Letter to the editor, re: Nader and popular support for progressive policies

To the editors:
In your harangue against Ralph Nader (Chicago Tribune editorial, "Irrelevant at any speed", 2008 February 27), you suggest that issues like single-payer health insurance and reducing the military budget are being ignored by the major presidential candidates because they "don't see sufficient public support for them". Five minutes on the internet would have proved you wrong.

In an October 2003 Washington Post-ABC News poll, 62 percent of respondents preferred "a universal health insurance program, in which everybody is covered under a program like Medicare that's run by the government and financed by taxpayers." Polls have consistently shown that overwhelming majorities of Americans believe health coverage is a right that should be guaranteed by the government, and large majorities are also willing to pay higher taxes to accomplish this goal. Yet single-payer health insurance, if done right, would actually lower overall health costs and simultaneously accomplish universal coverage. Just ask any other rich country - they all cover all their citizens, and they all pay less for comparable levels of care.

As for military spending, a March 2007 Gallup poll found that 43 percent of respondents think the U.S. spends too much on its military, compared with 20 percent who think military spending is too low and 35 percent who say it's about right.

Clearly there are high levels of popular support for progressive solutions, which is even more remarkable in light of the fact that mainstream politicians and the media ignore them. Perhaps Nader is right after all - progressive policies are suppressed not because of popular indifference but because powerful interests like the health
industry and military lobby have a stranglehold on our politics.

Heads up on Nader

Looks like Nader will be announcing a presidential run when he appears on Meet the Press tomorrow.

The vitriol from the liberals has already started. I doubt that Nader will have much of an effect on this election, since the Democrats will go all out to keep him off ballots and smear him in public, while the media will only talk to him about his chances for acting as a spoiler.

Nader will be the only high-profile candidate addressing hugely important issues like the need for single-payer healthcare, the ridiculous size of the military, and the continuing domination of corporate power over our lives. Yet I've become very disillusioned with him since the 2000 election. Certainly not for "costing Gore the election" (Gore won the election - the Supreme Court and electoral college were the real forces that cost him the election). The problem is that Nader never followed up with the real strength of his candidacy - getting disaffected people organized and involved in grassroots struggles. In 2004 Nader didn't even run on the Green Party ticket, further weakening the effort to build a real electoral alternative.

Even so, in the arguments that will follow Nader's announcement I'll definitely be defending his right to run and the importance of raising the issues he'll concentrate on. And most important, I'll remind those who hysterically condemn Nader that they should be spending their time instead demanding instant runoff voting, a simple electoral reform that would eliminate the spoiler problem and make our political system more democratic.

Suburbs still a haven of selfishness and racism

Probably the biggest obstacle in America to an environmentally sustainable society (other than maybe meat-eating) is the low density of our cities. There are a handful of high-density cities built in the 19th century, but the fastest-growing cities like Atlanta, Houston, Phoenix, and Las Vegas are almost completely composed of sprawl, and even the dense cities are surrounded by their own sprawling (and rapidly-growing) suburbs.

The main problem is that building and maintaining sprawl is an incredibly inefficient use of resources. It takes more land and covers it with concrete, strip malls, and TGIFridays; it uses more raw materials to build and heat so many one-family homes and to extend the roads, sewers, and electrical lines; and worst of all it requires that cars be the main form of transportation. Public transit is only feasible under conditions of high density, when ridership is high enough to sustain regular bus and train routes, while walking or biking the extended distances of the suburbs is usually not realistic for many people.

Long Island is the birthplace of sprawl, where the first true suburbs emerged after World War II. It is also an unusually progressive suburban area, electing more Democrats than Republicans and county leaders who argue for denser, more vertical development. But the impulses that have always led people to move to the suburbs - a desire for a big home with access to good schools and a neighborhood without any minorities or poor people - are still strong even there, even in the face of an impending crisis in housing affordability. A recent survey found that

Fifty-nine percent of Long Islanders could never imagine themselves living in an apartment. Asked which type of neighborhood they preferred — one where you could walk to stores or one that required driving — 56 percent said they would rather drive. Meanwhile, only 7 percent agreed that “creating ethnically and economically diverse neighborhoods” was the major advantage of building more affordable housing. Asked what the worst disadvantage was, 20 percent said “bringing in the wrong kinds of people.”

If I were optimistic I'd say that once we get a carbon tax or its equivalent, a lot of this problem would go away. If the price of fossil fuels started to reflect their real social costs, the building of new sprawl would cease, cities like Houston or Phoenix would collapse economically and become the Detroits of the next generation, and high-density development would take off. But reading comments on Chicago Tribune articles related to transit, as I am wont to do, makes me think otherwise. Here's a fairly typical example, which the comment service identified as originating in Oak Brook, Illinois (errors of spelling and spacing preserved):

Maybe you can send all the illegals from your state [he is responding to a poster from California] and they can drive the buses and trains for $2.00 HR! Never mind we have way to many already!I hope the CTA goes down the toilet if you cant run a business with the money you have shut down we in the burbs are tired of bailing out Chicago! I'm lucky i dont buy anything in the collar counties so the only money they will ever get from is the money i cant control them from getting!I will be moving shortly from crook state!

The heady mix of antitax selfishness and anti-immigrant racism is pretty telling, and I think once the attack on car culture and sprawl starts taking off the backlash will only get worse. My fear is that we might be facing a new culture war, not over religious issues (fundamentalists may even prove to be allies), but over the sacrifices needed to combat global warming and the particular brand of anti-egalitarian, neoliberal individualism that could be called the ideology of the suburbs. It's a confrontation that will have to be made at some point, but I'm worried that getting bogged down in it might fatally delay urgent steps needed to control greenhouse gas emissions.

Electability?!

Edwards is out of the race, so what do we do now? On one level it makes no difference - the most important task, as it always has been, is to organize grassroots support for progressive policies and start creating democratic businesses. Edwards wasn't a true progressive anyway - an Edwards victory would have left us in a better position to push our policies, but we would have still had to organize to hold him to his word.

But it's also worth thinking about the electability issue. I find it distasteful, because I've always believed that we should vote for people who are actually giving us something we want, not just taking it away at a slower rate. But we tried the "heightening the contradictions" approach in 2000, and Bush actually fit the bill much better than expected. I thought he'd be marginally worse than Gore, but he (or rather the people actually deciding his policies) exceeded all expectations. So what about those contradictions? All the anti-Bush outrage didn't produce a new radical movement. Instead it's gone into wonkish blogging and great enthusiasm for candidates whose policies are somewhat better than Gore's were, but fundamentally of the same reformist/capitalist/imperialist nature.

So maybe it's time to try a corporate Democrat again, and hope that this time we've learned from the shocking passivity of the left during the Clinton '90s. The question then is - would Clinton or Obama be more likely to beat McCain?

I'm pretty sure Clinton would lose to McCain. The right wing's amazing and completely irrational hatred of her is the one thing that could effectively unify it behind a candidate it doesn't really like. Meanwhile, McCain appeals strongly to independents and probably some Democrats. McCain's big potential weakness is Iraq - if things start going badly again his consistent support for the war would hurt him. Except Clinton also voted for the war, came late and unconvincingly to oppose it, and is also very right-wing on other foreign policy issues like Iran.

Obama's foreign policies are pretty much the same as Clinton's, but the popular perception of them is not. If the war became an issue again, it would tremendously help Obama against McCain. Obama is also very attractive to independents and would probably hold Democrats together better. Unlike Clinton, Obama is likely to draw large numbers of politically disengaged people into the election, which would also probably increase the Democrats' gains in Congress. The far right, without the Clinton demon to rally against, would turn out in fewer numbers. I think Obama would probably beat McCain pretty easily.

I'm certainly not arguing that people in liberal states like New York, Illinois, or California should vote for Obama on election day. If the Democrat doesn't win those states, he or she has no hope of winning the election, so go ahead and vote Green. But voting for Obama on February 5 is worth considering. I just don't know if I can bring myself to do it.

Partial breach in the news blackout on meat and the environment

I've written before about the media's suppression of news on the important link between meat and global warming (here and here). Since then the blackout has remained pretty solid - a Lexis-Nexis search turned up plenty of discussion in the newspapers of Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, but only one major opinion article from the Los Angeles Times (2007 October 15) and no news articles.

This weekend, The New York Times finally published a full account of these findings, as well as a comprehensive list of the many other ways the livestock industry ravishes the environment: Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler.

The article was in the Week in Review section, so the prohibition on treating meat-related environmental destruction as news still stands, but the article is an outstanding summary of the issue. I encourage everyone to email it to anyone who might benefit.

There is clearly a lot of hunger for news on this topic - the article rose to the number 2 spot on The Times's most emailed list before falling to number 3 right now (Times readers just can't get enough of those vapid JFK-Obama comparisons). We'll have to see if there's any follow-up on the news reporting side, or if other news outlets follow The Times's lead.

The author stops well short of calling on people to stop eating meat, and in fact manages to avoid using the word vegetarianism entirely. This may be the best way to communicate with meateaters, and I won't argue against anything that reduces the number of animals tortured and killed. Even so, I'm concerned that what could become a growing movement to eat less meat for environmental reasons might completely ignore the issue of speciesism.

Meat and cars increase hunger

Periodically you hear the antimeat argument that, because you have to feed around 10 times as much grain to livestock to produce the same amount of calories as if you just ate the grain directly, we could solve world hunger if we stopped eating meat and sent the resulting surpluses to the hungry. That's a lousy argument, because the cause of world hunger is not global shortages, but inadequate distribution to the hungry caused by market forces and wars.

Well, it was a lousy argument till now. Because over the last several years global shortages have appeared in key crops, a development partly caused by meat. As the price of key foods like corn and cooking oil have risen, popular unrest is starting to boil over around the world. The past several months have seen food riots in Guinea, Indonesia, Mauritania, México, Morocco, Pakistan, Senegal, Uzbekistan, and Yemen. Food is getting more expensive in the US too, as discussed here.

The causes are complex, as detailed in this fine article. But there's no question that the two great enemies of the environment - meat and cars - are also key culprits in rising food prices. Basically, the increasing demand for meat and auto fuel is straining global food markets - grain is needed to feed factory farmed animals and can also be converted into ethanol; edible oils are turned into biodiesel. At the same time, higher petroleum prices are driving up the cost of shipping food around the world.

The rising prices build on each other: America's asinine corn ethanol subsidies have led many farmers to switch away from soy in favor of planting corn, which lowers the supply of soy oil and puts pressure on an already tight market in edible oils, themselves being diverted to biodiesel. Most tragic, all these developments threaten to make global warming even worse - corn ethanol probably adds more greenhouse gases than it avoids and tropical rainforests in Malaysia and Indonesia are being burned to clear the way for palm oil plantations, releasing huge amounts of carbon dioxide in the process.

Americans still aren't feeling the pinch too badly, but people in countries like México depend heavily on cheap corn, while people in Asia get a large number of their calories from cooking oils. Higher prices for these people don't mean cutting expenses by seeing one less movie every other week, it means spending less by going hungry.

So now, possibly for the first time, the desire of the world's best-off to eat meat (and drive cars) is directly causing the world's poorest to go hungry. Commodity prices are notoriously volatile, so it's too early to tell if this is an aberration or a permanent problem that will get worse with time. But even if a sudden drop in the price of oil takes some of the pressure off momentarily, the trends driving food price inflation - high rates of both meat-eating and driving in the rich countries and rapidly increasing rates of the same in China and India - are probably here to stay. If global warming wasn't enough reason to make some big changes, how about the prospect of global food conflict?

Poverty and the election: More polemics on Obama vs Clinton

Lorrie Moore's op-ed today is the counterpoint to Gloria Steinem's deeply flawed argument for privileging gender over race while ignoring class and voting for Hillary Clinton. The first third of Moore's op-ed is the best opinion piece I've read in the mainstream media about the election. For a brief, shining moment, "likability", "change", "experience", the latest polls, and incessant campaign advice from so-called political analysts disappear, replaced by a harsh reminder that politics is actually a matter of life and death. Moore is the first person I've seen who raises what is probably the most urgent social issue in the country - poverty and its connections to institutionalized racism. This is a theme ignored by all the candidates except John Edwards (chastised as being too harsh by those so-called political analysts the few times they bothered to mention his candidacy), but Moore does not mention Edwards.

Moore also reminds us of what the Clinton years were like - something that many have forgotten or are too young to remember. There were a few big initiatives - the killing of around a million Iraqis thru sanctions and bombings, a variety of airborne war crimes in Yugoslavia, Sudan, and Afghanistan, military aid to state terrorists in Turkey, Colombia, and elsewhere, an unprecedented neoliberal offensive to remove all limits on the power of capital, an end to the last few guarantees to a basic standard of living. But mostly the Clinton presidency was an era of minute poll-tested policies designed to buy the electoral support of the middle class while avoiding the central problems of the time - global warming, deindustrialization, poverty, skyrocketing inequality of wealth, race and gender discrimination, punitive criminal justice laws and the drug war, rising numbers of uninsured coupled with rapid increases in the cost of healthcare, the crippling debts of the global south, the unchecked power of corporations.

In other words, the Clinton approach was to combine major negative policies with a paralysis of low expectations on central social problems. There is good reason to think a Hillary Clinton presidency would replicate this pattern - a point made nicely by Frank Rich, who notes that Clinton's top campaign strategist is a pollster - the same man who helped make the 1996 presidential election primarily about school uniforms and V-chips.

After pounding home the execrable Clinton legacy, Moore shifts gears and argues that the worst-off social group in the country is not girls but boys.

The political moment for feminine role models, arguably, has passed us by. The children who are suffering in this country, who are having trouble in school, and for whom the murder and suicide rates and economic dropout rates are high, are boys — especially boys of color, for whom the whole educational system, starting in kindergarten, often feels a form of exile, a system designed by and for white girls.

Designed by and for white girls? Moore provides no evidence for that, and it seems pretty implausible to me. Given the level of segregation in this country, most boys of color don't even go to school with any white girls. I'm even more troubled by Moore's refusal to admit that gender inequality remains a huge social problem in the US. But her point that boys of color are faring worst in our society seems pretty fair (altho Moore's failure to mention girls of color even once seems motivated exclusively by her polemical anti-Clinton, pro-Obama aim). So if you buy the idea that a president who belongs to an oppressed social group might somehow alleviate that oppression - even if his or her policies do not address it at all - then Moore seems to be on pretty solid ground in endorsing Obama.

But wait a minute. Why are these boys doing so badly? Is it because they don't have any role models in national politics? Moore herself knows the answer:

their families [have been] torn apart by harsh economics and a merciless criminal justice system. Why does it seem to be the Republicans who are more vocal about reforming our drug laws? Why has no one in the Democratic Party campaigned to have felons who have served their time made full citizens again?

I'm not sure where she's getting the idea that Republicans are calling for the reform of the drug laws, but otherwise this is a pretty good summary. Deindustrialization and the flight of capital that accompanied the creation of the suburbs robbed these communities of their jobs. The enforcement of drug prohibition, targeted primarily at people of color, and punitive rather than rehabilitative criminal justice laws imprisoned a large percentage of the community. Exploitative landlords and banks and criminally negligent public housing agencies and school systems ground these communities into the dirt. The explosion of violence surrounding the drug trade and the emergence of gangs as surrogate families ravished these communities, and left most of their young men with felony records that made it impossible for them to reintegrate into society.

The solutions are pretty straightforward: end drug prohibition or at least decriminalize drugs. Make it illegal to discriminate against felons in employment and allow them to vote. Sever education financing from property taxes and equalize funding across neighborhoods. Harshly penalize predatory commercial practices. Undertake massive investment in job creation and infrastructure in the poorest neighborhoods.

Is Obama supporting these kind of policies? This may come as a surprise to the progressives who have low expectations of Obama, but to a certain extent he is. There's a huge hole in the part of the proposal where an end to drug prohibition should be, and the job creation section seems far too weak, but Obama actually has a pretty good list of policies that would constitute a decent start to addressing the issue.

The problem is that Obama has intentionally excluded any discussion of poverty from his campaign, which continues to be built around empty rhetoric and biography. Can we really expect Obama, if elected, to spend any of his political capital pushing expensive programs to help the systematically disenfranchised underclass? If progressive forces remain silent, or demobilize in the wake of the election, I think the answer is an obvious "no".

But here's the difference with Clinton: she doesn't even have a poverty proposal. And if she ever did try to push an antipoverty agenda, she'd be tarred as an unreconstructed liberal. Ironically, Clinton is the least liberal candidate but is popularly identified as the most liberal, making it even harder for her to push good policies even if she wanted to. Obama, precisely because he is campaigning as a post-partisan candidate, would probably have more room to advance liberal policies if he were so disposed.

We shouldn't kid ourselves - to the extent Obama's policies are progressive, it's because the mood of the country is progressive and he was afraid of losing support if he didn't match Edwards's proposals. And we certainly shouldn't settle for Moore's terribly naive optimism that simply having a black man in the White House will save the victims of poverty. But if we get organized before a President Obama takes office, we have a shot at ending up with positive reforms. The chances seem much smaller if we face a President Clinton.

On voting for people based on their anatomy or melanin

I think it's worth raising the question, as Naureen does, of how such a symbolically loaded thing as electing the first woman president or the first black president would affect American culture and even culture in other countries. (Naureen supports Clinton because she thinks electing her would strengthen the fight against misogyny, but she doesn't explain why electing Obama wouldn't have the same effect on racism.)

I've already written about my fear that an Obama presidency might actually make race inequality worse. What about a Clinton presidency? Clinton, like Obama, periodically panders to reactionary forces by casting herself in traditional gender terms. Last October she famously taunted her opponents, saying, "if you can't stand the heat get out of the kitchen. And I'm very much at home in the kitchen." Yet her aggressive style probably does more to undercut traditional gender expectations than her obviously calculated attempts to play into those norms reinforces them. We should, however, be careful here. Do we really want to promote unprincipled triangulation and ruthless power-grabbing as the alternative to feminine docility?

In the Obama post I didn't give any consideration to the possibility that having a black man in the White House might give blacks themselves greater confidence to confront racism and capitalism, or that it might reduce the incidence of racism in white people (if only among younger white people). The same positive cultural effects on gender issues might be a result of a Clinton presidency.

At the same time, either a Clinton or Obama presidency - both likely to govern as centrists at home and as liberal imperialists abroad - might reduce the capacity of progressive forces to mobilize against their conservative policies. It might also inflame patriarchal or racist forces and increase identity polarization (this seems more likely under a Clinton presidency given the powerful and widespread personalized hatred of her - nothing similar has emerged around Obama). Whether this would be good or bad is hard to say.

How these things play out culturally is probably too complex to predict. So I think it should be less of a factor in our decisionmaking than the imperative to undertake popular mobilization and push progressive issues on whoever is the next president.

I also think it's about time the left stops using identity politics as a central organizing principle. We should recognize that identity-based inequality is still a thriving part of our culture and resolutely oppose that. But unless our goal is a society composed of a finite number of rigidly-defined identity groups that individuals "should" belong to based on their genetic heritage, we should also be criticizing the facile prescribed identities that so animated the left in the '90s.

After the caucuses

It's disappointing that John Edwards's solidly progressive campaign was beaten by Barack Obama's huge advantage in money, Obama's adulation among the media, and the surprising popular enthusiasm surrounding his contentless mantra of hope and change. Edwards is basically finished now. Despite winning second place, the media only talked about the first- and third-place finishers. The only chance Edwards had of breaking thru the media's indifference and hostility was by pulling an upset in Iowa. The media don't have much interest exploring corporate domination of politics or policies that might mitigate poverty or global warming, but they will respond to a big story in the horse race.

The good news is that Hillary Clinton was beaten even more badly than Edwards. The Democratic establishment's candidate lost in Iowa, where the establishment candidate is generally safe. Morever, she lost to a black man in one of the whitest states in the country, and she was even outpolled among women (Clinton got 30 percent versus Obama's 35 percent). However, Clinton is still ahead in the polls for the New Hampshire primary, which will be held January 8.

But does any of this matter to progressives? Obama's policy proposals are nearly identical to Clinton's, and both are tied into very similar networks of political and economic power (Obama's are based in Chicago rather than New York). Obama, like Clinton, is campaigning on platitudes and biography rather than the progressive reforms that might build momentum for positive legislative change after the election.

Despite the overwhelming similarities, on policy Obama is probably still preferable. His foreign policy advisers are demonstrably less bloodthirsty than Clinton's - even if the whole lot remain American supremacists. Obama has stated his willingess to meet directly with the leaders of America's designated enemies, while Clinton has criticized him for doing so and said that using nuclear weapons against Iran should remain an option. A final, far more significant difference is that Obama has called for the abolition of nuclear weapons while Clinton has avoided any clear statements on the issue.

If we could trust Obama to follow thru on even these few commitments, he would obviously be preferable to Clinton. But even tho Obama's voting record in the Illinois and US Senates has been fairly liberal, his policy initiatives have been pretty lackluster and there's no evidence he has any particular loyalties to a progressive agenda. My impression is that Obama is an opportunist - even his community organizing stint on the South Side might best be seen as Obama positioning himself for an anticipated run for mayor of Chicago (keep in mind those were the days of Harold Washington, when being an organizer would have made sense as a way into politics).

Nevertheless, Obama seems more open to a progressive agenda than Clinton, who remains rigidly attached to centrism in her own peculiar blend of elitist ideology and opportunism. If a popular movement for single-payer healthcare, high carbon taxes, or the abolition of nuclear weapons arose, I expect Clinton would be hostile but Obama might well be supportive. Obama may have the same DLC-type associations as Clinton, but Clinton grew completely out of those networks and has flourished within their warm embrace for twenty years, while Obama is still fairly new to politics and his loyalties may still be fluid.

We should also keep in mind the incredible popular enthusiasm Obama has generated. The sight of a politician summoning huge crowds and drawing previously nonvoting constituencies into the electorate hasn't been seen for forty years. If Obama wins the nomination and the election and chooses to pursue liberal policies, he has the potential to form a powerful new progressive majority. Under the right circumstances, this majority might even take the lead and push Obama onto a truly left-wing path. I think it's obvious that a similar scenario under a Clinton presidency is laughable.

I admit that a surging radical politics associated with Obama is pretty unlikely. But in strong contrast to the previous three elections of my adult life, 2008 presents us with some hope - because Obama as (potential) nominee is not a priori hostile to the progressive agenda and because the political climate in the country is so much better (talk of universal healthcare, for example, was strictly avoided by Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and John Kerry). With Obama we have about an even chance of turning things around - depending entirely on how strong popular forces are. With Clinton there is no such chance.

Progressives should use the election to mobilize people into grassroots organizations that present the Democratic nominee with hard and fast demands on healthcare, global warming, foreign policy, immigration, and poverty. They should make clear that Obama's rhetoric of unity disguises the antidemocratic forces that are a central component in his campaign. And they should prepare for the real fight, which is over the direction of the country once the new president, whoever it is, takes office.

Hard numbers on healthcare

The completely unacceptable performance of the American healthcare system has been widely recognized for at least 30 years. So it's baffling that politicians and the media have almost completely ignored the experience of a dozen other industrialized countries whose approach to healthcare has produced far better results.

Baffling, that is, until we recognize what following the lead of the other rich countries would entail - the almost complete elimination of private insurance providers and perhaps private pharmaceutical companies as well. The health industry is one of the richest in the nation, with plenty of money to corrupt politicians and threaten them with massive hostile propaganda campaigns if the lure of campaign contributions is inadequate. Since the media are too timid to venture beyond the incredibly narrow mainstream political debate, there has been almost no attention to the experience of other countries that spend significantly less per person on healthcare yet manage to insure everyone.

Winning a single-payer health insurance system, which in practice would mean extending Medicare to everyone in the country, is one of the most urgent political issues we face. So it's extremely important to counter the widespread ignorance and misconceptions among Americans about government-provided healthcare in the other rich countries. Here are some hard numbers that demolish the idea that private insurance is superior to single-payer in any way.

A survey of Australia, Canada, Germany, Netherlands, New Zealand, Britain, and the US found that the US spends twice as much per capita ($6697) as even the second-highest spending country (Canada, $3326). The other countries spend even less - New Zealand spends only one-third as much as the US. This disparity is even more shocking in light of the fact that even with our astronomical healthcare expenses we leave 16 percent of the population without coverage, while the other countries cover everyone.

What about the results of the health system? I looked at the WHO's health statistics for Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Britain, and the United States - all have universal, government-provided healthcare except the US. The US is last in life expectancy - as many as 6 years behind the leaders. The US had the highest infant mortality rate (7 per 1000 live births) - South Korea was 6 deaths per 1000 live births and the other countries were between 3 and 5 deaths per 1000 live births. Per capita number of doctors varied - France and Germany had the highest, Australia, Canada, Britain, and the US were in the middle, and Japan and Korea had the lowest.

A survey of Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Netherlands, Japan, Britain, and the United States gives some more information. The US had the highest number of years lost to diabetes and circulatory and respiratory diseases, as well as the largest number of deaths due to surgical or medical mishaps.

In terms of overall opinions on healthcare, Americans are less satisfied than those with universal healthcare (see the first study). 16 percent of Americans said there were only minor problems in the health system, while 34 percent said the health system should be completely rebuilt. In the other countries, around 25 percent believed their health system had only minor problems (42 percent in Netherlands), while only 15 percent or so called for fundamental changes.

Confidence in the likelihood of receiving good-quality care was about the same in countries with universal healthcare as it is in the US (it was slightly lower in Canada, Germany, New Zealand, and Britain, about the same in Australia, and much higher in Netherlands). Wait times for surgery in the US were shorter than other countries (except Germany, which was significantly shorter than the US), but the differences were not overwhelming. Even Canada and Britain, the worst performers, held 85 percent of surgeries in under 6 months - and this relatively poor performance might be because of recent conservative attempts in both countries to reduce medical spending.

Another study assigned rankings to the health systems of Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, Britain, and the United States. Rating the countries on "right" (effective) care, safe care, coordinated care, patient-centered care, access, efficiency, equity, and capacity to promote healthy lives, the US scored last or second-last in all categories except right care (the US's strong performance in preventive medicine was responsible for this single bright spot).

In 2000 the WHO ranked all the health systems in the world. Here are some of the rankings: France (1), Italy (2), Japan (10), Britain (18), Germany (25), Canada (30), Australia (32), US (37). Costa Rica was 36, Slovenia was 38. Cuba was 39.

(Also check out this Paul Krugman column, which tears apart the standard arguments in favor of private insurance.)

The conclusions are inescapable: the US spends by far the most money per capita on health care in the world - 2 to 3 times more than other rich countries. Yet the US leaves 1/6 of the population uninsured while the other rich countries cover everyone; the US's health indicators are no better and often worse than those countries with universal coverage; and Americans are less satisfied with their health system than are people with government-run systems. What makes our healthcare system operate so poorly?

The main reason is that private health insurance is a remarkably inefficient way to deliver health insurance. Dr. Stephanie Woolhandler, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard, notes that we spend "almost a third of every health care dollar on administration and paperwork generated by the private health insurance industry" while "[c]ountries like Canada spend about half that much on the billing and paperwork side of medicine". An even more relevant comparison is Medicare - America's own government-run insurance program for the elderly, which would be extended to everyone under single-payer insurance. Compared with the 30 percent administrative costs of private insurers, Medicare's administrative costs are significantly lower - between 2 and 5 percent depending on how they're figured.

Why is Medicare so much more efficient than private insurers? One reason is that Medicare doesn't spend millions of dollars on advertising and the ridiculous pay packages of HMO corporate executives. At least as important, Medicare benefits from economies of scale. The US has hundreds of private healthcare bureaucracies duplicating each other's work and paying thousands of employees to figure out how to deny care to sick people. Other countries do the paperwork through a single comparatively efficient government agency, with no profit incentive to deny care.

By Woolhandler's calculations, Medicare for everyone would save so much money that we could extend coverage to the 47 million uninsured and still have enough money left over to improve the coverage of those currently underinsured. So single-payer should be a no-brainer - it should look good to those who want to help their fellow Americans struck down by horrible illnesses, but it should equally appeal to those who simply want to stop spending so much on healthcare. The only reason we're denied this obvious solution is the tremendous power of the private healthcare lobby. It's up to us to organize and apply as much pressure as needed to convince our representatives to implement the only efficient and ethical answer to the healthcare crisis.

The greenwashed mayor

Two weeks ago The Reader published another great article on the state of Chicago's recycling program, noting the (very slow) progress and emphasizing the many remaining problems, particularly the city's failure to enforce the legal requirement that apartment buildings offer recycling. Now we find out that even funding for the expansion of curbside recycling for single-family houses is being cut. Meanwhile, the CTA stumbles along after getting another last-minute, temporary reprieve from its doomsday service cuts and fare increases. And even if the farce in Springfield eventually comes up with the funding, CTA's growing infrastructure crisis will remain unaddressed.

So what does Daley decide to propose at this moment? A plan to reduce Chicago's carbon dioxide emissions 25 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. That's certainly a welcome goal, but who does Daley think he's fooling? For years Daley has been talking about making Chicago the greenest city in the country, but what has he actually done? There are some real achievements (see this article, which not only praises Daley's environmental initiatives but his authoritarianism as well). But some green roofs, median flowers, and bike lanes, as welcome as they are, do not get us very far toward a sustainable city.

Daley should take a look at Mayor Bloomberg's plan for New York. Instead of ambitious rhetoric and timid follow-thru, Bloomberg is taking steps toward sustainability that are unprecedented in the United States. In a multifaceted proposal to make New York's transit, electricity, water, air, and built environment greener, particularly noteworthy are Bloomberg's plans for transportation. He is:

• promoting congestion pricing, under which drivers entering the city would pay a fee for the privilege of causing gridlock,
  
• strengthening existing public transit system, already by far the best in the country,
  
• replacing New York's entire cab fleet with hybrid vehicles,
  
• building the 2nd Ave subway to take pressure off the Lexington Ave line (4, 5, 6 trains), a single line which every day provides twice as many rides as the entire El system does.

The plan is not perfect - notably absent is any initiative to reduce meat-eating - but in its ambition and in the amount of resources it commits to sustainability it is unmatched in this country. If Daley wants to reduce greenhouse gases even 1 percent, he's going to need the kind of plans New York is already carrying out. Compared to this, Daley's green initiatives are just embarrassing.

It's not news if it makes smug environmentalists uncomfortable

The New York Times finally reported on the UN study that found the global livestock industry contributes more to global warming than even cars. (An editorial responding to the study was published last December, weakly concluding that there is no way to reduce the amount of meat we eat, but the paper's news section was silent until last week.) Except this wasn't an article about the UN report at all, but rather about the rift between animal rights groups and mainstream environmental organizations over whether to inform people that meat and dairy are a principle cause of global warming. Even better, it was stuck in the business section under the heading "advertising" (PETA, the Humane Society, and others are starting to run ads on the connection). Now this certainly is a legitimate news story, but it seems a bit strange that The New York Times, which has covered global warming from every other angle, will run this kind of story while otherwise ignoring the issue of meat.

Daley throws a fit

This is vintage Daley. The Tribune runs a good article on the city government's failure to reduce carbon emissions, finding that instead of meeting the pledge to reduce emissions one percent/year they've actually increased by 22 percent over the last four years, and that Daley still has not followed thru on this promise to increase renewable sources of electricity to 1/5 of the total. Daley responds like a petulant child, attacking the Tribune instead of explaining how he's going to fix the problems they found. Here's a sample: "Well, they're cutting all the trees down," Daley said, referring to wood pulp used to produce newsprint. "Go talk to the Tribune. Chop another tree down. Great." . . . "We should never have built the Tribune building because it was a high-rise when it was built on Michigan Avenue," the mayor said. "They should have never [built] your printing plant in Chicago for all your [delivery] trucks in Chicago. Why are you doing that? . . . "Nothing else to write," he said.

Green Taste of Chicago

The Tribune ran a letter I wrote in its online-only letters section here.

Would Obama make race inequality worse?

Barack Obama is the first presidential candidate since Ralph Nader in 2000 to generate real popular excitement. Like Nader, Obama is drawing huge crowds on the order of 15,000-20,000 people to his campaign events. Obama has received campaign donations from far more people than his rivals - 104,000 in the last reporting period compared with Clinton's 60,000 and Edwards's 40,000. How can we explain this excitement? It's definitely not that Obama is offering a concrete alternative - in policy terms, he is almost indistinguishable from Hillary Clinton. (His recently released health care plan may be an exception - Clinton has yet to produce her own.) What does distinguish Obama is his image and his race.

Obama has successfully cultivated the image of an outsider, an anti-establishment candidate and a fresh face. How he has managed this I'm not entirely sure, since everything about the campaign is very much of the establishment. Half of Obama's campaign money comes from extremely rich people who can afford to send more than $2300 to a political candidate. Only 21 percent comes from those donating $200 or less (see Opensecrets.org for these numbers). He relies on the same sectors for donations as Clinton does - finance capital, lawyers, Hollywood (a good article on Obama's fundraising operation and his corporate patrons is here). Many of his top fundraisers, in fact, worked in the Clinton administration or were Clinton donors close enough to the president to be invited to the White House. Obama has deep connections to the Daley machine in Chicago. His campaign is staffed by veteran Democratic operatives. To the extent there is a difference between Clinton and Obama's political connections, it's one of region: Obama draws from Chicago capitalists, Clinton from New York capitalists.

Almost no one is talking about it, but I think Obama's race is at least as important in generating this popular excitement as his image is. There's something truly gratifying to many liberals about throwing support behind the first black man with a good chance at winning the White House - especially when his main opponent is such a staunchly establishment figure as Hillary Clinton.

However, we need to be very careful about this kind of approach. Would an Obama presidency help reduce America's stunning racial inequality? There are no clear answers, but it seems at least as likely that race inequality could be made worse under Obama.

To be fair, Obama has given some attention to the structural causes of the problem. He has spoken about how unequal school funding leads to a wide gap in education opportunities between whites and blacks. He has drawn attention to underinvestment in public goods like hospitals and infrastructure. However, in a now-familiar theme, Obama has not followed this recognition with ideas on how to address it. As The Los Angeles Times noted, "Obama did not offer specific proposals to solve the problems he described. His approach has more often relied on lofty rhetoric than real-world prescriptions."

If Obama were to someday champion policies to address the structural problems he points out, then some progress might be made. But there is another side to Obama's approach to race. In addition to speaking vaguely about the ways our society is designed to reproduce racial inequality, Obama also frequently reproaches black people for causing their own problems. Drawing on the rich language that white conservatives and black professionals have developed to fix blame for racial inequality on poor blacks themselves, Obama regularly chastises blacks to put greater value on education and stop listening to rap. According to The Washington Post,

"In Chicago, sometimes when I talk to the black chambers of commerce, I say, 'You know what would be a good economic development plan for our community would be if we make sure folks weren't throwing their garbage out of their cars,' " Obama told a group of black state legislators in a speech in South Carolina last month.

This kind of rhetoric is employed with two goals in mind. First, it is directed at whites in an effort to reassure them that Obama will not pursue radical policies to address racial inequality. Second, it is directed at the black bourgeoisie - a major source of campaign funds for Obama - to affirm members' condescending attitudes and draw them into the Obama camp for the key Democratic primaries in which they exercise great influence. Whatever the motives, the outcome is to reinforce an already strong urge within our culture to blame the victims of racism and capitalism for their own plight.

Aside from this kind of pandering, an Obama election victory might also aggravate racial inequality for reasons totally outside Obama's control. For years many whites have pointed to successful black public figures like Michael Jordan, Oprah Winfrey, or Colin Powell to back their claim that racism is no longer an important part of society. Electing a black man to the presidency would immeasurably strengthen the rhetorical power of this claim, while doing nothing to undo the very real structural inequalities and popular prejudices that still make race one of the most important factors in the distribution of wealth and power.

Despite these dangers, I would still rather see Obama in the presidency than Clinton (Edwards, of course, is far preferable to both). We have to evaluate candidates on their policies, not on their image and not on their race. And we have to be prepared, no matter who wins, to mobilize against the many reactionary policies he or she will pursue. Falling in love with a candidate is worst possible thing to do.

Bad day for transit

The CTA today announced its "doomsday scenario" of fare increases and service cuts that will go into effect in September if the state legislature refuses to cover the $110 million budget deficit. Service on the Yellow Line and Purple Line Express would be eliminated. A new fare structure with higher rates during rush hour would be implemented. Rush hour prices would be $3.25/ride on the El and $2.75 on buses, at other times it would be $2.50 and $2.25 respectively. All bus routes that currently do not run on Sundays would be eliminated.

Underfunded transit is a nationwide problem. Today Los Angeles's MTA also announced major fare increases, in some cases doubling the cost of multiday passes. Philadelphia's SEPTA yesterday postponed a final decision on its own doomsday proposal, which would raise fares 31 percent while cutting service by 20 percent. Boston's MBTA is projected to fall between $4 and $8 billion short in funding over the next 20 years. California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's budget proposal would cut $1.3 billion from public transit.

Public transportation is not a far left-wing cause. In all these cases, business groups support adequate transit funding because they know that a working transport system is essential to a functioning economy. Yet legislators not only ignore the oncoming devastation of global warming, they even ignore their corporate patrons. The impregnable position of cars in our culture seems to be the best explanation. How do you address an injustice that the vast majority of the population embraces?

letter to the editor, re: gas prices

UPDATE: My letter was published in the Trib, May 25.

The Chicago Tribune editorialized the other day about the positive side of higher gas prices, somehow ignoring all the real reasons expensive gas is good and only mentioning that buying less gas allows us "to stop being held economic hostage to the writhing Middle East". I've been writing to reporters lately and asking why they never include a discussion of how bad car culture is for our society when they write their endless articles about the crisis in gas prices (which are now nearly 1/2 as much as in some European countries. The horror!). I've had a range of replies, from quite hostile to sympathetic, but none of them have explained why they can never mention the terrible social costs of driving.

To the editors:
You are absolutely right that higher gas prices are a blessing in disguise ("The good thing about gas prices", editorial, 2007 May 20). Every day we see the terrible social damage done by cars: deaths and injuries from accidents, dirty air causing asthma attacks in children, global warming slowly building toward catastrophe.

Not to mention the fact that building our lives around cars makes for less livable cities and simply does not make sense financially. Building roads, paying for gas, wasting valuable space on parking lots and gas stations, paying higher health insurance rates to cover the public health damage of driving — all these costs would be eliminated if we relied instead on walking, biking, and public transit. The cost
of building and maintaining a comprehensive public transit system pales in comparison to all the hidden costs of car culture.

The price of gas should reflect the damage caused by driving, which is far greater than $3.50/gallon. We should substantially increase the tax on gasoline and devote the revenues to public transit.

Keep foie gras illegal

Daley is stepping up his campaign to have the ban on foie gras overturned. Defending this ban is important not only to reduce demand for a product that involves horrific cruelty. It is also a hugely significant symbolic struggle.

Chicago was the first city in the country to outlaw foie gras, and the fact that those fighting foie gras elsewhere can say that even Chicago has a ban is a big advantage. It normalizes this kind of anti-cruelty law, especially since Chicagoans cannot be dismissed as "hippies" or "crazy liberals" as people in a place like San Francisco are. Just as important, the ban on foie gras establishes the principle that how we treat animals is a legitimate subject for legislation. Once relatively easy victories like the foie gras ban are securely established, we can go on to raise questions about the cruelties of factory farming and, ultimately, whether even "humane" killing is acceptable.

Of course, ending the meat industry cannot be accomplished primarily thru legislation, but the legislative battleground is also extremely important in building the social movement against meat. The loss of the foie gras ban would be a big setback. Call or email your alderman now. (Find contact info at Civic Footprint.)

Save public transit in Illinois

Copy and forward to anyone who might be interested - now is the best time to call elected officials on this.


Public transit in Illinois has been chronically underfunded for decades. The cost of providing transit has risen sharply in the last 20 years, but the governor and General Assembly have consistently refused to provide the needed funds. As a result, the RTA (composed of Illinois's transit agencies, the CTA (El and buses), Metra, and Pace) has been forced to mortgage its future by dipping into maintenance funds to pay operating costs.

The predictable result has been decaying infrastructure and aging equipment, leading to declining levels of service and a looming crisis for the transit system. Without emergency funding, the RTA will implement fare increases and service cuts this year. Without a major increase in longterm financing, funding crises will continue to erupt every year.

Public transit *should* be the future of urban transportation. Cars foul the air and kill or injure thousands of people every year. They waste huge amounts of public space with parking lots, gas stations, and highways. Worst of all, they are one of the main causes of global warming, which will have devastating consequences if we don't address it soon.

The best way to solve the transit crisis is to raise the tax on gasoline. The low price of gas does not reflect the immense social and environmental damage caused by driving. Raising the gas tax and spending the money on transit would fund the creation of a world-class public transit system, and it would give people the incentive to use it. This solution has already drawn support from groups like Chicago Metropolis 2020, a coalition of businesses.

However, transit funding faces the continuing indifference of Governor Blagojevich and the General Assembly. A wide range of groups has recently begun a pressure campaign to save transit in Illinois. Now is the time to add your voice:

call Blagojevich at 217-782-0244 or 312-814-2121, and leave a comment at http://www.illinois.gov/gov/contactthegovernor.cfm

call your state legislators - find them at http://www.civicfootprint.org

and remember to voice your support for an increase in the gas tax.


More information:

Opponents of transit have often claimed that the RTA does not need more money, it just needs to be more efficient. An independent audit by the Illinois auditor general ought to put these claims to rest. The report not only emphasizes the severe and longstanding underfunding of public transit, it finds that in comparison with other American transit agencies the RTA scores average or better in measures of efficiency. It scores lower than average in service effectiveness - mainly because its equipment is much older than that of its peer agencies. (http://www.auditor.illinois.gov/Audit-Reports/Performance-Special-Multi/Performance-Audits/07-Mass-Transit-NE-IL-Perf-Exec-Summary.pdf pp. 14-21)

Other critics have questioned the priorities of the CTA and the Daley administration, which have fast-tracked expansion projects like the Circle Line and airport express that are useful to already well-served professionals, while ignoring expansion proposals for underserved communities, like the Mid-City Transitway and extensions of the Red, Orange, and Yellow lines. These complaints are well-founded - see http://razetheladder.blogspot.com/2007/02/paving-over-mid-city-transitway.html for details. However, adequate funds for existing services must be maintained even as we pressure the Daley administration to expand the system in the fairest and most effective way.

More information on the transit crisis and ways to get involved:
http://transitfuture.cnt.org
http://movingbeyondcongestion.com

Gentrification makes everyone (who matters) happy!

Here's the latest article in the genre of "bad neighborhood is now safe for you [white professional] to live in!", only it's for an entire city: Not Hot Just Yet, but Newark Is Starting to Percolate.

Surely newspapers don't need reporters to write these articles from scratch every time. They should just have a template with blanks for the names of hot new restaurants, gallery owners, and loft residents. No need, of course, to leave blanks for the names of the working class and poor people who actually live in these places. Live there, that is, until the laws of economic efficiency cleanse them to make way for assholes who say things like this: "Sometimes I feel like I’m in a foreign country. Let’s just say we’re pioneers on our block."

The unconscious racism and classism of the country's comfortable classes is never better on display than in articles like this, which write the entire pre-gentrification population out of existence (except metonymically in sentences like this: "I think people finally realize Newark is more than just about crime and drugs.") "Power concedes nothing without a demand" - not even recognition of the lives it shoves aside.