded by payroll deductions, some government subsidies, and through price controls. Many Singaporeans also have supplemental insurance for services not covered by the government. The country spends 3 percent of GDP on health care, compared to 17 percent ($2.4 trillion) in the United States. Compare that to 10.9 percent of the GDP spent on health care in Switzerland and 9.7 percent in Canada.

  Someday we will come to the conclusion that universal health care is the optimum solution. We already have a program that works—Medicare—all we have to do is expand it to everyone. We will find it makes the most sense for our economy as a whole and, more importantly, that it is the moral thing to do. The frustrating thing about this cause is that we can only get the votes for baby steps. “You can’t pass legislation with polls,” Senator Kent Conrad told me on my radio show. “You need votes—and we don’t have the votes.” What? For the first time since 1979, the Democrats had sixty votes in the Senate, and still I was hearing “Well, you know, Eddie, we jest can’t get ’er dun.”

  You’re kidding, right? You’re telling a guy who, like millions of others, busted his ass for a victory for Barack Obama and a Senate majority, all on the promise of change, that the Democrats are still kowt
owing to the minority! “Excuse me there, would it be OK if we passed a little health care legislation?”

  Those sixty votes lasted just a year, and the Democrats failed to take advantage of the opportunity.

  What the hell! What would Bush have done with sixty votes? We’d be in Iran by now! The Dixie Chicks would be in jail and Toby Keith would be the secretary of defense. What is with the Democratic Party? I keep hearing about these Chicago Thug Politics. Yeah? Well, gimme some! The opportunities afforded by a sixty-vote Senate majority come around as often as Haley’s Comet or Dick Cheney telling the truth—and the Democrats acted like they were on life support. Where’s our Tom DeLay? Why, as Democrats, can’t we put the hammer down?

  OK, OK! As we discovered, the sixty-vote majority was strictly theoretical, anyway. Smokey Joe Lieberman (I-CT) long ago abandoned any fealty to the Democratic Caucus. (Note the use of the word “Democratic.” I find the use by conservatives of the term “Democrat Party” insulting. They can’t stand our association with democratic principles, apparently. We don’t call them the Republic Party, do we?)

  I appreciate the president’s efforts to try to work with Republicans, but they are too invested in his failure. Olive branches are not working, so at least try a bigger branch, Mr. President! Sometimes you do need a big stick. Barack Obama needs to set aside Lincoln for a while and model LBJ. Heck, Landslide Lyndon was known to pick up senators by the ears! That’s how I heard it, anyway.

  Republican opposition to health care reform has little to do with the actual issue. It’s about taking the president down, as Tim Dickinson explained in Rolling Stone: “Behind the scenes, top Republicans—including House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, Minority Leader John Boehner and the chairman of the GOP’s Senate steering committee, Jim DeMint—worked hand-in-glove with the organizers of the town brawls. Their goal was not only to block health care reform but to bankrupt President Obama’s political capital before he could move on to other key items on his agenda, including curbing climate change and expanding labor rights. As DeMint told an August [2009] teleconference of nearly 20,000 town-hall activists, ‘If we can stop him on this, the administration won’t be able to go on to cap and trade, card check and the other things they want to do.’”