A 5 to 4 vote on the U.S. Supreme Court put our elections into the control of corporations.

Saturday, January 21, marked the second anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling stating that corporations are people and that they can spend unlimited amounts of money influencing our political elections. Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission rates down there with the Dred Scott Decision (1857), which helped bring on the Civil War, and Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which sanctioned “separate but equal” as the law of the land.

Citizens United was a radical ruling in that it was the culmination of a thirty-year effort to replace the American republic with an American plutocracy. It was also a reactionary ruling because it was intended to turn the clock back to the Gilded Age of the 1880s and 1890s when the wealthy ruled without restraint. Justice Anthony Kennedy, the lone conservative on the Court and therefore the determining vote, sided with the four radical-reactionary extremists (Roberts, Scalia, Alito, and Thomas) for the 5 to 4 decision!

The election results of 2010 may be the first products of Citizens United, and the plutocrats got the best seats in the U.S House of Representatives, state governorships, and state legislatures that money could buy: Thus, (1) the Fox-Republican-TEA Party has gridlocked the U.S. Congress so that very little can be done to improve our transportation and communications infrastructure, improve the environment, or promote job growth; and (2) Fox-Republican-TEA Party state governments across the land have essentially declared war against the middle class.

Nevertheless, all is not lost. American laborers, public servants, and small business owners and employees must never give up. An Ernest Hemingway character, Harry Morgan in To Have and Have Not, recognized that “No matter how a man alone ain’t got no bloody chance.” However, there is strength in numbers. And as Edward R. Murrow once said: “We are not descended from fearful people.”

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont has introduced a constitutional amendment that will nullify the Citizens United decision.

Over 50 national, state, and local organizations representing various constituencies and issues have endorsed the passage of a constitutional amendment to overturn the Citizens United decision. Many cities – including NYC, Los Angeles, Boulder, Chapel Hill, and Missoula – have passed resolutions and ballot initiatives to do so. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont has submitted his “Saving American Democracy Amendment,” and we need to encourage every member of Congress to be a co-sponsor.

When the newly-elected Gov. John Kasich, with his Republican legislative majority, pushed through his anti-worker/anti-middle class bill, Ohioans got signatures on petitions, brought that bill to a popular vote, and overturned it in the 2011 November elections.  The usually arrogant Kasich seemed humbled and admitted that he should have listened to the people.

Gov. Scott Walker surprised Wisconsin voters when they found out about his anti-public servant/anti-middle class agenda and are now attempting to recall him.

The courageous Wisconsin 14 blew the whistle on newly-elected Gov. Scott Walker’s agenda to take away the hard-earned rights of Wisconsin’s public workers. They were the minority Democratic legislators who refused to quietly let the Republican majority sabotage Wisconsin’s middle class. Realizing the only way to prevent it was to deny the required quorum for a vote, they left the state and publicized what the Republican governor and legislature were up to. The people were furious. The result was weeks of protests in the state capitol in Madison. Police, firefighters, teachers and their students, farmers, and others came together to prevent the passage of the punitive bill.

Walker and company didn’t care! The bill was passed and signed anyway.  At the time, an apparently photo-shopped picture of a highway sign made the rounds on the Internet: “Welcome to Wisconsin – A Division of Koch Industries.” Billionaire David Koch had helped finance Walker’s election campaign, so everyone finally realized who Walker really represented. The governor all but admitted it in a hilarious, though scary, telephone conversation in which a blogger tricked him into thinking he was talking to David Koch.

The people of Wisconsin continue to be active. They got signatures on petitions, brought recall elections for several Republican legislators, and came within one seat of the Democrats’ regaining control of the legislature and overturning the anti-middle class law. They’ve now gotten over one million signatures –about 500,000 more than required – to force Gov. Walker himself into a recall election!

Rick Snyder of Michigan is one of the Republican governors attacking the middle class. He is using Emergency Financial Managers to replace elected officials and end collective bargaining.

Michigan’s Republican Gov. Rick Snyder, who also took office in Jan. 2011, signed a bill that increased the powers of emergency financial managers. Managers, with six-figure salaries, are able to renegotiate, modify, or void collective bargaining agreements and other contracts. These agents of the governor can sell public assets, merge cities or school districts, end public services, and even remove elected officials! Flint, Mich. – often cited as the birthplace of the American middle class because of a successful strike for workers’ rights that paved the way for others – is one of the bill’s victims. The people of Michigan are getting signatures to bring a referendum on this bill.

The Bonus Army built a Hooverville, which was a typical survival technique used by the unemployed during the Great Depression.

In the spring and summer of 1932, as the Great Depression approached its deepest point, 17,000 unemployed veterans from WWI and their families (43,000 in all) marched on Washington, DC, to demand the Congress pay in advance a bonus scheduled for 1945.  They were known as the Bonus Army. Even though Republican Pres. Herbert Hoover ordered no violence against the demonstrators, Douglas MacArthur eventually led a military attack on the protesters and burned the marchers’ ramshackle encampment.  Hoover accepted responsibility. In Albany, NY, Gov. Franklin Roosevelt was furious and asked, “Why didn’t Hoover offer the men coffee and sandwiches instead of turning Pat Hurley [Sec. of the Army] and Doug MacArthur loose?” There was a big difference between FDR and Herbert Hoover.

Today we have an Occupy Movement that is bringing attention to the vast discrepancies between the haves and have-nots, or the 1 % versus the 99 %. Director/producer Oliver Stone tried to warn about financial profiteering and abuse back in the Reagan Era with his movie Wall Street. He was disappointed that hardly anyone got the message and that most people seemed to admire the “greed is good” mentality.

That all changed with the economic meltdown, bank bailouts, unemployment, and home foreclosures. Occupy appropriately began on Wall Street and spread nationwide and overseas. Sadly, billionaire NYC Mayor Bloomberg sent in the police to drive the occupiers from “Liberty Square.” That incident and forced evacuations elsewhere, as in Seattle, are symbolically reminiscent of the fate of the Bonus Army, but the movement hasn’t died – and we can’t afford to let it die.

Jane Darwell and Russell Simpson as Ma and Pa Joad in the John Ford production of The Grapes of Wrath. Ma Joad proclaims "We're the people."

Probably the greatest literary document of the Great Depression was John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.  Ma Joad was its strongest character. It was she who organized the family to start anew after losing the family homestead. Now we are in a Great Jobs Depression and the middle class is under siege. We need to remember what Ma Joad said to Pa: “But we keep a’comin’. We’re the people that live. They can’t wipe us out; they can’t lick us. We’ll go on forever, Pa, ’cause we’re the people.”

The U.S. flag over the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial

I recently completed my longtime quest to visit all fifty states by spending six days in Hawaii. Of course, I set aside one of those days to go to Pearl Harbor where the National Park Service operates a visitors’ center and the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt defined December 7, 1941, as “a date that will live in infamy.” The Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor resulted in 347 airplanes destroyed, 21 ships sank or damaged and 1,177 servicemen killed. Their names are listed at one end of the Arizona shrine. Their average age was 19.

U.S.S. Arizona Memorial

With many of its crew trapped inside, the battleship Arizona sank within nine minutes of its being attacked – those sailors are still entombed there. The memorial is directly above the sunken ship. Oil from the vessel still leaks into the harbor and drifts toward the U.S.S. Missouri, the battleship on which Douglas MacArthur accepted the Japanese surrender four years later on September 2, 1945. The Missouri has been restored and moved within site of the Arizona so that visitors can witness the beginning and end of our official involvement in World War II at the same time.

Oil still leaks from the sunken Arizona, and it drifts toward the U.S.S. Missouri.

“Remember Pearl Harbor” is a reminder of what we as a nation can do when we pull together for a common cause. WWII was a time of shared sacrifice in which those on the home front conserved and rationed to support our forces overseas. The Japanese commander of the sneak attack prophetically lamented afterward that he feared he had “awakened a sleeping giant.” He was right. We mobilized our workforce, our industries, and our military and were victorious within four years.

What a difference 60 years make. The infamous 9/11 attacks in 2001 by 19 suicidal hijackers resulted in the cold-blooded murders of nearly 3000 innocent victims. The American people were probably ready to unite to do whatever was necessary to achieve justice and to prevent such a thing from ever happening again.

The response to 9/11 cried out for shared sacrifice and for a federal project similar to the Manhattan Project to produce a synthetic oil to eliminate our reliance on oil from the unstable Middle East. Sadly, President George W. Bush sided with Big Oil and Coal and told us to “go shopping.” Instead of his asking to eliminate his 2001 tax cuts for the rich, he expanded them in 2003 and chose to pay for his Afghanistan and Iraq Wars “on a charge card” – with much of the borrowed money coming from China. The Afghanistan War still continues!

The Arizona shrine has a wall listing the names of the 1,177 servicemen killed on Dec. 7, 1941. Their average age was 19.

As Mr. Bush ran up the deficit to pay for his tax cuts and two wars (and an unfunded prescription drug program he added in 2003), the only ones asked to sacrifice were those who volunteered to fight in his two wars. Meanwhile, unlike after Pearl Harbor, the job market failed to grow following Mr. Bush’s 2001-2002 recession. It was only a couple of months before the Election of 2004 that there was a slight net growth of jobs – Bush was almost the first president since Herbert Hoover during the Great Depression who had not seen any growth in jobs since entering office.

Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto feared he had "awakened a sleeping giant" after he had attacked Pearl Harbor before the declaration of war had been delivered.

Also in contrast to Pearl Harbor, we failed to unite after the near global meltdown in September 2008 resulting in millions of workers losing their jobs. Instead of our uniting behind our obvious needs to create new jobs to rebuild our crumbling parks, bridges, and highways and for stricter regulation of the banking, oil, and coal industries, we got a Republican minority in Congress that resisted doing anything.

Thanks to the quick organization of the billionaire Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity, we got public rallies of TEA Parties opposing solving any of our problems: no health insurance reform, no jobs programs, and no regulation of Big Business. Those rallies still seem to be the most shameless public displays of selfishness and greed in American history. Because of those Astro Turf rallies, their defense of the plutocracy, and the Republicans’ abuse of the filibuster in the Senate, anything that eventually passed got watered down to dilute their effectiveness.

What united the Republicans during the Clinton Years was their desire to restore the plutocracy of the late 19^th century and to find a reason to impeach Bill Clinton. What unites the current Fox-Republican-TEA Party is quite similar: they are more determined than ever to return to the Gilded Age when the super rich had near-absolute power, and they want to be sure President Barack Obama fails to create enough jobs so they might defeat him in 2012.

This does not unite the nation – it divides us. Ever since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, we have seen a 30-year increase in the wealth of the few at the top but a decline or stagnation of the middle class. The last ten years have been the most devastating. The Elections of 2010 brought in several Republican governors in states like Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, and Maine who surprised the voters by being stealth operatives for the plutocracy.

"Wild Man (John) Kasich" is one of several Republican governors pushing an anti-middle class agenda.

John Kasich somehow got elected governor in Ohio! I always remember Kasich as being one of Newt Gingrich’s “gang of thugs” that took over the House of Representatives in 1995 and set out to get Clinton. I used to enjoy my father’s reaction to Kasich whenever he showed up on television news. He called him “Wild Man Kasich.” “Look at him,” my father would say. “You can see it in his eyes – he’s just wild!” Sure enough, he did have that wild, deranged look. I was relieved when Kasich left the House to be one of billionaire Rupert Murdoch’s Republican propaganda voices on Fox “News.” I hoped he would do less harm there.

Governor Kasich’s eyes have lost that glazed, crazed look. Instead, they now have a cold and mean look. That’s appropriate considering the anti-middle class, anti-worker, and anti-public servant bill he rammed through his compliant Republican legislature. The good news is that the middle class suddenly woke up and tried to stop him. When that failed, the people set out to get signatures on petitions demanding a referendum so they could vote on it themselves. They got thousands more signatures than necessary. When Kasich’s bill was voted on by the people, it was rejected by a landslide!

For the last 30 years, the middle class has been “a sleeping giant.” The war against the American working class, which intensified this year, may have the same effect as Pearl Harbor. The plutocrats and their supporters may have us against the ropes, but we are not down for the count yet. The Occupy Movement promoting justice for the 99 % is spreading, and, if it keeps going, the middle class may rise again.

by David Offutt
A version of this essay was published December 29, 2011, in the El Dorado News-Times as a guest column.

On November 8, 2011, Arkansas voters approved a $575 million bond program to repair more than 400 miles of interstate highways. At least 27,000 jobs are expected to be created.

How many times have you heard the standard, conservative cliché that “governments do not create jobs” and have actually given it any thought? Is there really a Social Security crisis, or do you just accept that there is one? The November 8 elections gave us some encouraging signs – Arkansas voters renewed a highway bond bill that will create 27,000 jobs, and Ohio voters rejected Republican Gov. John Kasich’s anti-worker/anti-middle class/anti-public servant bill. Hence, I thought this would be a good time to take a look at the ridiculous claims that creating jobs and saving Social Security will destroy this nation. 

El Dorado, AR, opened its $43 million high school in August 2011, accommodating 1500 students.

This August, my home town, El Dorado, AR, opened its new, beautiful, state-of-the-art senior high school. Does anyone really believe that it was built with no electricians, no plumbers, no carpenters, no bricklayers, no designers, no landscapers, et al? Did no one manufacture and install all those tables, chairs, and desks? The city widened Timberlane, the street that leads to the new school from West Hillsboro/Hwy 82B, to accommodate the anticipated student traffic. Was this done without any construction crews?

A former colleague read one of my monthly columns on my High Noon website and left me a note – yes, that same banal platitude: “Governments do not create jobs.” I sign a statement every year acknowledging that if federal funding for my position as a teacher of adult education expires then so will my job. The teacher who left me that note resigned from our program as a regular part-time teacher to teach math at the state sponsored Southern Arkansas University in Magnolia. Her husband works in East Camden for Lockheed-Martin, which is heavily dependent on government contracts. If someone like she really believes that “governments do not create jobs,” you can see how much trouble the country is really in.

Divorced from reality, a strange otherworldliness seems to have taken hold of much of the nation. They seem to believe that the Construction Fairy builds bridges, highways, dams, schools, and other public structures. They expect the Public Service Fairy to hire educators, firemen, policemen, park rangers, and other civic jobs. 

Mitt Romney should be a good representative for the plutocracy. David Koch sponsored one of Mitt's first fundraisers, and Romney considers the Koch brothers to be the "financial engines of the TEA Party."

Paul Krugman, the Nobel laureate and economist, laments the right-wing’s belief in the Confidence Fairy. It kicked in almost immediately after the near economic meltdown and the election of Barack Obama in 2008. Plutocrats, like the Koch brothers – whom Mitt Romney calls “the financial engines of the TEA Party,” were well aware of what really needed to be done but quickly organized to prevent constructive action. The Confidence Fairy concept is the naïve and counterproductive belief that if government cuts spending and pays off its debts, then businesses and consumers will feel more confident about the future and will begin spending again.

Economist Paul Krugman fears that the current rightwing belief in the Confidence Fairy will lead to disaster. The conservatives in the U.S. and in Europe are promoting austerity measures of spending cuts when they need to be promoting government spending.

The obvious fallacy of believing in the Confidence Fairy is that the unemployed, the underemployed, and what’s left of the income-stagnated middle class don’t have the money to spend. Therefore, businesses are not going to increase production for goods they can’t sell. Also, the upper 1 % who have most of the money, wants to have even more and is obsessed with letting as little of it as possible trickle down to the have-nots.

It seems that the more employees that a corporation lays off, the more likely the CEOs will be rewarded with huge bonuses: The Bank of America recently announced the termination of 3500 jobs and rewarded its CEO Brian Moynihan with a $9 million all-stock bonus. Also, Moynihan and two other top executives saw their annual base salary increased $50,000. So, apparently, the richer the top 1 % gets, the less likely they will create any jobs. Interesting isn’t it.

Now, let’s look at that so-called Social Security crisis. It has been determined that if nothing is done about the current Social Security program over the next 27 years, by the year 2037, it will be able to pay most of the current benefits but not all of them. Some of my more elderly friends laugh this off because they figure to be dead by then. Some people are wealthy enough that they expect to never need the benefits, so they don’t care anyway.

The biggest myth about Social Security is that it is a drain on the national budget. Actually it pays for itself and is borrowed from to make the annual deficit seem smaller that it really is. The phony crisis issue is being used by those who want to destroy the system. The plutocrats don’t want to pay into it and clearly don’t care whether anyone else who truly needs it has access to it or not.

FDR signs the Social Security Act into law in August 1935. Contrary to critics and opponents of the program, it is still doing very well and is not in crisis.

Many people have forgotten one of the most important reasons that FDR and his New Dealers created the Social Security System. It was to encourage older workers to retire and get out of the job market to make room for the younger unemployed workers. Therefore, most of the ideas to reform SS that are being proposed by opponents of the system would do a lot of harm and virtually no good. Most payments are not that large anyway, so cutting benefits would be irresponsible and hurt the consumer economy and the quality of life. Increasing the age for full retirement from 66 to something higher would harm efforts to reduce the 25 million unemployment/ underemployment problem.

Social Security can still play a role in creating jobs, and there are various solutions for financial solvency well beyond 2037. The age of eligibility for full retirement could be lowered back to 65 or even down to 64. Right now, the amount of one’s earnings for contributing to Social Security ends at $106,800. That limit could certainly be raised to assure the funding of such an invaluable program.

The problems with doing anything that might create jobs or improve Social Security are obvious. The Fox-Republican-TEA Party is not going to do anything that might assure the reelection of Barack Obama. Also, too many of those in the upper 1 % incomes and their allies in Congress and in state governments, like Wisconsin and Ohio, become apoplectic at the very idea that those who benefit most from our system should help pay for it. They don’t believe in the concept of “indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” They definitely like “liberty” but only in a “dog eat dog” context in which they are the rugged individualists who are on top and the rest of us are failures not worthy of their bother.

by David Offutt
A version of this essay was published November 21, 2011, in the El Dorado News-Times as a guest column.

So far, Barack Obama has been no FDR.

The nation needed a Franklin Delano Roosevelt to deal with the current economic crisis, but we got Mr. Obama instead. When FDR was ruthlessly attacked for putting people back to work during the Great Depression, he welcomed the Republicans’ wrath and enjoyed their accusing him of being a traitor to his wealthy class. In contrast, Mr. Obama has exasperated his supporters with his laid-back style and his willingness to cave-in to counter-productive demands by the Fox-Republican-TEA Party.

He was naive in believing that he could work with people who vowed to destroy him. His opponents are determined to prolong the “Great Jobs Depression” so they can defeat him in 2012, regardless of how many families are hurt in the meantime. They will agree to nothing that might work and that Obama can take credit for.

Mr. Obama may have finally had his “aha” moment. His speech before Congress on September 8 was possibly his most effective since his presidential campaign. Although his American Jobs Act is much too small, it shows he is taking some steps in the right direction. From the messy passage of the Affordable Health Care Act, he’s learned not to let Congress put together an important bill from scratch. He has made a specific proposal to Congress emphasizing the need for construction projects that repair our deteriorating and vital transportation and energy infrastructure.

He has also accepted the reality that too many voters don’t understand the obstructionist mission of the Fox-Republican-TEA Party. Mr. Obama has allowed his opponents to control the media and the debate on virtually every issue and has wasted the presidency’s most effective tool – the bully pulpit. This time he’s promised to take his case to the people, and he’s doing it. He can be a very effective spokesman for the middle class if he will stick to it.

He doesn’t like saying the same things over and over again, but his opponents have no such scruples. They will continue to repeat “tax cuts for the rich” as their only solution for the creation of jobs no matter how ineffective “trickle-down” economics has always been. In response, he must constantly make the case for more jobs to restore America’s highways, bridges, and schools.

 If American voters don’t demand it, the Republican-dominated Congress will never allow the American Jobs Act to even be considered. Remember: the Republicans control the House and abuse the filibuster in the Senate, so many of the unemployed and/or in the middle class have given up hope.

The stimulus bill may not have brought recovery, but it did do a lot of good.

Previously, Mr. Obama failed to mobilize the public in support of jobs, and he allowed his opponents to slander the original stimulus bill as “failed” while it did a lot of good and did no harm. I wonder how many citizens here in south Arkansas are aware that the SAU Tech Uptown Center, which houses the new adult education and workforce centers in Camden and the recently-opened 4-lane by-pass around El Dorado were funded by the stimulus bill. Also, El Dorado has been pleading, seemingly forever, for 4-lane access to Little Rock. How many opponents of the stimulus bill in El Dorado know that the current construction between Fordyce and Sheridan is funded by it?

Mr. Obama, who is President de jure (by election), has also decided to confront the only president that the Fox-Republican-TEA Party recognizes, President de facto Grover Norquist. Mr. Obama is now emphatically insisting that the Bush tax cuts on the well-to-do must end and that those who benefit the most from our capitalist system should pay their fair share. Mr. Norquist, however, has gotten virtually every Republican to sign his oath that they will never raise taxes no matter what the reason – thereby making public works, job creation, and eventual deficit reduction impossible.

The argument against spending programs today is the same that FDR heard during the 1930’s: (1) Government construction jobs are temporary, so we should wait and let the private investors create permanent jobs instead. (2) In the long run, people will have to start spending the money they’ve been hoarding under their mattresses. (3) Consumer demand will then lead businesses to restock and industries to expand production.

Harry Hopkins helped FDR develop the New Deal during the Great Depression. He supervised the Federal Emergency Relief Administration and the Works Progress Administration.

The problem then was the same as now: people didn’t have money saved that they could eventually spend. It was FDR’s advisor Harry Hopkins who tried to explain it to the Republican opposition: People need jobs in a hurry – “People don’t eat in the long run – they need to eat every day.” Those words still fall on deaf ears.

People in south Arkansas don’t need to be reminded that secure jobs in the private sector don’t exist. El Dorado poultry producers and employees of Pilgrim’s Pride definitely already know. So-called lifetime employees at International Paper in Camden learned it years ago. Recently 700 workers at Georgia-Pacific in Crossett found out. If consumer demand is down, investors are not going to increase supplies.  

I see an infuriating sign twice a day on my commute to Camden: “Future I-69 Corridor.” I recall when the project was approved; I told my father that El Dorado was finally going to get a nearby interstate highway. He quickly responded, “I’ll never see it.” He died over ten years ago, and we still have no construction activity at any I-69 signs in our vicinity. If we don’t get this job-producing project going now, when will there ever be a better time? Every day we postpone is another day delayed in the long term commercial benefit that our region hopes to receive once the highway is completed. 

Good jobs with good pay will provide the demand for goods and services that are required to get the private sector back into hiring and producing. As a result, government revenues on the local, state, and federal levels will also increase. Laid-off teachers and other public servants can be rehired. Many workers and retirees have had their salaries or pensions frozen and have cut back on non-essential spending because basic living expenses have continued to climb. If they get the cost-of-living increases they need to supposedly “break even,” they, too, may be able to spend again.

Martin Luther King, Jr., and LBJ

When Lyndon Johnson was trying to get Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, he asked Martin Luther King to keep up the pressure so that he would be forced to get it done. The same is true for President Obama. The need for major public projects and millions of jobs is indisputable. Whether we get them depends entirely on whether the American people truly care. Right now, Mr. Obama is directly asking the people to put the pressure on. Will they do it?

by David Offutt
A version of this essay was published October 24, 2011, in the El Dorado News-Times as a guest column.

President Obama allowed the Fox-Republican-TEA Party to change the Number 1 Priority away from job creation in favor of deficit reduction by way of spending cuts. They snookered him in their effort to make him a one-term president by assuring that high unemployment percentages will surely get higher. He should have known better.

The Great Recession, which began in December 2007 and supposedly “ended” two years later in December 2009, quickly morphed into what I call the Great Jobs Depression. The Bush administration bailed out the rogue banksters with no strings attached and supposedly staved off a complete economic meltdown. The Obama administration saved thousands of jobs by preventing the collapse of the American auto industry. It also implemented an unpopular stimulus bill, which was deplorably underfunded and only marginally successful. But where are the absolutely essential jobs creation programs? And why has there been no public outcry demanding them?

From 2001 into 2011, we have continued the always-catastrophic policy of making the rich richer and the poor poorer by initiating and foolishly continuing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. No matter what you call it – trickle-down economics, Hooverism, supply-side economics, Reaganomics, Bushonomics – it has never worked, and it’s inconceivable that it ever will.

JFK, during the campaign of 1960, called the Republican platform "the power of positive thinking."

When Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy ran against Richard Nixon in 1960, he called the Republican platform “the power of positive thinking.” Seeking the Republican presidential nomination in 1980 – unsuccessfully – George H. W. Bush accurately described Ronald Reagan’s economic platform as “voodoo.” When he eventually became President, he did it on a platform of continuing voodooism. “Read my lips: No new taxes.” When he raised taxes, his party abandoned him.

Today the Fox-Republican TEA Party is still spouting the same nonsense: “the wealthy are the job creators” and if you keep the Bush tax cuts or cut their taxes even more, some of that money will slowly trickle down to the people in form of jobs. For eleven consecutive years, we have once again seen the abject failure and absurdity of that policy.

The CCC boys worked in state and national parks and forests building trails, cabins, campgrounds, and various other worthwhile and lasting projects. They are needed again.

In December 2009, I wrote that the Obama administration needed to apply three tried and proven methods to promote job creation: (1) re-create a modernized Civilian Conservation Corps that worked so well during the Great Depression; (2) re-create the Works Progress Administration to modernize our highways, bridges, railways, waterways, and energy infrastructure; and (3) resurrect Richard Nixon’s revenue sharing program to prevent states from laying off or freezing the salaries of public servants, which only makes a bad situation worse, and to implement any long-delayed state-wide projects.  

They were needed because the plutocracy (the few who are very wealthy) had not created the jobs that Bush had promised, but history has taught us that they wouldn’t do it anyway. Also, Bush’s irresponsible, deficit-creating tax cuts for the super rich were due to expire at the end of 2010. It was possible that something positive could finally be done. Sadly, the tax cuts were extended, and we are still waiting for those desperately needed jobs programs! So what happened?

Grover Norquist, possibly the most influential of the "Wizards of Was," opposes any federal spending that might result in increased taxation of the plutocracy. He promotes huge spending cuts so as to reduce taxes on the wealthy even more than the Bush 35% rate.

Grover Norquist effectively ascended to become the de facto President of the United States. Economically, he is much more powerful than Barack Obama who is only the President de jure. President Norquist has worked relentlessly for a quarter of a century to return the nation to the 19^th century Gilded Age when the robber barons paid no income taxes at all. Virtually every Republican in Congress has signed an oath to him promising to never raise taxes – no matter what the reason.

Recently, during a Republican debate among presidential hopefuls inIowa, the eight candidates were asked if they would support a deficit-reduction bill that was 10 parts spending cuts and 1 part taxation. All opposed it. Does Norquist own these knights of the plutocracy or what? They all owe fealty to him and his fellow robber barons. Regardless of the crisis or need, Norquist and his Fox-Republican-TEA Party are determined that those who control 90 percent of the wealth in the United States will play no additional role in helping the nation.

With $21 billion each, the Kochs have TEA Partiers defending them against higher taxes and have governors and state legislatures, like in Wisconsin, doing their bidding.

In a half-hearted defense of President Obama, it should be pointed out that back in early 2009 when thousands of workers were daily losing their jobs, there were few rallies demanding that he or the government do something about it. Most rallies were just the opposite. The billionaire Koch brothers, Charles and David, put their political arm – Americans for Prosperity – to work organizing rallies of people who defended the extremely rich and opposed the government doing anything about the economic disaster. They believed the wealthy were TEA, “Taxed Enough Already” – hence, the formation of TEA Parties.

The people who really need help have been frustrated but mostly silent. One of the reasons for this has been their confidence in the safety-net programs of FDR’s New Deal of the 1930s and LBJ’s Great Society of the 1960s. Social Security, unemployment insurance, the minimum wage, food stamps, Medicare, and Medicaid have all been so successful that panic has not yet set in.

Although it was government deregulation of the banking industry that helped lead to the Great Recession, it was primarily the Bush tax cuts, the unfundedIraqand Afghan wars, and the unfunded Medicare drug plan boondoggle that ran up the debt. This made the deficit-spending that was needed to recover from the recession impossible to get through Congress, especially with Republicans continuing to be the Party of Hell No. Now, because of the Elections of 2010, with so many TEA Party representatives in Congress and a Republican majority in the House, recovery may well be beyond reach before things get really bad.

Ronald Reagan's first term ended with 9 to 10% unemployment. His second term had the largest bank failure and stock market crash since the Great Depression. He still remained popular, and today hardly anyone recalls his true record.

President Obama caved in to Republican demands for spending cuts in the midst of high unemployment. He seems to forget that the personally popular Reagan has been the only President reelected with 9 to 10 percent unemployment. If the Fox-Republican-TEA Party gets its way with cutting funds for regulatory and service agencies, workers’ and consumers’ livelihood, health, and safety will be jeopardized. Also, thousands more public servants will be unemployed, and the downward spiral of the economy will be exacerbated.

To run up the national debt so that it’s impossible to serve the people’s needs has been the Republican goal since the election of Reagan. Norquist calls it “starving the (government) beast.” This, in turn, will allow Big Business to do as it pleases without regulations.

People who serve the public are not their only targets. The primary marks on their hit list are the safety-net programs, which they’ve always opposed. You may think things are bad now, but if Norquist & Company succeeds, hunger and anger may at long last awaken the quietly dying middle class. We may eventually get those job programs, but they will come much too late for far too many.

by David Offutt
A version of this essay was published September 19, 2011, in the El Dorado News-Times as a Guest Column.

John C. Calhoun: He was once described by John Randolph as being "self-mutilated like the Fanatic that emasculated himself."

In early June, the Arkansas Museum of Natural Resources in south Arkansas presented its annual Chautauqua program. The theme this year was The Impending Crisis: Prelude to War. The Civil War began 150 years ago, so we are again remembering the issues that politics failed to resolve. The slave issue, and other constitutional and economic  issues related to the preservation of slavery, had to be settled on battlefields in which 600,000 Americans gave their lives over a four-year period.

Last year, the theme pertained to the 1920s, and President Coolidge was reincarnated by scholar Jim Cooke. At that time I wrote “Calvin Coolidge: A Patron Saint for the TEA Party.”  This year, in addition to Abraham Lincoln and Harriet Tubman, the museum’s program offered another personality, played by university professor Dr. Joseph Stukes, who also fits the characteristics for a TEA Party patron saint: South Carolina Sen. John C. Calhoun.

The bizarre and complicated coalition of the Fox-Republican-TEA Party seems united in its determination to undo the progressive social and economic reforms that characterized much of the 20^th century. It sincerely wants to return the nation to the plutocracy of the Gilded Age (1876-1900) – a time of rule by and for the very rich. This is a coalition of radical-reactionaries who want to turn the clock back. They appear to want to go so far as to fundamentally change our constitutional system and replace it with a confederation system, in which the national government will be weaker than the states.  

Calhoun was the leading voice of many of their methods: states’ rights, nullification, secession, the refusal to compromise, and the defense of slavery. With the exception of the specific praise of slavery, all of these issues are key positions of the current TEA Party movement. With massive sponsorship from the billionaire Koch brothers and their Americans for Prosperity political organ, TEA Party-supported governors and legislators have replaced the slavery issue with an agenda to undermine the middle class in general and the working class, unions, and public servants in particular.

Prior to 1828, as a congressman, secretary of war, and vice-president, Mr. Calhoun had been a strong nationalist who supported a protective tariff and internal improvements of railroads, highways, and canals. He wanted to promote American industry and national expansion.

The potential of Calhoun was enormous, but he was consumed by the fate of “the South, the poor South.” It was issue of slavery and the rising abolitionist movement that caused him to lose sight of what was best for the U.S. as a whole. The South had determined to remain strictly agricultural with a slave labor base, so Calhoun rejected his previous nationalist convictions. 

Even as vice-president Calhoun told President John Quincy Adams that slavery “was good – a positive good.” He wouldn’t accept that the South was on “the wrong side of history.” In 1832, he became the first and only vice-president until Spiro Agnew to resign from office. He entered the Senate and devoted the rest of his life to the South’s right to live in the past. 

In early 2009 our nation was entering the second year of the Great Recession and was still responding to the near-economic meltdown of September 2008. Saving or creating jobs should have been our primary objective. Needless to say, the Bush tax cuts for the very wealthy, which were primarily responsible for the huge federal deficits throughout the Bush-Cheney Era, would definitely have to go.

Incredibly, those disastrous tax cuts are still in place! The mythological belief that if the rich get richer they will allow some of their wealth trickle down to the masses in the form of jobs is still being flim-flammed. This is in spite of the voodoo economics of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush proving that no matter how many times they try it, it’s inconceivable that it will ever work. Like John C. Calhoun’s compulsive defense of slavery, those in the Fox-Republican-TEA Party obsessively defend tax cuts for the rich as being the only acceptable way to create jobs.   

Obviously, a major stimulus bill is what was in order. Repairs and expansion of our highway-river-rail-energy infrastructure (like the internal improvements that Calhoun originally supported) were long overdue, and our national parks have long been neglected. This was the time to address these problems AND put people to work. Unfortunately, the extremely rich plutocracy was ready to stop whatever they could from being done. They were not going to let Pres. Barack Obama become a second Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

David and Charles Koch are among the "Wizards of Was" who want to turn back the clock to the days of the Robber Barons when labor was totally at the mercy of their employers.

David and Charles Koch and other “Wizards of Was” got organized quickly. I call them the “Wizards of Was” because they work behind the scenes to return to the past when there were no income taxes, no collective-bargaining, no minimum wage, et al. Consequently, the badly compromised stimulus bill was only enough to create some jobs, save some others, and stop the bleeding. It wasn’t enough to ignite a recovery. Economist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman said the stimulus bill needed to be one and a half times what it was. More likely it should have been twice or triple that. The Fox-Republican-TEA Party continues to oppose any jobs programs and hopes to use the lack of job growth to make gains in the 2012 elections

Today, American labor and public servants have been labeled “evil – a negative evil,” and they are being blamed for our economic miseries. However, in the last decade, those who managed to remain employed saw their incomes increase an average of only 1 %! Put another way, based on the value of the dollar then and now, they make about $300 more now than they did ten years ago. And remember, these are the lucky ones who did not become unemployed or underemployed.

Meanwhile, during that same time, their cost of living continued to increase. My own homeowner’s insurance more than doubled (100 % plus). Gasoline prices increased 64 % – and that doesn’t include the current 2011 gas hike caused by oil profiteers. For many, the huge jump in gas prices in 2008  began a tradition of summer staycations instead of vacations.  

There are many apparently legal but unethical tactics used by Big Business and other employers to further exploit and weaken their middle class workers. A contract worker may be offered a contract that adds days, weeks, and/or daily hours to the contract pay period for the same salary as before. It certainly breeds hopelessness, discontent, distrust, and fear in the workplace, but in hard times any job is better than no job.

The idea and the ultimate goal seems to be to assure the continued existence of a large number of unemployed laborers who are willing to work for as few benefits as possible. The greater number of unemployed, the less those who are employed need to be paid or made happy. Employers can remind their employees that there are many others who want their jobs.

Among of the worst responses to the Great Recession have been layoffs and wage freezes of state employees imposed by the state governments. War seems to have been declared against public servants, and in some states many teachers, policemen, and firefighters are losing their hard-won rights of collective-bargaining. Some of the most reprehensible governors have been Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, Ohio’s John Kasich, New Jersey’s Chris Christie, Indiana’s Mitch Daniels, Texas’ Rick Perry, Michigan’s Rick Snyder, Maine’s Paul LePage, and Florida’s Rick Scott. Nevertheless, even Pres. Obama froze the wages of federal employees, and he’s expected to know better. The unemployed and underpaid employees spend less, deepen the recession, decrease state revenues, and increase future job losses. Nobody seems to care.

Andrew Jackson now watches over each incumbent U. S. President: On Jefferson Day 1830, he looked his vice-president John C. Calhoun in the eyes and toasted, "Our Union - it must be preserved."

George W. Bush wanted to privatize Social Security, Rep. Paul Ryan proposed to end Medicare, Rick Perry suggested Texas secede if health insurance reform was passed, and Idaho and others are claiming states’ rights to nullify the Affordable Healthcare Act by de-funding it. Seeing Calhoun’s influence today, it’s no wonder that Andrew Jackson said in 1837 that one of the things he most regretted was that he “never hanged John C. Calhoun.”

by David Offutt
A version of this essay was published July 6, 2011, in the El Dorado News-Times as a Guest Column.

While logistically improbable, circumstantial evidence made such a scenario plausible. (1) The initial 2001 invasion of Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban was so successful that it was hard to believe that bin Laden could have escaped from the Tora Bora caves. (2) Within six months of bin Laden’s disappearance, President Bush admitted that he didn’t care where he was and didn’t give him much thought. (3) The idea of a multi-millionaire like bin Laden living indefinitely in various caves was impossible to imagine. (4) Mr. Bush was clearly more interested in Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11, bin laden, al Qaida, or the Taliban. (5) In 2005 Mr. Bush dismantled the CIA team that had been specifically created to find bin Laden.

Also, Osama bin Laden and 9/11 were the best things to happen to the Republican Party since the existence of the Soviet Union. The Cold War (1945-1991) allowed the Republicans to use the fear of “the communists are coming!” to persuade voters that Democrats were “soft on communism.” When the perpetual “war” against Russia ended, the Republicans had to contend with the potential “peace dividend,” which was anathema to them. In the 1990’s President Bill Clinton drove them nuts with health care and environmental issues and raising tax rates on the extremely rich and balancing the budget.

The 9/11 attack allowed Bush/Cheney Republicans to return to their coveted policies of perpetual warfare and neglect of social-domestic needs. Amazingly, even though the World Trade Center was destroyed on Bush/Cheney’s watch, for nearly six years they got voters to believe that only they could keep America safe. Because the mere existence of bin Laden was so important politically for the Bush/Cheney Republicans, it was always highly unlikely he would ever be brought to justice during their tenure.

It also allowed me to make up the story that bin Laden was safe and living a life of ease on Bush’s ranch. At the same time, I always pointed out that the so-called rumor was absolutely false. The overall logistics of secretly hiding bin Laden on Bush’s ranch was virtually impossible. Building a bunker and then supplying it for seven years could never have been done without someone noticing or without someone on the inside spilling the beans. This is also the reason that I find it inconceivable that bin Laden could have been in that compound in Abbottabad since 2005 without the Pakistani government knowing about it.

Ironically, it was George W. Bush’s public indifference in locating bin Laden and his publicly disbanding the CIA’s bin Laden unit that ultimately allowed the world’s most wanted criminal to be found. Otherwise, bin Laden would never have felt safe enough to stay in one place for so long. Once President Obama told CIA director Leon Panetta to make finding bin Laden his number one priority, all the pieces of information could be put together – and those pieces led to one place instead of several. If the Bush/Cheney crew claimed this to have been their plan all along, they may have had some bragging rights.

The U.S. executed Japanese war criminals after WWII for waterboarding. During the first Bush/Cheney term, we seem to have forgotten who we are.

Unfortunately, the success of finding bin Laden has resurrected support for the U.S.to return to its “dark side.” Many of the villains of our descent into the methods of our enemies are now claiming that torture was responsible for getting bin Laden. Unsurprisingly, Dick Cheney, who is known as Darth Vader and as America’s Torquemada – the evil perpetrator of the Spanish Inquisition, is claiming vindication for his criminal policies. Lawyer John Yoo, who was assigned the task of creating legal cover for authorizing torture, is understandably doing the same. So is former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others. If these people were to travel outside the U.S., they could be arrested for war crimes. Here, they are making the rounds on television talk shows.

 I’ll try to resist  repeating everything I wrote on this topic in my Nov. 27, 2009, essay “Investigating the Bush/Cheney Torture Policy.”  At that time, I opposed the decision by President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder not to investigate the illegalities of “enhanced interrogation” and waterboarding – synonyms for torture. I didn’t like, but understood why, that they didn’t want to prosecute individuals for these crimes. Nevertheless, the important thing was, and still is, to make sure no future president resumes these heinous acts.

Bill O'Reilly sees nothing wrong with the U. S. violating international law and practicing the use of torture. Morality and ethical behavior seem to be of no concern to him.

Bill O’Reilly is one of Rupert Murdoch’s most popular entertainers on Fox “News” and, therefore, an unofficial spokesman for the Fox-Republican-TEA Party. In  one of his weekly newspaper columns, ironically titled “Truth and Ideology” ( May 5, 2011), Mr. O’Reilly advocated precisely what I’ve been warning against. He wrote that “if Obama doesn’t want to order waterboarding, fine. That’s on him. But the elected leader of the nation should have the power to make the decision.” No! The president is not above the law! Richard Nixon believed that a presidential order meant that it was legal and should be carried out. Nixon resigned to avoid impeachment. We can’t allow our constitutional system to be subverted into a dictatorship.

Having been tortured by the North Vietnamese, John McCain speaks with authority on the torture issue. He insists that torture didn’t provide the major leads that got bin Laden. Of course, we know that torture is intended to get victims to say what we want to hear. However, based on the law of averages, it may get accurate information on very rare occasions. Regardless, it can’t be trusted without verifying it from other non-tortured sources, which the FBI and the National Defense Intelligence College contend is much more effective and reliable anyway.

The seemingly sociopathic O’Reilly asks “who cares?” We all should care. There is a universal moral standard that all nations and individuals are judged by: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Those who authorize torture and those who commit torture are personally barbarized. They also degrade the rest of us and our nation as well.

Remember the lines delivered by Spencer Tracy in “Judgment at Nuremburg”: “A country is not a rock….It is what it stands for when standing for something is most difficult.” President Obama has been forewarned by Mr. O’Reilly and others. Unless he and the Congress act, the next Nixonian president who believes that the end justifies the means will undo what’s been corrected, and we will be the lesser for it.

by David Offutt
A version of this essay was published June 8, 2011, in the El Dorado News-Times as a Guest Column.

Here we are at Earth Day 2011, and things don’t look so good.  After 41 years of promoting awareness about the health of the planet, we should be learning from our experiences much more than we are. Within the last 12 months, we’ve had the worst oil disaster ever in the Gulf of Mexico, we’ve had an earthquake and tsunami that caused a nuclear plant crisis in Japan, and we’ve had elections that returned opponents of the environment to control the House of Representatives.

The Obama administration justifiably held BP to at least some accountability for the effects of its Deepwater Horizon blowout, but now the administration is already issuing new permits for drilling. However, it recently became public that whatever is supposed to activate blowout preventers instead deactivates the blowout preventers at the same time! It turns out that this problem has been known for years and still nothing has been done about it – so much for safe drilling!  

Nuclear energy is considered one of the solutions to the climate change crisis because it generates electrical power without contributing to carbon dioxide emissions. The obvious drawback is that if anything goes wrong its effect will change global warming from ‘gradual and catastrophic’ to ‘immediate and catastrophic.’ The recent disaster at the Fukushima plant in Japan has added natural disasters to the many other reasons for our long-time doubts about the wisdom and safety of nuclear energy.

Candidate Barack Obama realized the dangers when he was running for president in 2007 and 2008. He admitted that all that was wrong with nuclear power was “that it might blow up.” In fact, nuclear energy reminds me of the old football cliché about throwing a pass – only one good thing can happen, and everything else is bad:

 (1) There’s always the possibility of a terrorist attack – and don’t forget that right wing hate groups have been multiplying since the election of Barack Obama – we now have over 1000 organized hate groups inside the United States.

(2) Radioactivity weakens metal over time, and that’s the reason we intended to replace or shutdown our 40-year-old plants – instead there are plans to stretch them years beyond their “safe” period of productivity.

(3) Accidents really do happen – at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979, it was a stuck valve that fooled workers into thinking they had sufficient water to cool the reactor and caused them to almost expose the core and have a complete meltdown.

(4) And there are those pesky spent fuel rods that nobody wants – once these uranium packed rods no longer produce enough heat to provide electricity, they are placed in water for more than umpteen years because they are still too hot to dispose of.

Shockingly, President Obama now supports new and “safer” nuclear plants! What changed his mind? His energy secretary, Steven Chu, is a strong proponent of nuclear energy. Also his top advisor and political consultant David Axelrod was a PR consultant for Exelon, the biggest nuclear plant operator in the US. Once again, our president needs to be reminded of a lesson from John F. Kennedy. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, our military’s joint chiefs of staff recommended an air strike on Russian sites inCuba. They insisted that the Soviet Union would do nothing in retaliation.  JFK said that the only good thing about their advice was that if they were wrong there wouldn’t be anyone left to tell them about it.

In addition to the few issues listed above (there are many more), here are two other things that he needs to seriously consider: (1) nuclear plants are run for profit – if owners or managers have to choose between profit and safety, profit will trump safety every time; (2) and, in the past 30 years, more often than not, a majority of voters have chosen presidents (Reagan, Bush I,  and W. Bush) and congresses that oppose regulating industry and oppose safeguarding workers, consumers, and the environment – Mr. Obama is gambling that that trend will not continue – but the Elections of 2010 that brought the Fox-Republican-TEA Party to power in the House of Representatives are proof of how dangerous that presumption is.

After only four years, the foxes are back in charge of the henhouses and chairing the committees in the congressional House. One of the typical ones is Rep. John Shimkus, the new chair of the House Subcommittee on Environment and Economy, who opposes any government regulation of greenhouse gas emissions because, according to the Bible, after the Great Flood, “God said the earth would not be destroyed by a flood.”

One of the major unifying factors of the diverse members of the Fox-Republican-TEA Party is their denial of climate change. All are expected to pretend that the massive accumulated scientific evidence doesn’t exist and ignore the near universal agreement among climatologists and other scientists.

One of their sponsors, ExxonMobil, keeps junk scientists on its payroll to create doubt in the mind of the public – much like the tobacco companies used to do. Fox “News” editor Bill Sammon emailed his staff to always immediately point out “that critics have called into question” the data used whenever climate change or global warming is mentioned. David and Charles Koch, of Koch Industries, have invested millions in TEA Parties and Americans for Prosperity to elect politicians who will do the bidding of the super rich and oppose any anti-pollution legislation or rules that might affect corporate profits.

The Wizards of Was, like the Koch brothers, who work behind the curtains to turn the clock back to the unregulated 1880s and 1890s, have the House of Representatives eating out of their very wealthy palms. The House recently passed another of its ever-increasing malicious bills. HR910 actually prevents the Environmental Protection Agency from doing its job. This is in spite of the estimate that for every dollar spent on the EPA, we save about $22 in health, air, and water quality! Though unlikely to pass the current Senate, this bill would deny the EPA the authority to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions – I’m not making this up! Regardless, this bill was not passed by stupid people. They are essentially sociopaths. These congressmen, guided primarily by their corporate bosses, just don’t seem to care what happens to the rest of us or to the planet.

Many voters also treat global warming as a religion they simply can choose not to believe in. Apparently, they really believe that climate change is just nature taking its course. But it’s not nature that’s pumping excessive carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It’s not nature bulldozing, chain-sawing, and burning the planet’s rain forests. Is it conceivable that human activity is having no impact on our climate? Is it even remotely possible that the drastically rising carbon rates, which have historically corresponded to temperatures, have nothing to do with our actions? Is it logical in any way?

by David Offutt

Author’s Note: This essay was the 81st consecutive monthly letter I’ve sent to the editor of the El Dorado News-Times and my 6th annual contribution for Earth Day. However, it is also the lst letter that the editor declined to print. Shea Wilson, the previous editor, moved on and was replaced by Chris Qualls on January 28, 2011.

Bernstein and Woodward exposed the illegal, clandestine activities of the Nixon White House with the help of an anonymous insider.

Many of us recall one such hero from the Nixon Era whose identity many of us feared we would never learn: Mark Felt, a deputy associate director of the FBI. Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had a secret “garage freak” that they called Deep Throat who helped them expose the Watergate Scandal. The Nixon administration corrupted our election system and planned to use the agencies of the federal government to destroy Nixon’s “political enemies.” Deep Throat told them that it was incredible: just about everybody was involved; the criminality reached throughout the administration.

Mark Felt of the FBI was Deep Throat

Mark Felt, at 91and in failing health, ended the mystery in 2005 and announced that he had been Deep Throat. It may have been braver had he gone public in 1972-74, but it also may have been suicidal. Nevertheless, many campaign finance reforms were enacted, at least in part, as a result of his patriotic whistle blowing. Predictably, the Republican Party immediately began trying to get rid of those reforms. Tragically, in the January 2010 Citizens United ruling, the five Republican justices on the U.S. Supreme Court did it for them and overturned most of them. Unidentified corporate contributions will no doubt determine our future elections.          

In the spirit of the people’s right to know, I want to recognize Wendell Potter, a courageous individual who over the last three years helped bring attention to the need for health insurance reform. Sadly, just like with Watergate, many voters didn’t want to know about the problems of health insurance for profit and/or didn’t want others to know about them. But thanks to Mr. Potter and others like him, we know that Congress was informed and could not ignore the need to act.  

Wendell Potter, a health insurance company insider, exposed industry tactics and advocated reform.

Wendell Potter was a vice president of corporate communications at CIGNA, the 4th largest health insurance company in the U.S. He resigned in 2008 after months of suffering from a guilty conscience. In July 2007 he had witnessed a traveling free clinic in rural Virginia where hundreds of people who couldn’t afford health insurance met with doctors in animal stalls. Mr. Potter knew that there was no reason that the United States could not do better than that.  He became a whistleblower on his and other companies’ tactics of protecting their profits ahead of protecting their clients.

Michael Moore's documentary film "Sicko" was falsely discredited by the health insurance industry.

One of his jobs at CIGNA had been to discredit Michael Moore’s movie “Sicko” (June 2007) before it was ever released.  He said that the entire industry was terrified at what people would learn if they saw the movie. Mr. Potter’s job was to convince the public that Moore’s film was inaccurate and/or unsubstantiated so that they either wouldn’t go to see the movie or not believe it. He said that he succeeded in muting the impact of the film because he and others like him were good at their jobs. As to the accuracy of the film “Sicko,” he said on “Bill Moyers’ Journal” (Aug. 2009) that Michael Moore “hit the nail on the head.” He publicly apologized to Mr. Moore when they both appeared on MSNBC’s “Countdown” (Nov. 2010), and Moore graciously accepted the apology.  

Mr. Potter testified before Congress (June 2009) and encouraged the creation of a public health insurance option to compete with private insurers. Any bill without it would continue to allow Wall Street-managed insurers to monopolize the industry, motivated solely by profits. Because of compromises made to get Republicans and conservative Democrats to support it, the Affordable Heath Care Act does not have the public option – but Republicans still didn’t vote for it.

The irony is that the final reform bill was based on a plan that was implemented in Massachusetts by its former Republican governor Mitt Romney. Another irony is that the individual mandate that requires everyone to be covered so as to keep costs at a minimum was a Republican proposal back when Bill Clinton was trying to get reform in 1993-94. That Republican proposal is now their main grievance against President Barack Obama’s reform program. Appropriately, the Republicans have been compared to Lucy in the “Peanuts” comic strip. She would hold the football for Charlie Brown to kick but pull it away at the last second.

The insurance companies wanted the individual mandate that is in the reform bill. What they don’t want are all those reform conditions: no one can be denied coverage because of pre-existing conditions; no one can be dropped from coverage when he or she most needs it during a lengthy illness; children can get coverage until age 26 under their parents’ plans; the notorious “donut hole” will be filled so that Medicare prescription drug plans will no longer have gaps in their coverage; and much more.

Also, you may recall the imaginary “death panels” that celebrities like Sarah Palin talked about to create opposition to reform. Most lies usually have some connection to truth. The reform bill actually prevents “death panels” being used by private insurance companies to terminate a patient’s coverage when costs start cutting into their bottom line. It was cheaper to hire investigators to find some reason to cancel a client’s coverage than it was to pay for the client’s health care.

Hopefully, the “death panels” in some state governments will also be ended. Arizona’s Republican governor Jan Brewer and her Republican legislature decided that saving the lives of 98 patients who were on a waiting list to receive life-saving transplants was too expensive. Their victims were notified that they had been removed from the list, effectively telling them to die and get out of the way. Two of them have already passed away.  

I’m writing this now because, currently, many Republican governors and/or Republican state legislatures are doing everything they can to prevent the American people from receiving these long-awaited insurance reforms. Those few in the upper 2 % income bracket, those with full-time jobs that include insurance benefits, and retirees who are content with their Medicare and other pension programs may fear any change whatsoever. However, even they should want the reforms for everyone else. That’s the kind of people we should be. The Affordable Health Care Act was made possible with help of people like Wendell Potter.

by David Offutt
A version of this essay was published March 16, 2011, in the El Dorado News-Times as a Guest Column.

Actor Ronald Reagan brought a spirit of optimism to the White House, established an administration run by and for the plutocracy, and made everyone believe that he or she could also be a millionaire.

February 6 was the 100^th anniversary of former actor, governor, and president Ronald Reagan’s birth. We are now engaged in a yearlong remembrance of the cheerfulness and optimism he brought to the White House. His nostalgic memory of late 19^th century America when it seemed that everyone could be a millionaire was just what many voters wanted to hear. He reminded them of a time before the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, and gasoline shortages. Many of us have other special memories of the Reagan Era.

Many in the current Fox-Republican-TEA Party advocate destroying the U. S. Department of Education. However, in 1986-87, under Secretary William Bennett, that department scoured the nation in search of high schools that might have something close to ideal curriculums. The school where I taught during the eighties was Xavier Prep in New Orleans, and the Prep was one of thousands evaluated by Bennett’s department.

On visitation day, one of Bennett’s agents sat in on my honors’ U. S. history class. I never deviated from my normal routine whenever visitors or evaluators showed up. (Once, North Central Accreditation representatives visited an Arkansas public high school where I taught for four years. My students wanted to know why I was their only teacher who was teaching the same way as always.) The day before, my students had taken a 55-minute unit test which consisted of multiple choice, matching, short answer, and essay questions. On that day, as usual, I returned their graded tests and devoted the entire 55-minute class to going over each and every question.

My visitor expressed amazement at my grading all those papers in one night and getting them back to the students so quickly, but I always considered that to be essential before moving on to a new topic. He also asked me to provide him with copies of that and previous tests so that he could take them back to Washington. That was essentially my meager contribution to what was a school-wide effort to demonstrate what we did for our students.

Xavier Prep High School in New Orleans

Eventually, five or six schools were recognized for having  outstanding curriculums, and Xavier Prep was one of them. Each of the honored schools was invited to send a representative to Washington for a luncheon in the White House with President Reagan. The Prep had been founded by the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament as an all-black college prep school, and it had evolved into an all-girls school. Appropriately a Black English teacher, Carolyn Oubre, represented the school at the luncheon. (She is now the principal.) What follows is how she described her experience.

Secretary of Education William Bennett brought teachers to Reagan's White House to honor their schools for having ideal curriculums.

Sec. Bennett met with the teachers before Reagan’s appearance and laid out some basic ground rules. He told them if they had a chance to speak to the president whatever they had to say should be in the form of a story – that way the president would be able to follow them much better. He also asked them not to “get technical” on anything.

Ms. Oubre got to sit next to the president. A Hispanic teacher sat across from them next to Mr. Bennett. This arrangement was understandable because it was probably a conscious attempt to counter Mr. Reagan’s negative relationship with minorities in general and Blacks in particular. The president opposed the creation of Martin Luther King Day; he deliberately began his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers had been murdered; and his trickle-down economic policies had been designed to benefit the wealthy at the expense of the middle class – especially hurt were minorities, family farmers, and union members.

As chief of staff, former Senator Howard Baker brought competency and law and order to the White House and got us through the last years of Reagan's presidency.

Howard Baker, the president’s final chief of staff, was also there. Mr. Baker had been brought in to create order after Reagan’s presidency virtually collapsed under the weight of the Iran-Contra Scandal. To do so, Mr. Baker resigned a long-held, safe Senate seat and also decided to forgo his own plans to run for president in 1988.  He promised that he would never write a tell-all book about how bad things were in the White House, which the president’s other chiefs of staff had done – former Chief of Staff Donald Regan spilled the beans about Nancy and the president’s reliance on an astrologer to arrange Reagan’s calendar. Mr. Baker has kept his word, and his selfless stint at the White House was his finest hour as a public servant. I’ve always given him credit for getting us through the last years of the Reagan Era.

Ms. Oubre found that Mr. Reagan’s reputation for having a poor memory was not entirely correct. You may recall that the president was not pursued for impeachment by the Congress or the special prosecutor for the Iran-Contra crimes because it was believed that Reagan couldn’t remember the details and/or never really understand the unconstitutional nature of the actions he authorized. Carolyn talked to him about his movies and found that his long-term memory was excellent. With enthusiasm and without hesitation, he named directors and actors with whom he had worked . 

The president eventually asked her what she taught. Upon learning that she was an English teacher, he suggested that English must be the easiest language in the world to learn. Carolyn heard Mr. Baker “chuckle” and watched Mr. Bennett immediately look down at his plate and begin to shovel food into his mouth. Since English is acknowledged as one of the most difficult languages to master, she asked the president why he thought that. He explained that whenever he watched a foreign movie, a short English subtitle always summed up the long, drawn out dialogue of the other language.

Not long after that, something scary happened. The president began to shake uncontrollably and appeared to be falling apart. Ms. Oubre became alarmed, and very quickly someone on the president’s staff came behind the president and spoke to him over his shoulder: “Sir, it’s time for you to see that gentleman.” Somewhat befuddled, Mr. Reagan responded, “Whatever you say.” Two staff members held his arms and escorted him from the room. Within a short time, the president returned without assistance, as jovial and gracious as before. Carolyn was relieved but never learned the cause of the sudden spell. 

When Ronald Reagan died of Alzheimer’s on June 5, 2004, I recalled my fondness for Reagan when was the host and occasional star of “General Electric Theater,” a CBS anthology series. He had that pleasant voice, that winning smile, and that “awe-shucks” likeability. When he carried those traits into the White House, many voters connected with his carefree style. No matter what was actually happening, he made them believe that it truly was “morning in America” again. His rose-tinted view of our Gilded Age past is even more popular today.

by David Offutt
A version of this essay was published February 25, 2011, in the El Dorado News-Times as a Guest Column.