Rage - Explained

The Rage Is Not About Health Care

By FRANK RICH

Published: March 27, 2010

THERE were times when last Sunday’s great G.O.P. health care implosion threatened to bring the thrill back to reality television. On ABC’s “This Week,” a frothing and filibustering Karl Rove all but lost it in a debate with the Obama strategist David Plouffe. A few hours later, the perennially copper-faced Republican leader John Boehner revved up his “Hell no, you can’t!” incantation in the House chamber — instant fodder for a new viral video remixing his rap with will.i.am’s “Yes, we can!” classic from the campaign. Boehner, having previously likened the health care bill to Armageddon, was now so apoplectic you had to wonder if he had just discovered one of its more obscure revenue-generating provisions, a tax on indoor tanning salons.»

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Frank Rich

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But the laughs evaporated soon enough. There’s nothing entertaining about watching goons hurl venomous slurs at congressmen like the civil rights hero John Lewis and the openly gay Barney Frank. And as the week dragged on, and reports of death threats and vandalism stretched from Arizona to Kansas to upstate New York, the F.B.I. and the local police had to get into the act to protect members of Congress and their families.

How curious that a mob fond of likening President Obama to Hitler knows so little about history that it doesn’t recognize its own small-scale mimicry of Kristallnacht. The weapon of choice for vigilante violence at Congressional offices has been a brick hurled through a window. So far.

No less curious is how disproportionate this red-hot anger is to its proximate cause. The historic Obama-Pelosi health care victory is a big deal, all right, so much so it doesn’t need Joe Biden’s adjective to hype it. But the bill does not erect a huge New Deal-Great Society-style government program. In lieu of a public option, it delivers 32 million newly insured Americans to private insurers. As no less a conservative authority thanThe Wall Street Journal editorial page observed last week, the bill’s prototype is the health care legislation Mitt Romney signed into law in Massachusetts. It contains what used to be considered Republican ideas.

Yet it’s this bill that inspired G.O.P. congressmen on the House floor to egg on disruptive protesters even as they were being evicted from the gallery by the Capitol Police last Sunday. It’s this bill thatprompted a congressman to shout “baby killer” at Bart Stupak, a staunch anti-abortion Democrat. It’s this bill that drove a demonstrator to spit on Emanuel Cleaver, a black representative from Missouri. And it’s this “middle-of-the-road” bill, as Obama accurately calls it, that has incited an unglued firestorm of homicidal rhetoric, from “Kill the bill!” to Sarah Palin’s cry for her followers to “reload.” At least four of the House members hit with death threats or vandalism are among the 20 political targets Palin marks with rifle crosshairs on a map on her Facebook page.

When Social Security was passed by Congress in 1935 and Medicare in 1965, there was indeed heated opposition. As Dana Milbank wrote in The Washington Post, Alf Landon built his catastrophic 1936 presidential campaign on a call for repealing Social Security. (Democrats can only pray that the G.O.P. will “go for it” again in 2010, as Obama goaded them on Thursday, and keep demanding repeal of a bill that by September will shower benefits on the elderly and children alike.) When L.B.J. scored his Medicare coup, there were the inevitable cries of “socialism” along with ultimately empty rumblings of a boycott from the American Medical Association.

But there was nothing like this. To find a prototype for the overheated reaction to the health care bill, you have to look a year before Medicare, to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Both laws passed by similar majorities in Congress; the Civil Rights Act received even more votes in the Senate (73) than Medicare (70). But it was only the civil rights bill that made some Americans run off the rails. That’s because it was the one that signaled an inexorable and immutable change in the very identity of America, not just its governance.

The apocalyptic predictions then, like those about health care now, were all framed in constitutional pieties, of course. Barry Goldwater, running for president in ’64, drew on the counsel of two young legal allies, William Rehnquist and Robert Bork, to characterize the bill as a “threat to the very essence of our basic system” and a “usurpation” of states’ rights that “would force you to admit drunks, a known murderer or an insane person into your place of business.” Richard Russell, the segregationist Democratic senator from Georgia, said the bill “would destroy the free enterprise system.” David Lawrence, a widely syndicated conservative columnist, bemoaned the establishment of “a federal dictatorship.” Meanwhile, three civil rights workers were murdered in Philadelphia, Miss.

That a tsunami of anger is gathering today is illogical, given that what the right calls “Obamacare” is less provocative than either the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or Medicare, an epic entitlement that actually did precipitate a government takeover of a sizable chunk of American health care. But the explanation is plain: the health care bill is not the main source of this anger and never has been. It’s merely a handy excuse. The real source of the over-the-top rage of 2010 is the same kind of national existential reordering that roiled America in 1964.

In fact, the current surge of anger — and the accompanying rise in right-wing extremism — predates the entire health care debate. The first signs were the shrieks of “traitor” and “off with his head” at Palin rallies as Obama’s election became more likely in October 2008. Those passions have spiraled ever since — from Gov. Rick Perry’s kowtowing to secessionists at a Tea Party rally in Texas to the gratuitous brandishing of assault weapons at Obama health care rallies last summer to “You lie!” piercing the president’s address to Congresslast fall like an ominous shot.

If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It’s not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver — none of them major Democratic players in the health care push — received a major share of last weekend’s abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan “Take our country back!,” these are the people they want to take the country back from.

They can’t. Demographics are avatars of a change bigger than any bill contemplated by Obama or Congress. The week before the health care vote,The Times reported that births to Asian, black and Hispanic women accounted for 48 percent of all births in America in the 12 months ending in July 2008. By 2012, the next presidential election year, non-Hispanic white births will be in the minority. The Tea Party movement is virtually all white. The Republicans haven’t had a single African-American in the Senate or the House since 2003 and have had only three in total since 1935. Their anxieties about a rapidly changing America are well-grounded.

If Congressional Republicans want to maintain a politburo-like homogeneity in opposition to the Democrats, that’s their right. If they want to replay the petulant Gingrich government shutdown of 1995 by boycotting hearings and,as John McCain has vowed, refusing to cooperate on any legislation, that’s their right too (and a political gift to the Democrats). But they can’t emulate the 1995 G.O.P. by remaining silent as mass hysteria, some of it encompassing armed militias, runs amok in their own precincts. We know the end of that story. And they can’t pretend that we’re talking about “isolated incidents” or a “fringe” utterly divorced from the G.O.P. A Quinnipiac poll last week foundthat 74 percent of Tea Party members identify themselves as Republicans or Republican-leaning independents, while only 16 percent are aligned with Democrats.

After the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, some responsible leaders in both parties spoke out to try to put a lid on the resistance and violence. The arch-segregationist Russell of Georgia, concerned about what might happen in his own backyard, declared flatly that the law is “now on the books.” Yet no Republican or conservative leader of stature has taken on Palin, Perry, Boehner or any of the others who have been stoking these fires for a good 17 months now. Last week McCain even endorsed Palin’s “reload” rhetoric.

Are these politicians so frightened of offending anyone in the Tea Party-Glenn Beck base that they would rather fall silent than call out its extremist elements and their enablers? Seemingly so, and if G.O.P. leaders of all stripes, from Romney to Mitch McConnell to Olympia Snowe to Lindsey Graham, are afraid of these forces, that’s the strongest possible indicator that the rest of us have reason to fear them too.

Whatever it takes....

Homemade helicopter and now this...given the circumstances, how many could conjure up such a contraption under duress? Go to the link for the photo.

HeraldSun

Kept alive with a bike and washer

From: HeraldSun

November 30, 2009

A TEENAGE girl lived on a ventilator made from a washing machine and bicycle when her family couldn't pay for a hospital bed.

Ji Xiaoyan, 15, was taken off her ventilator and discharged from hospital in China as her family could no longer afford to pay her medical bills, The Associated Press reports.

Not to be deterred, however, her family made her a makeshift ventilator from bicycle and washing machine parts, driven by a noisy electric motor. The contraption pumped air into the teenager's lungs through a washer hose plugged into an incision in her throat for more than a month, until the family got donations for treatment.

"I knew my child didn't want to leave this world. We had to save her no matter what," Yang Yunhua, the girl's mother, a farmer in Henan province, told AP. "But we are only poor people."

They were finally able to raise the almost $24,000 needed to treat her for a rare neurological disorder that paralyzed her from the neck down, AP said.

Her father, a teacher, earns only $150 a month, so family and friends contributed most of the rest.

Ji has since recovered partial use of her limbs and no longer needs a ventilator to breathe.

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/lifestyle/the-other-side/teenager-ji-xiaoyan-kept-alive-with-a-bicycle-and-washing-machine/story-e6frfhk6-1225805260710

Clearview Golf Club - More than a Historical Landmark

African-American Golf-Pioneer Bill Powell Dies at 93

(New York Times 1/2/2010)

Bill Powell, who was honored last summer as a racial pioneer in American golf more than 60 years after building a golf course while he was shunned by the sport he loved, died Thursday at a hospital in Canton, Ohio. He was 93.

The cause was complications from a stroke, the P.G.A. of America said.

In August 2009, when the P.G.A. of America held the 91st annual P.G.A. Championship in the Minneapolis area, it bestowed its highest honor, the Distinguished Service Award, on Mr. Powell.

According to the organization, Mr. Powell was the only African-American to build, own and operate a golf course in the United States.

When he returned to the Canton, Ohio, area from England in 1946 after serving in the Army Air Forces, Mr. Powell, a passionate golfer since caddying at age 9, was denied a chance to play on public courses. When he tried to get a bank loan to build his own course, he was rejected.

Jackie Robinson’s breaking of the color barrier in major league baseball was still a year away. The nation’s golf courses, like much of America, remained segregated. And the P.G.A. of America’s bylaws barred nonwhites from membership, a ban that remained in effect until 1961.

But Mr. Powell, a security guard for the Timken bearing and steel company in Canton, was undaunted.

“It’s distasteful when you get turned down,” he told The New York Times in 2009. “You have a little pride. You say the hell with them. You say I’m not going to badger. I’m not going to beg them. So I said I’ll just build a golf course.”

And so he did.

With financial help from two black physicians and a loan from a brother, Mr. Powell bought 78 acres on a dairy farm in East Canton.

Doing most of the labor by hand, helped by his wife, Marcella, Mr. Powell seeded pastures, tossed aside boulders and pulled up fence posts. In April 1948, what he called “this crazy dream” came true. He opened Clearview Golf Club with an initial nine holes and welcomed players of all races.

There were incidents of vandalism in the course’s early years — flag sticks were removed and ethnic slurs scrawled — but the course flourished, and Mr. Powell expanded it to 18 holes in 1978, having bought a total of 130 acres. The Department of the Interior designated Clearview as a national historic site in 2001.

“He was just obsessed,” Mr. Powell’s son, Larry, the Clearview course superintendent, told ABC’s “Good Morning America” in 2009. “He put all his efforts mentally, emotionally and physically into accomplishing his goal.”

When Mr. Powell, bent by age, was honored by the P.G.A. of America, he received congratulations from President Obama and former President George H. W. Bush. And he was accorded four standing ovations by the audience of more than 600 at the Pantages Theater in Minneapolis.

Seated in a large leather chair, he read an acceptance speech that his daughter, Renee, a pioneering figure in women’s pro golf, helped him craft. In it, he explained why he had built Clearview. “I did not want other people who wanted to play the game of golf to have to suffer the indignities that I had,” he said.

He closed with his credo: “Stand firm. Never give up. Never give in. Believe in yourself, even when others don’t.”

William James Powell was born in Greenville, Ala., then moved with his family to Minerva, Ohio, some 20 miles from Canton, as a youngster. He played golf and football in high school and attended Wilberforce University in Ohio, a historically black school, where he was a member of the golf squad.

With few decent job openings for blacks, Mr. Powell was hired at Timken as a janitor, but a few months later he became the company’s first black security guard. Returning to Timken after the war, he worked nights to support his family while building his golf course.

When Renee was 3 years old, Mr. Powell designed a miniature golf club and gave her lessons at Clearview. In 1967, Renee Powell became the second black woman, after Althea Gibson, to play on the Ladies Professional Golf Association Tour. She competed on the tour until 1980 and is now the head pro at Clearview.

In an e-mail message, Renee said of her father, “Early on we found that we had to share him with the world and what a gift he was!” In addition to his son and daughter, Mr. Powell, who lived in East Canton, is survived by twin sisters, Mary Alice Walker, of Akron, Ohio, and Rose Marie Mathews, of Minerva. His wife died in 1996.

The National Golf Foundation presented its Jack Nicklaus Golf Family of the Year Award to the Powells in 1992.

But Mr. Powell cherished a tribute beyond the spotlight as well. In 1997, as he told The Akron Beacon Journal, he was thrilled when two white women drove from Atlanta just to play his course.

“They shook my hand and thanked me,” he said. “They said I have a piece of history here, and they wanted to be a part of it. Can you imagine?”

Finally

OpEd Columnist

Maureen Dowd

November 1, 2009

New York Times

PORT MORTUARY'S PULL

Michelle had gone up to New York to watch the World Series opener with Jill Biden and Yogi Berra.

The president had dinner at the White House with Sasha and Malia. Then, shortly before midnight, he donned a dark overcoat, boarded Marine One and flew to Dover Air Force Base.

On the tarmac in the darkness, he stood at attention, saluting, as 18 flag-draped cases were taken off an Air Force C-17 and carried to Port Mortuary by military teams in camouflage fatigues and black berets.

The Halloween-eve parade of death included casualties from America’s most horrific day in Afghanistan in four years, and its bloodiest month of the war.

It may have been a photo op, another way Obama could show he was not W., the president who started the Iraq war in a haze of fakery and then declined to ever confront the reality of its dead.

Certainly, as Obama tries to figure out how to avoid being a war president when he’s saddled with two wars, he wants as much military cred in the bank as he can get.

But it was also a genuinely poignant moment. It is how we want our presidents to behave, doing the humane thing especially when it’s hard. And Obama, who called it “a sobering reminder” of sacrifices made, signaled to Americans that he will resist blinders as he grapples with the byzantine, seemingly bottomless conflicts he inherited.

Leave it to Liz Cheney, in her continuing bid to out-Cheney her scary dad, to suggest that Obama is a crass publicity-seeker.

“I think that what President Bush used to do is do it without the cameras,” she told a Fox News radio host.

She’s right: There were no press cameras at Dover in the previous administration. There was also no W.

While Bush occasionally visited the wounded and the families of those killed, he never went to Dover to salute the fallen. And he barred any media coverage of it, trying to airbrush the evidence that the wars he started were not the cakewalks he had promised. He did not attend a single funeral. It reflected an emotional and spiritual smallness typical of his administration, like Donald Rumsfeld signing letters to families of dead troops with an autopen and Paul Wolfowitz understating the number of war dead.

Dona Griffin of Terre Haute, Ind., the mother of Army Sgt. Dale Griffin, who was among those Obama saluted, appreciated the president’s presence.

“Unless we can see the images and look into the eyes and the faces of those that are sacrificing, we forget,” she said on “Good Morning America.”

As Obama conducts his White House seminar on war, Dick Cheney accuses him of dithering. He and W. not only didn’t dither before Iraq, they never bothered to ask “Whither?” Debate and due diligence were for sissies. Far more fun playing Jove, heedlessly throwing thunderbolts.

President Obama bore witness just as he is deciding whether to accede to Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s request for up to 80,000 more troops in Afghanistan.

He should keep in mind Cyrus Vance’s warning before President Carter decided to send a Delta team to rescue the Iranian hostages (an ill-fated decision that provoked Vance’s resignation as secretary of state). “Generals will rarely tell you they can’t do something,” he said. “This is a complex damn operation, and I haven’t forgotten the old saying from my Pentagon days that in the military, anything that can go wrong will go wrong.”

Barack Obama, the wunderkind who came out of nowhere to win the presidency, was supposed to push America out of the ditch and into a glittering future. But modernity is elusive when you’re in a time machine to the 14th century called Afghanistan. The tableau of Obama at Dover evoked the last line of “The Great Gatsby:” “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

As Obama comforted families at a tragic moment, he also had to contemplate a tragic dimension of his own presidency: It’s nice to talk about change, but you can’t wipe away yesterday.

Obama wants to be the cosmopolitan president of the world, and social engineer at home to improve the lives of Americans.

But what he had in mind for renovating American society hinged on spending a lot of money on energy, education, the environment and health care. Instead, he has been trapped in the money pits of a recession and two wars.

For now, the man who promised revolution will have to settle for managing adversity.

It is, as Yogi Berra said, “déjà vu all over again.”

Awakening the Dragon?

...perhaps "Enter the Dragon"?

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The New Sputnik Part 1

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: September 26, 2009

Most people would assume that 20 years from now when historians look back at 2008-09, they will conclude that the most important thing to happen in this period was the Great Recession. I’d hold off on that. If we can continue stumbling out of this economic crisis, I believe future historians may well conclude that the most important thing to happen in the last 18 months was that Red China decided to become Green China.

Yes, China’s leaders have decided to go green — out of necessity because too many of their people can’t breathe, can’t swim, can’t fish, can’t farm and can’t drink thanks to pollution from its coal- and oil-based manufacturing growth engine. And, therefore, unless China powers its development with cleaner energy systems, and more knowledge-intensive businesses without smokestacks, China will die of its own development.

What do we know about necessity? It is the mother of invention. And when China decides it has to go green out of necessity, watch out. You will not just be buying your toys from China. You will buy your next electric car, solar panels, batteries and energy-efficiency software from China.

I believe this Chinese decision to go green is the 21st-century equivalent of the Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of Sputnik — the world’s first Earth-orbiting satellite. That launch stunned us, convinced President Eisenhower that the U.S. was falling behind in missile technology and spurred America to make massive investments in science, education, infrastructure and networking — one eventual byproduct of which was the Internet.

Well, folks. Sputnik just went up again: China’s going clean-tech. The view of China in the U.S. Congress — that China is going to try to leapfrog us by out-polluting us — is out of date. It’s going to try to out-green us. Right now, China is focused on low-cost manufacturing of solar, wind and batteries and building the world’s biggest market for these products. It still badly lags U.S. innovation. But research will follow the market. America’s premier solar equipment maker, Applied Materials, is about to open the world’s largest privately funded solar research facility — in Xian, China.

“If they invest in 21st-century technologies and we invest in 20th-century technologies, they’ll win,” says David Sandalow, the assistant secretary of energy for policy. “If we both invest in 21st-century technologies, challenging each other, we all win.”

Unfortunately, we’re still not racing. It’s like Sputnik went up and we think it’s just a shooting star. Instead of a strategic response, too many of our politicians are still trapped in their own dumb-as-we-wanna-be bubble, where we’re always No. 1, and where the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, having sold its soul to the old coal and oil industries, uses its influence to prevent Congress from passing legislation to really spur renewables. Hat’s off to the courageous chairman of Pacific Gas and Electric, Peter Darbee, who last week announced that his huge California power company was quitting the chamber because of its “obstructionist tactics.” All shareholders in America should ask their C.E.O.’s why they still belong to the chamber.

China’s leaders, mostly engineers, wasted little time debating global warming. They know the Tibetan glaciers that feed their major rivers are melting. But they also know that even if climate change were a hoax, the demand for clean, renewable power is going to soar as we add an estimated 2.5 billion people to the planet by 2050, many of whom will want to live high-energy lifestyles. In that world, E.T. — or energy technology — will be as big as I.T., and China intends to be a big E.T. player.

“For the last three years, the U.S. has led the world in new wind generation,” said the ecologist Lester Brown, author of “Plan B 4.0.” “By the end of this year, China will bypass us on new wind generation so fast we won’t even see it go by.”

I met this week with Shi Zhengrong, the founder of Suntech, already the world’s largest manufacturer of solar panels. Shi recalled how, shortly after he started his company in Wuxi, nearby Lake Tai, China’s third-largest freshwater lake, choked to death from pollution.

“After this disaster,” explained Shi, “the party secretary of Wuxi city came to me and said, ‘I want to support you to grow this solar business into a $15 billion industry, so then we can shut down as many polluting and energy consuming companies in the region as soon as possible.’ He is one of a group of young Chinese leaders, very innovative and very revolutionary, on this issue. Something has changed. China realized it has no capacity to absorb all this waste. We have to grow without pollution.”

Of course, China will continue to grow with cheap, dirty coal, to arrest over-eager environmentalists and to strip African forests for wood and minerals. Have no doubt about that. But have no doubt either that, without declaring it, China is embarking on a new, parallel path of clean power deployment and innovation. It is the Sputnik of our day. We ignore it at our peril.

**************************************************************

But, just wait a minute. This story may be more telling....

China’s Mr. Wu Keeps Talking Part 2

By DAVID BARBOZA

Published: September 26, 2009

AT 79, Wu Jinglian is considered China’s most famous economist.

Wu Jinglian helped to create China's market economy, and now he is defending it against conservative hardliners in the Communist Party.

In the 1980s and ’90s, he was an adviser to China’s leaders, including Deng Xiaoping. He helped push through some of this country’s earliest market reforms, paving the way for China’s spectacular rise and earning him the nickname “Market Wu.”

Last year, China’s state-controlled media slapped him with a new moniker: spy.

Mr. Wu has not been interrogated, charged or imprisoned. But the fact that a state newspaper, The People’s Daily, among others, was allowed to publish Internet rumors alleging that he had been detained on suspicions of being a spy for the United States hints that he is annoying some very important people in the government.

He denied the allegations, and soon after they were published, China’s cabinet denied that an investigation was under way.

But in a country that often jails critics, Mr. Wu seems to be testing the limits of what Beijing deems permissible. While many economists argue that China’s growth model is flawed, rarely does a prominent Chinese figure, in the government or out, speak with such candor about flaws he sees in China’s leadership.

Mr. Wu — who still holds a research post at an institute affiliated with the State Council, China’s cabinet — has white hair and an amiable face, and he appears frail. But his assessments are often harsh. In books, speeches, interviews and television appearances, he warns that conservative hardliners in the Communist Party have gained influence in the government and are trying to dismantle the market reforms he helped formulate.

He complains that business tycoons and corrupt officials have hijacked the economy and manipulated it for their own ends, a system he calls crony capitalism. He has even called on Beijing to establish a British-style democracy, arguing that political reform is inevitable.

Provocative statements have made him a kind of dissident economist here, and revealed the sharp debates behind the scenes, at the highest levels of the Communist Party, about the direction of China’s half-market, half-socialist economy.

In many ways, it is a continuation of the debate that has been raging for three decades: What role should the government play in China’s hybrid economy?

Mr. Wu says the spy rumors were “dirty tricks” employed by his critics to discredit him.

“I have two enemies,” he said in a recent interview. “The crony capitalists and the Maoists. They will use any means to attack me.”

Nevertheless, some analysts believe that Mr. Wu’s critiques are aiding one government faction in a power struggle with another, and that he is protected.

His pro-market ideas have influenced a generation of younger economists who now hold senior government posts, including Zhou Xiaochuan, the leader of China’s central bank, and Lou Jiwei, chairman of the country’s huge sovereign wealth fund.

“He is like the father of economics here,” says Laurence Brahm, who wrote several books about China’s reform period. “What he said was the blueprint for reform.”

Critics say Mr. Wu’s influence on government is waning. (They note that he is not invited to weekly economics seminars held for top leaders, including Prime Minister Wen Jiabao.)

Given this, some people say, Mr. Wu is courting danger by speaking out.

“You have to remember, China is a dictatorship,” says Victor Shih, a professor of political science at Northwestern University. “If they want to shut him up, they can.”

GIVEN the risks, it’s hard not to wonder why one of the architects of China’s reforms has turned so negative, so angry and so defiant.

Mr. Wu’s personality and tumultuous life story provide some clues.Even his supporters acknowledge that he has a combative streak and describe him as a stubborn idealist whose verbal jousting skills were honed during years of hardship and political warfare.

“He always expressed his ideas in the sharpest way,” says Zhang Chunlin, who was a student of Mr. Wu. “He’s not diplomatic. Even at close to 80 years old, he argues with journalists.”

That he has lived such a long life would have surprised his parents, wealthy intellectuals who ran one of the country’s largest independent newspapers, in Nanjing. A sickly child with tuberculosis, he was not expected to live past the age of 1. He spent much of his youth confined to bed, reading Russian novels and the works of Lu Xun, an influential Chinese writer from the 1920s.

One of his earliest memories is arriving in the wartime capital, Chongqing, in 1937, at the age of 7, as his family fled Nanjing and the invading Japanese. The emaciated rickshaw driver stopped for opium; the destitute were everywhere.

“In Shanghai or Nanjing, beggars would help you and then ask for money,” he recalls. “But in Chongqing, they’d grab food from your mouth.”

Such experiences helped mold him into an idealistic socialist, as many Chinese were during that era. He studied Marxist economics in college and graduated with honors in 1954 from Fudan University in Shanghai. That won him a position at the country’s elite research institute, the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.

Soon after he arrived, however, China was engulfed by political campaigns, like the Great Leap Forward, that required little research. The cruelest was the Cultural Revolution, from 1966 to 1976, when intellectuals and the descendants of landlords were identified as “counterrevolutionaries.” In Beijing, Mr. Wu says, Red Guards shaved half the head of his wife, Zhou Nan, and ransacked his mother’s home.

Mao Zedong wanted intellectuals sent to the countryside to be “re-educated.” So in 1969, virtually the entire Academy was sent to Henan Province to learn to farm and to build houses in remote villages.

Ms. Zhou was ordered to work as a peasant in Shanxi Province; their two children, ages 4 and 6, were left with relatives in Beijing.

“When I left, I was prepared never to return home again,” Mr. Wu says solemnly. “We were told we’d farm for the rest of our lives.”

Mr. Wu says the hardships included sessions in which he was denounced as an anti-Maoist. When pressed to confess, or to denounce others, he says he refused, and then was beaten and placed in solitary confinement.

“They sent me to the stage to confess, then they started beating me,” he says. “Of course I felt extreme anger. But I realized it wouldn’t last for long; it was too absurd.”

This didn’t shake his faith in socialism, but he began to distrust the people around Mao who were calling believers like him enemies of the people.

His only solace, he later said, was the friendship he developed with a scholar named Gu Zhun, who was an early critic of central planning, and an advocate of market reform. Mr. Gu encouraged him to learn English and to explore the outside world, which Mr. Gu said was the only hope for China to develop.

When Mr. Wu returned home three years later, in 1972, his daughter said he was still “under the spell of Communism,” partly because of the guilt he felt for having grown up in a wealthy home.

“He said a person should have just one shirt,” recalls his daughter, Shelley, 46. “And he didn’t like my sister and I to write our names on our personal property.”

AFTER the Cultural Revolution ended with Mao’s death in 1976, Mr. Wu says he began to see that Mao’s economic policies had brought the country to the brink of collapse.

In 1978, when Deng Xiaoping began to press ahead with bold reforms aimed at opening up the country, Mr. Wu was heavily influenced by the thought and advice of his colleague Mr. Gu, who had died in 1974. He learned English, and in 1983 went to Yale as a visiting scholar. Much of his time there was spent studying modern economic theory.

Mr. Wu returned to Beijing in 1984, just as China’s economic reforms were gathering momentum under Zhao Ziyang, the party leader and chief economic planner.

That year, Mr. Wu says he helped Ma Hong, a top government adviser, draft a paper that defined the country’s shift from a planned to a market economy. “This was a very important turning point for China’s economy,” he says.

Once the proposal was accepted, Mr. Wu was elevated to the Development Research Center, the institute affiliated with the powerful State Council. Soon, he was visiting Zhongnanhai, Beijing’s leadership compound, to offer advice and debate economic policy.

Several research institutes advised Mr. Zhao and Mr. Deng on how to remake the old socialist system with elements of free enterprise. Some who sat in on those meetings say that Mr. Wu was argumentative and prickly when debating economic policy, even with Mr. Zhao.

The reforms, though, fueled strong growth and are widely credited with changing the course of the nation.

But by the late 1980s the reforms also opened the doors to corruption and soaring inflation, feeding public anger that contributed to the 1989 student demonstrations in Tiananmen Square.

Mr. Zhao was removed from office just ahead of the bloody assault on the students and the campaign against dissent and “liberalization.” The reforms stalled.

Not long after, Mr. Wu and other reformers were attacked for favoring a Western-style market system.

Bao Tong, a former aide to Mr. Zhao, said the reformers faced strong opposition from Soviet-trained economists who were wedded to the ideas of central planning.

“For the first guys who advocated a market system, it was pretty dangerous,” Mr. Wu said in a recent telephone interview.

He was among them, and so he was derisively branded “Market Wu.” For a time, publishers refused to sell his books.

“That’s when the conservatives came in and said the reforms had messed everything up,” says Barry J. Naughton, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, and author of “The Chinese Economy.”

Mr. Naughton says: “Wu Jinglian fought against the backlash. He said, ‘We need more market reform, not less.’ ”

The reform camp became stronger after Mr. Deng’s famous 1992 “southern tour” — in which he called for bolder reforms and encouraged people to get rich.

Soon, Mr. Wu’s influence in government grew. In the 1990s, he served as an adviser to Zhu Rongji and Jiang Zemin, the country’s top leaders, helping them speed up reforms and restructure badly run state-owned companies.

Every step of the way, he fought off opposition, and debated, often publicly, the shape and pace of the reforms.

“This debate about the market economy is the most important discussion throughout the 30 years of reform,” says Liang Guiquan, an economist at the Guangdong Academy of Social Sciences. “And it’s still going on now. Wu Jinglian has always been at the center of that debate.”

BY most measures, China’s economic transformation has been a resounding success. Anyone who travels here can see it: the change in people’s living standards, the makeover of big cities — what has come to be called China’s economic miracle.

But Mr. Wu sees the defects: a government prone to “meddling” in the marketplace; a widening income gap; inefficient monopolies; and crony capitalism.

His critique sharpened considerably after Jiang Zemin stepped down as president in 2003, and Mr. Wu’s role was diminished.

In interviews, Mr. Wu says he feels compelled to speak out because conservatives and “old-style Maoists” have been gaining influence in the government since 2004. These groups, he said, are pressing for a return to central planning and placing blame for corruption and social inequality on the very market reforms he championed.

At the same time, Mr. Wu says, corrupt bureaucrats are pushing for the state to take a larger economic role so they can cash in on their positions through payoffs and bribes, as well as by steering business to allies.

“I’m not optimistic about the future,” Mr. Wu said. “The Maoists want to go back to central planning and the cronies want to get richer.”

Well, someone finally stepped forward and...

said it....

OP-ED COLUMNIST New York Times (Sunday Edition) September 13, 2009

Boy, Oh, Boy Maureen O'Dowd

The normally nonchalant Barack Obama looked nonplussed, as Nancy Pelosi glowered behind.

Surrounded by middle-aged white guys — a sepia snapshot of the days when such pols ran Washington like their own men’s club — Joe Wilson yelled “You lie!” at a president who didn’t.

But, fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy!

The outburst was unexpected from a milquetoast Republican backbencher from South Carolina who had attracted little media attention. Now it has made him an overnight right-wing hero, inspiring “You lie!” bumper stickers and T-shirts.

The congressman, we learned, belonged to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, led a 2000 campaign to keep the Confederate flag waving above South Carolina’s state Capitol and denounced as a “smear” the true claim of a black woman that she was the daughter of Strom Thurmond, the ’48 segregationist candidate for president. Wilson clearly did not like being lectured and even rebuked by the brainy black president presiding over the majestic chamber.

I’ve been loath to admit that the shrieking lunacy of the summer — the frantic efforts to paint our first black president as the Other, a foreigner, socialist, fascist, Marxist, racist, Commie, Nazi; a cad who would snuff old people; a snake who would indoctrinate kids — had much to do with race.

I tended to agree with some Obama advisers that Democratic presidents typically have provoked a frothing response from paranoids — from Father Coughlin against F.D.R. to Joe McCarthy against Truman to the John Birchers against J.F.K. and the vast right-wing conspiracy against Bill Clinton.

But Wilson’s shocking disrespect for the office of the president — no Democrat ever shouted “liar” at W. when he was hawking a fake case for war in Iraq — convinced me: Some people just can’t believe a black man is president and will never accept it.

“A lot of these outbursts have to do with delegitimizing him as a president,” said Congressman Jim Clyburn, a senior member of the South Carolina delegation. Clyburn, the man who called out Bill Clinton on his racially tinged attacks on Obama in the primary, pushed Pelosi to pursue a formal resolution chastising Wilson.

“In South Carolina politics, I learned that the olive branch works very seldom,” he said. “You have to come at these things from a position of strength. My father used to say, ‘Son, always remember that silence gives consent.’ ”

Barry Obama of the post-’60s Hawaiian ’hood did not live through the major racial struggles in American history. Maybe he had a problem relating to his white basketball coach or catching a cab in New York, but he never got beaten up for being black.

Now he’s at the center of a period of racial turbulence sparked by his ascension. Even if he and the coterie of white male advisers around him don’t choose to openly acknowledge it, this president is the ultimate civil rights figure — a black man whose legitimacy is constantly challenged by a loco fringe.

For two centuries, the South has feared a takeover by blacks or the feds. In Obama, they have both.

The state that fired the first shot of the Civil War has now given us this: Senator Jim DeMint exhorted conservatives to “break” the president by upending his health care plan. Rusty DePass, a G.O.P. activist, said that a gorilla that escaped from a zoo was “just one of Michelle’s ancestors.” Lovelorn Mark Sanford tried to refuse the president’s stimulus money. And now Joe Wilson.

“A good many people in South Carolina really reject the notion that we’re part of the union,” said Don Fowler, the former Democratic Party chief who teaches politics at the University of South Carolina. He observed that when slavery was destroyed by outside forces and segregation was undone by civil rights leaders and Congress, it bred xenophobia.

“We have a lot of people who really think that the world’s against us,” Fowler said, “so when things don’t happen the way we like them to, we blame outsiders.” He said a state legislator not long ago tried to pass a bill to nullify any federal legislation with which South Carolinians didn’t agree. Shades of John C. Calhoun!

It may be President Obama’s very air of elegance and erudition that raises hackles in some. “My father used to say to me, ‘Boy, don’t get above your raising,’ ” Fowler said. “Some people are prejudiced anyway, and then they look at his education and mannerisms and get more angry at him.”

Clyburn had a warning for Obama advisers who want to forgive Wilson, ignore the ignorant outbursts and move on: “They’re going to have to develop ways in this White House to deal with things and not let them fester out there. Otherwise, they’ll see numbers moving in the wrong direction.”

29 Years Later

On August 29th, all the networks covered the funeral of Senator Edward Kennedy. As the funeral prepared for the flight to Washington DC, a network fill started to air the highlights of Ted Kennedy's career in the Senate. Flipping the channels, I came across the complete video version of Kennedy's speech at the Democratic National Convention of August 1980.

I have it pasted to this post. Please read it carefully. In as much as we as a nation have progressed (however debatable) over the last 29 years, identify the key issues in his speech and we will find we have a long road ahead on achieving many of those goals.

I find myself in the minority, recognizing that this country has been good to me; with steady employment and very good benefits - and I'm willing to give back to this country in the form of additional tax payments to insure others less able, have basic medical/health insurance. I do want a choice, to retain my own private health insurance or as needs change - opt for the public option. Basic health insurance should be a right and not a privilege.

We have an opportunity to make some fundamental changes. Let's not miss that opportunity and wait another 29 years.

Here's Ted Kennedy's speech. Read it carefully. Thanks.

Well, things worked out a little different from the way I thought, but let me tell you, I still love New York.

My fellow Democrats and my fellow Americans, I have come here tonight not to argue as a candidate but to affirm a cause. I'm asking you--I am asking you to renew the commitment of the Democratic Party to economic justice.

I am asking you to renew our commitment to a fair and lasting prosperity that can put America back to work.

This is the cause that brought me into the campaign and that sustained me for nine months across 100,000 miles in 40 different states. We had our losses, but the pain of our defeats is far, far less than the pain of the people that I have met.

We have learned that it is important to take issues seriously, but never to take ourselves too seriously.

The serious issue before us tonight is the cause for which the Democratic Party has stood in its finest hours, the cause that keeps our Party young and makes it, in the second century of its age, the largest political party in this republic and the longest lasting political party on this planet.

Our cause has been, since the days of Thomas Jefferson, the cause of the common man and the common woman.

Our commitment has been, since the days of Andrew Jackson, to all those he called "the humble members of society--the farmers, mechanics, and laborers." On this foundation we have defined our values, refined our policies and refreshed our faith.

Now I take the unusual step of carrying the cause and the commitment of my campaign personally to our national convention. I speak out of a deep sense of urgency about the anguish and anxiety I have seen across America.

I speak out of a deep belief in the ideals of the Democratic Party, and in the potential of that Party and of a President to make a difference. And I speak out of a deep trust in our capacity to proceed with boldness and a common vision that will feel and heal the suffering of our time and the divisions of our Party.

The economic plank of this platform on its face concerns only material things, but it is also a moral issue that I raise tonight. It has taken many forms over many years. In this campaign and in this country that we seek to lead, the challenge in 1980 is to give our voice and our vote for these fundamental democratic principles.

Let us pledge that we will never misuse unemployment, high interest rates, and human misery as false weapons against inflation.

Let us pledge that employment will be the first priority of our economic policy.

Let us pledge that there will be security for all those who are now at work, and let us pledge that there will be jobs for all who are out of work; and we will not compromise on the issue of jobs.

These are not simplistic pledges. Simply put, they are the heart of our tradition, and they have been the soul of our Party across the generations. It is the glory and the greatness of our tradition to speak for those who have no voice, to remember those who are forgotten, to respond to the frustrations and fulfill the aspirations of all Americans seeking a better life in a better land.

We dare not forsake that tradition. We cannot let the great purposes of the Democratic Party become the bygone passages of history.

We must not permit the Republicans to seize and run on the slogans of prosperity. We heard the orators at their convention all trying to talk like Democrats. They proved that even Republican nominees can quote Franklin Roosevelt to their own purpose.

The Grand Old Party thinks it has found a great new trick, but 40 years ago an earlier generation of Republicans attempted the same trick. And Franklin Roosevelt himself replied, "Most Republican leaders have bitterly fought and blocked the forward surge of average men and women in their pursuit of happiness. Let us not be deluded that overnight those leaders have suddenly become the friends of average men and women."

"You know," he continued, "very few of us are that gullible." And four years later when the Republicans tried that trick again, Franklin Roosevelt asked "Can the Old Guard pass itself off as the New Deal? I think not. We have all seen many marvelous stunts in the circus, but no performing elephant could turn a handspring without falling flat on its back."

The 1980 Republican convention was awash with crocodile tears for our economic distress, but it is by their long record and not their recent words that you shall know them.

The same Republicans who are talking about the crisis of unemployment have nominated a man who once said, and I quote, "Unemployment insurance is a prepaid vacation plan for freeloaders." And that nominee is no friend of labor.

The same Republicans who are talking about the problems of the inner cities have nominated a man who said, and I quote, "I have included in my morning and evening prayers every day the prayer that the Federal Government not bail out New York." And that nominee is no friend of this city and our great urban centers across this Nation.

The same Republicans who are talking about security for the elderly have nominated a man who said just four years ago that "Participation in social security should be made voluntary." And that nominee is no friend of the senior citizens of this Nation.

The same Republicans who are talking about preserving the environment have nominated a man who last year made the preposterous statement, and I quote, "Eighty percent of our air pollution comes from plants and trees."

And that nominee is no friend of the environment.

And the same Republicans who are invoking Franklin Roosevelt have nominated a man who said in 1976, and these are his exact words, "Fascism was really the basis of the New Deal." And that nominee whose name is Ronald Reagan has no right to quote Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The great adventures which our opponents offer is a voyage into the past. Progress is our heritage, not theirs. What is right for us as Democrats is also the right way for Democrats to win.

The commitment I seek is not to outworn views but to old values that will never wear out. Programs may sometimes become obsolete, but the ideal of fairness always endures.

Circumstances may change, but the work of compassion must continue. It is surely correct that we cannot solve problems by throwing money at them, but it is also correct that we dare not throw out our national problems onto a scrap heap of inattention and indifference. The poor may be out of political fashion, but they are not without human needs. The middle class may be angry, but they have not lost the dream that all Americans can advance together.

The demand of our people in 1980 is not for smaller government or bigger government but for better government. Some say that government is always bad and that spending for basic social programs is the root of our economic evils. But we reply: The present inflation and recession cost our economy $200 billion a year. We reply: Inflation and unemployment are the biggest spenders of all.

The task of leadership in 1980 is not to parade scapegoats or to seek refuge in reaction, but to match our power to the possibilities of progress. While others talked of free enterprise, it was the Democratic Party that acted and we ended excessive regulation in the airline and trucking industry and we restored competition to the marketplace. And I take some satisfaction that this deregulation was legislation that I sponsored and passed in the Congress of the United States.

As Democrats we recognize that each generation of Americans has a rendezvous with a different reality. The answers of one generation become the questions of the next generation. But there is a guiding star in the American firmament. It is as old as the revolutionary belief that all people are created equal, and as clear as the contemporary condition of Liberty City and the South Bronx.

Again and again Democratic leaders have followed that star and they have given new meaning to the old values of liberty and justice for all.

We are the party. We are the party of the New Freedom, the New Deal and the New Frontier. We have always been the party of hope. So this year let us offer new hope, new hope to an America uncertain about the present, but unsurpassed in its potential for the future.

To all those who are idle in the cities and industries of America let us provide new hope for the dignity of useful work. Democrats have always believed that a basic civil right of all Americans is their right to earn their own way. The party of the people must always be the party of full employment. To all those who doubt the future of our economy, let us provide new hope for the reindustrialization of America. And let our vision reach beyond the next election or the next year to a new generation of prosperity. If we could rebuild Germany and Japan after World War II, then surely we can reindustrialize our own nation and revive our inner cities in the 1980s.

To all those who work hard for a living wage let us provide new hope that the price of their employment shall not be an unsafe workplace and a death at an earlier age.

To all those who inhabit our land from California to the New York Island, from the Redwood Forest to the Gulfstream waters, let us provide new hope that prosperity shall not be purchased by poisoning the air, the rivers and the natural resources that are the greatest gift of this continent.

We must insist that our children and our grandchildren shall inherit a land which they can truly call America the beautiful.

To all those who see the worth of their work and their savings taken by inflation, let us offer new hope for a stable economy. We must meet the pressures of the present by invoking the full power of government to master increasing prices.

In candor, we must say that the Federal budget can be balanced only by policies that bring us to a balanced prosperity of full employment and price restraint.

And to all those overburdened by an unfair tax structure, let us provide new hope for real tax reform. Instead of shutting down classrooms, let us shut off tax shelters.

Instead of cutting out school lunches, let us cut off tax subsidies for expensive business lunches that are nothing more than food stamps for the rich.

The tax cut of our Republican opponents takes the name of tax reform in vain. It is a wonderfully Republican idea that would redistribute income in the wrong direction. It is good news for any of you with incomes over $200,000 a year. For the few of you, it offers a pot of gold worth $14,000. But the Republican tax cut is bad news for the middle income families.

For the many of you, they plan a pittance of $200 a year, and that is not what the Democratic Party means when we say tax reform.

The vast majority of Americans cannot afford this panacea from a Republican nominee who has denounced the progressive income tax as the invention of Karl Marx. I am afraid he has confused Karl Marx with Theodore Roosevelt--that obscure Republican president who sought and fought for a tax system based on ability to pay. Theodore Roosevelt was not Karl Marx, and the Republican tax scheme is not tax reform.

Finally, we cannot have a fair prosperity in isolation from a fair society. So I will continue to stand for a national health insurance.

We must not surrender to the relentless medical inflation that can bankrupt almost anyone and that may soon break the budgets of government at every level. Let us insist on real control over what doctors and hospitals can charge, and let us resolve that the state of a family's health shall never depend on the size of a family's wealth.

The President, the Vice President, the members of Congress have a medical plan that meets their needs in full, and whenever senators and representatives catch a little cold, the Capitol physician will see them immediately, treat them promptly, fill a prescription on the spot. We do not get a bill even if we ask for it, and when do you think was the last time a member of Congress asked for a bill from the Federal Government?

I say again, as I have before, if health insurance is good enough for the President, the Vice President and the Congress of the United States, then it is good enough for you and every family in America.

There were some who said we should be silent about our differences on issues during this convention, but the heritage of the Democratic Party has been a history of democracy. We fight hard because we care deeply about our principles and purposes. We did not flee this struggle. We welcome the contrast with the empty and expedient spectacle last month in Detroit where no nomination was contested, no question was debated, and no one dared to raise any doubt or dissent.

Democrats can be proud that we chose a different course and a different platform. We can be proud that our party stands for investment in safe energy instead of a nuclear future that may threaten the future itself.

We must not permit the neighborhoods of America to be permanently shadowed by the fear of another Three Mile Island.

We can be proud that our party stands for a fair housing law to unlock the doors of discrimination once and for all. The American house will be divided against itself so long as there is prejudice against any American buying or renting a home.

And we can be proud that our party stands plainly and publicly and persistently for the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment.

Women hold their rightful place at our convention, and women must have their rightful place in the Constitution of the United States. On this issue we will not yield, we will not equivocate, we will not rationalize, explain or excuse. We will stand for E.R.A. and for the recognition at long last that our nation was made up of founding mothers as well as founding fathers.

A fair prosperity and a just society are within our vision and our grasp, and we do not have every answer. There are questions not yet asked, waiting for us in the recesses of the future, but of this much we can be certain because it is the lesson of all our history: Together a president and the people can make a difference. I have found that faith still alive wherever I have traveled across this land. So let us reject the counsel of retreat and the call to reaction. Let us go forward in the knowledge that history only helps those who help themselves.

There will be setbacks and sacrifices in the years ahead but I am convinced that we as a people are ready to give something back to our country in return for all it has given to us.

Let this be our commitment: Whatever sacrifices must be made will be shared and shared fairly. And let this be our confidence: At the end of our journey and always before us shines that ideal of liberty and justice for all.

In closing, let me say a few words to all those that I have met and to all those who have supported me, at this convention and across the country. There were hard hours on our journey, and often we sailed against the wind. But always we kept our rudder true, and there were so many of you who stayed the course and shared our hope. You gave your help, but even more, you gave your hearts.

Because of you, this has been a happy campaign. You welcomed Joan, me and our family into your homes and neighborhoods, your churches, your campuses, your union halls. When I think back of all the miles and all the months and all the memories, I think of you. I recall the poet's words, and I say: What golden friends I have.

Among you, my golden friends across this land, I have listened and learned.

I have listened to Kenny Dubois, a glassblower in Charleston, West Virginia, who has ten children to support but has lost his job after 35 years, just three years short of qualifying for his pension.

I have listened to the Trachta family who farm in Iowa and who wonder whether they can pass the good life and the good earth on to their children.

I have listened to the grandmother in East Oakland who no longer has a phone to call her grandchildren because she gave it up to pay the rent on her small apartment.

I have listened to young workers out of work, to students without the tuition for college, and to families without the chance to own a home. I have seen the closed factories and the stalled assembly lines of Anderson, Indiana and South Gate, California, and I have seen too many, far too many idle men and women desperate to work. I have seen too many, far too many working families desperate to protect the value of their wages from the ravages of inflation.

Yet I have also sensed a yearning for new hope among the people in every state where I have been. And I have felt it in their handshakes, I saw it in their faces, and I shall never forget the mothers who carried children to our rallies. I shall always remember the elderly who have lived in an America of high purpose and who believe that it can all happen again.

Tonight, in their name, I have come here to speak for them. And for their sake, I ask you to stand with them. On their behalf I ask you to restate and reaffirm the timeless truth of our party.

I congratulate President Carter on his victory here.

I am confident that the Democratic Party will reunite on the basis of Democratic principles, and that together we will march towards a Democratic victory in 1980.

And someday, long after this convention, long after the signs come down, and the crowds stop cheering, and the bands stop playing, may it be said of our campaign that we kept the faith. May it be said of our Party in 1980 that we found our faith again.

And may it be said of us, both in dark passages and in bright days, in the words of Tennyson that my brothers quoted and loved, and that have special meaning for me now: 
"I am a part of all that I have met....
Tho much is taken, much abides....
That which we are, we are-- 
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
 ...strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

For me, a few hours ago, this campaign came to an end. For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die. Hear this .WAV 173K

Senator Edward M. Kennedy - August 12, 1980