The Cloward-Piven Strategy, Part I: Manufactured Crisis

By Jim Simpson | Sunday, August 31st, 2008 at 2:10 pm

Liberals self-righteously wrap themselves in the mantle of public spirit. They ardently promote policies promising to deliver the poor and oppressed from their latest misery — policies which can only find solution in the halls of government. But no matter what issue one examines, over the last fifty plus years, the liberal prescription has almost always been a failure.

Why is this so? Why does virtually every liberal scheme result in ever-increasing public spending while conditions seem to get continually worse? There are a number of reasons:

1. The programs usually create adverse incentives. This is especially true in so-called “anti-poverty” programs. The beneficiaries find government subsidies a replacement for, rather than a supplement to, gainful employment and eventually become incapable of supporting themselves. This in turn creates a dependent culture with its attendant toxic behaviors which demand still more government “remedies.”
2. The programs create their own industry, complete with scads of “think tanks” and “experts” who survive on government research grants. These are the aptly named “Beltway Bandits.”
3. They create their own bureaucracies, whose managers conspire with interested members of Congress to continually increase program funding, regardless of merit.
4. Members of Congress secure votes and campaign donations by extorting them from beneficiaries of such programs, either through veiled threats — “vote for me or those mean Republicans will wipe out your benefits” — or promises of still more bennies.

In short, all develop a vested interest in the program’s survival. But if the result is always more and more government, of government, by government, and for government, with no solution in sight, then why do liberals always see government as the solution rather than the problem?

Similarly, liberals use government to promote legislation that imposes mandates on the private sector to provide further benefits for selected groups. But the results are even more disastrous. For example, weighing the laws or stacking the courts to favor unions may provide short term security or higher pay for unionized labor, but has ultimately resulted in the collapse of entire domestic industries.

Another example is health care. The Dems are always trying to impose backdoor socialized medicine with incremental legislation. Why do you suppose American healthcare is in such crisis? Answer: the government has already become too deeply involved. For example, many hospitals are closing their doors because they are overwhelmed with the burden of caring for indigent patients, illegal immigrants and vagrants who must, by law, be admitted like everyone else, despite the fact that they cannot pay for services. Read about it here — Destroying Our Health Care. The net result is reduced availability of care for everyone, exactly the opposite of what liberals claim to want.

To further complicate things, liberal jurists and lawyers have created new theories of liability that utilize the legal system as a means to further redistribute income. This too, has resulted in higher costs and prices in affected industries, higher insurance costs, or in some cases, complete elimination of products or services.

Liberals’ endless pursuit of “rights” for different groups also does little but create increasing divisions in our society. Liberal policy pits old against young, men against women, ethnic and racial groups against one another, even American citizens against illegal aliens, all in the name of “equality.” The only result is anger, tension and equal misery for all.

How does any of this improve our lot?

Finally, when companies relocate overseas to avoid the high cost of unionized labor and heavy domestic regulation, liberals sarcastically excoriate them for “outsourcing” America. Yet, when it comes to certain domestic industries, liberals in Congress suddenly become free marketers and choose to buy from overseas contractors rather than domestic suppliers. This happened most recently with a huge military contract being outrageously awarded to the heavily subsidized European consortium, AIRBUS, over America’s own Boeing. Since liberals claim to be so determined to “save the American worker,” what gives?

You have to take a step further back and ask some fundamental questions. Why is the liberal public policy record one of such unmitigated disaster? I mean, even the worst batter hits one occasionally. No one bats zero. No one that is, except liberals.

Prior to the Republican takeover in Congress in 1994, Democrats had over fifty years of virtually unbroken power in Congress with substantial majorities most of the time. With all the time and money in the world — trillions spent — they couldn’t fix a single thing, not one. Today’s liberal has the same complaints, and the same old tired solutions. Can a group of smart people, studying issue after issue for years on end, with virtually unlimited resources at their command, not come up with a single policy that works? Why are they chronically incapable?

Why?

When things go bad all the time, despite the best efforts of all involved, I suggest to you something else is at work — something deeper, more malevolent.

I submit to you that it is not a mistake, the failure is deliberate!

There is a method to the madness, and the method even has a name: the Cloward-Piven Strategy. It was first elucidated in the 1960s by a pair of radical leftist Columbia University professors, Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven:

The strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis…. …the “Cloward-Piven Strategy” seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.

[Part II of this article will explore those organizations created to implement the Cloward-Piven strategy and their ties to the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama.]

The Complete Cloward-Piven Series

The Cloward-Piven Strategy, Part I: Manufactured Crisis
The Cloward-Piven Strategy, Part I — print copy
The Cloward-Piven Strategy, Part II: Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis
The Cloward-Piven Strategy, Part II — print copy
The Cloward-Piven Strategy, Part III: Conspiracy of the Lemmings
The Cloward-Piven Strategy, Part III — print copy
Hate Crimes Legislation — Back Door Censorship

The Cloward/Piven Strategy of Economic Recovery
By Nancy Coppock
Using borrowed money for a band-aid bailout of the economy should seem backwards to most people. However, it likely is a planned strategy to promote radical change. Those naively believing that President Obama is simply rewarding his far-left base, and will then move to the political center, must wise up.

The assumption that Obama will need the nation to prosper in order to protect the 2010 mid-term election incorrectly assumes that he esteems free market capitalism. He does not. Rather than win through superior ideas and policies, the Democrat plan for success in the mid-term elections is to win by destroying political opposition.

Obama adheres to the Saul Alinksy Rules for Radicals method of politics, which teaches the dark art of destroying political adversaries. However, that text reveals only one front in the radical left's war against America. The Cloward/Piven Strategy is another method employed by the radical Left to create and manage crisis. This strategy explains Rahm Emanuel's ominous statement, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste."

The Cloward/Piven Strategy is named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. Their goal is to overthrow capitalism by overwhelming the government bureaucracy with entitlement demands. The created crisis provides the impetus to bring about radical political change.

According to Discover the Networks.org:

Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, wrote Cloward and Piven, activists should work to sabotage and destroy the welfare system; the collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the nation... [Emphasis added.]


Making an already weak economy even worse is the intent of the Cloward/Piven Strategy. It is imperative that we view the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan's spending on items like food stamps, jobless benefits, and health care through this end goal. This strategy explains why the Democrat plan to "stimulate" the economy involves massive deficit spending projects. It includes billions for ACORN and its subgroups such as SHOP and the Neighborhood Stabilization Program. Expanding the S-Chip Program through deficit spending in a supposed effort to "save the children" only makes a faltering economy worse.

If Congress were to allow a robust economy, parents would be able to provide for their children themselves by earning and keeping more of their own money. Democrats, quick to not waste a crisis, would consider that a lost opportunity.

The Cato Institute reports that the plan will harm a faltering economy, intentionally causing increased job losses leading to increased demands for the aforementioned programs. Even the jobs to be created are set apart to render social justice, not economic revival. Robert Reich believes new infrastructure jobs should not go to white construction workers. Meanwhile, workers at Microsoft, IBM, Texas Instruments, and the retail market find themselves experiencing the life of the welfare poor.

If highly educated and trained workers continue to lose jobs and business falters as a whole, where will these jobless workers go? Could this be construed as revolutionary social reorganization that puts the underachiever above the achiever? Where is the future economic strength when jobless professionals collect welfare and unemployment while dreaming of a minimum wage job? For whites, there's not even the hope of a good paying construction job.

Because these programs are financed with deficit spending, the effect of the Cloward/Piven Strategy becomes doubly destructive. Talk about a perfect storm! The Democrat stimulus plan is a mechanism whose goal is the destruction of the traditional American way of life. It is bitter irony that the American taxpayer will actually fund the destruction of his own ability to live according to the values of our Founding Documents. It is not alarmist to identify this situation as a coup d'etat.

As the flow of money from the top of the economy dries up, job losses and mortgage busts will mount exponentially. The Democrat stimulus plan provides for welfare expansion but not for a robust economy that creates high paying jobs. Is this what Obama means when he warns, "It's going to get worse before it gets better?" If we are not bailing out corporate America so they can regain profitability, we must conclude Obama is working toward another end goal. Recognizing these attack methods reveals the only logical response -- an unwavering wall of "No!"

Nancy Coppock publishes The Jackalope's Voice.

The American Spectator : Obama's Rationing Man

Special Report

Obama's Rationing Man

By Philip Klein on 5.13.10 @ 6:09AM

While much of Washington is focused on President Obama's Supreme Court pick, Republicans are gearing up for a confirmation battle over another Obama nominee who promises to put health care back in the spotlight.

At issue is Obama's choice to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Donald Berwick, a Harvard professor with a self-professed love affair with Britain's socialized health care system. In his writings and speeches, Berwick has defended government rationing and advocated centralized budget caps on health care spending.

"Cynics beware, I am romantic about the (British) National Health Service; I love it," Berwick said in a July 2008 speech at England's Wembley stadium. "All I need to do to rediscover the romance is to look at health care in my own country."

While Berwick would not have the authority to impose a British health care system on the United States in one fell swoop, as head of CMS, he would be running both Medicare and Medicaid. Given that the two programs alone account for more than one out of every three dollars spent on health care in America (all government programs combined account for 47 percent), private players tend to follow CMS's lead. Berwick himself has made this point.

"(G)overnment is an extraordinarily important player in the American health care scene, and it has inescapable duties with respect to improvement of care, or we're not going to get improved care," he said in a January 2005 interview with Health Affairs. "Government remains a major purchaser.… So as CMS goes and as Medicaid goes, so goes the system."

There are two basic visions for how to contain the growth of health care spending. The free market approach would give individuals control over their health care dollars, with the idea that it would encourage more shopping that will drive down costs and increase quality as has happened in every other aspect of the consumer-based economy. But the other approach, employed by nations such as Britain, is to have the government ration care to meet a global budget.

President Obama rejected the market-based approach, and sought to drastically expand insurance coverage while reducing health care costs. But according to a report by CMS's chief actuary, the new law will actually increase health care costs. That leaves rationing of care based on a bureaucratic notion of the common good as the remaining option for containing skyrocketing spending, and it's an outcome that Berwick himself once predicted would be necessary to achieve universal coverage.

"(T)he Holy Grail of universal coverage in the United States may remain out of reach unless, through rational collective action overriding some individual self-interest, we can reduce per capita costs," Berwick wrote in an article for Health Affairs he co-authored in 2008.

He went on to write that, "The hallmarks of proper financial management in a system… are government policies, purchasing contracts, or market mechanisms that lead to a cap on total spending, with strictly limited year-on-year growth targets."

On a number of occasions, Berwick has praised Britain's National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE), a body of experts that advises the government-run health care system on how to allocate medical spending based on cost-benefit analysis. Among other decisions, they have ruled against the use of cancer-treating drugs and put a dollar value on the final six months of human life.

"NICE is extremely effective and a conscientious, valuable, and -- importantly -- knowledge-building system," Berwick said in an interview last June in Biotechnology Healthcare. "The fact that it's a bogeyman in this country is a political fact, not a technical one."

The national health care law that President Obama signed in March will greatly expand the role of CMS by adding an estimated 15 million beneficiaries to Medicaid. In addition, the law contains a number of initiatives, to be spearheaded by the Secretary of Health and Human Services in conjunction with the head of CMS, to provide incentive-based pay to doctors and hospitals based on performance. This builds on the comparative effectiveness research provision of last year's economic stimulus package. While none of these measures will have the same sway as NICE does in Britain, taken together, they will move America in a NICE-like direction, especially with Berwick at the helm.

In 2003, Berwick signed on to an open letter in Health Affairs, called "Paying for Performance: Medicare Should Lead." (Among his co-signers was Nancy-Ann DeParle, the current White House health care czar.) "Our recommendation-to the executive branch; to Congress; to employers and health plans; and to hospitals, physicians, nurses, and other health professionals -- is that payment for performance should become a top national priority and that Medicare payments should lead in this effort, with an immediate priority for hospital care," the letter read. It went on to say that the CMS administrator's successors must continue to show "aggressiveness and commitment" to the cause, noting that, "A major initiative by Medicare to pay for performance can be expected to stimulate similar efforts by private payers…"

The idea of paying doctors and hospitals for delivering better quality health care and of offering guidance on best practices seems benign enough. As the letter put it, "Quality is not an issue for partisanship." The problem arises when government bureaucrats or expert panels are in the position of judging quality, performance, and best practices which get applied across a broad and diverse population.

As cardiologist Sandeep Jauhar argued in a September 2008 New York Times op-ed, pay for performance initiatives can cause unintended consequences such as doctors overprescribing certain medications that are deemed effective and carry bonuses. He also recounted how an initiative in the early 1990s to give report cards to doctors performing coronary bypass surgery prompted doctors to cherry pick patients to avoid the most severely ill cases that could jeopardize their grades.

The problem with any uniform medical guidance is that what's good for the "average" patient may not be right for any given patient.

The irony in all of this is that Berwick, at times, has eloquently argued for what he called an "extremist" patient-centered approach to health care, in which hospitals wouldn't restrict visiting hours or force patients to wear gowns. As he said in a speech to the American Board of Internal Medicine in 2008 of the experience of a patient at a hospital: "That's what scares me: to be made helpless before my time, to be made ignorant when I want to know, to be made to sit when I wish to stand, to be alone when I need to hold my wife's hand, to eat what I do not wish to eat, to be named what I do not wish to be named, to be told when I wish to be asked, to be awoken when I wish to sleep."

Yet the term "patient-centered" is typically used by supporters of a free market approach to health care who argue for more individual choice and consumer empowerment. It's hard to think of a health care system in the world that dehumanizes patients more than Berwick's beloved British system.

In March 2009, a report found that up to 1,200 died as a result of "appalling standards of care" at just one hospital in Britain's NHS. The Telegraph reported that "patients (were) left for hours in soiled bedclothes.…" In addition, "Patients described one ward as a 'war zone' and said people were often left in Stafford's A&E (Accident and Emergency) for hours covered in blood and without pain relief, even though they had serious injuries. Others were left without food or drink, leading some to reportedly drink from vases when thirsty."

In November, another report estimated that up to 400 patients a year died at two other hospitals, with similar conditions that included, according to the Telegraph, "lack of basic nursing skills, curtains spattered with blood on wards, mould in vital equipment and patients being left in A&E for up to ten hours."

During the health care debate, Obama dismissed any attempt by Republicans to liken his vision to the British system. But Berwick's nomination, which will have to be approved by the Senate, provides Republicans with ample fodder to make the connection.

On Wednesday night, Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell took to the floor for a half-hour along with fellow Republican Sens. Pat Roberts and John Barrasso to rip into Berwick's positions, in what could be seen as the opening salvo in the nomination battle.

"Many of us are alarmed by the nominee's focus on the British health care system," McConnell said, and criticized Berwick for "applauding a system where care is denied, delayed, or rationed."

McConnell also suggested that Obama intentionally delayed the Berwick appointment until after the passage of the health care law, because announcing his CMS pick during the debate would have confirmed Republican charges that Democrats were intent on rationing care.

Berwick will have to first pass muster with the Finance Committee, which oversees Medicare and Medicaid. A hearing has yet to be scheduled.

Though the nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court is likely to garner more attention, the Berwick pick could produce more fireworks. In Berwick's case, there's a long paper trail detailing his disturbing views on a wide range of matters relevant to the position he's seeking.

Philip Klein is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent. You can follow him on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/Philipaklein

The American Spectator : Obama's Hackneyed Hypocrisy

Streetcar Line

Obama's Hackneyed Hypocrisy

By Quin Hillyer on 5.13.10 @ 6:08AM

Who the hell does Barack Obama, this morally preening, arrogant hypocrite, think he is? His vacuous, demagogic shtick about helping the "people" fight "the powerful" is getting so old from his lips, and already was so hackneyed even before he expropriated it, that it's a miracle that even he himself can say it anymore without getting nauseated by his own oleaginous triteness.

Obama spewed the same old effluvia Monday when introducing Elena Kagan as his nominee for the Supreme Court. Let us count the inanities and dishonesties in his introductory remarks:

"Behind law there are stories -- stories of people's lives as shaped by the law, stories of people's lives as might be changed by the law…" Of course, here he is quoting Kagan herself, but it's still absurd. Of course the law affects people's lives: That's why we have elections to choose legislators to write the laws, and it's why we give trial judges at least a modicum of discretion in meting out sentences when laws are violated. But even that discretion is governed by the laws as laid out by the legislative process. The appeals courts exist to ensure that those laws are applied the same way to every litigant regardless of what their personal stories are, not because of their personal stories.

"During her time in this office, she's repeatedly defended the rights of shareholders and ordinary citizens against unscrupulous corporations." What nonsense. A corporation is a set of shareholders. When a corporation pays a judgment, its shareholders are the ones who pay. When the corporation loses money, it is the shareholders who lose the money. When a lawsuit supposedly on behalf of shareholders is successful, the "payout" gets taken from the corporate accounts, which devalues the stock of, yes, the shareholders themselves. Setting the shareholders against the corporation is asking Peter to fight not Paul, but Peter himself. It's like boxing one's own image in a mirror -- except that when you throw a punch, both the mirror and the puncher get hurt. So too in any match between a corporation and its shareholders: It's nothing more than self-mutilation.

"In a democracy, powerful interests must not be allowed to drown out the voices of ordinary citizens." This is a truism. Too bad he doesn't abide by it. Barack Obama has spent his whole adult life doing the bidding of powerful interests. At Harvard, that bastion of the powerful elite, he kissed up to enough factions to become president of the law review while actually writing next to nothing. In Chicago, he settled in tony Hyde Park with the help of a highly suspect sweetheart deal on his property, got an adjunct gig at the powerful University of Chicago, cultivated leftist elitists like Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn who sat on wealthy nonprofit boards, and chose the church of the wild and hateful Rev. Jeremiah Wright because it gave him a powerful entrée into the poor black community that he otherwise would lack if he spent all his time in Hyde Park. He himself noted that he didn't really join a church until he appreciated "the power of the African-American religious tradition to spur social change." This all was of a piece with his training as an acolyte of Saul Alinsky, who taught that power is its own justification. In the state legislature, Obama became a creature of powerful party leader and eventual Senate President Emil Jones. As Senator and president, he has consistently sided with the most powerful interests in his party, almost never lifting a finger without the approval of the powerful labor bosses (SEIU President Andy Stern was the first year's most frequent outside visitor to the White House) or of the plaintiffs' attorney lobby. He negotiated in secret with the pharmaceutical lobby; he was the second biggest campaign contribution recipient from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac sources, which helps explain why Fannie and Freddie keep getting more taxpayer loot while Obama's administration cracks down on everyone else. Of course, Obama also is all too cozy with the only major investment bank that made out like a bandit in the past several years, Goldman Sachs. Meanwhile, ordinary citizens were ignored, steamrolled over, insulted, and threatened while Obamacare was passed by hook and crook.

Then again, it is beyond obnoxiousness, especially by means of judges whose powers are designed to be limited, for denizens of Hyde Park and New York's Upper West Side by way of the Harvard dean's office, to even pretend to have special insight into, and power to determine, what is in the best interests of those Kagan called "the despised and disadvantaged." The Obamites are the people who savaged "Joe the Plumber," and this is the president who while campaigning claimed that a preference for limited government was merely the province of those who "get bitter [and] cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Barack Obama posing as the representative of the people against the powerful is like Tiger Woods feigning virginity while crusading against promiscuity.

Finally on the absurd-o-meter, Obama said that Kagan's confirmation would create "a court that would be more inclusive, more representative, more reflective of us as a people than ever before." Huh? It would mean that every single justice is a product of either Harvard Law or Yale Law. It would mean the last three appointees were undergraduate alumni of Princeton. It would mean that both of Obama's appointees were women who grew up in New York City, as did the only other woman on the court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg. (Two other justices were born in nearby Trenton, New Jersey.) It would mean there is not a single Protestant on the court, only one southerner, and only two who attended undergraduate school away from the Northeastern seaboard.

In truth, none of this should matter: Quality and qualifications are a matter neither of geography nor religion, and bean-counting-identity-politics by arbitrary criteria should be anathema in a republic. But if Obama is going to try to sell Kagan on such flimsy criteria, the least he could do is to choose criteria that aren't so self-evidently untrue. Kagan would make this court not "more reflective of us as a people than ever before," but instead even more reflective of cloistered, supercilious, East Coast academia.

Then again, that's a perfect reflection of Obama's whole political milieu: East Coast academia, married to Chicago-style power politics rampant with rank dishonesty, backed by demagogic nonsense. Here's hoping all good Americans keep clinging to guns and religion, and to our American limited-government traditions, while focusing our antipathies in a way that keeps these dangerous Obamites at bay.

Quin Hillyer is a senior editorial writer at the Washington Times and senior editor of The American Spectator.

Health care fails small businesses - The Boston Globe

Jim Stergios and Amy Lischko
The Boston Globe
Health care fails small businesses
By Jim Stergios and Amy Lischko
May 12, 2010


NOT LONG AFTER President Nixon took the unprecedented step of imposing peacetime wage and price controls, the American people learned a basic economic lesson: Artificial controls don’t work unless underlying costs are controlled.

Four decades later, the Patrick administration is imposing controls on small business health insurance rates. The move will prove to be little more than an election-year reprise of Nixon’s failed effort.

The Commonwealth’s 2006 health care reform was supposed to help address rising health insurance costs for small businesses. It hasn’t — and small businesses are paying the price.

The Commonwealth Connector, an independent authority meant to act as an insurance plan clearinghouse, was established to provide real choices and information needed to evaluate options. In theory, an informed and robust marketplace would bend the cost curve and get more of the working poor and lower middle class insured.

The theory is right, but the implementation has failed in two important ways.

First, the Connector focused all its energy on providing nearly free products to the indigent. In contrast, the Connector’s board seemed almost uninterested in market-rate products for small business employees.

The Connector revenues come from selling plans, and selling nearly free products was the path of least resistance. Unsurprisingly, 90 percent of the Connector’s operating revenue has come from the fee it earns for state-subsidized plans.

The lack of focus on small businesses is evident. The Connector took three years to make information about provider networks and participating primary care providers for small businesses available on its website. It took over two years to launch a small employer pilot program; in more than a year it attracted just 65 businesses and has now been replaced by a new program that offers only seven plans.

Implementation also fell short when the Connector chose to build a top-down bureaucracy rather than leverage the broker and private market community. The quasi-governmental Connector has a $40 million annual budget and 45 employees earning annual salaries that average $100,000. Its board is heavily weighted toward government officials and unions.

Paternalistic fears about “confusing’’ people have led the Connector to over-regulate and minimize consumer choice. Instead of engaging the private market by providing unique products, it has rejected or failed to renew products, resulting in offerings that simply duplicate ones already privately available.

This bureaucratic setup cannot provide choices that contain costs to employees and owners of small businesses — nor help address today’s double-digit increases in small business rates.

Utah, the only other state with a health care exchange, demonstrates that there was another path forward.

Utah’s Health Insurance Exchange was started with a $600,000 appropriation and has no board and just two employees. The Exchange provides a technology backbone that enables private entities — brokers and businesses — to take advantage of consumer-based options.

Consistent with the Exchange’s mission to promote small business growth, it is part of the Governor’s Office of Economic Development. Private sector partners provide a significant amount of unpaid policy advice on what businesses and employees need.

Fewer than 1,500 small business employees receive coverage through the Connector. In Utah, with a far smaller population, about 55,000 small business employees have purchased health insurance through the Exchange. It offers 66 plans from a number of carriers, including the largest ones in the state.

The focus on business growth and input from the private market has helped promote other reforms. In its first year, the Exchange developed a database that compares the cost of care across all providers; four years after its establishment, the Connector still hasn’t developed a similar tool. Unlike Massachusetts, Utah has also passed tort and medical malpractice reform.

We applaud the Connector’s success in insuring the indigent. But it has failed to provide small businesses with affordable, diverse choices.

Small business owners cannot afford 25 percent annual hikes to already astronomical health insurance premiums, especially in this economic climate. Price controls will do nothing to control underlying forces that drive health insurance premium increases. And unless Massachusetts does the hard work of getting costs under control, Patrick could be remembered as the guy who tried to prop up the levy as the floodwaters surged in.

Jim Stergios is executive director and Amy Lischko is senior fellow on health care at Pioneer Institute.

Say Anything » In Defending Obamacare, Justice Department Doesn’t Draw Distinction Between Health Care And Health Insurance

In Defending Obamacare, Justice Department Doesn’t Draw Distinction Between Health Care And Health Insurance
Rob Port • May 12, 2010
Holder Testifies On Justice Dep't Budget Before Senate Appropriations Cmte

The Obama administration has begun its legal defense of the health bill, and their opening salvo claims that the bill is in keeping with the Constitution because health care is interstate commerce of the sort covered by the commerce clause.

But there’s a problem. The legal challenge to the bill is based on the federal government’s regulation of health insurance. Not health care. That’s a distinction with a big difference.

Washington (CNN) – The Obama administration has launched its first legal defense of the new health care law, insisting the federal government has the power to force citizens to have health insurance.

“The health care industry operates in interstate commerce and there is a long recognized federal interest in its regulation,” said a legal brief filed in federal court in Detroit, Michigan, by the Justice Department.

The health care industry may be interstate commerce, but health insurance is not. By federal law. In fact, one reform conservatives offered as an alternative to the effective nationalization of health insurance crammed through Congress by Democrats was to allow Americans to buy health insurance coverage across state lines. Which would constitute interstate commerce.

Something that, again, is not going on with health insurance policies now.

But even if health insurance was interstate commerce, one basis for the legal challenge has to do with whether or not the federal government can compel commerce. Meaning is it constitutional for the federal government not to regulate interstate commerce but rather require Americans to engage in interstate commerce at the threat of a fine.

That is, again, a distinction with a big difference.

Rev. James Martin, S.J.: Want to Experience God? You Already Have: Incompletion

Rev. James Martin, S.J.

Catholic priest and author of The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything
Posted: April 28, 2010 03:15 AM


Want to Experience God? You Already Have: Incompletion
What's Your Reaction:


"I could believe in God if I only experienced God."

If I had a dollar for every time I've heard that sincere and heartfelt statement, I'd be a rich guy. (Well, actually I'd have to give the money to my religious community since I take a vow of poverty, but you get the general idea.)

Many people today -- seekers, agnostics, atheists -- find it difficult to believe in God for many reasons. First is the suffering they see in the world. How could a good God let people suffer, especially, they say, children and victims of natural disasters? Second is the evil and mendacity that they see in religion, like the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic church.

But the third reason is that they feel that they have had no real experience of God. Even many otherwise religious people feel that they've never had a "direct" experience of God.

I think many people have, but they're just not aware of it, or they dismiss it as "something else." Or they're not encouraged to talk about it in spiritual terms.

One of the most basic ways of experiencing God is experiencing a desire for God. Desire often gets a bad rap in spiritual circles, but it is an essential part of spirituality, because desire is a key way that God's voice is heard in our lives. Our deepest desire, planted within us, is our desire for God. And it's God who plants those desires within us, as one way of drawing us to the divine.

Maybe you're surprised by the notion that everyone has an innate desire for God. If you're an agnostic, you might believe that intellectually but haven't had experiences yourself. If you're an atheist, you might flat-out disbelieve it.

So for the disbelieving, the doubtful, and the curious (and everyone else, for that matter), let's look at how these holy desires manifest themselves in everyday life.

What do they look like? What do they feel like? How can you become aware of your desire for God?

Over the next few days and weeks I'm going to talk about some of the most common ways that our holy desires reveal themselves in our daily lives. As you read, you might take a moment and consider which have been at work in your own life.

The first is incompletion.

Many of us have felt the feeling that, even though we have had some success and happiness, there is something missing. Way back in the 1960s Peggy Lee sang "Is That All There Is?" In the 1980s U2 sang "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For." We all feel that restlessness, that nagging feeling that there must be something more to life than our day-to-day existence.

Feelings of incompletion may reflect dissatisfaction with our daily lives and point us to something that needs to be rectified. If we are trapped in a miserable job, a dead-end relationship, or an unhealthy family situation, it might be time to think about serious change. Dissatisfaction doesn't have to be stoically endured: it can lead to a decision, change, and a more fulfilled life.

Yet no matter how happy our lives are, part of this restlessness never goes away, this restlessness that provides a tantalizing glimpse of our longing for God. "Our hearts are restless until they rest in you," wrote Augustine, 1,500 years before Peggy Lee and Bono. This longing is a sign of the longing of the human heart for God. It is one of the most profound ways that God has of calling us to the divine.

In the echoes of our restlessness, we can hear God's voice.

Sometimes those feelings are stronger than simple incompletion and feel more like an awful emptiness. One writer called this emptiness within our hearts the "God-shaped hole," the space that only God can fill.

Some people try to fill that hole with money, status, or power. They think: If only I had more -- a better job, a nicer house -- I would be happy. Yet even after acquire these things, people may still feel incomplete, as if they're chasing something that they can never catch. We race ahead, straining to reach the goal of fulfillment, yet it always seems just out of reach. The prize of wholeness is elusive. Emptiness remains.

That was my experience early in my business career. After graduating with a business degree from the Wharton School in the early 1980s, I thought that once I landed a good job, pumped up my bank account, and filled my closet with elegant suits, I would be happy. But even with a job, money, and the best suits I could afford, I wasn't satisfied. Something was missing. It would take me several years to figure out what it was.

One of the best reflections on this topic comes from the twentieth-century spiritual writer Henri Nouwen. Nouwen, a Dutch Catholic priest and psychologist, wrote a perceptive book called The Selfless Way of Christ, in which he examined this relentless quest to fill the empty hole in our lives. He observes that those rushing to fill that hole already sense that it is a useless quest:

Somewhere deep in our hearts we already know that success, fame, influence, power, and money do not give us the inner joy and peace we crave. Somewhere we can even sense a certain envy of those who have shed all false ambitions and found a deeper fulfillment in their relationship with God. Yes, somewhere we can even get a taste of that mysterious joy in the smile of those who have nothing to lose.

In their drive to fill this hole, others are pulled toward addictive behaviors, anything to fill them up: drugs, alcohol, gambling, shopping, sexual addictions, compulsive eating. But those addictions lead only to a greater sense of disintegration, a more cavernous emptiness, and, eventually, to loneliness and despair.

This hole in our hearts is the space from which we call to God. It is the space where God wants most to meet us. Our longing to fill that space comes from God.

And it is the space that only God can begin to fill.

Reflection Questions:

1) Do you want to believe in God? Could you see this very desire as one way that God has of drawing you closer?

2) When was the last time you felt the need for "something more"? Where were you? What was the experience like? Is it possible that the source of this desire is an inborn longing for God?

3) Is it strange to think about God calling you through desire? Why couldn't God use this desire as a "calling" of sorts?

4) What keeps you from linking your desire for God with a "calling" from God?

5) What are your deepest desires? Do they include God?

In our next post we'll look at "common longings" and "everyday connections" as pathways to God.