The Purity Test (stop shitting in the punch bowl)

Tue Dec 19 15:46:47 CST 2017

Franklin Roosevelt, outside of historical understanding, does not prove
that wrong.
Read what so many progressives thought about his 'failures'. I urge all.
Read about how so many thought his compromises to pass legislation were
weak tea.
Positive actions always look better when no one knows the perceived
negatives.
Obama's legacy will look like that even before the distance we have from
Roosevelt in remembered memory.

Read The New New Deal by a writer who set out believing  that the stimulus
was weak tea. He came away with the best book on  ALL
that Obama's administration did---starting with working with Bush's team
even before he was inaugurated on two important financial bills--
and then, after showing how incredibly effective TARP and the stimulus
bills were immediately--and then in time release, he went on to show
how, perhaps like that guy referred to earlier re the internal net
neutrality maneuvers, Obama crafted and chose folks to find ways to get
appropriated
money spent in stimulus-like ways.....and put a longtime DC guy, Jack Lew
who knew the bureaucracy better'n anyone in DC--like Arendt and Pynchon, I
say, not
literally--who could earmark spending and even better, when he had to make
social services cuts per the 'pay for' conditions of many bills and
funding, he knew the zombie departments already doing nothing vital any
longer for Americans and got their budgets killed as part of the deal.

34 million Americans got health care coverage under the ACA in the ONLY
plan that would have passed. The only one. That MA state model
of Romney's,with measurable cost controls is the ONLY ACA those blue dog
Dems--remember them?--would finally vote for. I remember that
voting well, that final turning.

That is what leadership looks like; Making happen the art of the best
possible, which is Morris's (and others) deep truth.

A--and, almost no one around Obama wanted to push for the ACA in year
one...perhaps the second most-gutsy---or third (after saving the American
automobile
industry) but he made them. As we all can know, had he not, it never would
have passed. Damn gutsier and harder decision than many of Roosevelts, who
could not
get health care passed. many better summaries than this but I'm busy:

FDR’s first attempt — failure to include in the Social Security Bill of
1935
Next came Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR), whose tenure (1933-1945) can be
characterized by WWI, the Great Depression, and the New Deal, including the
Social Security Bill. We might have thought the Great Depression would
create the perfect conditions for passing compulsory health insurance in
the US, but with millions out of work, unemployment insurance took priority
followed by old age benefits. FDR’s Committee on Economic Security,
the CES, feared
that inclusion of health insurance in its bill, which was opposed by the
AMA,would threaten the passage of the entire Social Security legislation.
It was therefore excluded.

FDR’s second attempt — Wagner Bill, National Health Act of 1939
But there was one more push for national health insurance during FDR’s
administration: The Wagner National Health Act of 1939. Though it never
received FDR’s full support, the proposal grew out of his Tactical
Committee on Medical Care, established in 1937. The essential elements of
the technical committee’s reports were incorporated into Senator Wagner’s
bill, the National Health Act of 1939, which gave general support for a
national health program to be funded by federal grants to states and
administered by states and localities. However, the 1938 election brought a
conservative resurgence and any further innovations in social policy were
extremely difficult. Most of the social policy legislation precedes 1938.
Just as the AALL campaign ran into the declining forces of progressivism
and then WWI, the movement for national health insurance in the 1930’s ran
into the declining fortunes of the New Deal and then WWII.

On Tue, Dec 19, 2017 at 3:47 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> I don’t accept this idea that good ideas can never win, and good people
> will always lose . Franklin Roosevelt proves that wrong. Give people
> something worth having  and fighting for and they will support you.
>   Obama started with a majority and it seems to me he lost it when he
> failed to deal with the reckless lawbreaking of the Banks in the house-loan
> scam. His ACA turned out to be weak tea originally developed by Mitt Romney.
>
> I have not walked away from anything but wars of aggression and fossil
> fuel addiction.. You can support them if you like, justify them if you
> will. I will not.
> > On Dec 19, 2017, at 3:31 PM, Robert Mahnke <rpmahnke at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Anyone with a complaint about Obama from the left, which must include
> most of us, would have been disappointed with a Bernie presidency too,
> because any legislation he would have wanted to pass would have had to get
> through a Senate and a House like the one that Obama dealt with for the
> last six years, not the Congress of his first two years that passed most of
> his legislative accomplishments. The choice is to take what's on the table
> and keep working for more and better, or to walk away in disgust that
> fellow citizens don't share our priorities.
> >
> > On Tue, Dec 19, 2017 at 12:13 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Anyone who voted for anyone other than Hilary voted for Trump, and they
> are assholes.
> >
> > David Morris
> >
> > On Tue, Dec 19, 2017 at 12:04 PM Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> > Obama had 8 years to put out fires. He started more instead. The punch
> bowl is already full of shit and people know that. People did not vote for
> Trump. They voted against Hillary. That is what the polls show and that is
> what common sense says.
> > > On Dec 19, 2017, at 9:54 AM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > https://first-draft.com/2017/12/19/im-done-with-your-doug-
> jones-feelings-too-internet/
> > >
> > > "People I know and love are suffering and will suffer while we
> fantasize about having more than two parties, about not having to choose
> between the arsonists and the (dumb, underfunded, likely corrupt) fire
> brigade. Me and mine would like the fires out."
> > >
> > >       Virus-free. www.avg.com
> >
> > -
> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
> >
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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