President Obama, Listen to Bill Moyers.

Photo of Billionaires for Wealth Care.

Billionaires for Wealthcare is a grassroots network of health insurance CEOs, industry lobbyists, talk-show hosts, and others profiting off of our broken health care system.

We are not a political, religious or even particularly well-organized group. We're simple folk, thrilled profiteers pouring out of our corner offices to dance on the grave of "Change."

We'll do whatever it takes to ensure another decade where your pain is our gain. After all, when it comes to healthcare, if we ain't broke, why fix it?

On Friday, September 4, the veteran journalist and former press secretary (to Lyndon Johnson) tried to the President some advice in an essay at the end of his PBS program, Bill Moyers Journal. Referring to the editors of The Economist saying the health care debate had become delirious, he found that charitable and preferred the term "deranged."

Only in a fantasy capital like Washington could Sunday morning talk shows become the high church of conventional wisdom, with partisan shills treated as holy men whose gospel of prosperity always seems to boil down to lower taxes for the rich. Poor Obama. He came to town preaching the religion of nice. But every time he bows politely, the harder the Republicans kick him. No one's ever conquered Washington politics by constantly saying "pretty please" to the guys trying to cut your throat. Let's get on with it, Mr. President. We're up the proverbial creek with spaghetti as our paddle. This health care thing could have been the crossing of the Delaware, the turning point in the next American Revolution — the moment we put the mercenaries to rout, as General Washington did the Hessians at Trenton. We could have stamped our victory "Made in the USA." We could have said to the world, "Look what we did!" And we could have turned to each other and said, "thank you." As it is, we're about to get health care reform that measures human beings only in corporate terms of a cost-benefit analysis. I mean this is topsy-turvy — we should be treating health as a condition, not a commodity. ...

Come on, Mr. President. Show us America is more than a circus or a market. Remind us of our greatness as a democracy. When you speak to Congress next week, just come out and say it. We thought we heard you say during the campaign last year that you want a government run insurance plan alongside private insurance — mostly premium-based, with subsidies for low-and-moderate income people. Open to all individuals and employees who want to join and with everyone free to choose the doctors we want. We thought you said Uncle Sam would sign on as our tough, cost-minded negotiator standing up to the cartel of drug and insurance companies and Wall Street investors whose only interest is a company's share price and profits.

Here's a suggestion, Mr. President: ask Josh Marshall to draft your speech. Josh is the founder of the website talkingpointsmemo.com. He's a journalist and historian, not a politician. He doesn't split things down the middle and call it a victory for the masses. He's offered the simplest and most accurate description yet of a public insurance plan; one that essentially asks people: would you like the option — the voluntary option — of buying into Medicare before you're 65? Check it out, Mr. President.

This health care thing is make or break for your leadership, but for us, it's life and death. No more Mr. Nice Guy, Mr. President. We need a fighter.

Richard Trumka (WaPo profile by Alec MacGillis--email) will be taking over as President of the AFL-CIO. In a speech August 31 at the Center for American Progress he issued a call to arms.

Today, more than ever, we need to be a labor movement that stands by our friends, punishes its enemies, and challenges those who, well, can’t seem to decide which side they’re on.

I’m talking about the politicians who always want us to turn out our members to vote for them, but who somehow, always seem to forget workers after the votes are counted.

For example, legislators who don’t understand that their job isn’t to make insurance companies happy; it’s to keep Americans healthy!

Legislators who say they’re are all for health care reform, but refuse to stand up for a public system that puts people before profits!

You know, to hear some of them, you’d think the objective isn’t to come up with a health care plan that works; it’s to write a bill Republicans will vote for.

I think they need to understand that that you can have a bill that guarantees quality, affordable health care for every American – or you can have a bill the Republicans will vote for.

But you can’t have both!

What ever happened to 1% for the imagination?

Pets are non-partisans, but should the arts be, too?

Back on February 2 my friends DC poets Ethelbert Miller and Melissa Tuckey, along with the executive director of the Institute for Policy Studies, had a piece in The Nation call for 1% of the stimulus package to go to the arts. After all, the Works Progress Administration.

Another friend--Amanda Michel--now has a job now tracking stimulus funds for ProPublica. I had collaborated with her on election coverage when I was community developer for NewsTrust and she ran Off the Bus for the HuffPo. So, I thought, why now take a look at what's going on with stimulus funds and the arts here in Virginia.

Over a year ago, on August 2, San Francisco Chronicle reporter Chris Cadelago(email) had observed that the Obama campaign

has an official arts policy committee, which is co-chaired by Margo Lion, the Broadway producer, and George Stevens Jr., founder of the American Film Institute. It calls for a national reinvestment in the arts as well as a national arts corps, made up of young artists who could work in inner cities.

Novelist Michael Chabon had even drafted an introduction to the arts policy.

America's artists are the guardians of the spirit of questioning, of innovation, of reaching across the barriers that fence us off from our neighbors, from our allies and adversaries, from the six billion other people with whom we share this dark and dazzling world...Art increases the sense of our common humanity. The imagination of the artist is, therefore, a profoundly moral imagination: the easier it is for you to imagine walking in someone else's shoes, the more difficult it then becomes to do that person harm.

That was then and this is now. The House put $50 million in additional funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, which the Senate took out with former Republican Presidential candidate Senator John McCain stating. While the money was restored, the $150 appropriation by the House for infrastructure for the Smithsonian was sliced down to $25 million. Robert Lynch is a bit more optimistic, tracking other money that arguably can help artists.

Here in Virginia the Virginia Commission for the Arts reported awards to preserve positions in various parts of the state. I'll get into those tomorrow. The library is closing.

New Jobs: Green, "Shovel Ready" or Military-Industrial?

As the economy continues to sputter, the WaPo's Paul Kane and Michael D. Shear front-page "Green' Jobs Compete for Stimulus Aid: Obama Weighs Them Vs. Traditional Projects" contrasts with "Defense Spending Would Be Great Stimulus: All three service branches are in need of upgrade and repair" by WSJ board of contributors member Martin Feldstein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Reagan and a professor at Harvard. I've got to wonder about the latter, as Lawrence F. Skibbie paraphrased an observation by one of the members of his National Defense Industrial Association in his June 22, 1998 testimony to the Commission to Study Capital Budgeting:

it is unclear that a meaningful assessment can be made of the economic return on investment for resources committed to military capital assets

Kane and Shear write,

environmentalists and smart-growth advocates are trying to shift the priorities of the economic stimulus plan that will be introduced in Congress next month away from allocating tens of billions of dollars to highways, bridges and other traditional infrastructure spending to more projects that create "green-collar" jobs.

That's drawing flack from the Blue Dog Coalition of fiscally conservative House Democrats. Congressman Baron P. Hill (D-IN), incoming co-chairman told

If we're going to call it a stimulus package, it has to be stimulating and has to be stimulating now. I think there are members of our caucus who are trying to create a Christmas tree out of this

The Post paints this as "shovel-ready" union construction job v.s. green-collar job competition and in an example of stating opinion without supporting facts says the latter,

often have the long-term potential to revolutionize the economy but tend to lack the short-term bounce of old-fashioned infrastructure work

Anna Burger, chairman of Change to Win, a union group is quoted as saying,

In fact, we do have crumbling roads and bridges that need to be repaired. It's not about pitting one against the other. It's about how we find a sustainable economy.

Terence M. O'Sullivan, head of the Laborers' International Union of North America, adds

We're committed to green jobs and rapid transit and all the rest of it.

Senior aides in the new administration and the congressional leadership

suggest that there have been delays in identifying enough of the environmentally friendly projects to reach a dollar level that will truly jump-start the economy.

Democratic negotiators plan to reconvene around New Year's Day to try to hash out the final details of the plan before the 111th Congress starts Jan. 6, with a goal of passing a bill out of the House and Senate shortly after Obama is sworn in Jan. 20. At a meeting of Obama's transition team yesterday, Vice President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. vowed that the proposal would not become a "Christmas tree" for lawmakers' policy earmarks. He defended it against the criticism on the left that too much of its focus would be on old-fashioned projects.

"We've let our infrastructure crumble for a long, long time from water to roads to bridges. It makes sense to invest in them now," Biden said.

Colin Peppard, a transportation expert for Friends of the Earth was not as deferenital:

They're going to put a bunch of money through a broken system to stimulate the economy. That doesn't make sense to me....One minute they want to spend it quickly, the next minute they want to spend it well.

FOA has begun a Road to Nowhere campaign, saying that new roads would lead to "new pollution -- keep the economic stimulus clean." But what about existing roads that need repair?

Meanwhile, speaking of economic stimulus, you gotta laugh to keep from crying. Check out Chuck Collins's & Nick Thorkelson's Economic Meltdown Funnies from Jobs with Justice and the Institute for Policy Studies Program on Inequality and the Common Good.Check out Chuck Collins & Nick Thorkelson Economic Meltdown Funnies from Jobs with Justice and the Institute for Policy Studies Program on Inequality and the Common Good.