The Notion

Greece Votes Socialist

By Maria Margaronis

Going against the European grain, Greece has voted George Papandreou's center-left PaSoK party to power in a landslide. Promising a new political culture, an end to cronyism and a 3 billion euro stimulus package for the economy, the president of the Socialist International has at last won the job that was held by his father and grandfather before him. But despite being to the manor born, Papandreou is neither a lightweight nor a populist demagogue in the style of his father, Andreas, who took such pains to be a thorn in Ronald Reagan's side. Mild-mannered, thoughtful, modest, he is a new Papandreou for the age of Obama: an American-born, European social democrat with a green conscience and a commitment to markets as well as democracy.

Nor is his victory a sign that Europe is leaning left: witness Angela Merkel's recent triumph in Germany. It is a local phenomenon, the product of Greece's recent political history. PaSoK lost power to the conservative New Democracy in 2004 after eleven years in office, during which it squeezed Greece into the Eurozone, put through a patchwork program of modernizing reforms, mended relations with Turkey, staged a grand (and exorbitant) Olympic Games, and became a byword for paybacks and corruption. New Democracy's Kostas Karamanlis (also a scion of an old political dynasty) took over with a promise to clean out the Augean stables.

But New Democracy's carryings-on made PaSoK's scandals look like minor pecadilloes. Overpriced government bonds were sold to state pension funds; cabinet ministers dreamed up lucrative property scams with abbots from Mount Athos. On Karamanlis's watch, vast tracts of the country literally went up in flames; the fire service, weakened by political interference, did too little much too late, and the promised restoration of forests, farms and villages fell victim to the usual toxic mixture of incompetence and graft. For a few days last December, violence in Athens gripped the world's TV cameras. The shooting of a 15-year old boy by a trigger-happy policeman seemed to sum up the state's indifference to a whole generation; broken promises were repaid with smashed shop windows and hopelessness with rioting in the streets.

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October 5, 2009

When Pundits Attack: The Beck-Brooks Fight

By Ari Melber

Perhaps we still do not understand the current Obama backlash.

David Brooks caused a small stir on Friday by arguing that conservative radio hosts are, paradoxically, a lot like well-behaved children. They are seen – splashed across magazine covers and endlessly profiled – but not heard, politically, since they do not swing elections.

"The talk jocks can't even deliver the conservative voters who show up at Republican primaries," Brooks observed, reminiscing about how McCain's media detractors could not stop him in South Carolina last year.

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October 5, 2009

The (Iffy) Case Against a Public Option

By Eyal Press

Can successful universal health care be achieved without a public option? Earlier this week, Jonathan Cohn pointed to the example of The Netherlands, a country that relies exclusively on private insurers while providing coverage to all citizens. Surveys indicate that the Dutch are extremely satisfied with the quality of their system; studies have ranked the Netherlands ahead of countries such as Britain and Sweden (and, of course, The United States) in deaths prevented through access to timely and affordable medical care.

In other words, the Dutch system works. But as Cohn notes, the system's success depends on something the United States lacks: "Private insurance in the Netherlands works because it operates more or less like a public utility. The Dutch government regulates industry practices tightly – more tightly than the reforms now moving through Congress propose to do in the United States."

Similar comparisons have been drawn with Switzerland, another country that has achieved universal coverage while relying mainly on private insurers. But here, too, the differences are as striking as the similarities – not least that the providers in Switzerland are nonprofits and that medical care is viewed as a social good, not a business. As the law professor and health care analyst Timothy Stoltzfus Jost told The Times earlier this week, "There is no government-run plan to compete with the private nonprofit plans. But health insurance is considered social insurance. It's not a for-profit enterprise."

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October 3, 2009

Media Push False Equivalency Between Left and Right Rage

By Leslie Savan

Nearly every morning for eight years, my husband would go into the shower with the news blaring on the radio, and I could hear him over the rush of water grumbling, "I hate George Bush. I hate George Bush." And, occasionally, "Won't somebody kill George Bush?"

Don't call the Secret Service, Newsmax: My husband was, of course, simply filled with rage that Bush had seized office with fewer votes than Al Gore, invaded a country that had never attacked us, killed thousands of our soldiers and scores of thousands of Iraqis, legalized torture, allowed comprehensive government eavesdropping, shipped jobs overseas, and encouraged Wall Street to enrich the few while impoverishing the rest. You gotta yell something sometimes, and who hasn't?

The thing about liberals is they do this standing naked in a shower and come out merely wet and spluttering. The thing about rightwingers is they work themselves up into a similar rage, strap on a .45 loaded with dum-dums, and go to political meetings screaming that something must be done about Adolf Obama--or maybe write columns seriously suggesting a military coup "to resolve the 'Obama problem.'"

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October 2, 2009

Stop Bullying the Anti-Bullying Czar

By Emily Douglas

In the mid-nineties, when Kevin Jennings was the executive director of a fledging non-profit supporting LGBT youth and teachers called GLSEN (for the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Educators Network), he gave a lecture to my all-girls high school in Baltimore. I remember almost nothing about the content of his presentation; what I remember is that the school brought an openly gay man to address us directly on the matter of being gay. (Still, prior to the speech, our guidance counselor warned us that while homosexuality was okay, "experts advise" against coming out in high school.) Jennings, meanwhile, was appealing, accessible, and seemed to be working a circuit - going to any school that would let him be a warm, unashamed gay person in front of young people.

More than ten years later, my sister, now a junior at the same school, tells me that there's a Gay-Straight Alliance, several out teachers, and a popular annual Day of Silence. Kevin Jennings, meanwhile, is no longer heading a small advocacy group - he's part of the Obama administration.

Jennings has been appointed head of the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools, a post focused primarily on violence and drug prevention. He should know a thing or two about the kind of violence that can face LGBT youth: GLSEN has documented the prevalence of anti-LGBT violence and harassment in schools, finding in a 2007 survey that 39 percent of students experienced physical assault because of their sexual orientation; 81 percent of students were harassed on a regular basis. In last weekend's New York Times magazine cover story on gay and questioning middle school students, author Benoit Denizet-Lewis notes that a University of Nebraska-Harvard Medical School study found anti-gay harassment to be the most "psychologically harmful type of bullying." In Denizet-Lewis's article, teachers and students interviewed describe anti-gay slurs as ubiquitous. One teacher told him, "If I have to stop what I'm doing every time a student says ["That's so gay"], I won't have any time to teach!"

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October 1, 2009

Brighton Beach Postcard

By D.D. Guttenplan

Brighton.

Short of sashaying over the waves, or flying Harry Potter's Nimbus 2000 (perhaps on loan from his good friend J.K. Rowling) into the Labour Party conference here yesterday, there wasn't much Gordon Brown could do to keep the British press from writing his political obituary. With an election due sometime before May, Labour is currently third in the opinion polls, trailing not just David Cameron's Conservatives but also the Liberal Democrats. Outside the Brighton Centre, a noisy handful of demonstrators shouting "Don't they know there's a bloody war on!" shuffled along the seafront, sharing sidewalk space with a more numerous assemblage from the postal workers' union, protesting government plans to sell off part of the Royal Mail. (The delay in postal deliveries from strike action in London meant that your correspondent's press credentials, mailed in mid August, still haven't arrived.)

On Monday Labour delegates cheered Peter Mandelson, who twice resigned from the cabinet in disgrace only to be drafted back last year by an increasingly desperate Brown, when he told them "If I can come back ... we can come back." And they loved it when Mandelson, architect of the postal sell-off and master of all political dark arts, told them "this election was still up for grabs." Brown's job was to make them believe it.

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September 30, 2009

Punch in the Streets, Not in the Suites at G-20

By Laura Flanders

The G20 summit wrapped up in Pittsburgh Friday with pledges but little punch. Except in the streets.

On climate change, world leaders vowed "strong action" and on the economy, "balanced economic growth." The summit endorsed granting more voting rights at the IMF and World Bank to ‘underrepresented' countries like CHINA. With a billion people and the world's second largest economy -- China may budge up from having 3.6% of all votes.

Underrepresented booming countries may get a bigger voice in global finance. Nice. But under-represented people? Well there's the rub.

Around 200 people were arrested during the two-day Pittsburgh summit.  Heavy policing seems to be the only plan world leaders have come up with for shutting reality out.

Reality, for those in the streets, not the suites, of the world, is a whole new economy -- way more than a downturn -- and the prospect of long-term, possibly permanent, unemployment.

Read the papers, and the stats are all there. In the US, job seekers now outnumber job openings six to one. Official unemployment stands at 9.7 percent, its highest level in 26 years. If you're a teenager, it's over 25 percent. No reason there to shun protest for fear of ruining your job prospects, they're grim and only getting grimmer. That's if radicals like Paul Craig Roberts, a former officer of the Reagan Administration, are to be believed.

If measured according to the methodology used when he was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Roberts says "the unemployment rate today in the US is above 20%. Moreover, there is no obvious way of reducing it."

Consumer spending -- the engine that drove 70 % of the US economy and by extension much of the world's -- isn't coming back. And that's just the way it's going to be, President Obama's chief economic adviser Larry Summers told the BBC (my sister, actually) in Pittsburgh.

"The US can't, shouldn't and won't continue to experience the consumption-led growth of the past few years." said Summers. And the world -- and we -- should just adjust...

The message is pledge-on! Endorse "strong action" on climate and "balanced growth." But all those poor people out of work? They'll just have to adjust.

While banks are doling out cash by the millions to kill any new regulation of Wall St. (which clearly has its heart set on making another buck off all that poverty...) There is one part of the economy that seems actually to be getting stimulated: Policing. If ever civil society finds a voice and decides actually to wield it, they'll be ready. How else to reign in reality, for lawd's sake?

Laura Flanders, is the host of GRITtv which broadcasts weekdays on satellite TV (Dish Network Ch. 9415 Free Speech TV) on cable, and online at GRITtv.org and TheNation.com. Follow GRITtv or GritLaura on Twitter.com.

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September 29, 2009

Lose the Love/Hate, But Keep the Hope.

By Melissa Harris-Lacewell

It seems Eyal and Richard have thrown down the gauntlet with their criticisms of the emotional, irrational, fact-proof fantasies that seem to characterize contemporary politics in the United States.

Richard's piece asks for emotional maturity in our politics. I only partially agree. Yes, we need to halt the characterizations of Obama as savior or as anti-Christ. And we similarly should moderate our memories of the Bush years as evil or perfect. Still, I believe that the Obama win is important precisely because it injects a certain emotional valence into our electoral politics: a much needed revival of American hope. Obama won, in part, by encouraging us to feel good, to be optimistic, and to believe. The problem is when we direct that hope and belief onto the character/candidate rather than investing that optimism in the movement itself.

There is a way to hold onto hard won optimism while still demonstrating emotional restraint in the public sphere. There are some ways to intervene in this moment with optimism and effort.

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September 28, 2009

Ending the Cycle of Presidential Love and Hate

By Richard Kim

Eyal's post juxtaposes the irrational views an alarming number of Republicans have about Barack Obama (a Kenyan-Muslim-Socialist-Hitler!) with the conspiracy theory--apparently held by 25 percent of Democrats--that Bush let 9/11 happen to justify a march to war. Fair enough, but I'm not sure you need to graze that far afield to find a left-right correspondence.

The first time I encountered a fantastic, fact-proof theory about Obama was during primary season. It was at a debate-watching party where an acquaintance of mine, an Obama-volunteer, hissed at Hillary Clinton's response to a question about same-sex marriage. "She's such a homophobe!" the woman exclaimed. I felt the need to correct the record.

"She's not really any more anti-gay or pro-gay than Obama. Neither of them back gay marriage, for example," I pointed out.

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September 28, 2009

The Wisdom of the Public

By Eyal Press

It's been a rough week for those of us who believe that only a tiny minority of Americans hold ludicrous and outrageous views. As this distressing survey by Public Policy Polling revealed, the belief that Barack Obama was born outside the United States is inching toward becoming a majority view among Republicans (43 percent are on board). The belief that George W. Bush let 9/11 happen to justify marching the US into war is espoused by one-in-four Democrats.

So it's true: a lot of Americans in both parties are willing to believe wacky and irrational things about their opponents. It's apparently not enough to judge someone misguided or erroneous. One has to see either Bush or Obama as the Anti-Christ (a view that curries favor among roughly ten percent of voters).

But before too much despair sets in among people who consider themselves rational-minded, take a look at the CBS NEWS/New York Times poll on health care and Afghanistan published today. According to the poll, 76 percent of Americans believe Republicans have not explained their plans to overhaul the health care system. And 59 percent believe Obama has not clearly explained his plans.

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September 25, 2009