Your Crack Is Showing

Oh boy, prepare yourselves for the latest edition from Peter Schiff’s Not Ready For Prime Time File. In a blog post on TakiMag.com, Schiff lays out some of his key policy views that we’d likely see if he runs for Senate, namely opposing regulating greenhouse emissions to curb global warming and providing healthcare for all Americans. On healthcare he writes:

On the other hand, no one carries home maintenance insurance to pay for a clogged drain or broken garage door. If insurance paid for the plumber visit every time a toilet overflowed, we would now have a plumbing crisis, and Congress would be looking to reign in runaway plumbing bills with “national plumbing insurance.”

That’s right, Schiff just compared national healthcare reform to plumbing. Or to be more specific, the ability to receive treatment for life threatening illnesses to a backed up septic system. Because, you know, they’re about the same on the Grand Scale of Glibertarian Importance.

Seriously, I’m reaching a point where I hope Schiff runs for Senate in Connecticut just for the comic relief he’ll bring to an otherwise tense race.

New & Improvement Chinese Internet Censorship

Keith Bradsher of the New York Times reports on the growth of censorship of the internet by the Chinese government and the close connection between efforts to monitor and censor pornography and political thought online. This comes at a time when the Chinese government has already received much international attention for its Green Dam-Youth Escort censorship and monitoring program required to be preinstalled on all new computers in China.

Liu Xiaobo, one of China’s best-known dissidents, was formally arrested Tuesday on suspicion of subversion, six months after he was detained for joining other intellectuals in signing a document calling for democracy. This month, the authorities refused to renew the licenses of more than a dozen lawyers after they agreed to represent clients in human rights cases.

The same public security agencies charged with fighting pornography are responsible for suppressing illegal political activity, said Nicholas Bequelin, a researcher in Hong Kong for Human Rights Watch. The government’s statistics for seizures of illegal publications tend to include both pornographic and political documents, he noted.

“The two are closely associated,” Mr. Bequelin said. “These campaigns work hand in hand.”

It’s not shocking that tools used to censor one type of information would be well-suited to censor another type of information. It’s just rare that a government would engage in such brazen efforts to limit what information their citizenry would have about key historic events, territories occupied by the Chinese military, and religious groups.

Additionally, the Bradsher piece includes this bit of information about China’s surveillance state infrastructure that I was unaware of:

For example, Chinese law requires that karaoke bars, nightclubs and Internet cafes be monitored 24 hours a day by closed-circuit television cameras on the grounds that prostitutes may try to find clients at such locations. But according to security industry executives, China’s anti-prostitution surveillance regulations are stricter on the Internet cafes.

While nightclubs and karaoke bars are required to store their video records on their premises, Internet cafes must be wired to the nearest police station and provide a continuous, instantaneous record of who is using which computer. If an e-mail message from a cafe’s computer later catches the attention of investigators, the police can review the video records to see who was using the computer.

Good to know that if I’m ever in China, I probably shouldn’t use a public internet cafe.

This information about the Chinese government’s censorship of the internet and intense efforts to monitor everything that their citizenry searches for online is deeply disturbing. It’s yet another instantiation of the Chinese government using high tech tools and software – many of them made by American technology companies – to maintain their control of political power. These are not the actions of a government that finds its authority in the support of the people. And it certainly isn’t how a respected member of the global community behaves. Most importantly, the systemic distrust of the government of its people can only, on a long enough time line, lead to its downfall.

Exactly

Congesswoman Lynn Woolsey and liberals in the House seem to get it on healthcare reform. Roll Call reports:

House liberals are warning the Senate, Democratic leaders and President Barack Obama that a government-run insurance option must be included in any health reform bill, or else the powerful bloc will vote it down.

“Usually, we work behind the scenes to strengthen legislation,” said Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.), co-chairwoman of the 80-member Congressional Progressive Caucus. “We’re careful not to take on our party’s leadership, or President Obama.

“This time, however, is different.”

Woolsey made it clear that she and many of her colleagues will vote to kill a health care plan if it leaves patients at the mercy of private health insurance companies.

“No one in this building wants health care reform as much as we do. However, if reform legislation comes to the floor, and it does not include a real and robust public option that lives up to our criteria, then we will fight it with everything that we have,” she said.

Woolsey was speaking at an event with the Progressive Caucus, Congressional Black Caucus, Congressional Hispanic Caucus and the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus. This bloc could ensure that either we get a public health insurance option or we don’t get anything until there’s the political will in the White House and the Senate to fight for it. This strikes me as the right course of action.

What Constitutes Success in Healthcare Reform?

As the healthcare debate continues unfold and legislative resolutions continue to take longer to produce, I can’t help but wonder what the Obama administration and Congressional Democrats are going to view as constituting success. The Senate HELP Committee has extended markup on their legislation and they now won’t be considering the coverage parts of legislation, which include the public health insurance option, until after the July 4th recess. The Finance Committee seems to have moved completely beyond the public option and is now fiddling with various ideas of regional insurance co-ops, which are in no way a substitute for a national public health insurance option. The House, on the other hand, has aggressively pushed meaningful reform that includes strong employer responsibility provisions and a robust public option.

In my eyes, the House efforts are both leading towards the sort of legislation that I think would constitute meaningful reform and being done in a way that will likely maximize the positive impact through strong, principled engagement of the legislative process.  Somewhere along the line, the House and Senate will have to get together to figure out what this legislation will really look like. Either on body will have to accept the others’ work, or it will have to be hammered out (read: rewritten from scratch) in conference committee. There are, as I see it, five possible procedural outcomes:

  • The Senate considers and passes/modifies the House bill
  • The Senate considers the HELP Committee bill and sends it on to the House
  • The Senate considers the Finance Committee bill and sends it on to the House
  •  A conference committee reports a merger of the House legislation and whatever comes out of the Senate
  • Nothing passes

Only the first option, where the Senate makes the House legislation their underlying bill and then Democrats try to fight off damaging amendments from Republicans to water it down, is really likely to produce successful reform. I hope the second option, where the Senate makes a strong HELP Committee bill underlying and passes it without being watered down, is also possible, but we don’t yet know how good the HELP legislation will be. I have no faith in the Finance Committee or the outcome of a conference committee at this point in time.

It all comes down to how is the White House and Democratic leaders in Congress thinking about what constitutes success. If they really want to cover a larger majority of uninsured Americans and get the economy back on track, I don’t see how they can look at anything that fails to include a public health insurance option as a success. If passing anything and calling it “landmark healthcare reform” regardless of what it actually does is enough of a success, then I worry that there will not be pressure by leadership to ensure that what I think of as a high quality bill passes. We’re reaching the point where President Obama, Senator Baucus, Reid, Dodd, Speaker Pelosi, and Rep. Hoyer (to name a few) need to decide what is more important: creating compelling ad scripts for the 2010 and 2012 elections or really helping working Americans have affordable, high quality healthcare. That’s the choice – politics or policy. Judging by the quality of the bill that eventually gets pushed forward to a final vote, we will see which won out.

Hindsight & Political Physics

The New York Times profile of Senator Max Baucus and his role leading the Finance Committee towards a healthcare reform bill contains an infuriating nugget of strategic hindsight.

He conceded that it was a mistake to rule out a fully government-run health system, or a “single-payer plan,” not because he supports it but because doing so alienated a large, vocal constituency and left Mr. Obama’s proposal of a public health plan to compete with private insurers as the most liberal position.

God God, man!  It’s like Baucus had never heard of physics before he fell down.

Seriously, the lack of strategic understanding by Democratic elected officials is mind-boggling. That Baucus is only now realizing the strategic value of keeping a single-payer system on the table from Day One, even only as a means to provide political space for something like a political option, is simply stunning. Of course Baucus, and likely the whole country, willpay for his strategic error as the public health insurance option doesn’t survive the Finance Committee’s draft process. After all, while Baucus may be making noises about not being able to keep the Obama-backed public health insurance option on the table because of this error in strategy, he is also conceding it as a means of winning the support of at least one Republican on his committee. Not because he needs the vote to pass legislation out of the Finance Committee, but because he thinks bipartisanship is more important than providing working Americans with universal health care.

Baucus’s statement about the strategic error he made (though in fairness this is a mistake that every Democrat in the Senate save Bernie Sanders has made, as well as most members of the House caucus and Presidnet Obama) is a rare admission by a senior Democrat that there is political value in the party maintaining strong liberal positions. The simple fact is that if the Democrats want to achieve their moderate goals for quasi-liberal, pro-business policy, they can’t have quasi-liberal policies as the left flank. This leaves them coming to the table with only one direction to move: away from their goals and towards the Republican position. This amounts to making concessions before you even start negotiating, by the simple fact that you have no margin for concession short of not getting what you want.

A strong liberal flank of the Democratic Party enables more moderate, but still Democratic, policies to be enacted. Even if the left exists to provide political space for compromises towards the more moderate, it would still enable more Democratic legislation to pass with fewer concessions to Republican positions. That, in itself, would amount to moving the country to the left, even without seeing hardline progressive legislation coming through.

Everything we know about Democratic elected officials is that they are ready to concede their values if its politically and legislatively expedient. There needs to be space for this behavior to take place without hurting actual Democratic policy efforts. The best way to create this space is by fostering the Democratic left and treating it as a serious policy option, worthy of consideration. In this case, having a vibrant discussion of a single-payer healthcare system in the Finance and HELP committees of the Senate could have facilitated moving conservative Democrats and even some moderate Republicans to support a public health insurance option. Single-payer would have created the space for the public option. It would have given Obama, Kennedy, and Dodd a left flank to lean into and eventually give up, while making the public option appear what it truly is: a moderate position that is widely appealing to the American public.

The one question that merits consideration in the discussion of how single-payer could have been used to facilitate the public option becoming law is why would progressive activists allow themselves to work tirelessly for a policy that will only, in the end, be conceded? I say for the same reason we work tirelessly to support Democratic candidates, largely regardless of their specific policy positions. It’s the only best way to get anything close to progressive policies enacted into law.

Creating space on the left for Democrats to work could have enabled something great on healthcare reform. It’s nice to see Baucus recognize the error of his ways (after it’s likely cost us the public health insurance option), but how will this mistake inform his future legislative strategies? Will he embrace the role of strong liberal policy pushes in the future, in recognition of how they enable other Democratic legislation to pass? Or will he just move along and keep looking for that bipartisan sweet spot that makes him sleep comfortably at night, regardless of how policy concessions made before he even begins negotiation hurt working Americans?

Tibetan Jailed for Content of Text Messages

The Dui Hua Foundation has translated documents from the indictment and verdict of a Tibetan tour guide, Gonpo Tserang, who has been jailed for three years for text messages he sent during the spring 2008 national uprising in Tibet.

These messages, which prosecutors claim “distorted the facts and true situation regarding social stability in the Tibetan area following the ‘March 14 incident” were considered by the court to be deserving of severe punishment.

Dui Hua has important analysis of this sentencing:

Gonpo Tserang’s case illustrates both the extent to which Chinese police were engaged in monitoring communications between Tibetans and outsiders during the period after the protests and the low threshold for criminal liability in such situations. We do not know the content of Gonpo Tserang’s messages, but sending this handful of messages to individuals outside of China resulted in a three-year sentence. Such intense monitoring and the potential consequences of being caught saying the wrong things to outsiders help to explain the wariness of many Tibetans to report what they witnessed. To a large extent, this wariness has allowed the official Chinese narrative of events to become dominant. It also compels observers to wonder what punishments might be handed down to Tibetans who have been reported detained for saying or doing even more.

This is simply chilling. While we have seen massive Chinese censorship of the internet and availability of information about Tibet to people within Tibet and China, we have also seen a half century of the Chinese government criminalizing the idea of Tibetan independence. The history of China’s occupation of Tibet is filled with patriotic monks, nuns, and lay people being sentenced to jail time, beaten, and tortured for saying “free Tibet,” carrying the Tibetan national flag, singing the Tibetan national anthem, or carrying a picture of the Dalai Lama. But I don’t know of any instances where the Chinese government jailed a Tibetan for the contents of a text message. Sadly, it is a natural evolution of the Chinese government’s crackdown on Tibetans and their effort to eradicate Tibetan’s unquenchable desire for independence.

Congressional Healthcare

The way things are going, I think there is going to be a lot of clamoring to remove healthcare benefits from compensation for serving as a Senator or Congressman. Multimillionaires with lifetime access to top-of-the-line care are not showing themselves to be well suited to make decisions about what sort of healthcare coverage is available to everyone else. If this all shakes out without real, meaningful reform, especially including the public health insurance option, I’d hope that someone in each of these bodies has the courage to start returning some of their benefits package.

Dodd Now In Favor of Marriage Equality

This is great news. Dodd is now where he should be on marriage equality. I’m very proud of him for this. His willingness to re-evaluate his beliefs should be a model for other elected officials nationwide.

My young daughters are growing up in a different reality than I did. Our family knows many same-sex couples – our neighbors in Connecticut, members of my staff, parents of their schoolmates. Some are now married because the Connecticut Supreme Court and our state legislature have made same-sex marriage legal in our state.

But to my daughters, these couples are married simply because they love each other and want to build a life together. That’s what we’ve taught them. The things that make those families different from their own pale in comparison to the commitments that bind those couples together.

And, really, that’s what marriage should be. It’s about rights and responsibilities and, most of all, love.

I believe that, when my daughters grow up, barriers to marriage equality for same-sex couples will seem as archaic, and as unfair, as the laws we once had against inter-racial marriage.

And I want them to know that, even if he was a little late, their dad came down on the right side of history.
I have always been proud of my long record fighting for the civil rights of the LGBT community. I’ve co-sponsored legislation to strengthen hate crime laws and end discrimination in the workplace. I’ve spoken out against “don’t ask, don’t tell” and always supported equal rights for domestic partnerships.

But I am also proud to now count myself among the many elected officials, advocates, and ordinary citizens who support full marriage equality for same-sex couples.

Working with Senator Dodd throughout 2007 and early 2008, I heard him talk about gay marriage and the importance of equality a lot. Despite sounding so close to being in support of full equality, when I worked for him he was not there. Seeing a major politician grapple with these issues is interesting and I’m proud to see Senator Dodd now carry his beliefs that he wouldn’t want his daughters subject to any discrimination based on their sexual orientation to its logical conclusion.

I can only hope that Dodd follows this up with legislation to repeal DOMA and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, while simultaneously spending time talking with President Obama to try to convince him to move to the right side of history on marriage equality.

Healthcare Failure & Accountability

Per Joe Sudbay, Paul Krugman’s column hitting conservative Democrats for failing to advance a massively popular policy initiative that the public voted for this past election, it’s deeply troubling that a handful of Democratic senators are the ones standing in the way of needed reform. Sudbay writes, “The American people actually expect elected officials to deliver on campaign promises.” But I think it’s something beyond this.

Promises were made and voters decided accordingly, but this is less about the specific voters in states like Nebraska, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Montana (to name a few) whose conservative Democratic senators are causing problems with the positive agenda in the Senate, but more about the agenda promised from the White House downward. Implicit in the agenda Obama put forward during the election was that Democrats would support his policy plan. Voters were told that if they supported Obama, change would come. Obama has made some clear statements about what he wants to see in healthcare reform, namely, a public health insurance option. It was part of his policy plan on the campaign and received major attention from voters during both the primary and the general election. He still supports it. So where are the Democrats? Where do the Landrieus, Liebermans, Baucuses, and Hagans of the world get the license to steal the change the people voted for in Barack Obama from them?

What seems fundamental is that the conservative Democrats of the Senate do not feel accountable to either the public or the President. How they got to that point can be debated. But I find it hard to imagine a scenario where these politicians escape the ire of the electorate for standing in the way of the change they were promised on the national campaign trail. Because I highly doubt that the voting public will hold President Obama at fault for the actions of Hagan, Baucus, Landrieu, and Lieberman. Senators assuming otherwise are making a dangerous gamble and one that will actually hurt working families, and not just curren office holders.