The Notion

Media Overexposes 'Obama Is Overexposed' Complaint

By Leslie Savan

To push health care reform, President Obama will appear on five Sunday talk shows (on ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, and Univision) and on Letterman Monday; this, after last week's speech to Congress and his 60 Minutes and CNBC appearances. And, as they did in March and in May and in July, the media are in fretting that, lord love a duck, Barack Obama is "overexposed." If he keeps this up, he's going to block our view of all the tea-party folk screaming "You lie!" in their "I'm With Joe Wilson" T-shirts.

"We've never had a president with this all-consuming need to be on television 24/7," raged Rush Limbaugh. "This is like Castro!" A Kansas City Star writer was more concerned about Obama's hold on the nation's bubblegum grannies, asking, "Will Barack Obama be the next Ricky Martin?"

Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski concurred. "I'm worrying he's making a mistake," she said, while her guest, The New York Times's Mark Leibovich, proffered that maybe Obama is "showing off" and, citing the Univision appearance, asked, "How do you say 'overexposure' in Spanish?"

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September 19, 2009

Where's the Norma Rae of Healthcare?

By Laura Flanders

Crystal Lee Sutton died last week. You might know her by her "other" name. It was Sutton's story that inspired the film Norma Rae, starring Sally Field who won an Oscar, a Golden Globe and Best Actress award at Cannes for her portrayal of Sutton, a North Carolina union organizer in the early 1970s. In an act of defiance Sutton wrote the word "UNION" on a piece of cardboard and stood up on her work table at the J.P. Stevens textile plant. Her co-workers followed and turned their machines off in solidarity.

After hearing of her death, Field said that, "portraying Crystal Lee in Norma Rae not only elevated me as an actress, but as a human being."

Sutton fought for the working poor much of her life. What she also had to fight for, it turns out, was healthcare. After being diagnosed with cancer a few years back, she was told that her insurance wouldn't cover the potentially life saving medication she needed. By the time the approval came through Sutton's cancer had spread.

Speaking of her own predicament, Sutton said, "How in the world can it take so long to find out [whether they would cover the medicine or not] when it could be a matter of life and death. It is almost like, in a way, committing murder."

She died at 68.

It makes all the talk of death panels, a government takeover, and socialized medicine sound rather silly, doesn't it? Cancer's bad enough. But at least it's an equal opportunity killer. Our current for-profit insurance system isn't benign, and there's nothing equal about it. Is there someone out there somewhere standing on a table with a cardboard sign: 'HEALTHCARE'? We'd love to make a movie about it.

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 17, 2009

Can We? A Brief History of American Racism

By Melissa Harris-Lacewell

Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798. These four acts of Congress were meant to protect the new nation from French immigrants. They reflected a broad paranoia that French newcomers would poison American minds and weaken the new American government.

By 1802 President Thomas Jefferson led the repeal of most of these acts because they overstepped federal authority and instituted unjust restrictions.

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September 16, 2009

Copenhagen in Crisis: How Much Does it Matter?

By Maria Margaronis

Diplomatic anxiety about the Copenhagen climate summit is reaching fever pitch. UN Secretary Ban Ki-moon has issued an urgent warning that the talks are stalled; UN development chief Helen Clark is already engaged in damage control and lowering expectations. Ed Miliband, the British climate change minister, is shuttling around the world to try and oil the wheels ahead of next week's New York meeting. What's at the root of the problem? There's the long standing tension between rich and poor countries: the rich don't want to take responsibility for their expensive life styles, the poor don't want the ladder pulled up while they're still on the ground. There's China and its coal plants. And then there's You Know Who.

The front page of this morning's Guardian trumpets an exclusive: news of a fracas between European and US negotiators about the shape of the treaty to be negotiated. Man Bites Dog, perhaps; but it's still worth paying attention. According to unnamed officials, the Obama team plans to scrap most of the Kyoto framework for reducing carbon emissions and replace it with a new system of its own devising. Eighty-one days before Copenhagen, we don't yet know what that system's going to be--except that it seems to give the US a neat way out of any international agreement by making emission reductions subordinate to domestic laws. Think about it: would you negotiate an arms control treaty that could be scuppered by some pork-barrel filibuster?

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September 16, 2009

The No-Shame Zone

By Eyal Press

On the day after the one-year anniversary of Lehman Brothers' collapse, I find myself wishing every American could gather this evening for a screening at 209 West Houston – home to the great independent movie theater Film Forum, which for the past two weeks has been showing "American Casino," a bracing new documentary by Leslie and Andrew Cockburn about the subprime mortgage meltdown. The film is admittedly not a lot of fun to watch. What it inspires instead is rage: at the officials (Alan Greenspan, Phil Gramm) who trumpeted the virtues of financial deregulation; at ratings agencies that pretended to scrutinize whether mortgage-backed bonds being sold and resold were trustworthy (while actually handing the job to the banks that were paying them); at financiers who kept repackaging the mortgage-backed junk into inscrutable financial instruments; at predatory lenders who deliberately targeted low-income minority communities that are now awash in foreclosures.

The most amazing thing to me about the film was the utter lack of remorse expressed by the people who conspired to create the mess. The closest we come to an apology is a half-hearted admission from former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, who is shown telling Congress he was "shocked" that allowing large, unaccountable financial institutions to pursue their self-interests might cause problems. But nobody seems to be genuinely sorry. The people who made money from selling the junk kept it. The banks that profited so handsomely proceeded to get bailed out. The communities preyed on by predatory lenders are now full of boarded-up buildings and foreclosed homes. And, as The Times reported this weekend, bonuses and pay on Wall Street have gone right back to pre-crisis levels.

Is it too much to expect people who become millionaires by knowingly deceiving their fellow citizens to feel some measure of responsibility and shame?

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September 15, 2009

The Speech & The Public Option

By Eyal Press

The last ten minutes of Barack Obama's healthcare speech, invoking the legacy of Ted Kennedy and emphasizing concern for others as an essential part of "the American character," were powerful and affecting. Eschewing the professorial tone he has too often struck when discussing healthcare in recent months, Obama spoke instead about "large heartedness" and the "terror and helplessness" any parent would feel to have a sick child go without treatment because of money. He also said "the danger of too much government is matched by the perils of too little," and that "without the leavening hand of wise policy, markets can crash, monopolies can stifle competition, and the vulnerable can be exploited." This was not FDR in 1936 (see the Michael Lind column to which my last post linked), but it was stated with conviction.

Nobody who listened to the speech – including many of the stone-faced Republicans in the audience – could come away doubting Obama is serious about passing major healthcare legislation. But will this legislation include a public option? The speech left me dubious. In this portion of his otherwise stirring address, Obama sounded notably vague, almost apologetic, telling the members of Congress it was "worth noting" that a majority of Americans support a public option (um, yeah, one would think so), and then chiding those on the left and right who have exaggerated its significance.

This was unfair to people on the left and the right, most of whom see the public option as significant (just as the healthcare industry does) for good reason. I suspect Obama's words heartened a great many insurance executives, and that they will lead, down the road, to a compromise that marks an improvement over the current system but also a missed opportunity.

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September 10, 2009

Take the Obama Conspiracy-Theory Challenge!

By Leslie Savan

Now that President Obama's speech to school kids has proved not to be the Maoist indoctrination tool that the right absolutely knew it would be, it's time for the rest of us to start facing down the next big, media-fanned psychokiller fantasy. But what will it be?

It beggars the imagination: As Condi Rice said about planes deliberately crashing into the World Trade Center, who could have imagined that the president of the United States would be attacked for telling kids to stay in school and believe in themselves? Or that he'd be accused of wanting to euthanize America's grannies, or of being born in Kenya, which would, after all, make his presidency illegal?

It takes a lively paranoia, a financial stake, and/or a belief that a black man has no right to order white folks around to come up with such outlandish fabrications. But if any of you can tap your inner John Bircher, please share your crazed thoughts: What will be the right's next big Obama conspiracy theory?

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September 10, 2009

Challenger to "You Lie" Congressman Cashes In After Speech

By Ari Melber

The words "you lie" will live in infamy for Joe Wilson, the overheated Republican Congressman who shouted at President Obama during his address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday. Beyond criticism and a swift apology, the incident has already provided a fundraising bonanza for Wilson's opponent, Rob Miller, a Democrat and Marine Corps veteran.

Miller raised over $50,000 in just a few hours after Wilson's outburst, after activists and small donors flooded his page on ActBlue. Bloggers and readers at Daily Kos, a popular liberal blog, also used the site to instantly create a dedicated fundraising page highlighting the incident. The portal, titled "Defeating the man who yelled 'liar' at Obama: Goodbye Rep Joe Wilson," has already raised $35,000 for Wilson from over 1,050 individual donors.

Miller welcomed the spontaneous support on Wednesday night, sending a message to supporters on his Twitter feed: "55K raised, let's double THAT in 12 hours."

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September 10, 2009

We Needed Van Jones on the Inside

By Melissa Harris-Lacewell

In March, I wrote here on The Notion in celebration of the appointment of Van Jones . I am both politically committed to and academically interested in issues of environmental justice. Jones' appointment was a clear victory for the EJ movement.

The modern environmental justice movement emerged more than three decades ago. Its fight has been centered on two important issues: the disproportionate impact of local decisions that site polluting industries and undesirable land uses in poor and minority communities, and the damaging health effects of urban pollution on black and brown citizens.

Distinct from the earlier conservation movement, EJ linked environmental injustice to racial injustice. It opened a new era of civil rights activism in many localities and created new Latino, African American, and Native American leaders who became important, if largely unknown, actors in green activism. EJ organizing was often done by ordinary men and women in Southern rural and Northern urban areas. These were not middle-class "race leaders" dictating a particular political agenda, instead these were truly grassroots organizing efforts focused around immediate concerns and readily identifiable problems.

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September 8, 2009

State of the Nation: Brooks vs Lind

By Eyal Press

According to David Brooks' latest column, Barack Obama's approval ratings are falling because his administration "has joined itself at the hip to the liberal leadership in Congress." Hmm. On the basis of… what exactly? Appointing extreme liberals such as Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner to bail out the banks and Wall Street? Signaling that inclusion of a "public option" in a healthcare overhaul – the fervent hope of the liberal leadership in Congress – is not essential?

"This is a country that has just lived through an economic trauma caused by excessive spending and debt," argues Brooks, which is why he thinks the "animating issue" among disgruntled citizens is "fiscal restraint." Over at Salon, Michael Lind offers a different view, pointing to some other animating issues, like resentment at the "Wall Street elites who wrecked the economy" while working-class people lost their jobs and houses. Where Brooks counsels fiscal restraint, Lind advises Obama to find his inner Franklin Roosevelt. "We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob," declared FDR in 1936. "Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me and I welcome their hatred."

I'm with Lind. For the past three decades, few Democrats have dared to voice such populist sentiments, ceding the ground to Republicans, who have rallied ‘the people' against every special interest imaginable save for the corporations and wealthy elites who have persistently benefited from their policies. Frustrated Democratic strategists have then wondered why the public's anger is misdirected while refusing to look in the mirror and ponder whether perhaps the reason rests in their own party's silence. Passing serious health care reform presents Obama with the perfect opportunity to reverse the equation. So far, he hasn't taken it. The familiar pattern is playing out.

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September 2, 2009