Michael Steele recently said during a Univision interview that: “I don’t think we need a comprehensive overhaul of our healthcare system.”

When Bill Caudle lost his job at a plastics company this year, he also lost his health coverage. That means that he lost the ability to pay for his wife’s healthcare, as she has ovarian cancer. He was so committed to making sure his wife can get the treatment that she needs, so committed that she not become one of the 45,000 Americans who die from inadequate health coverage every year…that he joined the Army.

Thomas Jefferson noted that a volunteer-based large standing army required a permanent class of paupers. At the end of his presidency he bragged about largely eliminating America’s standing army, saying that: “Our men are so happy at home that they will not hire themselves to be shot at for a shilling a day. Hence we can have no standing armies for defence, because we have no paupers to furnish the materials.”

Bill Caudle’s story is emotionally moving but is also very important. It’s stories like these that should make us all take a step back from the politics and statistics and look at the human element of all of this. It is morally inexcusable that in the richest country in the world someone would have to join the Army to get healthcare for his wife. That’s what the national healthcare debate should be about.

The Dow has recently hit above 10,000 points, and 79 metropolitan areas in the US are officially out of recession. However the unemployment rate is still officially 9.8%, and is realistically more like 16% if you include those who have given up looking for work, or are “underemployed” (working a part time job that does not sustain their family). It seems that though the bailout was capable of re-inflating Wall Street and Goldman-Sachs, everyone in Washington seems to be scratching their heads on how we can lower the unemployment rate. I’d like to submit my own suggestion for putting Americans to work, lets bring back the WPA and the CCC.

Despite what you might hear from Michael Steele, government has a very good record of creating public works jobs. Not only can public works projects give unemployed Americans temporary work, it can create new investments for America that hold real value. Not Wall Street making money with money value, or McDonalds “would you like fries with that” value, I mean real economic value. To paraphrase Adam Smith: when a stick is on the ground it has no value, but when you carve it into an axe handle your labour has given it value. New bridges, better roads, power lines, and high-speed rail…these are the sorts of projects that give jobs to Americans and invest in the public commons. It seems that when government gives truckloads of money to banks, the executives who sold all of us out get the dividends. But when government invests in the commons, everyone receives the dividends.

So if we want to see a real recovery for Americans, not a jobless one, we need let our unemployed citizens get back to work. This is a way to make them breadwinners again while also investing in the future of our country.

I just got back from a talk by Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein sponsored by the GW Jewish Progressive Political Association. Klein’s main forte of late has been the health care debate, and he spoke both on that issue and its corollary — how cumbersome the U.S. Senate is.

I found Klein’s thoughts very insightful, especially as they related to what the final health bill will be sold as. There is a tremendous sense of frustration among liberal Democrats at the difficulty in putting through a bill to their liking, even with 60 Senate seats. What he warned against, though, was the urge among Democrats to demand a total victory the way Republicans seek the bill’s total defeat. This is Obama’s first major policy initiative, and if it was to fail it would be disastrous for him.

But failure isn’t certain. With Olympia Snowe’s backing, Democrats will probably be able to pass a deficit-neutral bill with Chuck Schumer’s creative “opt-out” compromise on the public option. And even though the new law wouldn’t guarantee insurance to everyone, it would probably hit in the range of 94%, according to recent estimates. Klein also pointed out that social welfare programs tend to grow overtime, not shrink; what might be an incomplete bill could be mended later.

Given the ridiculous number of structural obstacles to meaningful health care reform — “death panels,” town hall mobs, insurance industry lobbying, Republican filibuster threats, unions angry over excise taxes, liberal and conservative wings of the party fighting, five standing committees and two negotiating committees to get the bill through — we ought not to feel too badly about this fight.

Canada’s very successful healthcare system was not started on the national level, but began in the great Province of Saskatchewan. There was no painful gridlock, no death panels, not even one teabagger. Instead, the successes of Saskatchewan were simply emulated by every other province until every Canadian citizen was covered. If your idea is good enough, someone will steal it. Canada seems to understand a cornerstone of American political tradition better than we do: states’ rights. Of course I’m not talking about the poll tax and Jim Crowe kind of “states’ rights,” what I mean is the idea of using our states as political “laboratories.” This is a long cherished American political tradition, allowing the states to try out new policies for themselves instead of on the national level, allowing the rest of the country to observe how successful a new policy could be. If this were done effectively, our Congress wouldn’t have to debate the hypothetical impacts of some new policy, but instead could say: “It worked for California, it could work for America.” Now of course just because something works in one state doesn’t mean it would necessarily work for all of the states, but why not allow those states to run more of their own policy if it works for them? Why not allow Californians to legalize marijuana if they want to, does someone from Tennessee really care? (more…)

Last November, moments before then-Senator Barack Obama broke the ceiling of 270 electoral votes to clinch the presidency, major news networks had announced that Virginia had moved into the Democratic column for the first time since LBJ defeated Goldwater in 1964, sending shockwaves through the party. Many of us believed that Obama’s revolutionary candidacy had brought about a new, unbreakable majority, best exemplified by an impressive seven-point victory in the Old Dominion.

But for most Democrats, last November seems like a decade ago. The Virginia Governor’s race, seen by many pundits as a referendum on President Obama’s increasingly unpopular domestic policies, has taken a drastic turn for the worse. Moderate Democrat State Sen. Creigh Deeds, ahead early in the race, now trails his Republican opponent Bob McDonnell by 8.8 points according to the RealClearPolitics average. (more…)

There is a Supreme Court case coming up the political pipeline that could result in all of us saying goodbye to the Senator from California and Congressman from Texas, and welcoming the Senator from Hewlett-Packard and Congressman from Exxon-Mobil. This case, Citizens United v. Federal Election Committee, is being used as a springboard by special interests to eliminate all limits on campaign finance laws and unleash corporate money into our government. (more…)

You don’t have to go far on a college campus to hear someone railing against corporations in America. “Corporations control our government!” is a fairly common sentiment among liberal crowds, but does anyone really know what that means? Why are corporations able to apparently control our legislators and the sausage-factory of congress more than any of us? Before this starts, lets define a corporation. A corporation is an entity created by the state that gives the people who create the corporation limited liability and in return, the state grants them a charter in order for them to “serve the public good.” I’m not talking about all businesses right now, only those that have been chartered by the government to have limited liability in return for a commitment to serve the public good, and thus should be held to a higher standard than all other businesses. So how did we get to a point where corporate power seems to seep through every pore of our government? I give you the Supreme Court case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company. (more…)

A common meme heard from right-wing commentators on Sunday morning talk shows is that “Europe is moving to the right,” presumably because they hate their inept government healthcare and don’t want to suffer under high tax rates anymore. This is simply a lie, and can be proven by looking at the actions of “conservative” leaders of Europe and the party platforms of those “conservative” parties in Europe. One of my personal favourite examples is that of Angela Merkel and the Christian Democratic Union in Germany.

While it’s easy for Pat Buchanan to say that the election of Angela Merkel means that German people hate their healthcare and “socialist” government, her government’s actions speak otherwise. During the depths of the recession in the past year, in order to curtail layoffs, the Merkel run German government offered to pay 90% of worker’s wages if those companies kept them in work…how conservative of her. France’s Nicolas Sarkozy, another supposed “conservative” made similar moves in France, and a few months ago we saw that both Germany and France were officially out of recession and had growing economies again. Apparently when government ensures workers the right to a job and makes sure that they’re making real goods, wealth is created…who knew? Meanwhile, we’re left with unemployment and right wing conservatives in this country who would hardly let President Obama pass a public works bill. (more…)

Politico reported today that Bob Wexler is resigning to take a policy position in the Obama administration. With a few minutes or research, I discovered that President Obama has yet to appoint an Ambassador to Israel. As a strong advocate for Israel and pro-peace organizations such as Seeds of Peace, he would be an ideal fit for this position. Will this happen? I think it’s likely, and worth giving up a Congressional seat for. For now, it’s just speculation.

When the Indian embassy was bombed in Afghanistan, the Indian government did not respond by launching air strikes, or sending troops, or railing against Muslim extremism. Instead, they invested in building Afghani infrastructure, including a power grid and road system…

The book “Three Cups of Tea” by Greg Mortenson describes the author’s experiences in Afghanistan after he was injured in a climbing accident and was taken in by a small village to heal. During his time in the village he learned the local traditions and customs, mainly that the Afghani culture is one of hospitality, meaning that if you are given assistance or aid you incur an obligation to return the favour. When he was healed he paid back that debt by raising money to build schools in rural/tribal areas, especially for girls who receive little to no education. Mortenson’s experiences showcase the sort of policy that we should have in Afghanistan: we should be building schools in villages instead of bombing them. There is a time and place for conventional war, but history proves that Afghanistan (the “Graveyard of Empires”) is not the place for it. The key to understanding a hospitality culture is that it is also a retribution culture, as in, if you build schools for them they will like you, and if you bomb their uncle they might want to kill you.

The problem in America is that our foreign policy has for too long been run by frightened people, who say that the strong way to implement foreign policy is bombing villages and sending our young men and women to die, instead of doing the real strong and principled work of creating peace in Afghanistan. A couple weeks ago Newsweek ran a cover article that featured interviews with Taliban leaders, the main message of which being that these people will not give up, and killing their brothers and sisters will only embolden them. One of the men lived a very happy life selling vegetables until his father, a relatively peaceful Muslim cleric, was beaten and killed by American soldiers. He immediately joined a Taliban insurgent group to kick out the “invaders.” This word is crucial, it shows that we are being viewed through the lens of revenge culture, not through the lens of hospitality culture as we intended. We cannot achieve our goals in Afghanistan if we are seen as invaders, and we will be seen as invaders even more if President Obama sends more soldiers into Afghanistan. The debate shouldn’t be over whether to send more soldiers or not, it should be over whether we send an army of contractors (the non-Blackwater kind) and builders, or to cut our losses and get every American man and woman out while we can. On this point I find myself slightly undecided, but what I know for sure is that more fighting men and women isn’t the right answer. I think they’ve given enough anyway.