“What worries me: time and time again,” writes Brendan Skwire in the Philadelphia Weekly about the circuses which are currently passing for Democrats’ town hall meetings on healthcare, “[is that] the needs of the stupid and disingenuous are not only treated as valid concerns, but as the greatest concerns.” Well, yes. This being the United States, one of the most gleefully anti-intellectual nations on earth, stupid people aren’t pathetic dolts to be pitied or perhaps sent to a reeducation camp. They’re the shining example we’re supposed to look up to.

Obamacare, whatever it is or was going to be once the President saw fit to share it with the public, is dead. That it would die a dog’s death was predictable, so predictable that I predicted it a couple of months ago. “No one is going to call their Congressman, much less march in the streets, to demand action for a half-measure–or, in this case, a quarter-measure,” I wrote then. “Without public pressure to push back against drug and insurance company lobbyists, nothing will change.”

The latest Rasmussen Poll shows most Americans are against Obama’s vague “public option,” 53 percent to 42.

There was public pressure, all right-from the right. Limbaugh and Hannity stirred up a hornet’s nest of frenzied morons, throwing around words like “fascist” and “Nazi” as if they didn’t know that they referred to themselves, which of course they didn’t. They turned out, bigger and louder than the president’s supporters, who were handicapped by (a) not exactly knowing what they were being shouted over about and (b) not really caring that much because there wasn’t much in it for them.

I pay $800 a month for private health insurance. That’s $10,000 a year, or about $14,000 in pre-tax earnings. If Obama had proposed European-style socialized medicine, wherein doctors and nurses are government employees, I would have stood to have been $14,000 a year richer. As for workers who get healthcare insurance through their employers, Obama could have required all bosses to pass along the savings by giving their employees a $14,000-a-year raise.

$14,000 is definitely motivation enough to pry me away from my usual Netflix evening in order to outshout the rednecks at my local town hall. How about you?

Now Obamacare is dead. The good part is that, because it wouldn’t have made much difference in our lives anyway, it doesn’t much matter.

Still, there are political lessons to be learned:

Lesson One: Violence Works. The more rambunctious right-wingers showed up with assault rifles outside halls where the president was speaking. Can you imagine what would have happened if lefties had brought their AK-47s to anti-Iraq War rallies? The cops would have killed them. Their friends and relatives would have disappeared into some Bushie secret prison in Romania. Or maybe the Bush junta would have gotten so scared the war would never have happened.

The death of half-assed Obamacare is merely the latest evidence of a fact that the left, in thrall to militant pacifism, refuses to see. Only two means exist in order to effect change: violence, or the credible threat thereof. The charged atmosphere of imminent violence permeating the town hall meetings intimidated liberal wimps from the grassroots to the Oval Office.

Lesson Two: Incrementalism Never Works. The Bush Administration, which barely controlled the Senate and was widely viewed as electorially illegitimate, managed to ram through dozens of pieces of radical, sweeping legislation and start two wars from thin air. Obama’s Democrats have a presidential mandate, a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and a commanding lead in the House-yet they still haven’t pushed through a single significant bit of liberal legislation. The difference is strategy: Republicans under Karl Rove shored up the base, declared themselves the only “real” Americans and ran roughshod over the Democrats.

Obama, on the other hand, didn’t so much lose the healthcare debate to right-wing attack ads as he argued with himself so long that he ended up winning-and therefore losing. Rather than demand socialized medicine, he proposed a “public option,” whatever that meant, in a doomed bid to gain political cover by convincing a few moderate Republicans to break ranks. Now he’s given that up in favor of some “co-op” thing. Forgotten in all the noise: there hasn’t even been a vote on a healthcare bill.

Lesson Three: It’s Easier to Motivate Stupid People. Democrats, led by their professorial boy president, thought they would win the healthcare battle with logic and charts. Republicans understood the truth: there are more stupid Americans than smart ones, and it’s easy to stir them up by threatening to take away their guns and kill God (socialism).

Old-school Democrats like FDR and LBJ didn’t bother to appeal to Americans’ non-existent intellects. They rammed through laws that improved people’s lives. People like to live better. So they stuck. Obama should have done the same.

Obama Still Trying to Define Victory in Afghanistan

What if they gave a war and nobody knew why?

When the U.S. began bombing Afghanistan in October 2001, America’s war aims were clear: capture or kill Osama bin Laden, overthrow the Taliban government, deny Al Qaeda training camps and a safe haven.

Of course, two out of three of these goals were based on lies; both bin Laden and most of Al Qaeda’s camps and personnel were in Pakistan, not Afghanistan. There was also a fourth unmentioned war aim, a lie of omission: lay an oil and gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan via Afghanistan.  Still, the Bush Administration deserves credit for articulating clear goals—metrics, in bureaucratese—against which success or failure could be measured.

President Obama has rebranded Bush’s Afghan War as his own. Afghanistan, Obama said during the campaign, was the war America should be fighting. And so we are. Obama has dispatched tens of thousands of additional troops to the “graveyard of empires,” many redeployed from Iraq.

But, unlike Bush, he still hasn’t told us why we’re in Afghanistan.

When he took office, Obama’s stated war aims were muddled: propping up U.S. puppet Hamid Karzai, training local Afghan police, and reducing opium cultivation. The first two led to no clearly-enunciated end; how long would they take? If we really cared about number three, we might as well have put the Taliban—who’d had some success in getting rid of opium—back in charge.

Obama reads the polls, which reflect increased skepticism about his Afghan war. So, in May, Obama attempted a reset. “We have a clear and focused goal,” he assured a White House audience: “to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future.”

In other words, back to Bush.

Here again, let’s give Bush credit. He never floated war aims in a country—namely Pakistan—which we weren’t actually fighting in.

Sure, the CIA is firing missiles from remote-control drone planes at every Pakistani wedding party in sight. But Al Qaeda will never be defeated with air power alone. As things stand, Pakistan remains a heavily-funded U.S. client state—not an enemy with which we are at war. There are no U.S. ground troops in Pakistan. Until that changes, Obama’s aim in Afghanistan (and Pakistan) remains <span style=”font-style:italic;”>prima facie</span> unachievable.

Leaders who clearly articulate the aims of a war—and secure domestic political support for those aims—may weather the inevitable ebbs and flows of warfare. FDR did this after Pearl Harbor, ensuring that Americans accepted the sacrifices required to defeat Germany and Japan during the difficult years of 1942 and 1943, when the outcome remained uncertain. A lack of clear, widely supported war aims, on the other hand, almost inevitably results in a collapse of interest—much less support—on the home front.

The stated aim of the Vietnam War—containing communism—was vague and contained no definable end. If you do define the goalposts, you’re forced to concede defeat if you fall short: Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq began with a clearer goal, getting rid of Saddam’s WMDs, but turned sour when Americans discovered Saddam didn’t have any. Bush was smart enough to declare “Mission Accomplished.” It might have worked, too, if only he’d yanked out U.S. troops and blamed the ensuing chaos on unruly and ungrateful Iraqis.

Ten and a half time zones away from Washington, American soldiers are fighting and dying in Afghanistan. Afghan resistance forces are fighting and dying too, protecting their homeland. And Afghan civilians are dying in the crossfire. But, eight years into this misbegotten war, “the Obama Administration is [still] struggling to come up with a long-promised plan to measure whether the war is being won,” reports <span style=”font-style:italic;”>The New York Times</span>.

Proposals for such measurements range from the insipid to the absurd. The “number of operations in which Afghan soldiers are in the lead,” for example, will be tabulated and reported to a typically credulous media. Whether said sorties are effective won’t matter. Also being considered is “an opinion poll to determine Afghan public perception of official corruption at national, provincial and district levels.” Never mind that most Afghans live in areas controlled by violent local warlords, who may not be big fans of free speech among their subjects.

When you can’t tell whether you’re winning or losing, you’re losing.

(Ted Rall, President of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, is author of the books “To Afghanistan and Back” and “Silk Road to Ruin.”)

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL

“At Will” Employment Laws Unproductive, Barbaric

You’ve seen how TV covers the immediate aftermath of a disaster. A tornado or earthquake or whatever has just ripped through a community. Rubble and bodies lie scattered. Asked to comment, stunned survivors weep and confirm the obvious—they’ve lost everything.

Then the reporter’s wrap-up: “Now, the rebuilding begins. Back to you, Bob.”

The impulse to clean up and move on after taking a hit is universal. But the underlying assumption—that everything will eventually be OK again—is uniquely American. Taking office four months into the economic collapse, President Obama played to our belief that gumption cures everything, saying in his inaugural address: “Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.”

They don’t roll that way in Yugoslavia, where Serbs still seethe over a battle fought in 1389. Nor in the Middle East, where displaced Palestinians hold on to deeds and house keys for homes they lost 60 years ago. People nurse resentments. They long for revenge.

Here in the United States, the overall unemployment rate is over 20 percent and rising. Corporations collected trillions of dollars in government bailouts, while ordinary workers got nothing. Millions of people are losing their homes to foreclosure, yet the president has yet to lift a finger to help them. Meanwhile, companies like Goldman Sachs are paying their officers obscene bonuses. How come there’s no social unrest? Where’s the outrage?

As the little girl in the “Addams Family” movie said: “Wait.” In the meantime, Americans’ tolerance for getting fired and becoming homeless owes everything to that trope: “Now, the rebuilding begins.”

Lost your job? Hit Monster.com and cut-and-paste your résumé until your index finger turns sore. Lost your house to foreclosure? Your brother-in-law’s couch will see you through. And those CEOs who profited from your misery? Admit it—you’re jealous. You’d do the same if you were in their position.

But there’s a rub. A big rub. After a layoff, the rebuilding doesn’t begin.

“On average, most workers do not recover their old annual earnings” after being laid off, Till von Wachter, a Columbia University economist, tells <span style=”font-style:italic;”>The New York Times</span>.

Wachter studied the income histories of workers who lost their jobs a quarter-century ago, during the Reagan recession of 1981-1985. The results were startling. “Even 15 to 20 years later, most on average had not returned to their old wage levels,” he found.

The former layoff victims now earn 15 to 20 percent less than comparable workers who had not gotten canned. “One of the main reasons for the [lower pay], according to economists, is that workers who endure a layoff are more likely to be laid off again,” reports the <span style=”font-style:italic;”>Times</span>.

“What tends to happen is the worker has to start over with a new employer, sometimes in a new industry,” explains UC Davis economics professor Ann Huff Stevens. “You’re at the bottom of the totem pole again.”

Many of the people Wachter studied “had been forced to drastically change their lifestyles to cope with lower incomes. Several have struggled with long bouts of unemployment. Some were laid off several times. Many have been forced to lean heavily on spouses’ incomes.”

Layoff victims followed the rules. But it didn’t do any good. During the 1980s and 1990s the rich got richer, the poor got poorer, and the middle class withered away. Now, among industrialized nations, only Russia has a smaller middle class and higher poverty rate than the United States.

Maybe the rest of the world has it right. If Americans began holding grudges against the corporate chiefs and politicians who exploit their labor and rip them off, they wouldn’t have to silently absorb losing their jobs so some rich executive can give himself another raise.

There is a better way: ban layoffs.

Outlawing layoffs would mean getting rid of the brutal concept of “at will” employment. In the U.S., employers can hire and fire you whenever they feel like it. There are limited exceptions. It’s illegal to fire you because of your race or because you refused a sexual advance, for example. But you have to hire a lawyer and go to court to enforce that law. In general, employers hold all the cards.

In France, on the other hand, almost every worker receives a written employment contract. Almost all French employment contracts are for an indefinite term. You can keep your job as long as <span style=”font-style:italic;”>you</span>-—not your boss—feel like it.

Firing an employee in France is hard. “Dismissals are subject to stringent, and often bureaucratic, procedural statutory constraints,” says the Parisian law firm Triplet & Associés. “Redundancies, or layoffs on economic grounds, are subject to separate and complex procedural and substantive constraints particularly in the case of multiple dismissals…It is extremely easy and at virtually no cost for an employee to start litigation against his (ex) employer before separate Labor Courts…It is rare that the plaintiff be other than an employee and just as rare that claims be dismissed with no award whatsoever being made against the employer.”

French workers don’t have to dig out of nearly as many layoffs. When they do, they’re entitled to generous severance packages.

Don’t these pro-worker protections allow slackers to keep their jobs? Don’t they hurt the economy? Nope. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, hourly productivity is higher in France than in the United States.

It’s time to eliminate the barbaric wage slavery of “at will” employment. Only then can the rebuilding—of the American middle class—truly begin.

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL