Psyche, Science, and Society

Pete Seeger & Arlo Guthrie: Union Maid

Add comment September 3rd, 2007

James Carroll: Labor’s Failure

For Labor Day, Boston Globe columnist James Carroll writes of:

Labor’s Failure

by James Carroll

LABOR DAY can seem like a holiday that belongs to another era. That is not because the trade union movement is no longer relevant, nor does the impulse to honor work and workers ever lose its importance. But the word “labor” once defined an entire culture, with its “names, battle slogans, and costumes,” in Karl Marx’s phrase. Where did it go? The labor movement had its symbols, from politically charged clothing to badges to the holidays in May and September; its structures, from picket lines to unions to worker-owned insurance companies; its rhetoric, from the manifestos of agitators to the leaflets of organizers to the songs of Woody Guthrie; its ethic, defined as solidarity.

Millions continue to hold membership in unions, which continue to protect the rights of workers, but the triumph of the labor movement consisted in its becoming a feature of a social landscape that is taken for granted. It was nifty when workers’ apparel - blue jeans - and equipment - pick-up trucks - became items of upper class fashion, but the shallow victory implied a substantial defeat. Labor stopped being a force for political change, much less for social justice. What happened?

The 19th-century dream of a workers’ vanguard leading to a better world was both betrayed and realized, and in each case, labor was undercut. The betrayal occurred when tyrants, in advancing the cause of “the people,” actually advanced themselves. The “dictatorship of the proletariat” turned out to be mere dictatorship. Yet the discrediting of the vision of Karl Marx by the 20th-century communisms that claimed him does not vitiate the original vision. Echoing what Mahatma Gandhi once said of Christianity, Marxism has yet to be really tried.

The realization of the workers’ dream occurred, across the same decades of the 20th century, when regulated capitalism made its adjustments, and a vast population of working people was able to lay solid claim to the middle class. But affluence had an inherently co-opting effect, as was powerfully displayed during the American civil rights movement, when the labor virtue of solidarity was trumped by racism, and union members mostly found themselves on the wrong side of history. The curious phenomenon of “Reagan Democrats” saw workers recruited into a reactionary political movement that undercuts their own interests.

Meanwhile, the human significance of work was undergoing a massive cultural mutation, as traditional industry gave way to high technology, skill to mechanization, manufacturing to information, and economic nationalism to globalization. Marx worried about the control of the means of production, but what is control when the factory is replaced by the keyboard as the center of invention? For 200 years, “capital” was decisive, but then along came “intellectual capital.” Goodbye borders. Goodbye regulation. Welcome to the free market, a free-for-all that destroys freedom. The very conditions of transcendent inequality that gave rise to the labor movement in the first place are now being rapidly re-created on a global scale, with unions reduced to the role of sputtering kibitzers.

In the United States, the most revealing failure of the labor movement to live up to its foundational ideal involves labor’s role as a pillar of the military-industrial complex. The engine of the American economy is defense spending. For two generations, but especially since the end of the Cold War, the nation has cannibalized itself by investing its best minds and most of its treasure in a profoundly counterproductive military establishment.

Usually this is blamed on the so-called “iron triangle” of corporations, Congress, and the Pentagon, which keep trillions of dollars circulating through the unbroken loop. But the labor movement has long been an essential part of this corrupt system, with union lobbyists playing their crucial role in keeping the lucrative defense contracts coming.

What would have happened at the end of the Cold War, when the expected “peace dividend” might have rescued education or rebuilt the nation’s infrastructure, if union leaders, backed by the grass-roots labor movement, had demanded an end to the Pentagon boondoggle? The conversion of a military-based economy, serving no real purpose beyond its own enrichment, to an economy of authentic productivity would have transformed foreign policy in the nick of time (no war in Iraq), and provided resources for homefront infrastructure (no failed dikes in New Orleans, or collapsed bridges in Minneapolis).

It did not happen, for a lot of reasons - one of which is the hollowed out commitment of a movement that should have known better. What this nation needs is a revitalized reason to celebrate Labor Day.

Add comment September 3rd, 2007

Most satistying jobs

The General Social Survey is administered to a representative sample of Americans every two years. The2006 GSS asked respondents about job satisfaction and general happiness.

Here are the Top 10 most gratifying jobs and the percentage of subjects who said they were very satisfied with the job:

• Clergy—87 percent percent
• Firefighters—80 percent percent
• Physical therapists—78 percent percent
• Authors—74 percent
• Special education teachers—70 percent
• Teachers—69 percent
• Education administrators—68 percent
• Painters and sculptors—67 percent
• Psychologists—67 percent
• Security and financial services salespersons—65 percent
• Operating engineers—64 percent
• Office supervisors—61 percent

Here are the 10 least gratifying jobs, where few participants reported being very satisfied:

• Laborers, except construction—21 percent
• Apparel clothing salespersons—24 percent
• Handpackers and packagers—24 percent
• Food preparers—24 percent
• Roofers—25 percent
• Cashiers—25 percent
• Furniture and home-furnishing salespersons—25 percent
• Bartenders—26 percent
• Freight, stock and material handlers—26 percent
• Waiters and servers—27 percent

In general, the jobs associated with the highest satisfaction tend to be associated with service and allow a fair degree of autonomy for workers. They do not appear to be among the highest-paying jobs.

The authors also looked at how happy the people were in various professions. The professions with the happiest people are:

• Clergy
• Firefighters
• Transportation ticket and reservation agents
• Housekeepers and butlers
• Hardware/building supplies salespersons
• Architects
• Mechanics and repairers
• Special education teachers
• Actors and directors
• Science technicians

The clergy and firefighters get the best of both worlds: high job satisfaction and high happiness.

Of course, researchers will note that we can’t know from these data alone whether some jobs lead to satisfaction, or whether certain people, those who tend to be satisfied, tend to gravitate to certain jobs. But one can’t help suspecting that service to others combined with relative autonomy is a good recipe for job satisfaction.

Add comment April 22nd, 2007

Howard Zinn: ‘Je Ne Suis Pas Marxiste.’

Inveresk Street Ingrate has reproduced an old article by Howard Zinn on what he found valuable in the life and work of Karl Marx, appropriately titled ‘Je Ne Suis Pas Marxiste.’ Well worth reading.

Here’s the explanation of the title:

remembered that famous statement of Marx: “Je ne suis pas Marxiste.” I always wondered why Marx, an English-speaking German who had studied Greek for his doctoral dissertation, would make such an important statement in French. But I am confident that he did make it, and I think I know what brought it on. After Marx and his wife Jenny had moved to London, where they lost three of their six children to illness and lived in squalor for many years, they were often visited by a young German refugee named Pieper. This guy was a total “noodnik” (there are “noodniks” all along the political spectrum stationed ten feet apart, but there is a special Left Noodnik, hired by the police, to drive revolutionaries batty). Pieper (I swear, I did not make him up) hovered around Marx gasping with admiration, once offered to translate Das Kapital into English, which he could barely speak, and kept organising Karl Marx Clubs, exasperating Marx more and more by insisting that every word Marx uttered was holy. And one day Marx caused Pieper to have a severe abdominal cramp when he said to him: “Thanks for inviting me to speak at your Karl Marx Club. But I can’t. I’m not a Marxist.”

From his conclusion:

He epitomised his own warning, that people, however advanced in their thinking, were weighted down by the limitations of their time. Still, Marx gave us acute insights, inspiring visions. I can’t imagine Marx being pleased with the “socialism” of the Soviet Union. He would have been a dissident in Moscow, I like to think. His idea of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” was the Paris Commune of 1871, where endless arguments in the streets and halls of the city gave it the vitality of a grass roots democracy, where overbearing officials could be immediately booted out of office by popular vote, where the wages of government leaders could not exceed that of ordinary workers, where the guillotine was destroyed as a symbol of capital punishment. Marx once wrote in the New York Times that he did not see how capital punishment could be justified “in a society glorifying in its civilisation.”

Perhaps the most precious heritage of Marx’s thought is his internationalism, his hostility to the nation state, his insistence that ordinary people have no nation they must obey and give their lives for in war, that we are all linked to one another across the globe as human beings. This is not only a direct challenge to modern capitalist nationalism, with its ugly evocations of hatred for “the enemy” abroad, and its false creation of a common interest for all within certain artificial borders. It is also a rejection of the narrow nationalism of contemporary “Marxist” states, whether the Soviet Union, or China, or any of the others.

In addition to the important concepts of Marx mentioned by Zinn, I would add  that of commodity fetishism. The idea that human relationships get transformed into things that are given a price and bought and sold on the open market has greater resonance today, when thre is virtually nothing that isn’t for sale. Beauty? Buy it here! Love? This way?

And my own profession of psychotherapy has transformed intimacy into a commodity, available to those who can afford it. In typical capitalist fashion, now that therapeutic intimacy is a commodity, its providers are having their wages squeezed lower and lower. Marx, presciently predicted the proletarianization of all. In our time we are seeing this prediction being realized as “professionals,”  doctors, lawyers, therapists, etc., are increasing turned into employees, “wage slaves”, loosing control of their professional destinies and doing the bidding of others.

Add comment April 20th, 2007

Iraqi oil workers union opposing oil sell-off

Jeff3, a diarist at Daily Kos, has a post exploring the role of the raqi Federation of Oil Unions in opposing the law authorizing the sell-off of Iraqi oil to foreign corporations:

The members of union maintain the oil infrastructure, they know how it works, where it’s weaknesses are, where the strengths are. And, given the fact that just about every article I’ve read on the oil infrastructure in Iraq, indicates that the pipelines/terminals are jury-rigged/worn out, if you bring in new workers to fix the problems, you have to replace everything. So, if they decide to, say, creatively, ‘fix’ the system, who knows what might happen…

Add comment April 6th, 2007

Unions worse than terrorists!

Bush and the Senate Republicans made their priorities clear:

President Bush and his Senate allies will kill a Sept. 11 antiterror bill if Congress sends it to the White House with a provision to let airport screeners unionize, the White House and 36 Republicans said Tuesday.

“As the legislation currently stands, the president’s senior advisers would recommend that he veto the bill,” said White House spokesman Scott Stanzel.

Senate Republicans swiftly backed up the threat with a pledge by more than enough senators to block any veto override attempt.

“If the final bill contains such a provision, forcing you to veto it, we pledge to sustain your veto,” they wrote to the president.

Any pretense that these jokers really believe there is a major threat from “terrorists” is beyond silly. the “terrorist threat,” for them, is simply a ruse to attack American inalienable rights, liberties, and the ability to pursue happiness. After afll, as Sy Hersh recently reported, Bush is funneling arms to al Qaeda linked groups in Iran and Lebanon.

Add comment February 28th, 2007

Hedges on Nader

Chris Hedges, one of today’s moral beacons, contemplates supporting Ralph Nader, should he make another run for the Presidency:

These corporations, and their enraged and manipulated followers in the Christian right, tens of millions of them, if left unchecked will propel us into despotism. The corporate state has rigged our system, hollowed out our political process and steadily stripped citizens of constitutional rights, federal and state protection and assistance. This may be the twilight of American democracy. And it is better to stand up and fight, even in vain, than not to fight at all.

Add comment February 26th, 2007

Krugman on health reform viciousness

Paul Krugman takes on the Decider’s disgusting health insurance “reform” plan, which taxes workers with good insurance to fund the well-off who choose not to have insurance. Not mentioned in Krugman’s critique is that tax breaks do not help poor people very much, not only because their tax rate is low anyway, but also because they don’t have the cash to put out all year in hopes of a refund the next spring.

Gold-Plated Indifference

by Paul Krugman

President Bush’s Saturday radio address was devoted to health care, and officials have put out the word that the subject will be a major theme in tomorrow’s State of the Union address. Mr. Bush’s proposal won’t go anywhere. But it’s still worth looking at his remarks, because of what they say about him and his advisers.

On the radio, Mr. Bush suggested that we should “treat health insurance more like home ownership.” He went on to say that “the current tax code encourages home ownership by allowing you to deduct the interest on your mortgage from your taxes. We can reform the tax code, so that it provides a similar incentive for you to buy health insurance.”

Wow. Those are the words of someone with no sense of what it’s like to be uninsured.

Going without health insurance isn’t like deciding to rent an apartment instead of buying a house. It’s a terrifying experience, which most people endure only if they have no alternative. The uninsured don’t need an “incentive” to buy insurance; they need something that makes getting insurance possible.

Most people without health insurance have low incomes, and just can’t afford the premiums. And making premiums tax-deductible is almost worthless to workers whose income puts them in a low tax bracket.

Of those uninsured who aren’t low-income, many can’t get coverage because of pre-existing conditions — everything from diabetes to a long-ago case of jock itch. Again, tax deductions won’t solve their problem.

The only people the Bush plan might move out of the ranks of the uninsured are the people we’re least concerned about — affluent, healthy Americans who choose voluntarily not to be insured. At most, the Bush plan might induce some of those people to buy insurance, while in the process — whaddya know — giving many other high-income individuals yet another tax break.

While proposing this high-end tax break, Mr. Bush is also proposing a tax increase — not on the wealthy, but on workers who, he thinks, have too much health insurance. The tax code, he said, “unwisely encourages workers to choose overly expensive, gold-plated plans. The result is that insurance premiums rise, and many Americans cannot afford the coverage they need.”

Again, wow. No economic analysis I’m aware of says that when Peter chooses a good health plan, he raises Paul’s premiums. And look at the condescension. Will all those who think they have “gold plated” health coverage please raise their hands?

According to press reports, the actual plan is to penalize workers with relatively generous insurance coverage. Just to be clear, we’re not talking about the wealthy; we’re talking about ordinary workers who have managed to negotiate better-than-average health plans.

What’s driving all this is the theory, popular in conservative circles but utterly at odds with the evidence, that the big problem with U.S. health care is that people have too much insurance — that there would be large cost savings if people were forced to pay more of their medical expenses out of pocket.

The administration also believes, for some reason, that people should be pushed out of employment-based health insurance — admittedly a deeply flawed system — into the individual insurance market, which is a disaster on all fronts. Insurance companies try to avoid selling policies to people who are likely to use them, so a large fraction of premiums in the individual market goes not to paying medical bills but to bureaucracies dedicated to weeding out “high risk” applicants — and keeping them uninsured.

I’m somewhat skeptical about health care plans, like that proposed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, that propose covering gaps in the health insurance market with a series of patches, such as requiring that insurers offer policies to everyone at the same rate. But at least the authors of these plans are trying to help those most in need, and recognize that the market needs fixing.

Mr. Bush, on the other hand, is still peddling the fantasy that the free market, with a little help from tax cuts, solves all problems.

What’s really striking about Mr. Bush’s remarks, however, is the tone. The stuff about providing “incentives” to buy insurance, the sneering description of good coverage as “gold plated,” is right-wing think-tank jargon. In the past Mr. Bush’s speechwriters might have found less offensive language; now, they’re not even trying to hide his fundamental indifference to the plight of less-fortunate Americans.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports that Universal Health Coverage Attracts New Support. Of course, this support is for a corporate-dominated private insurance system that creates a new entitlement program for the nations greediest insurance companies while doing little to reduce the costs of healthcare.

Add comment January 22nd, 2007

Christmas in the Trenches

In this year, like so many other years, in which the latest war grinds on, we should remember there was a time when, for a brief while, the soldiers refused to kill one another:

Christmas in the Trenches

by John McCutcheon (1984)

My name is Francis Tolliver, I come from Liverpool.
Two years ago the war was waiting for me after school.
To Belgium and to Flanders, to Germany to here
I fought for King and country I love dear.
‘Twas Christmas in the trenches, where the frost so bitter hung,
The frozen fields of France were still, no Christmas song was sung
Our families back in England were toasting us that day
Their brave and glorious lads so far away.

I was lying with my messmate on the cold and rocky ground
When across the lines of battle came a most peculiar sound
Says I, “Now listen up, me boys!” each soldier strained to hear
As one young German voice sang out so clear.
“He’s singing bloody well, you know!” my partner says to me
Soon, one by one, each German voice joined in harmony
The cannons rested silent, the gas clouds rolled no more
As Christmas brought us respite from the war
As soon as they were finished and a reverent pause was spent
“God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” struck up some lads from Kent
The next they sang was “Stille Nacht.” “Tis ‘Silent Night’,” says I
And in two tongues one song filled up that sky
“There’s someone coming toward us!” the front line sentry cried
All sights were fixed on one long figure trudging from their side
His truce flag, like a Christmas star, shown on that plain so bright
As he, bravely, strode unarmed into the night
Soon one by one on either side walked into No Man’s Land
With neither gun nor bayonet we met there hand to hand
We shared some secret brandy and we wished each other well
And in a flare-lit soccer game we gave ‘em hell
We traded chocolates, cigarettes, and photographs from home
These sons and fathers far away from families of their own
Young Sanders played his squeezebox and they had a violin
This curious and unlikely band of men

Soon daylight stole upon us and France was France once more
With sad farewells we each prepared to settle back to war
But the question haunted every heart that lived that wonderous night
“Whose family have I fixed within my sights?”
‘Twas Christmas in the trenches where the frost, so bitter hung
The frozen fields of France were warmed as songs of peace were sung
For the walls they’d kept between us to exact the work of war
Had been crumbled and were gone forevermore

My name is Francis Tolliver, in Liverpool I dwell
Each Christmas come since World War I, I’ve learned its lessons well
That the ones who call the shots won’t be among the dead and lame
And on each end of the rifle we’re the same

Here is my article , written for last year’s Christmas season:

The 1914 Christmas Truce and the Possibility of Peace

A new French film, Joyeux Noel , brings the 1914 Christmas truce, that moment when a world of peace could be imagined, to a wider audience.

An article on the truce and the film from the Telegraph has this nugget:

Some viewers might find a certain sentimental excess in the scene in which a Scottish bagpiper spontaneously joins in when German soldiers began singing Stille Nacht (Silent Night). There are records of such an event. “All the acts of fraternisation had one thing in common: music and song,” says Carion. “I loved the idea that these could stop a war for a few hours.”

Perhaps we should learn something from this experience about the importance of music to peace. After all, the 60’s peace movements were infused with song, whereas today’s movements are silent. Music and song can unite, they can inspire, but they also can soothe. Movements for peace need all three.

The Telegraph article continues to point out that the reality of peace is beyond what audiences can believe:

The film also features a foraging ginger cat adopted as a mascot by both the French and the Germans. The cat existed, and, in real life, it was arrested by the French, convicted of espionage and shot in accordance with military regulations. “It was an era of madmen,” says Carion, who filmed this scene - to the great distress of his extras - but decided not to include it in case his audience didn’t believe it.

A Scottish bishop’s sermon, which includes references to a “crusade” and a “holy war”, seems like a thumpingly obvious effort to find parallels with more recent discourses about Iraq. In fact, these words were, Carion says, taken directly from a sermon preached by an Anglican bishop at Westminster Abbey. Here, too, the truth was toned down: Carion excised the real bishop’s references to German soldiers “crucifying babies on Christmas Day” in order to make it credible.

Perhaps the propensity toward war is aided by our unwillingness to imagine the depths to which people can sink when captured by the lure of war, the fantasy of perfect union with the state, that idealized perfect mother, and the ability to extrude all evil onto the enemy, that poisonous cannibalistic bad mother. As Christopher Hedges points out in War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, in more normal times we disown this desire for union and extrusion and cannot remember or imagine how destructive it can be.

Perhaps this dynamic also helps explain people’s passivity toward the threats to democracy facing us in the United States today. For those identified with their country, to truly accept the danger puts the evil, the bad, inside the union, where it is especially terrifying.

A resolution for many is the demonization solution, to view George W. Bush and his administration as absolute evil, destroying the country and the world. While tempting, and certainly not without evidence, the problem with this outlook is that it is the mirror image of that attitude which leads us into the nightmare. To those adopting this view, evil resides in Bush, in Cheney, in the Republicans. If only they could be removed, impeached, tried, the world would be saved. The problem with this notion is that it encourages only destruction of the enemy, not construction of something better. History has repeatedly demonstrated that movements guided by hatred do not end up producing a better world.

The Christmas truce, in its magnificence, gives us a tiny glimpse of a true alternative, a world in which we are all simply human, in which that which we have in common is greater than that which divides us. For the brief moment of that truce, lasting days or weeks, the soldiers on all sides embodied the wisdom of peace through union, a union without an all-bad enemy (though the officer class trying so hard to restore their respective killing machines surely could have qualified). A union of fun, of games, and of song. A world dominated by eros.

The challenge, so far unsolved, is how to take such a moment and make it last, or at least not turn into its opposite, a renewed carnage of destruction. This challenge, as pacifists and nonviolent activists have repeatedly discovered, requires us to find a way to accept and tame the capacity for destructiveness in each of us, so as not to need to attribute it to an enemy. At the same time, we need to find a way to continue peace and unity in more normal, less extraordinary times, beyond the moment of fusion. For eventually the excitement fades and we remember all our irritations, our gripes and our fears. To bring peace into daily life is the need upon which the future of the human race may well depend.

This is the utopian challenge for our day.

Peace on Earth! Goodwill to Men and Women!

For more information on the 1914 truce, see the book Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce by Stanley Weintraub.

Add comment December 23rd, 2006

Krugman: Don’t reduce the deficit. It only enables them

Paul Krugman points out a major flaw in Democrat’s attempts at balancing the budget: they only enabled the right-wing’s class warfare for the utra-rich against all the rest. To his credit, Krugman says spend any savings on improving our welfare, not on reducing the deficit:

Democrats and the Deficit

Now that the Democrats have regained some power, they have to decide what to do. One of the biggest questions is whether the party should return to Rubinomics — the doctrine, associated with former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, that placed a very high priority on reducing the budget deficit.

The answer, I believe, is no. Mr. Rubin was one of the ablest Treasury secretaries in American history. But it’s now clear that while Rubinomics made sense in terms of pure economics, it failed to take account of the ugly realities of contemporary American politics.

And the lesson of the last six years is that the Democrats shouldn’t spend political capital trying to bring the deficit down. They should refrain from actions that make the deficit worse. But given a choice between cutting the deficit and spending more on good things like health care reform, they should choose the spending.

In a saner political environment, the economic logic behind Rubinomics would have been compelling. Basic fiscal principles tell us that the government should run budget deficits only when it faces unusually high expenses, mainly during wartime. In other periods it should try to run a surplus, paying down its debt.

Since the 1990s were an era of peace, prosperity and favorable demographics (the baby boomers were still in the work force, not collecting Social Security and Medicare), it should have been a good time to put the federal budget in the black. And under Mr. Rubin, the huge deficits of the Reagan-Bush years were transformed into an impressive surplus.

But the realities of American politics ensured that it was all for naught. The second President Bush quickly squandered the surplus on tax cuts that heavily favored the wealthy, then plunged the budget deep into deficit by cutting taxes on dividends and capital gains even as he took the country into a disastrous war. And you can even argue that Mr. Rubin’s surplus was a bad thing, because it greased the rails for Mr. Bush’s irresponsibility.

As Brad DeLong, a Berkeley economist who served in the Clinton administration, recently wrote on his influential blog: “Rubin and us spearcarriers moved heaven and earth to restore fiscal balance to the American government in order to raise the rate of economic growth. But what we turned out to have done, in the end, was to enable George W. Bush’s right-wing class war: his push for greater after-tax income inequality.”

My only quibble with Mr. DeLong’s characterization is that this wasn’t just one man’s class war: the whole conservative movement shared Mr. Bush’s squanderlust, his urge to run off with the money so carefully saved under Mr. Rubin’s leadership.

With the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear that conservatives who claimed to care about deficits when Democrats were in power never meant it. Let’s not forget how Alan Greenspan, who posed as the high priest of fiscal rectitude as long as Bill Clinton was in the White House, became an apologist for tax cuts — even in the face of budget deficits — once a Republican took up residence.

Now the Democrats are back in control of Congress. They’ve pledged not to be as irresponsible as their predecessors: Nancy Pelosi, the incoming House speaker, has promised to restore the “pay-as-you-go” rule that the Republicans tossed aside in the Bush years. This rule would basically prevent Congress from passing budgets that increase the deficit.

I’m for pay-as-you-go. The question, however, is whether to go further. Suppose the Democrats can free up some money by fixing the Medicare drug program, by ending the Iraq war and/or clamping down on war profiteering, or by rolling back some of the Bush tax cuts. Should they use the reclaimed revenue to reduce the deficit, or spend it on other things?

The answer, I now think, is to spend the money — while taking great care to ensure that it is spent well, not squandered — and let the deficit be. By spending money well, Democrats can both improve Americans’ lives and, more broadly, offer a demonstration of the benefits of good government. Deficit reduction, on the other hand, might just end up playing into the hands of the next irresponsible president.

In the long run, something will have to be done about the deficit. But given the state of our politics, now is not the time.

Add comment December 22nd, 2006