More Love for the Democrats
Dr. X posts this from SF General:
"From today's Chronicle:
California has nearly 6.8 million elderly, frail and chronically infirm Medi-Cal beneficiaries, and many would be forced to find help elsewhere, or make do on their own, without emergency funding from the state Legislature...but help is unlikely because both the [Democratic] Senate and the [Democratic] Assembly would have to approve an emergency bailout, and the Assembly has gone on summer recess."I'd like to make a joke about this, but there's nothing funny to say. What a bunch of jerks."
posted by Latouche at Large at 10:36 PM
2 Comments:
Yeah, but not exactly:
http://www.californiaprogressreport.com/2007/07/is_the_californ.html
Plenty of shame to go around but you can't lay this all at the feet of the Democrats, not this time, sorry.
Shown here, the persistent problem with the Democratic party, is lack of populist, err, balls.
While we're reasonably happy with the presidential choices, and the shift in national direction away from proto-fascism, every local D I know feels like we are pushing on Harry Reid, Libermanian wet noodles on so many fronts.
The centrists, a briefly useful kick in the pants for the original Clinton election, have been much worse than useless, caving to corporate cannibals on everything, tolerating Bushist threats to the nation, destroying accountability in the name of getting along. The sorry state of the DLC - or the Democratic party in Alaska - today is wholly deserved by the pseudo-moderate betrayal of its fundamental ideals by many of its leaders.
Economically, I think we should use every economic means necessary to advance essential American values of democractic citizenship, egalitarianism, and wide open opportunity. We are dedicated, after all, to the proposition that all of us are created equal, and yet we have intrinsic rights to maximize our liberty, our very happiness, under law. Sometimes that's straight up open markets (what few there really are - home contracting, flash games, candlemaking and WSJ sales come to mind), sometimes it's unambigious socialism. (That's a full-on Fuck you, vastly overpaid doctors of America.) But we must be fierce advocates for the opportunity, health, education, freedom and security of Americans.
But while I am impressed by and support ingenious policy, I am fairly anti-wonk. A good shot of thoughtful populism helps the country. It says: take of your citizens first; the American people are culturally and financially generous by nature and will usually extend this to everyone if they aren't being tossed into a viper pit of social darwinism. The terrible error of the War on Poverty was to divorce the people from the policymakers. A tragic loss of national opportunity ensued.
The right wins by lying to the poor about the nature of this pit, neatly blaming their own class-war policies on environmentalists, labor unions, gays, feminists, academics, minorities, immigrants, the numerous boogiemen that they posit despise ordinary Americans. Yet Americans are politically, culturally, and socially generous when they are optimistic, when they belong to something outside of themselves, when they are invested in creating good policy, and when they believe the future is better.
WE used to be the optimists. The nagging despair that comes from knowledge about the stakes for the human race, for the earth itself, must be managed, must be balanced and changed into action.
What to do? Most political arguments, as such, just feed the big. Model your values in conversation, in behavior, in action.
Post a Comment
<< Home