Hundreds of Survivors of Bhopal Disaster Protest Obama India Visit
A group of 400 survivors of the Bhopal disaster have been protesting Obama's
visit to India. The 1984 Bhopal industrial gas disaster left an estimated
15,000 people dead. The company, Union Carbide, is now a subsidiary of Dow
Chemical. Dow has faced calls to clean up the contaminated site, increase
compensation for victims, and fund studies to assess damages to the
environment and public health. India has also demanded the extradition of
former Union Carbide CEO Warren Anderson, who fled India shortly after his
arrest in the disaster's aftermath.
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http://www.democracynow.org/2010/11/8/hundreds_of_survivors_of_bhopal_disaster
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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/opinion/07rich.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha211
Barack Obama, Phone Home
By Frank Rich
NY Times Op-Ed: November 07, 2010
AFTER his "shellacking," President Obama had to do something. But who had
the bright idea of scheduling his visit to India for right after this
election? The Democrats' failure to create jobs was at the heart of the
shellacking. Nothing says "outsourcing" to the American public more
succinctly than India. But the White House didn't figure this out until the
eve of Obama's Friday departure, when it hastily rebranded his trip as a
jobs mission. Perhaps the president should visit one of the Indian call
centers policing Americans' credit-card debts to feel our pain.
Optics matter. If Washington is tumbling into a political crisis as the
recovery continues to lag, maybe the president shouldn't get out of Dodge.
If the White House couldn't fill a 13,000-seat arena in blue Cleveland the
weekend before the midterms, maybe it shouldn't have sent the president
there. If an administration charged with confronting a Great Recession knew
that its nominee for secretary of the Treasury serially cut corners on his
taxes, maybe it should have considered other options. Shoulda, woulda,
coulda. Well, here we are.
True, the big things matter more than the optics. Unfortunately, they are a
mess too.
You can't win an election without a coherent message. Obama, despite his
administration's genuine achievements, didn't have one. The good news - for
him, if not necessarily a straitened country - is that the G.O.P. doesn't
have one either. This explains the seemingly irrational calculus of
Tuesday's
exit polls. Voters gave Democrats and Republicans virtually identical
favorability ratings while voting for the G.O.P. They gave Obama a slightly
higher approval rating than either political party even as they punished
him. This is a snapshot of a whiplashed country that (understandably)
doesn't
know whose butt to kick first. It means that Obama can make a comeback, but
only if he figures out what he has to come back from and where he has to go.
The president's travails are not merely a "communications problem." They're
also a governance problem - which makes them a gift to opponents who prefer
no governance at all. You can't govern if you can't tell the country where
you are taking it. The plot of Obama's presidency has been harder to follow
than "Inception."
Health care reform remains at the root of this chaos. Obama has never
explained why a second-tier priority for him in the 2008 campaign leapt to
the top of his must-do list in March 2009. For much of the subsequent year
spent fighting over it, he still failed to pick up the narrative thread. He
delayed so long in specifying his own priorities for the bill that his
opponents filled the vacuum for him, making fictions like "death panels"
stick while he waited naïvely for bipartisanship to prevail. In 2010, Obama
and most Democrats completed their transformation of a victory into a defeat
by running away from their signature achievement altogether.
They couldn't talk about their other feat - the stimulus, also poorly
explained by the White House from the start - because the 3.3 million jobs
it saved are dwarfed by the intractable unemployment rate. Nor could they
brag stirringly about a financial regulatory reform effort that left too
many devilish details unresolved, too many too-big-to-fail banks standing
and nearly all the crash culprits unaccountable.
With a cupboard this bare, Blame Bush became the Democratic message by
default. But a message that neither boasts of any achievements nor offers
any specifics for the future is a political suicide note.
Blame Bush was also a part of the G.O.P. message this year. When Republican
candidates weren't trashing Obama, they routinely deplored the spending
excesses of their own Bush-era Congress and ripped into the villainous Bush-
Paulson TARP as if their leaders hadn't all signed on to it. The rest of the
G.O.P. message - typified by the "Pledge to America" peddled by John
Boehner - was as incoherent as the Democrats'. Traditional Republican
boilerplate - lower taxes, less spending, smaller government - was chanted
louder and louder, to pander to the Tea Party rebels, but with zero
specifics of how it might be carried out. The midterm strategy was
appropriately labeled "80-20" by the House majority leader in-waiting Eric
Cantor - 80 percent attacks on Democrats, 20 percent proposing a G.O.P.
plan.
But there was no plan. Even in victory, most Republicans can't explain
exactly what they want to do besides cut taxes and repeal health care (a
quixotic goal, given the president's veto pen and the law's more popular
provisions). A riotous dissection of this empty agenda could be found on
election night on MSNBC, where a Republican stalwart, Representative Marsha
Blackburn of Tennessee, called for "across the board" spending cuts. Under
relentless questioning from Chris Matthews, she exempted defense and
entitlements from the ax, thereby eliminating some 85 percent of the federal
budget from her fiscal diligence.
Pressed about Social Security and Medicare, Blackburn would only promise to
have an "adult conversation" with Americans on the subject. That's the new
Republicanese for punting. The G.O.P. budget guru, Representative Paul Ryan
of Wisconsin, also called for a "conversation" in a specifics-deficient
op-ed manifesto in The Financial Times last week. Boehner and Mitch
McConnell, in their postelection press conference, declared no fewer than 11
times that they were eager to "listen" to the American people. At the very
least they are listening to a message guru like Frank Luntz.
Were they to listen to Americans, they'd learn that they favor budget cuts
mainly in theory, not in fact. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll this
summer found that three-quarters of Americans don't want to cut federal aid
to education - high on the hit list of most fiscal hawks - and more than 60
percent are opposed to raising the Social Security retirement age to 70.
Even in the Republican-tilted electorate of last week, exit polls found that
only 39 percent favored extending the Bush tax cuts to all Americans,
including those making $250,000-plus. Yet it's a full Bush tax cut extension
that's the entirety of the G.O.P. jobs program in 2010. This will end
"uncertainty" among the wealthiest taxpayers, you see, and a gazillion jobs
will trickle down magically from Jackson Hole.
Obama has a huge opening here - should he take it. He could call the
Republicans' bluff by forcing them to fill in their own blanks. He could
start by offering them what they want, the full Bush tax cuts, in exchange
for a single caveat: G.O.P. leaders would be required to stand before a big
Glenn Beck-style chalkboard - on C-Span, or, for that matter, Fox News - and
list, with dollar amounts, exactly which budget cuts would pay for them.
Once they hit the first trillion - or even $100 billion - step back and let
the "adult conversation" begin!
Better still, the president should open this bargaining session to the full
spectrum of his opposition. As he said at his forlorn news conference on
Wednesday, he is ready to consider policy ideas "whoever proposes them." So
why not cut to the chase and invite Congressional Tea Party heavyweights
like Jim DeMint, Rand Paul and Michele Bachmann to the White House along
with the official G.O.P. leadership? They will offer the specifics that
Boehner and McConnell are too shy to divulge.
DeMint published a book last year detailing his view that Social Security be
privatized to slow America's descent into socialism. Paul can elaborate on
his ideas for reducing defense spending and cutting back on drug law
enforcement. Bachmann will explain her plans for weaning Americans off
Medicare.
Maybe some of the big Tea Party ideas will be as popular as the Tea Partiers
claim them to be. We won't know until Congress tries to enact them. Nor will
we know Obama's true measure until he provides a coherent alternative of his
own about how he intends to put Americans back to work and keep them in
their homes. If he has such a plan, few, if any, Americans have any idea
what it is.
To do this, he'll have to break out of the White House bubble he lamented
again last week. He can no longer limit interactions with actual working
Americans to photo ops on factory floors or outsource them to a "Middle
Class Task Force" led by Joe Biden. He must move beyond his Ivy League-Wall
Street comfort zone to overhaul his economic team. If George Bush could
announce Donald Rumsfeld's replacement the day after his 2006 midterm
thumping, why is the naming of Lawrence Summers's much-needed successor
receding into eternity?
In the 1946 midterms, the unpopular and error-prone rookie president Harry
Truman, buffeted by a different set of economic dislocations, watched his
party lose both chambers of Congress (including 54 seats in the House) to a
G.O.P. that then moved steadily to the right in its determination to cut
government spending and rip down the New Deal safety net. Two years after
this Democratic wipeout, despite a hostile press and a grievously divided
party, Truman roared back, in part by daring the Republican Congress to
enact its reactionary plans. He won against all odds, as David McCullough
writes in "Truman," because "there was something in the American character
that responded to a fighter."
Surely there are dozens of supporters reassuring Obama with exactly this
Truman scenario this weekend. But if he lacks the will to fight, he might as
well just take his time and enjoy the sights of Mumbai.
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