Intervention

If there is one thing that both fundamentalists and reformers will agree on, it’s that the Iranian people’s long march to freedom began during the Constitutional Revolution or Mashruteh of 1906-1909. Today, both sides insist, that they’re the true defenders of the mashruteh legacy.

Iran’s constitutionalist uprising was the first significant revolution of the 20th century. It was an expression of rage against a corrupt and bankrupt monarchy. Much like today’s movement, it didn’t demand an overthrow of the prevailing system, but it unified the country’s merchants, intellectuals, and clerics in demanding nothing more than an elected parliament and a constitution. It resulted in the principles of equality, personal rights, universal public education, and freedom of the press. It was the first document of its kind in the Middle East, and it has formed the basis of Iran’s political debates ever since.

Initially, Iran’s shah Mohammed Ali tolerated the constitutional movement, but after an assassination attempt in February 1908, he began cracking down, by arresting constitutionalists, declaring martial law, and calling in the fearsome Russian Cossacks to intimidate protesters in the streets of Tehran. In 1908, the Cossacks unleashed a civil war, when they stormed the new parliament building, precipitated a gun battle, and killed several constitutionalists.

Despite demands for tough action from our government, by politicians with close ties to the evangelical Christian movement, Theodore Roosevelt’s State Department refused to take sides.

Thousands were starved or beaten into submission, and Iran’s brave little experiment with democracy appeared dead. However, eventually, our country found itself in an excellent position to reap the rewards of its neutrality. Iranian constitutionalists recognized the contrast between America’s hands-off attitude and the heavy-handed interference by Russia and Britain. They were impressed by this apparently unselfish new power on the world stage, and interpreted its silence as a form of support. When the constitutional upheaval was over, its leaders turned to America to help them build a new Iran.

Power may come from the barrel of a gun but freedom does not. The struggle continues in Iran and in America.

Obstruction

For over five months, Obama has faced nothing but attacks and obstruction from Republicans, because they have no ideas for improving peoples lives. Their only hope is to obstruct the his agenda, with a plan that includes:

1. Deny the Democratic Party another vote in the Senate, by bank rolling Norm Coleman’s effort to drag on the Minnesota Senate race.  They expected to slow down the Obama agenda, but it didn’t work.

2. Most congressional Republicans avoid attacking Obama, because he’s so very popular.  Instead, they’ve used Dick Cheney as an attack dog to sling mud at Obama. Cheney has no political future and nothing to lose.

3. Congressional Republicans have been attacking Obama on the economy by accused him of being a big spender. The Republican party has not accepted responsibility for the faulty intelligence, which resulted in the invasion of Iraq. That war has already cost us a $1 trillion and could eventually cost $3 trillion. They have the audacity to attack Obama for spending money to fix the economic catastrophe left behind by Bush administration.

4. The Republican party is using the bailouts to make the government the bogeyman. Although, the money loaned to GM and Chrysler is pocket change compared to the money that has been thrown at Wall Street, Republicans have attacked the auto bailout. They’re attempting to scare Americans by warning, look out for socialism. 

5. Republican have tried to vilify Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi by connecting her to torture. It’s important to recognize, that even if Pelosi had been briefed on torture, she couldn’t say anything about, because it was a national security matters.  

Republican have constantly promoted anti-government feeling. Now, they have an opportunity to pass health care reform, which can improve the conditions of people’s lives for generations to come. They won’t, because it has never been about big or small government, it’s always been about more effective government, which only the Democratic Party can deliver.

Spiraling Costs

An essential step to economic recovery is controlling the spiraling cost of health care. We’re spending over $2 trillion a year on health care, which is nearly 50 percent more per person than the next most costly nation. Nevertheless, every day more Americans become uninsured and the quality of care is lessened.

The cost of our health care is a threat to our economy and a serious burden on our families and businesses. Some doctors spend 20 percent of each day supervising a staff explaining insurance problems to patients, completing authorization forms, and writing appeal letters. It’s a routine, which has become distracting and taken time away from patient care.

Nationwide, over one third of small businesses have reduced healthcare benefits and another third have had to drop their workers’ coverage altogether. A major cause of the financial problems at General Motors and Chrysler were the huge costs of providing health care for their workers. As those costs grew those companies became less profitable, and competitive with automakers around the world.

The cost of our present health care is unsustainable. Health care reform is a necessity, because the cost of inaction is rapidly increasing. Failure to act soon will see premiums increasing, benefits eroding, and the rolls of the uninsured swelling to include more than a million additional Americans.

If we fail to act, one out of every five dollars we earn will have to be spent on health care within a decade. In thirty years, that trend that will mean lost jobs, lower take-home pay, shuttered businesses, and a lower standard of living for all Americans.

Federal spending on Medicaid and Medicare will grow over the coming decades by an amount almost equal to the amount our government currently spends on our nation’s defense.

Some Day

Long ago, abolitionist Frederick Douglass said: “A struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it maybe both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.”

President Dwight Eisenhower cautioned: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” Originally, he called it ‘the military-industrial-legislative complex,’ but cut out the word ‘legislative’ from the final draft, when asked to do so by Congress. Today, members of Congress continue to depend on war profiteers to contribute heavily to their re-election campaigns and provide jobs for their constituents.

Eisenhower observed: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hope of its children.”

Eisenhower speculated: “If men can develop weapons that are so terrifying as to make the thought of global war include almost a sentence for suicide, you would think that man’s intelligence and his comprehension... would include also his ability to find a peaceful solution.” And, it was Eisenhower, who warned: “We must achieve both security and solvency. In fact, the foundation of military strength is economic strength.”

Ike said: “When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war.” and “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.”

But, Ike’s most insightful remark was: “I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of their way and let them have it.” Our military-industrial-legislative complex, better get out of the way.

Perhaps, Eisenhower considered warmongers to be naive, fools and an embarrassment to this country, as I do.

History Lesson

On 6/16/09, Richard Averett of Otego had the following letter to the editor published in the Oneonta Star.

“Since 1945, the party that claims to support ‘small government’ and ‘fiscal responsibility’ actually spent more money and grew bigger governments than did Democratic presidents. In fact, Republican administrations (excluding Eisenhower) have outspent Democrats and driven up the national debt as a percentage of GDP by a whopping 3-to-1 ratio!

“When Reagan took office in 1981, the national debt was $930 billion, and when he left it had mushroomed to nearly $2.9 trillion, turning the largest creditor nation into the largest debtor nation in just eight short years. Reagan’s fiscal strategy was based on cutting taxes for the wealthy and increasing military spending while selling treasury bonds to foreign investors to pay the bills.

“Following in his mentor’s footsteps, George H.W. Bush ran up the national debt by almost $2 trillion, and until his son took office, he held the record for the largest annual budget deficit in U.S. history (more than $500 billion).

“In 1993, Clinton inherited a national debt of around $4.5 trillion and a budget deficit of $290 billion. By raising taxes on the wealthy (and cutting them for the middle-class and poor) and reducing military spending, the U.S. debt was cut by $360 billion and was $2.4 trillion less at the end of his presidency than had been projected when Clinton took office.

“When George W. Bush took the oath in 2001, he inherited a budget surplus of more than $230 billion with a national debt of around $5.6 trillion, and he immediately cut taxes for the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans by $630 billion, thus eradicating Clinton's surplus by year's end. Bush also raided Social Security to the tune of $150 billion to make the 2004 deficit appear smaller. By the end of Bush's presidency, the national debt had doubled to more than $10 trillion.”

The AMA

Historically, the American Medical Association has sought to block health care reform in this country.  The term socialized medicine, originated with the AMA, when they were trying to defeat FDR’s efforts to put medicine into the Social Security Act in the 1930s. 

In 1961, the group hired actor Ronald Reagan to be spokesman for their campaign to block Medicare. The script read: “My name is Ronald Reagan.  One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine.  All of us can see what happens once you establish the precedent that the government can determine a man’s working place and his working methods.  And behind it will come other federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country.  Until one day we will awake to find that we have socialism.” 

Recently, President Obama spoke to the American Medical Association. He said: ”When you hear the naysayers claim that I’m trying to bring about government-run health care, know this: they’re not telling the truth.  What a public option will help do, is put affordable health care within reach for millions of Americans.” 

Sixty percent of doctors claim, that they support a public option for health insurance, and the AMA might come on board in favor of a public plan. However, most likely the public plan would have to be so watered down, that it would be ineffective. 

The clout of the AMA has greatly diminished, and it no longer represents the vast majority of the physicians worldwide. Some member of the AMA are so resentful of the fact, that their group continues to be against a public option that they’re thinking of quitting the organization. 

Incited by Hate

In April, the extremism and radicalization branch of the Department of Homeland Security’s threat analysis division released its report on potential threats from right-wing extremists. That report stated: “Despite similarities to the climate of the 1990s, the threat posed by lone wolves in small terrorist cells is more pronounced than in past years.  In addition, the historical election of an African-American president and the prospect of policy changes are proving to be a driving force for right-wing extremist recruitment and radicalization.”

Conservative radio talk show host, Roger Hedgecock insisted: “If the Bush administration had done this to left-wing extremists, it would be all over the press as an obvious trampling on the First Amendment rights of folks and dissent.” Actually, in January, there was a warning about left-wing extremists. It was issued by the Obama administration, but both reports were begun under Bush.

Homeland Security Secretary, Janet Napolitano responded: “We do not exist to infringe, impinge or invade anybody’s Constitutional rights of free speech, of free assembly or anything else like that. We exist to protect the country against the homeland (sic) consistent with the United States Constitution. And so in there is where that product was created and what it was designed to do.”

Nevertheless, Secretary Napolitano was called before the House Homeland Security Committee and ranking Republican, Peter King, demanded that she further apologize for the report about right-wing extremist. Hate filled rhetoric keeps ratcheting up, and we seem to have forgotten, that Army veteran Timothy McVeigh, was incited by hate speech. Reportedly, the recent shooting of three Pittsburgh police officers by a man influenced by racist ideology and fears of gun confiscations. In early June, we saw two fatal shootings in which the prime suspects were clearly motivated by extreme right-wing political views, which the Homeland Security report had warned about. The killing of a guard at the Holocaust Museum, by James Von Brunn and the assassination of Dr. George Tiller in Kansas could embolden others, who are already on the edge.