Debating In My Local Newspaper

I refer to my commentary entitled: "The Bankruptcy Bill and Arlen Specter" which can be found here.

I published this commentary in my local newspaper, the Fort Lee Suburbanite, and it prompted a response from a Mr. Chiu, who has been a frequent contrarian of my opinions.

I quote his letter in full below along with my rebuttal. I think the exchange speaks for itself and accordingly I will not burden the reader with any further comments.

"I agree with Emil Scheller that it's unfair for corporations to have the right to abuse bankruptcy laws while individuals don't. Unfortunately, a few bad individual apples spoiled everything for ordinary people. Some deliberately ran up credit card debts and simply declared bankruptcy later on. It was common knowledge that one's bad credit record would be wiped clean after 7 years and credit card companies would again be mailing offers. No more.

"Of course, Scheller blames Republicans for the passage of legislation changing the bankruptcy laws. He states that 14 Senate Democrats also voted in favor of the bill, which passed 7425. I just checked on Google: 19 Democrats voted for the bill. 25 Democrats voted against the bill. There was one abstention. Whatever the case, Democrats could have filibustered to block the bill if they felt strongly enough about it. Could such inaction have had anything to do with campaign contributions sullying our political process? Ideally, Congress would pass similar legislation to crack down on corporate abuse of bankruptcy laws.

"Scheller justifies his use of the term "right-wing" by resurrecting his old straw man argument that conservatives want to undo the New Deal and Great Society. In fact, he gleefully uses his explanation as an excuse to throw out the word "reactionary" against conservatives. Now everyone knows full well that Big Government is so much a part of our lives that it would be impossible to repeal any part of the New Deal or Great Society, if even we wanted to. There's no going back. For example, we all have grandparents (and even parents) on Social Security. Or we may be beneficiaries of some social program or subsidy. In fact, when Republicans controlled Congress, they even increased the size of government. I recall one occasion in which the Bush administration wanted to slightly trim some social programs. Republican congressmen angrily refused to cut programs as they wanted to protect their poor constituents. No one has the heart to cut anything. Government just grows and grows. There are no reactionaries.

So pejorative terms like "right-wing" have no place in polite discourse. I avoid the use of terms like "Left-wing" or "Leftist" because those can also be construed as code words for "Communist" and "Socialist". We don't always have to agree with one another, but we should try to treat each other with respect."

"Mr. Chiu plays gotcha. I complained in my letter entitled, "The Bankruptcy Bill and Arlene Specter" which appeared in the Suburbanite of May 8, about "14" Democrats who voted for a bankruptcy bill in 2005 that took bankruptcy protection from ordinary Americans. Apparently I miscounted. As Mr. Chiu gleefully points out, actually 18 Democrats and 1 Independent voted for this outrageous bill. But this simply reinforces the point I was making, that there are too many Democrats who did the bidding of the banking lobby. But at least a majority of Democrats voted against it. Not a single Republican voted against it. The party of "No" wasn't the party of "No" then. They are never on the side of ordinary Americans.

"Mr. Chiu then goes on to try to justify this outrageous bill. He says "Some deliberately ran up credit card debts and simply declared bankruptcy later on." but Mr Chiu doesn't tell us where he gets this information from, and even if some did, does that justify such a drastic remedy? The fact is that according to the Harvard Journal of Health Affairs, in 2001 'medical bankruptcies affect about 2 million Americans annually -- counting debtors and their dependents, including about 700,000 children.

'Surprisingly, most of those bankrupted by illness had health insurance. More than three-quarters were insured at the start of the bankrupting illness. However, 38 percent had lost coverage at least temporarily by the time they filed for bankruptcy.

'Most of the medical bankruptcy filers were middle class; 56 percent owned a home and the same number had attended college. In many cases, illness forced breadwinners to take time off from work -- losing income and job-based health insurance precisely when families needed it most.

'Families in bankruptcy suffered many privations -- 30 percent had a utility cut off and 61 percent went without needed medical care."

"Chiu then goes on to claim once again that Republicans don't want to do away with Social Security. Has he conveniently forgotten Republican attempts to push for individual savings accounts invested in the stock market that would be funded by diverting a large portion of the SS taxes to such accounts, which would deplete the SS fund even faster than it is already being depleted. Ronald Reagan saved SS by increasing the limit on the payroll tax, provided for the the retirement age to be increased, and taxing higher income SS recipients and plowing the proceeds back into the trust fund, but the new Republicans want no such reforms. They want SS to be bankrupt just as quickly as possible.

Has Mr. Chiu conveniently forgotten McCain's comment on Social Security during the campaign, "Americans have got to understand that we are paying present-day retirees with the taxes paid by young workers in America today. And that’s a disgrace."

"There is nothing wrong with terms like Right and Left any more than there is anything wrong with using Republican or Democratic, but there is something wrong with misrepresenting the positions of the parties or of the issues as Mr. Chiu consistently does. There is something wrong with the smears like the Swift Boaters, which Mr.Chiu defended in a previous letter, There is something wrong with the Willie Horton ads, which Mr. Chiu defended in a previous letter. There is something wrong with the phony Harry and Louise ads which doomed Health Care reform in the Clinton Administration. And as I said in my previous letter, there is something wrongwith calling progressives Communists, Fascists, Socialists, Muslim and friend of terrorists, in the case of Obama
and even lesbian, in the case of Clinton, (not that either Muslim or lesbian should be a term of opprobrium).

"But I don't hear Mr Chiu criticizing these smears. Truth hurts Mr. Chiu! Attempts to divert attention from the real issues don't work anymore. Attempts at pretending that everybody is for Social Security don't work anymore; not when the record is so clear. The party of "No" is dooming itself. It is the party that has even turned its back on the positive aspects of Ronald Reagan, who, by the way, advocated trying to do away with nuclear bombs, an objective which todays Republican nay-sayers denounce. From the web-site of the Libertarian Cato institute website, "Reagan, contrary to his image as a champion of the bomb, was a nuclear abolitionist. This is not a mere historical curiosity. Abolishing nuclear weapons was one of Reagan’s fundamental goals for his presidency."

"We could easily carve two parties out of the Democratic Party and no-one would miss the one whose voice is Cheney and Limbaugh. Other parties in American history have vanished. Gone are the Federalist Party,
the Democratic-Republican Party and the Whig Party.

"Too many Democrats are too often on the wrong side of issues. But the party of "NO" deserves to see the setting sun. Lies can no longer save it."

The Media III - Falsehoods about Kerry

In my last posting entitled, "The Media II - Falsehood about Gore" I concluded with the promise, “NEXT TIME THE KERRY CAMPAIGN!”

I will deal with this here, but before I get into this subject I feel I must make another overall observation. In preparing these commentaries I extensively use Google to research the facts. However, here too I have found the deck to be stacked. For instance when I was researching the vicious and sustained attacks on Clinton during his Administration which I summarized in Media I, I first went to Google and entered “Lies about Bill Clinton”. Of the first 10 hits one was one about books for sale and would have to be considered neutral, but the other nine identified websites attacking Clinton for lying. Not one dealt with the subject I had identified.

Similarly, when I started researching “Lies about Gore” I put that subject into Google and guess what? It brought up seven sites alleging lies by Gore and only three on the subject requested. Next “Lies about Kerry” brought a similar result. Of the first ten hits 6 were claims of Kerry lies, 3 on target, and one not relevant. So even here the deck is stacked.

What are the facts? While serving in Vietnam, Kerry was awarded three Purple Hearts, one Bronze Star, and one Silver Star. That was in 1968.

The details of how he earned those medals are too long to be related in the body of this essay, but for those who interested the details are available here. For those who are not familiar with Snopes, it is a website which picks up allegations circulating in cyberspace and checks them. It then summarizes the allegation and designates them as, "false" "partially true" or "true". It then goes into details as to the allegations and then goes into detail as to he true facts. It is non-partisan and non-ideological.

During the next 35 years no one questioned the basis for these medals but in 2004 Kerry was running for President and the vicious lies commenced. First a book was published under the name “Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry. The publisher was Regnery a publisher who specializes in books of the Right. The authors were John E. O’Neil, whose history with the Republican party go back to the Nixon Administration, and Jerome E. Corsi who has made such hate comments about Catholics and Muslims and Jews as well as calling Hillary Clinton a “lesbo” that he became such an embarrassment to the publishers of the book that it was claimed that he wasn’t actually a co-author. The book claimed to be based on the testimony of men who had served with Kerry in Vietnam. It turned out that while all had served in Vietnam all but one had never served with Kerry or been present at the scene where the events, which led to Kerry’s medals, took place. Only one, Stephen Gardner, served on John Kerry's boat, and he was not present for the events that led to any of Kerry's medals or any of Kerry's three Purple Hearts. In other words, even a cursory examination of the book revealed that it had no basis in fact and was a totally contrived pack of lies. Yet the book was treated as a serious piece of journalism by the media and reviewed in that manner.

This was followed by a series of TV ads sponsored by a group that identified itself as “Swift Vets and POWs for Truth” and featured people who had no personal knowledge of the relevant events including women whose husbands had purportedly been prisoners of the Vietcong.

John McCain described these television ads as "dishonest and dishonorable." and called on President Bush to condemn the Swift Boat Veterans for Bush ads. JIM RASSMANN, a Republican, who was there, wrote in the Wall Street Journal, (Yes, The Wall Street Journal) on March 13, 1969, “John Kerry's courage and leadership saved my life.”

Despite this the media as usual acted as a megaphone referring to the book and the ads over and over again thus multiplying the effectiveness of the ads by a large multiple. Howard Kurz writing in the Washington Post said: “Without that echo chamber, this dinky little ad would have sunk without a trace. The irony was that the Post was one of the worst offenders. During one twelve-day span in late August, the Washington Post mentioned the Swifties in page one stories on August 19, 20, 21 (two separate articles), 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, and 31. More than 100 NY Times articles and columns made mention of the Swifties. CNN mentioned them in nearly 300 separate news segments. The easily attainable facts got lost in the media’s zest for he said/he said, with U.S.A. for example reporting, “ A clear picture of what John Kerry did or did not do in Vietnam 35 years ago may never emerge…” with the Times describing it as “murky”. It was not murky. The fact that the allegations had no basis in fact was easy to document, as were the endless contradictions. (See pp. 178-186 of Lapdogs by Eric Boehlert)

But contrast this with the way the media treated the allegations against Bush, his using his connections to get into the National Guard and his then going AWOL. These allegations were, according to the media, not noteworthy because they were old. Despite the fact that it was supported by many facts and Guard records, the press was anxious to avoid discussion and when CBS publicized a memo that turned out to be a forgery, the media was so anxious to make the story about the carelessness of 60 Minutes, that they quickly decided that this proved beyond any doubt that the allegations were untrue.

No one ever investigated who might have forged the memo. I have always suspected that it was forged by the Bush Re-election Committee, who having taken a leaf out the Nixon playbook planted the forgery in order to discredit it and thus discredit the facts of Bush’s malfeasance. They must have celebrated at how easily the media took the bait.

Until we get a courageous, independent investigative media worthy of Edward R. Murrow, our Democracy will be at the mercy of the liars, the dissemblers, and the prevaricators.