We’ve now learned that Scott Brown voted for the Massachusetts universal healthcare legislation when he was a state senator, but intends to vote against the current federal legislation in its current form.  Senator Brown gave his reasoning in a sound bite that National Public Radio ran for a few hours after his election victory over Martha Coakley last week.  (Note that I have been unable to find the bite in the NPR online archive and since the initial coverage, Brown has made a number of more conciliatory statements on the issue of healthcare reform that suggest that he already tacking back to the center.)

What Brown said, and this quote is not exact but rather an accurate recreation of his meaning most of his words, is that Massachusetts citizens have healthcare now and so why would he vote for a bill to cover others since it would likely cost the citizens of Massachusetts more money.

In other words, “I’ve got mine.  Screw everyone else.”  Once again, the politics of selfishness rears its ugly head and stares down the utilitarian notion that we as a people and our elected officials should care about the well-being of the country and our human community.  Freedom in the U.S. has grown to mean the freedom not to contribute to the common weal. 

Changing the topic: In the January 25 issue of The Nation (which was posted on the Nation website on January 7), William Greider reminds us that Social Security is not in as grave danger as its critics suggest, as long as the U.S. government pays back the money it has borrowed from the Social Security system to offset the U.S. budget’s deficit since the Reagan administration changed the bookkeeping rules for Social Security in the 80s. 

Now the U.S. has consistently paid off all the money it has ever borrowed from any source, but Greider details his fear that that it will renege on its debt obligation to Social Security if so-called “reformers” like Pete Peterson get their way.  I highly recommend that you read this article, and after doing so, please send a steady stream of correspondence to your Senators, Congressional representative and the President that you want the federal government to pay back what it owes the Social Security system and that no reform of Social Security should entail any plans to write off this debt.

There were many elements that led to Scott Brown defeating Martha Coakley to fill Ted Kennedy’s senate seat:

• The attractiveness of the candidate as a person: NPR has already discussed his viability as a presidential candidate.
• The uninspired campaign run by the Democrats until they were in trouble.
• The dumb luck and/or inspired planning to peak at the right moment.
• General anger at economic conditions.
• Displeasure because of the healthcare bill.
• Dislike of Obama.

The first three reasons have to do with politics, and mean nothing to the great ideological struggles in this country right now. 

So let’s consider the general anger over the economic conditions.  The media has fomented this anger in four distinct ways:

1. The need to come up with startling or awe-inspiring economic and business news every hour of every day creates an impatient and panicked public, one that sees its economic fortunes bouncing constantly from pillar to post.
2. The mainstream news media gives frequent voice to the false assumptions mouthed by many on the right that the recession belongs to Obama, despite the fact that Obama assumed office after the meltdown of the financial system because of the securitization of bad mortgages and after most of the massive layoffs had already occurred.
3. The ideological subtext of instant gratification—so necessary to keeping people buying goods and services— that imbues most non-news reporting makes people believe that all desires can be gratified instantly, including the desire for economic hard times to disappear.
4. The ideological subtext of much economic and business reporting that it’s always a good time to invest in stocks influenced both the news media and the government to declare the recession over while millions of people were still out of work or severely underemployed.  That might have pissed some people off, you think?

Interestingly enough, some of those who are angry over economic conditions want more government regulation and job stimulus programs, while others want fewer regulations and less government spending.  It is only the view of this second group that the mainstream news media insists on featuring.

When it comes to healthcare reform, it’s the same story as the economy: some people are angry because the likely bill doesn’t go far enough and others don’t want any bill at all.  In this case, I’m reasonably sure, though, that people angry because the bill doesn’t go far enough probably voted for Coakley, because they had nowhere else to go.

The news media played a role in creating anger over the health care bill, to be sure:

• The mix of sound bites from the “person in the street” interviews gave credence to incorrect information that reporters must have known was incorrect. 
• The entire phalanx of right-wing media repeated a series of lies, the biggest of which was the biggie that our health care system is better than those of other industrial and post-industrial states. 
• Perhaps the most pernicious act of the news media in the healthcare reform debate was the complete abdication of its responsibility to educate the public on what health care insurance is and does; for example, never presenting the fact that any public system in the United States would contract with insurance companies to process claims and provide oversight.

But I won’t blame the news media for the attitudes people currently have about healthcare reform: the management of the legislative process by the Democrats was so inept that it probably had the old Senate Master Lyndon Johnson turning in his grave.

I’m sure that some people voted for Brown because they dislike Obama, but I’m also fairly confident that most of them would have voted for Brown in any case. 

Unless dislike of Obama was the only reason they voted, that is, that the turnout on the right increased, while turnout of the poor, minorities and the young decreased (as compared to the Presidential election).  In fact, the Boston Globe reported that voting was heavy in the suburbs and light in the cities.

So at the end of the day, perhaps the real reason Brown won is that his people voted and Coakley’s (Obama’s) did not.  That of course points a finger at the political explanations listed at the beginning of this post.

One of the big discussions among liberals and lefties these days is whether or not to support the likely health care bill that will result from merging the House and Senate versions of health care reform.  In the most recent New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg lists some of the prominent lefties who have already come out against the likely bill.  I didn’t check his list of those advocating defeat of the likely bill, but it sounds right.  It includes Howard Dean, Arianna Huffington, Keith Olbermann and MoveOn.org.  Hertzberg goes on to tells why he thinks we should all support the likely bill. 

I agree that we should support the bill, flawed though it is in the number of additional people it will cover, the nature of standard coverage moving forward and how we as a society will pay for it. 

The flaws of the likely bill, however, are kind of like Al Gore’s were in his race against Bush the Second in 2000.  The difference between this bill and no bill at all are enormous, as were the real differences between Gore and Bush.

But the din of the debate on side issues, such as if the government has the right to promote a given religion by not including a safe and legal medical procedure in its coverage, makes it easy to forget what it will mean if no bill passes.  Just as in 2000, when the din of issues blurring the differences included Gore’s role in the creation of the Internet and Bush’ supposedly greater “likeability” (which turned out to be as much hokum as Bud Light’s “drinkability”!).

And as with the failure of Gore to win, if this health care bill fails, I guarantee that the majority of Americans will regret it for years to come.

I think to a large degree, too much is being made of leftist opposition to the likely bill.  I like, respect and often agree with all of the people who made Hertzberg’s list, which is why I’m wondering hopefully if perhaps one or more of the lions of the left are currently stating opposition to the likely bill for tactical reasons—to make certain that the final bill is as much to their liking as possible, to remind the Democratic leadership of its large left-of-center constituency.

The way that the National Basketball Association and some NBA teams have reacted to the Gilbert Arenas controversy has me more convinced than ever that one characteristic of our age (and here again, we are similar to the court of Phillip II of Spain) is to attempt to solve a problem by ignoring it and instead working on a completely different issue, claiming that the other issue is what matters. 

In our pursuit of terrorists, this bizarre strategy of ignoring the real problem and doing something else involved attacking Iraq when Al Qaeda was in Afghanistan and then attacking Afghanistan after the terrorists had moved to Pakistan.

In alternative energy, this strategy resulted in the Bush Administration providing massive support to a biofuels technology proven to consume more energy than it produces—processing corn into electricity.  Not only was money taken from more promising technologies, but the new demand for corn sent the price of food soaring.

And let’s not forget  that some on the right have blamed the lending policies of the federal government and not the bad loans unethically made and securitized by mortgage lenders as the cause of the real estate bubble whose bursting exploded into the worst recession since the one we call a depression.

In all of these cases, we in effect put a bandage on a foot when a hand was bleeding!

The same type of thinking has prevailed in the Arenas situation, which began when reports spread that the basketball player had pulled a gun on a teammate in the locker room in an argument about a gambling debt.  A few days after the world responded with shock and disgust, a photo captured Arenas playfully aiming at his teammates with his pointer fingers extended from his fists.

Let me first state that I think that Arenas and anyone else who pulled a gun in the incident at the heart of the controversy should be suspended from the NBA for 82 games, with a second offense drawing a lifetime ban.  The NBA rightfully bans guns from its locker rooms and practice facilities and should continue to do so.

But who really cares if Arenas was making fun of what he did with his teammates a few days later?  If someone had been hurt, the jocular attitude would certainly be in extremely poor taste, but since no one was hurt, just let the guy be a doofus.  Yet NBA Commissioner David Stern’s twisted reasoning made him ban Arenas for the silly joking around and not the dangerous incident.

The really twisted thinking though comes from the Capitals, Nets and other teams now banning card games in flight and in the locker room.  What if the players had argued over the last piece of cake?  Would you outlaw food in the locker room?  Locker room card games go back a long way, to the very origins of major league baseball, and are quite popular among players.  Why punish the many players who enjoy a friendly game because of one or two trigger-happy bozos?  It’s like punishing the Iraqi people with destruction of their economic and social infrastructure followed by years of war because some vicious terrorists are hiding in the hills of Afghanistan. 

In “The Way We Live” column of this week’s New York Times Magazine, Roger Lowenstein notes that about 10.7 million families owe more on their houses than the homes are currently worth.  He advises those people to do what any smart bank or business would do, which is to walk away from the loan and the house. 

The article is really quite canny in how it demonstrates that the amorality of business should rule the actions of the individual. He tries to dispose of the ethical constraints that prevent people from walking away from a bad debt, e.g., it debases the character of the borrower and it depresses the prices of the other houses in the neighborhood, by questioning why homeowners should have these feelings in the real world of commerce.   He gives many examples of businesses walking away from commitments through default and bankruptcy.  He also gives the example of a baseball team not signing a new contract with a big star as an example of why loyalty should not be considered a virtue in the world of business (although in this case, there is no contract!).

Of course, Lowenstein forgets that many loans are worth more than the asset that served as the reason for borrowing the money.  Every time a business or an individual buys a car, airplane, copy machine, computer or any other type of equipment, the value of the item declines immediately and precipitously, and to typically far below the funds borrowed. 

But instead of comparing a home to these loans, Lowenstein wants to turn the average homeowner into a sophisticated multinational corporation that makes all decisions based solely on improving the bottom line.

Roger, I have an idea:  Instead of asking homeowners to act more like amoral businesses, why don’t you instead call for new regulations that would bring some ethics into business actions? 

Roger would not even think of this approach because behind his article is the ideological message that underpins much writing about both economics and personal business: the idea that regulation of business is always wrong and that the marketplace will solve all our problems if we just get government and society out of the way.  Laissez faire means do what you want, and by giving homeowners permission to do what they want, he keeps that option open for the banks securitized and sold bad loans, big companies that walk away from communities to lower their cost structure or hedge fund managers who open new funds “rather than try to earn back their investors’ lost capital” (from the actual article).

But I wonder, if we all play by the rules of the big, do the small have any chance at all?