President Obama and Mitt Romney both made statements after the Supreme Court’s ruling earlier today on the President’s health care reform.
Here is Obama’s statement:
Here is Romney’s statement:
The health care law is going to be a big issue, to say the least, in the remaining four months of the presidential election campaign.
U.S. Supreme Court today presented President Obama with an historic victory when it declared his health care reform constitutional.
The victory came with smallest possible majority, 5 votes to 4, and it came, highly sensationally, by the very conservative Chief Justice John Roberts upholding the law when he sided with the four liberal justices. Usually, the role as the swing vote is played by Justice Anthony Kennedy, but this time Kennedy went hard against health care law and joined Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas in the minority.
When the decision came down this morning, it quickly became clear that the major issue in the law– so-called individual mandate , i.e., that everyone must buy health insurance or pay a fine, was constitutional in that the mandate can be regarded as a kind of a tax, and Congress, of course, has the right to impose new taxes.
While the Democrats were jubilant, the Republicans, who were expecting a “no” from the Court, were deeply disappointed and the House Republican majority immediately declared to continue the fight to repeal the health care law. It remains to be seen how the Supreme Court’s decision will affect the presidential election in November, although the ruling seems to a big boost for Obama, and the Democrats, in general. A ‘no’ in the Supreme Court would have meant an enormous loss of prestige for Obama from which it would have been very difficult to recover.
The Supreme Court ruling is also a victory for America, the only major Western democracy without universal health coverage for its citizens. Obama’s health care reform does not institute universal coverage, but 30 million more American will now have health insurance so it constitutes a major step towards health insurance and health care for all Americans.
Here is the Supreme Court ruling with the warning that it is long, almost 200 pages!
“Capitalism is a great system, I love it, but it exploits the weak”, says one of the main characters in the stunning documentary “Detropia” currently playing at the premier documentary film festival “Silverdocs” in Silver Spring, Maryland, just outside Washington, DC.
The film, about the impact on an entire city and its inhabitants of the brutal side of American capitalism, is the grim tale of the decline of Detroit, from a glamorous city with nearly 2 million inhabitants and a thriving automotive industry, to a city in tragic decline that has lost over half its population and with a higher percentage of poor people than any other American city.
Made by young documentary filmmakers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, the film is currently shown in packed theaters at the festival on the premises of the American Film Institute. Their film creates the same heartbreaking impressions as the two young French photographers Yves Marchand’s and Romain Meffres’ book “The Ruins of Detroit”, which I wrote about last year.
And the conclusion is also the same: how could America let this happen?
Here is a front page article in today’s New York Times about my old home country and about @Sweden — “Swedes’ Twitter Voice: Anyone, Saying (Blush) Almost Anything.”
Funny place, Sweden, the paper seems to think. Check it out!
Republican Governor Scott Walker’s easy victory in yesterday’s recall election in Wisconsin means that the conservative efforts to kill off the American labor movement will not only continue but likely increase in intensity.
It means that Walker is the only governor in three American recall elections that survived a recall effort.
It means that conservatives win recall elections, this time by successfully defending a conservative governor, while in the two previous recalls, 1921 and 2003, defeating sitting liberal governors.
It means that corporate money, allowed after the Supreme Court’s Citizen United ruling, which came in from out-of-state in huge amounts to Governor Walker, does make a difference. Walker outspent his challenger Tom Barrett 8 to 1.
It means little for the general election in November in Wisconsin, where Barack Obama beat John McCain in 2008 by 14 per cent. The Democratic presidential candidate has won in Wisconsin in every election since 1988, albeit narrowly in 2000 and 2004, and the State seems a pretty safe for Barack Obama in the fall.
The exit polls in Wisconsin confirm this. They show Obama beating Mitt Romney 51 to 44, and that 18 per cent of those who voted for Walker support Obama. Writes Michael Tomasky at the Daily Beast:
“Folks, if ever there was a day in the history of Wisconsin polling that should have shown Romney within spitting distance of Obama–or even ahead, given the obviously massive pro-Walker turnout–it should have been yesterday, which was the biggest and most enthusiastic day for Republican politics in recent state history. Yes, Romney should have been ahead, or at the very least tied. Instead, the same electorate that gave Walker this huge win said it would reelect the president handily.”
But the Republicans certainly hope that Walker’s victory will have national implications for the fall. And they will, not the least for American labor, which lost an important battle. As Jonathan Chait writes on his blog in New York Magazine:
“Walker’s win will certainly provide a blueprint for fellow Republicans. When they gain a majority, they can quickly move to not just wrest concessions from public sector unions but completely destroy them, which in turn eliminates one of the strongest sources of political organization for the Democratic Party. And whatever backlash develops, it’s probably not enough to outweigh the political benefit. Walker has pioneered a tactic that will likely become a staple of Republican governance. Fortune favors the bold.”
For the hard-pressed American trade union movement, with a membership of only 7 percent in the private sector while 36 per cent of public sector workers are union members, today’s recall election in Wisconsin is a moment of do or die.
Wisconsin’s voters will decide whether the Republican Governor Scott Walker, elected governor in November 2010, is fired or allowed to serve out his term after ramming through a new law revoking the collective bargaining rights of the State’s public employees.
The battle in Wisconsin has been going on for over a year and has mobilized all the political forces in the State, where in 1959 as the first State ever, the right to collective bargaining for public employees was established. In the process, Wisconsin has become the epicenter of the fierce ideological struggle in today’s American politics.
Only three times in history have American voters gone to the polls in so-called recall elections to decide on whether the State’s governor will be fired or get to continue to serve out the term.
The first recall election took place in North Dakota in 1921, when voters ousted Governor Lynn Frazier. Then followed California in 2003, when Democrat Gray Davis was voted out, paving the way for Arnold Schwarzenegger as the new governor. In both states, the recall elections were the result of angry conservative Republicans, while the Wisconsin election is the result of an angry union movement. All three elections resulted in fierce battles between the right and the left — in the first two, the right won.
The campaign has become the most expensive ever in Wisconsin. Over 63 million dollars have been spent in the fight between Walker and the challenger, Democrat Tom Barrett, Mayor of Wisconsin’s largest city, Milwaukee. Lots of money has rolled in from across the country. Of Walker’s 30 million dollars, two-thirds come from wealthy conservative forces outside of Wisconsin, while Barrett is far behind with 4 million, a quarter of which from out of state.
Walker leads in the polls by an average of 6.7 percent, so he is favored to win, according to the New York Times blog FiveThirtyEight. An unusually high turnout is expected, about 65 percent, which usually favors the Democrats. But in Wisconsin, voters on both sides so motivated that it is difficult to say who will benefit from voter mobilization.
A Walker victory will encourage the Republicans leading up to the presidential election in November, but President Obama’s victory in Wisconsin is probably not in danger. He currently leads over Mitt Romney in the polls by an average of 4.7 percent. Obama won there in 2008 and in Wisconsin, the Democratic candidate has won in every presidential election since 1988.
On the road again…
…and once again to Pittsburgh, the old steel city among the green hills of western Pennsylvania, where old friends live in a city of optimism and hope.
From Mount Washington, where the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers come together and become the Ohio River, the view of downtown Pittsburgh from the steep mountain as dramatic as in any other American city. Below, some twenty bridges in all directions cross the rivers between the city’s many neighborhoods. Among the skyscrapers downtown are some of America’s finest buildings, from the days of Carnegie, Heinz, and Mellon to modern masterpieces by Philip Johnson and others, and to native sons Andy Warhol’s and August Wilson’s museum and cultural center, respectively.
And across the rivers lie the splendid ballparks for the Steelers and the Pirates, important landmark in a city of passionate sports fans.
Carson Street on Pittsburgh’s south side reminds me of Haight Street in Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco’s old hippie neighborhood, with its galleries, rock clubs and small shops. Old mixes with new, former philosophy professor Edward Gelblum’s lovely old bookstore “City Books” with young Jake Nickman’s “Buddy’s Brew on Carson” – the finest of beer stores.
Coming into the city, along Monongahela River in Mon Valley, where the steel mills lie as giant monuments to a bygone era, side by side, mile after mile, in the small towns of McKeesport, Braddock, and Homestead, with furnaces long since cold and chimneys without smoke, the optimism and sense of hope might be a bit hard to understand. At its peak, the steel mills employed well over 100,000 workers, but in the crisis of the 70s and 80s, most of them lost their jobs, and Pittsburgh’s steel industry is only a fraction of what once was.
Today, Pittsburgh is the prime example that the old industrial cities in the “Rust Belt” can come back. But the recovery is based on something completely different than the steel, on distinguished universities and hospitals – biotech, green technology, health care, finance, and research. Today, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s (UPMC) logo is seen on top of what once was U.S. Steel’s 64-story headquarters, and with its 50,000 employees, the university hospital is western Pennsylvania’s largest employer.
It’s a city of history and character, and of excitement. I will return, again.
Here is a good read about the economies in Sweden and the countries in northern Europe, where, “befuddling Americans, economic growth is robust, and unemployment is lower than in most other European countries.”
So writes Stockholm-based businessman Daniel Sachs under the headline “The Nordic Model’s Economic Appeal” in the latest issue of “The Globalist.”
“The Nordic model leads to one great benefit: it promotes adaptability and openness to change…Openness to change is a core aspect of the competitiveness of the Nordic economies.”
Sachs, who was educated in Sweden and at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, writes that he believes in “incentives” but then uses a word seldom, if ever, used in the U.S. debate — “solidarity.”
“What the Nordic experience shows is that ‘individual’ incentives can be soundly balanced by solidarity on a ‘societal’ level. Solidarity makes good economic sense. Solidarity — that is, risk-sharing — is a key ingredient in being open to change…These aspects of the Nordic model — the relationship between state and individual, generous social protection, freedom of the individual and high levels of trust — all help foster risk-taking and openness to change.”
In turn, he ends, this has led to high levels of trust, fairness and transparency, low transaction costs and low corruption – all reasons why he as a businessman likes the Nordic model.
Anything to learn here?
