Conscience of a liberal

Paul Wellstone died with his wife, daughter, and campaign aides five years ago today, in a plane crash disturbingly reminiscent of the crashes used to kill South American progressives who wouldn't go along with the corporate program.

Ezra Klein writes a fine tribute to Wellstone in The American Prospect, including these lines:

"Politics is not about power," he would say. "Politics is not about money. Politics is not about winning for the sake of winning. Politics is about the improvement of people's lives. It's about advancing the cause of peace and justice in our country and the world. Politics is about doing well for the people."

Because of this, Wellstone had an immunity to the political trends that few politicians exhibit. When liberal was an epithet, Paul Wellstone wrote a book called The Conscience of a Liberal. When unions were in deep decline, Wellstone stood with them, and now the AFL-CIO now gives an annual award in his honor. After the Clinton health plan was crushed and Democrats retreated from health reform, Wellstone pushed for single-payer....

Paul Wellstone and plane crashes

The Twin Cities Daily Planet has a nice quote from Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, an activist professor considering running against Norm Coleman for Paul Wellstone's old Senate seat.

"The purpose of good government should be to make sure that the benefits of the economy are dispersed widely and that taxes are invested for the common good," said Pallmeyer. "The rules of the economic game are undermining the health of our families."

Pallmeyer supports single-payer universal healthcare.

I couldn't help but think of Wellstone as I watched John Perkins on Democracy Now last week. Perkins, the author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, talked in part about how he had viewed his work — corrupting foreign officials — as urgently necessary for the well being of those officials. If they weren't corruptible, they often died. Two South American presidents he worked with died in small plane crashes within weeks of each other after refusing Perkin's blandishments.

Perkins writes, "The book was to be dedicated to the presidents of two countries, men who had been his clients whom I respected and thought of as kindred spirits - Jaime Roldós, president of Ecuador, and Omar Torrijos, president of Panama. Both had just died in fiery crashes. Their deaths were not accidental. They were assassinated because they opposed that fraternity of corporate, government, and banking heads whose goal is global empire. We Economic Hit Men failed to bring Roldós and Torrijos around, and the other type of hit men, the CIA-sanctioned jackals who were always right behind us, stepped in."