Now that the Health Care Reform bill has been signed into law, it’s time for us to get busy advocating for state reform allowing for aspects of the federal bill to be implemented in Texas before 2014.

The federal bill includes Medicaid expansion, which will create coverage for 16 million people by 2019. This expansion signifies a radical conceptual shift from the current Medicaid system. In the current system, it’s not enough to be flat broke to receive Medicaid healthcare coverage. You have to be “broke plus” (i.e. broke plus pregnant, broke plus disabled, etc). This current system is based on the idea that only the “worthy poor” deserve health insurance. But beginning in 2014, there will be a mandatory “catch-all” category for everyone* who earns up to 133% of Federal Poverty Limits.

However, states have the option to implement a State Plan Amendment (SPA) that allows states to start buying these low income people into Medicaid earlier than 2014. Texas could potentially phase this plan in using a “lower income first” model. For example, depending on our budget, we could start with coverage for people who are at 75% or 100% of Federal Poverty Limits. In doing so, Texas would receive federal match money to cover people who wouldn’t ordinarily be covered.

Similarly, while the Health Care Reform ensures that pre-existing condition exclusions will be prohibited starting in 2014 (2010 for children) states may create a temporary high-risk pool for adults that will remain in effect until 2014.

Interested in putting together a coalition to help bring about these reforms here in the Lone Star state during the 82nd Legislative Session?

The National Health Law Program (NHeLP) suggests that organizations and individuals in Texas interested in pushing these state healthcare reforms come together, organize ourselves, and then contact NHeLP for more information and support on how to proceed.

*Does not include undocumented immigrants, as well as other groups who already have coverage such as Medicare enrollees, people over age 65, and mandatory coverage groups like pregnant women.

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So, let’s talk about Isaac, son of the Biblical patriarch Abraham, and Iphigenia, daughter of the ancient Greek King Agamemnon. These children lie beneath the sharpened butcher-blades of their fathers and warn humankind of the karmic catastrophe that is the willful sacrifice of children.

The images and narratives are deeply embedded in the roots of Western Civilization: Isaac and Abraham atop the dry, windswept land of Moriah; Iphigenia and Agamemnon across the waters on the rocky shore of Aulis. The “Binding of Isaac” was first written down in the 9th or 8th Century B.C. Iphigenia’s tragedy first appears in the Kypria, probably written in the 7th Century B.C. Both oral legends date to the far distant past of the Ancient Near East. Two great epics of Western culture pivot upon the theme of child murder.

Isaac and Iphigenia speak with literature’s most profoundly innocent voices. Isaac asks, “Father! Here is the fire and the wood but where is the sheep for the offering?” And Iphigenia: “I must say goodbye to the light.” Their words undam the heart and roll like a river through the troubled conscience of humankind.

Hear their voices as you consider this. In Crowley, Texas, the very week the health care reform bill was approved, Blue Cross/Blue Shield denied coverage to a newborn baby, Houston Tracy, saying he was born with an uncovered pre-existing condition. Without emergency heart surgery, Houston would die. One shudders to think that this ritual sacrifice was commonplace, and might be again if we are not vigilant.

And sacrifice it would have been, to Mammon and Moloch. Millions of children have been denied care to serve the profits of the health insurance industry. We are told the deaths are an actuarial necessity so that we may live, not so different from the ancient rationale of human sacrifice condemned by the Greeks, by the Hebrew Bible’s Yahweh and by Jesus. The Qur’an says flatly: “Kill not your children.” This ought to cause contented insurance actuaries to do a little soul searching, however much they want to gloat over a 2010 study that ranked them as holding the very best jobs in the country.

Despite the ethical injunctions, our history is strewn with the bones of children sacrificed to power-mad ambition or some ideology or another. Most of us honor the inherited moral imperative. Billions of children are raised in love and nurturance, one of our best proofs that goodness survives among us. Isaac was saved from Abraham’s cleaver; a ram took his place on the altar of death. According to legend (explored by Euripides), the goddess Artemis intervened in Iphigenia’s sacrifice, replaced her with a deer and spirited her away to Tauris.

Blue Cross/Blue Shield, facing a storm of bad publicity over Baby Houston, relented and paid for the child’s urgent care. Also, the health insurance industry backed off its threat to use a loophole in the reform bill to deny coverage to children. Innocent Isaac and Iphigenia live yet in our hearts, or in enough of our hearts that the insurance moguls drop their sharpened knives when caught in the act.

But this begs the question: how has the sacrifice of children continued at all, whether in war, by neglect, or by bureaucratic insurance company edict? “We’ll buy back our own harm with what is most dear to us,” said Iphigenia’s mother, Clytemnestra, to Agamemnon. We have bought ourselves a lot of harm over the millennia.

Last year, UNICEF reported that global childhood deaths had fallen below nine million a year. Another UNICEF report tells us that between 1986 and 1996, two million children were killed in war. Four to five million were disabled and 12 million left homeless. I couldn’t find figures for the last 14 years, but it’s a safe bet that there’s been no decline.

The fundamentalists and absolutists will blame original sin for the slaughter, arguing that it’s the fault of those who refuse to follow their Law. Their oaths are hollow. It’s the fundamentalists and absolutists who are deeply implicated in the awful crimes. I can hear them screaming already at the question, but what is the moral difference between the free market fundamentalists of the insurance industry who have condemned children to death in the name of the Invisible Hand and those who bomb innocents in the name of Allah, or Yahweh, or Jesus, or the Fatherland?

“We’ll buy back our own harm with what is most dear to us,” Clytemnestra said. Her words are a warning to nations in war who shrug off the deaths of civilians, including children, with the euphemism, “collateral damage.” Violent zealots who blow up schools and markets in the name of their god or ideology should consider Agamemnon’s fate, as should insurance executives and their empowering politicians.

Today, we can celebrate some signs of an awakening, here and around the globe. According to UNICEF, the number of global, under-five deaths fell from 12.5 million in 1990 to 2008 less than 9 million in 2008. Global measles deaths have fallen 74 percent.

We should be proud of extending health care to millions of children once excluded. Still, it is just a beginning, an acknowledgment of a moral responsibility too long ignored by too many. The United States ranked last among the 21 developed nations in children’s well-being. Around the world, one billion children are deprived of services essential to survival and development.

The lion sleeps tonight, but the lion is not yet tamed. Maybe we should let the children sing that song to us.

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Either Perry and reporters covering him don’t know what socialism is (and I doubt that), or Perry again is pushing  Tea Bag propaganda, and the press is too lazy or too intimidated to challenge it.

I’m used to Perry embarrassing Texas. So, I’m not surprised he’s parroting Dolph Briscoe’s old obsession with “creeping socialism.”  Thankfully, we’ve moved beyond the 1970s, though you wouldn’t know it from the Cold War rhetoric in a statement Perry released last Sunday and sound bites he repeated later in the week.

Journalists can’t stop politicians from issuing statements, but they can – and should – challenge them and include clarifying context in their reports when statements and sound bites push outright lies. Last week, the Associated Press and others quoted Perry (without questioning it or providing context) saying, the legislation “crosses over into the line of socialism.”

Socialism, for anyone who slept through 11^th grade, is an economic system where the means of production are owned either by the government or directly by the workers. The Socialist Party USA actually opposed the reform bill because it does just the opposite.

Obama and the Democratic Congress rejected a socialist approach when they removed the public option, which would have put the federal government in competition with for-profit companies. That effectively preserved the American insurance industry – and the longstanding market structure that supports it – as a conglomeration of regulated, shareholder-owned corporations.

Don’t believe me? Go to the NYSE; they are all still there: Aetna, Cigna, etc… There is no new federal program like Medicare or Social Security to compete in the marketplace with private insurers – much less replace them. (It does expand Medicaid, the federal-state partnership in place since 1965 to provide insurance for the  poor, but people on Medicaid are not potential buyers for market-priced insurance.)  It’s simply a disgrace for Perry to mislead Texans who trust him, and it’s a disappointment for journalists who know better to allow him to use their access to the public and the credibility of their organizations to spread the “socialist” lie.

What I think we’re seeing is Perry trying to creep out of the corner Congressional Republicans have created for anyone running on their ticket this year. Their saber rattling about repealing the legislation is just trash talk and fundraising fodder that raises further questions about their credibility. They know, and so do we, that there is no way they can flip enough seats in November to get the 2/3 majority in the House and Senate they would need to override Obama’s veto of anything designed to repeal this bill.

And frankly, anyone who has ever worked on a campaign at any significant level can see that barring something unforeseen it’s a huge mistake for Republicans to make health care their signature national issue. Political campaigns aren’t about trying to change anyone’s mind or core values. That’s foolish; it just doesn’t happen. Campaigns are about convincing a majority of voters that the issues most important to them the day they vote are the issues they think your party is best prepared to handle.

In political parlance, taxes, the economy and defense are considered “Republican issues.” Education, the environment, human services (like health care) are considered “Democratic issues.”  If the midterm elections end up being about health care, conventional wisdom says, the narrative foundation favors Democrats. That is why I think Republicans eventually will try to shift the narrative to the economy, perhaps unemployment.

Bill White is the first Democrat in more than a decade with a real chance to win statewide in Texas, but he is going to have to be almost perfect to do it. His chances increase if the campaign narrative centers on health care and he is smart enough to use it to his advantage. His chances skyrocket if education joins health care as a top tier issue.

The Austin American-Statesman reported this week that Texas has the highest rate (25.1 percent) of uninsured residents in the nation. The number of Texas businesses that offer insurance to employees since Perry came into office dropped from 53 percent in 2000 to 49 percent in 2007. And  per-worker spending on insurance increased at a faster pace in Texas between 2000 and 2007 than it did nationally. (Here is a detailed overview of how Health Care Reform will affect Texas. It has 27 footnotes to document information that comes almost entirely from nonpartisan sources such as the American Medical Association, Kaiser Health Facts and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.)

Health Care is not a winning issue for Perry, which is why he’s selling the “socialist” scarecrow. He’s trying to reframe the issue, and he is using demagoguery to do it. You certainly aren’t hearing him say: “Let’s repeal the annual and lifetime caps on insurance reimbursement!” Or “Hey, I promise to restore the insurance companies’ right to refuse to treat your pre-existing conditions and drop your coverage when you get sick!”

Add the recent brouhaha at the Texas State Board of Education, and the political gods have handed White a real opening.

The question is whether White can package those issues for voters so they draw simple distinctions between him and Perry that are consistent with White’s own record. And whether news reporters continue to let Perry get away with terms like “socialism,” which misrepresent the truth, inflame public sentiment and question the credibility of the governor and news organizations that are covering this aspect of his campaign.

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…You discover that the GOP proposed the very thing it now calls (in Glenn Beck’s confused vocabulary) communist-fascist-socialist-totalitarian tyranny. Perry threatens to secede from the Union over it.  Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott commits taxpayer money to a frivolous federal lawsuit challenging it. Neither they nor their masters — Beck, Limbaugh et al — bother to remind Americans that the reforms were, largely, Republican proposals. The Miami Herald reports:

The lawsuit against the health care overhaul filed Tuesday by Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum is focused on a provision that has long been advocated by conservatives, big business and the insurance industry.

And then there’s this chart detailing the similarities between the health care reform just passed by Congress and a GOP proposal from 1993. Mandatory insurance coverage? You bet. The GOP loved it.  Require large employers to provide insurance to employees? You bet. The GOP loved it. Bans on exclusions for pre-existing conditions? You bet. The GOP loved it. Subsidies for low-income Americans? You bet. The GOP loved it.

(Thanks to KRLD radio star Scott Braddock for this, and for all his truth-seeking on health care reform).

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Insurance companies can no longer deny you coverage because of a pre-existing condition. You won’t pay premiums for years only to be kicked off your insurance plan when you get sick. Small business gets a tax break to provide insurance to its employees. A high-risk pool is established. And, the budge deficit is reduced by a trillion dollars over 20 years.

Despite the claims of the radical Right, there are no government death panels. Government is not running your health care. “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” remain the guarantees bequeathed to us by the Founders. “Remain” is the wrong word. Those promises were strengthened by passage of health care reform.

I have been saddened by the behavior of some during the course of the debate. The insurance industry spent millions and millions of dollars to mislead some Americans. They succeeded. Playing upon the fears and anxieties of some, they funded the tea parties which in the end were a lot more fertilizer than grassroots. That cynical effort also included the overt encouragement of racist rhetoric and even threats of violence. Those behind those manipulations will live in infamy.

The 2010 political landscape shifted last night. A win of this magnitude will certainly change the dynamics in Texas and around the country. The Republicans managed to put themselves on the defensive. When armed communists don’t show up in our living rooms and hospitals, they’ll have some explaining to do. I mean, they did wail that the bill meant certain doom for democracy.

It must be hell to be totally controlled by industry benefactors. Republicans had no choice but to carry water for their corporate benefactors. Well, they had a choice, but no courage to make the right choice. They are insurance shills, nothing more, nothing less.

I remember studying the Great Depression years and the New Deal in school. I was dismayed at the pure stupidity of Republicans who continued to make obscene gestures at the American people on behalf of their corporate godfathers. They paid the price. But they obviously haven’t learned that lesson.

Here in Texas, the 2010 election prognosticators will need to start over, just as they will in other states. It’ll take some time for the dust to settle. Democrats got a boost. But I wouldn’t put too much faith in anyone’s crystal ball in the next few hours and days. It will all be spin intended to influence the future, not predict it accurately. I’ll say this, though. It’ll be hard for Republicans to persuade us to go back to yesterday, to deny care because of a pre-existing condition. To them I say, health care reform is the new pre-existing condition.

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Human kindness is overflowing,
And I think it’s going to rain today.

There is no better accompaniment to the vote on health care reform than Randy Newman’s “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today,” a song that mourns our lack of compassionate action while musically acknowledging a little hope.

The hope is slim and fragile. But so is the brief and heartening new volume, Made for Goodness, by Desmond Tutu and his daughter, Mpho Tutu. It takes just a few notes in the major key or a few words from an enlightened champion of humanity’s heart like Bishop Tutu to remind us of our Buddha-nature or our divine spark.

The book arrived just in the nick of time. I was watching the tea bags on Saturday spit racist epithets at Congressmen and scream that reform would ruin the country. Not a whisper from them about the health of Americans, of course. Full of gales of FoxNews lies aimed at extinguishing the spark, they acted as though an American child restored to health really meant the arrival of the Red Dawn in Calumet, Colorado, or maybe the appearance of the anti-Christ at the local bowling alley.

Bishop Tutu, no stranger to racist violence, silences the misguided bigots with a gentle reminder:

We are fundamentally good. When you come to think of it, that’s who we are at our core. Why else do we get so outraged by wrong?

Evil and wrong are aberrations…You can see from the people we truly admire that we are attracted to goodness…even after her death Mother Theresa is admired, respected and revered. Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. are similarly revered…In our own time Nelson Mandela commands the same kind of admiration…

Acting like the anti-Tutu, David Brooks actually wrote that passage of health care reform was a blow against empathy and humankind. I’m not making that up. Calling an obscure Senate procedure called reconciliation (the word rang with more hope in Tutu’s South Africa) a threat to the collegial bonds among Senators (forget the rest of us), he whined:

The remnants of person-to-person relationships, with their sympathy and sentiment, will be snuffed out. We will live amid the relationships of group versus group, party versus party, inhumanity versus inhumanity.

Our current health care system, based on for-profit, you-can-live-but-the-other-must-die gatekeepers we call the insurance industry, is not unlike ancient human sacrifice to a merciless god – in this case, the god of the so-called free market. We shove our neighbors into the volcano to appease this unappeasable god. How else can we look at it? Health care can be extended to all Americans with no economic or medical downside for anyone. The entire attack on reform has been based on an insane and idolatrous belief in a transcendent god-market and Glenn Beck’s hymnal of hate (see above).

The ironic thing is, the insurance industry has nothing to do with a free market. It makes money off what it doesn’t provide, off coverage it refuses to extend and benefits it refuses to pay. In a sense, it was just such feudal monopoly practices Adam Smith hoped a benign and open market would subvert.

So afraid of this god are we that lawmakers never defied it or its insurance industry demons. Oh, there has been some empty rhetoric. But from the beginning, what complicated the reform effort was the refusal to attack the cause of the crisis: the insurance industry.

The cravenness of many political leaders during this debate is beyond contempt. In no danger themselves, they stood atop the volcano and watched Americans one after the other being burned alive in the fiery hell below. And all they could think to say was, “What about my political future?”

On Friday, I had to take my wife to the hospital emergency room (everything’s okay). While she rested comfortably, a middle-aged man lying on the other side of the slender privacy curtain called out. “I’m cold,” he said with a wobbly chill but no impatience in his voice. “Can I have some covers?” I knew where the blankets were, so when no nurse arrived, I took him one and laid it over him. He thanked me with a smile.

The extension of health care to millions of American will not cost any of us so much as the thirty seconds it took to deliver a blanket to a man a few feet away.

Regardless of the merits, omissions or unjust additions to the health care reform bill, we have to admit that the debate itself has exposed the ugly and selfish side of America. Passage might be hailed as historic, but it won’t erase the haunting images of spittle-chinned rednecks, manipulated by the wealthy and cynical, screaming about how reform will destroy America.

So here’s to Randy Newman and Bishop Tutu and their lovely songs in the key of life.

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Marcelas with his Grandmom and Sisters

I called a committed right-wing activist the other day and asked, “Do you support taxpayer-funded fire departments?” Angrily, he said, “No. Why should I pay to put out a fire of someone else’s home?” Well, I asked, how about police departments. “Hey, if people want protection they ought to hire a security firm. Blackwater, for instance. I’m tired of the leeches living off my money.”

Okay, I made the conversation up. But doesn’t it sound familiar? It tracks the right-wing rhetoric on health care reform.  We agree to fund fire departments because it’s the right thing to do morally, but also because we don’t want the neighbor’s fire burning down our own home. We benefit from the health of others in a similar way. Disease is often contagious. Like a fire.

In addition, a healthy America is economically healthier, too. It’s just a fact that we all benefit from the health of others. There’s a reason the proposed health care reform measure will decrease the federal deficit. More productivity. More taxes. Fewer work hours lost to illness. Less burden on local taxpayers. Education improves as children miss fewer school days. I could go on an on.

We don’t look at health care like we do fire departments because the private health insurance industry doesn’t want us to. They deliver nothing of value, really. The insurance industry just found a niche:  making money by collecting premiums, denying benefits, and excluding higher risk folk from coverage. Imagine calling the fire department and being asked, “Do you have insurance?” Fire Departments don’t rebuild our homes, of course. We have homeowner’s insurance for that. Or a lot of our own savings. But property insurance is quite a bit different than health insurance. Insurance companies can make the bet that not everyone’s home will burn down. But everyone, sooner or later, needs a doctor.

But nothing I can say would be as articulate as the words of 11-year-old Marcelas Owens, who’s been in Washington lately fighting for health care reform. You can listen to Dallas radio host Scott Braddock’s KRLD interview with Marcelas here.Marcelas testified before Congress. His message is simple. All Americans — everyone — deserve adequate health care. His mom died of pulmonary hypertension after losing her job, her health insurance, and access to medical care. She was a hardworking woman whose only mistake was getting sick. The Right, of course, blames her for that.

Marcelas, who turns 11 on Wednesday, also has had to contend with public attacks. Once, for instance, a radio commentator suggested that his mother’s pulmonary hypertension, a lung disorder, was a health problem of her own making.

“We don’t even know what was making her health bad,” said Marcelas, who fielded questions Monday with a soft, patient voice in between lolling on the floor of a hotel lobby, flipping a novelty pen.

As for his mother’s premature death, he said, “I don’t think it’s anyone’s fault. But they could have done more” for her.

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Sarah Palin admitted

The vocal opponent of health-care reform in the U.S. steered largely clear of the topic except to reveal a tidbit about her life growing up not far from Whitehorse.

“We used to hustle over the border for health care we received in Canada,” she said. “And I think now, isn’t that ironic?”

Isn’t that twisted, you mean. Palin has railed against the very idea of health care reform in this country, once going so far as to say there would be federal “death panels” who would decide who could live and who would die. But what does she turn to when she needs a doctor? You got it. A public option. In Canada.

Dogs bark. Birds fly. Politicians lie. There’s no real news here. But the monstrous hypocrisy of Republicans like Palin lying to prevent millions of Americans from getting the health care they need to stay alive while guaranteeing themselves good care — even at the cost of a trip to Canada — is beyond the Palin. So to speak.

Nearly half of America — Medicare, military personnel, federal retirees — already receive their health care from a public option. As far as I know, Peoria hasn’t turned to Stalinism. Dr. Trotsky is not performing tonsillectomies. Opponents of health care reform are bought-and-paid for shills of big insurance. They are being paid to turn you away from the doctor. Not really all that complicated a business arrangement.

America can extend health care to hardworking families AND it will lower the budget deficit that’s suddenly all the rage to worry about. Republicans didn’t mind George Bush tripling the deficit, of course. In any case, like I said, improving Americans’ health will lower, not raise, the deficit.

Goldman Sachs, by the way, is telling its clients to buy stock in big insurance companies, because their profits are up and competition is down. These are the same companies that are rejecting your claims or refusing you coverage altogether because you once had the measles.

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Health means life. If you get a major illness or injury and cannot get it treated adequately, you could die. And tens of thousands do.

Health means freedom. If you have a serious illness or injury and cannot get it treated, your freedom will be limited in many ways. Your physical freedom: you may no longer have the freedom to move around. Your economic freedom: you may not be able to work or your medical bills may impoverish you. Your emotional freedom: you will not be free to live a happy life.

Health is therefore a moral issue of the highest order. And it is a patriotic issue. Health security is a problem for far more Americans than military security. Your security is far more likely to be threatened by the lack of treatment for illness and injury than by any likely terrorist attack.

Real terror is seen in the thousands of letters sent to the White House and Congress by people whose lives have been shattered or threatened by the behavior of the health insurance corporations. Wellpoint, which made $2.7 billion in fourth quarter profits in 2009, tried to raise its Anthem/Blue Cross premiums 39% in California. Wellpoint made its profits by NOT giving health care. It treated 2.2million fewer people. It found a way NOT to treat people who needed treatment, either by refusing to insure them, or dropping them as clients, or denying authorizations. If you are sick or injured and that happens to you, you face terror — very real terror.

That’s when “health maintenance organizations” (HMOs) become health terror organizations.

The Obama administration has been missing the moral arguments in the health care debate, while conservatives always hit their moral targets. Where the conservatives argue loss of freedom (“government takeover”) and life (“death panels” and abortion), the administration has been giving policy wonk arguments about economic and pragmatic policy details that the public cannot understand: health exchanges, percentages of the poverty line (133% vs. 150%), and so on. They are real enough. But they do not communicate the moral issues.

Morality and Policy

Why should Congress move to reconciliation? Because it is moral. It is the right thing to do, because it will enhance life and freedom.

Why should the public option be in the reconciliation bill? Because it is right and practical: it allows the market to police the insurance companies — to keep their greed from overwhelming the life and freedom of tens of millions of Americans. And a public plan— an American Plan!— gives you an your doctor much more freedom to determine your treatment, with no profit incentives for insurance companies to deny you care.

Why should national exchanges, not state exchanges, be in the reconciliation bill? Because they provides greater economic freedom — through bigger pools, which means much more affordable insurance for all. Affordability means economic freedom!

Why cover folks up to 150%, not just 133%, of the poverty line. To offer life and freedom to many more of our fellow Americans.

Why should anti-trust exemptions be ended for health insurance companies? Economic freedom! Anti-trust exemptions function like corporate bailouts. They transfer the money from ordinary people into corporate coffers. By reducing or eliminating competition, corporations can charge more for less treatment to fewer people. Those extra charges, plus out of pocket costs when we are denied care under the plans, come out of our pockets. Anti-trust exemptions take money out our pockets and put it into corporate profits. They threaten our economic freedom.

And how should we be thinking about the passage of a health plan that makes progress but falls short of what is needed? We should be taking it as a national commitment — a moral commitment — to health for Americans. It is a commitment to doing what is right, to life, freedom, and health security, a first step of many steps to come.

It is time to return to the moral fundamentals. Health security is deeply patriotic — perhaps our most important form of security. Health means life. Health means freedom. Everyone can understand that.

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Intro

We begin with this week’s triple whammy.

Freedom vs. The Public Option

Which would you prefer, consumer choice or freedom? Extended coverage or freedom? Bending the cost curve or freedom?

John Boehner, House Minority Leader, speaking of health care, said recently, “This bill is the greatest threat to freedom that I have seen in the 19 years I have been here in Washington….It’s going to lead to a government takeover of our health care system, with tens of thousands of new bureaucrats right down the street, making these decisions [choose your doctor, buy your own health insurance] for you.”

This is exactly what Frank Luntz advised conservatives to say. They have repeated it and repeated it. Why has it worked to rally conservative populists against their interests? The most effective framing is more than mere language, more than spin or salesmanship. It has worked because conservatives really believe that the issue is freedom. It fits the conservative moral system. It fits how conservatives see the world.

The Democrats have helped the conservatives. Their pathetic attempt to make any deal to get 60 votes convinced even Massachusetts voters that government under the Democrats was corrupt and oppressive, not just inept, but immoral.

All politics is moral

All political leaders argue that they are doing the right thing, not the wrong thing, that their policies are moral, not evil.

Conservatives understand this, liberals tend not to. Conservatives know a morality tale when they see it: Greedy Wall Street bankers, who have cost people their homes, their jobs, and their savings get billion-dollar bailouts from the government, while those honest hard-working people get nothing. Corruption. Oppression. A threat to freedom.

The conservatives are winning the framing wars again — by sticking to moral principles as conservatives see them, and communicating their view of morality effectively. In the 2008 election, Barack Obama ran a campaign based on his moral principles and communicated those principles as effectively as any candidate ever has.

But the Obama administration made a 180-degree turn, trading Obama’s 2008 moral principles for the deal-making of Rahm Emanuel and Tim Geithner, assuming it would be “pragmatic” to court corporations and move to the right, in the false hope of bipartisan support. A clear unified moral vision was replaced by long laundry lists of policy options that the public could not understand, and that made ordinary folks feel they were being bamboozled. And in many cases, they were.

Even the language was a disaster. Liberals thought that conservatives would like consumer choice. That’s why they used “public option.” As Harry Reid said, “It’s public and it’s an option — a public option.” But what did a conservative hear in the words “public option?” Say “public” and he hears “government.” “Option” is a policy-wonk term, from the language of bureaucracy. Say “public option” and the conservative hears “government bureaucracy.”

The results of deal-making in the name of pragmatism have been considerably immoral, as documented thoroughly by progressives like Drew Westen, Matt Taibbi, Robert Kuttner, and many others. Advice on what to do instead has not been lacking from other progressives. Advice is all over the blogs. Guy Saperstein is an excellent example.

We progressives are long on factual analysis, critique, suggestion — and ridicule. Rachel Maddow is one of the best, and her popularity is well-deserved. What’s more fun than ridiculing Tea Party-ers, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and the like, by showing the factual errors, the flaws in their logic, and the cruelty of their positions.

But we have been dealt a triple blow. A year of failed deal-making by our side, the Tea Party win in Massachusetts, and worst of all, the 5-4 Supreme Court decision to turn our democracy into a corporate plutocracy. This is serious.

Democrats still have the presidency and a majority in the House and Senate, but the momentum is on the conservative side. Their victories in the framing wars have inevitably led to a crucial electoral victory and to a Supreme Court death threat to democracy itself, framed as free speech.
Democrats have electoral power, but progressives have not created an effective movement to take advantage of that power.

“Where’s the movement?”

In the emerging Obama mythology, this is the question attributed to President Obama whenever he is asked to take the lead on a progressive issue.  It is not an idle question. Leaders can only lead if there is a pre-existing movement for them to get in front of.

Moreover, there are other conditions. The idea behind a movement, and the language expressing its goals, must also pre-exist in public discourse. In other words, the movement must already have:

•          a popular base;
•          organizing tools;
•          a generally accepted morally-based conceptual framing;
•          an overall narrative, with heroes, victims, and villains;
•          a readily recognizable, well-understood language;
•          funding sources;
•          and a national communication system set up for both leaders and ordinary citizens to use.

The base is there, waiting for something worth getting behind. The organizing tools are there. The rest is not there.

That is the present reality. Expecting Obama to be FDR was politically unrealistic. And complaining that he isn’t doesn’t move anything forward.

Howard Dean was right when he said, “YOU have the power.”  What is needed is an organized activist public with a positive understanding of what our values are and how to links them to every issue. Barney Frank was only half-right when he said that the public gets active only when it is angry. That may be true for isolated issues — he was talking about regulating Wall Street. But anger is directed at isolated negatives. An effective movement must be positive, organized, and long-term, where an overall positive understanding defines the isolated negatives. And it must have all of the above.

The California Democracy Movement

We have the beginning of such a movement in California.
The central issue in California is basic democracy. California is the only state in America where the legislature is controlled by a relatively small conservative minority. Because it takes a 2/3 vote in both the Senate and Assembly to pass a budget or any tax, 1/3 plus one – 34% — in either house can control the vote by saying no to measures that would finance public needs.

Conservatives exercise that control for the simple reason that they don’t believe that government should serve public needs, that instead government should be privatized and shrunk to fit in a bathtub, as if governing would disappear with government.

But governing doesn’t disappear when government shrinks; instead corporations come to govern your life — like HMO’s, oil companies, drug companies, agribusiness, and so on, with accountability only to maximizing profit, not to public needs.

An overwhelming majority of Californians — over 60% — disagree. They believe that government should serve public needs, and they have elected sensible legislators. But they don’t quite make up 2/3. And so an extreme right-wing minority – about 37% — controls the state, its present and its future.

Luckily, there is a way out for the majority in California. The initiative process that created this situation can get us out. I have proposed The California Democracy Act as an initiative in the November 2010 election. It changes two words in the California Constitution – “two-thirds” becomes “a majority” in two places. It can be described in one simple sentence: All legislative actions on revenue and budget must be determined by a majority vote. That ballot initiative needs only a majority to pass. It would return majority rule to the legislature on everyday economic issues, bringing democracy back to California. Those interested can join the campaign by clicking on www.CaliforniansForDemocracy.com

Democracy is the central issue, and that is what our movement is about. We are setting up an infrastructure in California, with a statewide organization and a speakers’ bureau, for those who want to continue democratizing the state after the election.

Democracy is The Issue

The majority vote campaign gives us a chance to talk not only about this particular issue, but about democracy as it affects all issues. The clearest articulator of what democracy is about has been Barack Obama — the campaigner we cheered for, campaigned hard for, and voted for.

Democracy, he has observed, is based on empathy — on citizens caring about one another. That’s why we have principles like freedom and fairness, for everybody, not just for the rich and powerful. True empathy requires responsibility, not just for oneself, but also for others. And since we, as individuals and as a nation, are far from perfect, empathy demands an ethic of excellence, of making oneself better, one’s family and community better, and one’s nation better.

That view of citizenship in a democracy comes with a view of government. Government has two sacred moral missions: protection and empowerment.

Protection goes well beyond police and the military and the fire department to consumer protection, environmental protection, worker protection, health care, investor protection, social security, and other safety nets.

Empowerment is what the stimulus package was about: building and maintaining roads, bridges, public transportation, and public buildings; systems for communication, electricity, water; education, from pre-school through graduate and professional schools; scientific research and technological development; a banking system that works; a stock market that works; and a judicial system that works.

No one earns a living or lives well without protection and empowerment by the government. That is what taxes pay for. And the more you make from what the government gives you, the more you should contribute to keeping it going.

Tax Shifts

When you cut taxes that pay for public needs, you are actually shifting taxes. You are taxing others. In California tax cuts for corporations last year led to cuts in the support for public universities, which led to 32% higher tuition and a drastic cut in the number of students educated.  That 32% constituted a tax on those students and their parents, and when they had to borrow the money for college, interest payments on the loan effectively double the cost of the loan. That’s a very high tax shift. But an even higher tax is shifted onto students who cannot afford the higher tuition: the tax of a lost education lasts all one’s life and its cost is not only monetary, but a cost in human potential. It is also a cost to employers, who get less educated workers, and to society, which gets less educated citizens.

The Movement

We will be talking about all of this and more. Take economic democracy. California is the world’s seventh richest economy. It is ludicrous to say that there is no money in California. If the money for public needs is there, where is it? In California, the richest one percent owns more assets than the bottom 95 per cent. The money is concentrated at the top.

Just about every issue comes down to the issue of democracy. That is why we are starting with the California Democracy Act, which would finally end the rule of the state by a small minority of ultra-conservative legislators. It would finally give the voters of the state a voice in their own future and the future of their children and grandchildren.

If you live in California (one out of eight Americans does), then join the California Democracy Movement. If you live elsewhere, form your own democracy movement and unite with us. The principles are simple, and they are Obama’s:

Democracy is about empathy — caring about your fellow citizens, which leads to the principles of freedom and fairness for all. Empathy requires both personal and social responsibility. The ethic of excellence means making the world better by making yourself better, your family better, your community better, and your nation better. Government has two moral missions: protection and empowerment for all. To carry them out, government must be by, for, and of the people.

It’s only a paragraph. The principles apply to all issues. That’s the basis of a democracy movement. That’s what separates a movement from a coalition. Coalitions are based on interests. Movements are based on principles. We need a movement that transcends interests and goes beyond coalitions.

Movements also transcend particular policies. The framing of moral principles comes first and the policies elaborate on the principles. The way to unite a movement is to form policies that carry out the principles in ways that everyone can understand.

The time is now

We have a triple disaster on our hands: the administration’s failure at deal-making in the name of pragmatism and bipartisanship; the Tea Party victory in Massachusetts fueling and propelling ultra-conservatism; and the anti-democratic 5-4 ruling of the Roberts Court. We can no longer sit on our hands and just criticize the President, or give him advice and hope he can do it alone. We have to provide the answer to his question:  Where’s the movement?

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