President Obama’s “green jobs czar” (whatever that is, exactly) has admitted that he signed a 9/11 Truth petition that accuses former President Bush of orchestrating the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Well, he signed it, but he didn’t really agree with it. Or something.

You know, this illustrates a bigger problem. We’re likely to have more czars during Obama’s first term than Russia had in its entire history, and not one of them will be confirmed by the United States Senate. You can’t tell me that this guy would have made it through the Senate before this was exposed, and had it been exposed before his confirmation there’s almost zero likelihood that he would have been confirmed. Maybe the founding fathers knew what they were talking about with that whole “advice and consent” business.

Often, there’s a good litmus test for whether or not an idea is a good idea. If both the left and the right absolutely hate it, then it just might be a good idea because it doesn’t conform well to either of their ideologies. Enter the idea of health care cooperatives. The right dismisses cooperatives as government care under a different guise. The left rejects them because, they say, cooperatives will be fraught with mismanagement and corruption (because of course one finds none of this in government). Yep, anyone who talks about cooperatives have become persona non grata to Beltway ideologues. But what exactly are health care cooperatives?

The basic idea behind a health care cooperative is that citizens rather than bureaucrats come together to essentially create their own health care coverage and then to continue managing it. It is, in reality, the only true public option in that it would be an option organized directly by the public. The so-called “public option” being peddled right now is really the state option, which would leave bureaucrats appointed by the state (read: the president) in control of health care. Although the terminology of “death panels” has been exaggerated for maximum effect, it is quite likely that such a system so distanced from the concerns of the everyday person will lead to dangerous rationing of care. A cooperative would stay grounded in the concerns of the public.

One thing I like to point out to my more liberal friends is that, while they might like the idea of state health care now that their president is in office, they need to think further ahead. Do they expect Democrats to hang onto the White House forever? Obviously, Republicans don’t like the idea of their health care being managed by Barack Obama or, worse yet, his appointees (frankly, neither do I). But when I ask my liberal friends if they want their health care managed by someone like George W. Bush, they shudder (and frankly, so do I). What I’m getting at here is that those on the left and the right should be able to agree that health care is too important to be subjected to the ongoing war of partisan politics. That is exactly what will happen under state health care, and exactly what can be prevented by cooperatives.

Then you have the Republican solution, which is to allow even greater control of our health care system to be given to private industry. While some Republicans might claim that this approach is rooted in subsidiarity, ask yourself: If your health care is being managed by administrators who earn substantially more than you do and who may in fact have better health care coverage, is it really being managed at the lowest level possible? How far is your health care coverage from your everyday concerns? Under a private for-profit system, how much control do you actually exercise over your own health care?

The system that Republicans propose is in fact no better than the system proposed by Democrats. Instead of state bureaucrats, under the Republican plan corporate bureaucrats make decisions about your health care. They do so for the maximization of their profits rather than the maximization of your health. As liberals have argued at length, the private for-profit system has its own version of “death panels.” This privatized rationing includes but certainly isn’t limited to denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions or for so-called “experimental” treatments. When the ultimate goal is profit, there can be no question that health — my health, your health, our families’ health — will suffer. A non-profit health care cooperative is bound to be more compassionate.

This should be an idea that both the left and the right could get behind. For the left, it has the advantage of taking control of the health care system out of the hands of private industry and putting it into the hands of ordinary people. For the right, it has the advantage of preventing a state takeover of health care and enhancing health care choice. There’s something here for everyone, yet both left and right have shouted an emphatic “no” at this option. Why? Because the left can’t get past the enhancement of the state and the right can’t get past the enhancement of the market. Like I said before: Big government and big business, but where’s the “little guy” in all this?

In the end, and this is going to sound cynical, there’s virtually no chance that such a boldly centrist proposal that utterly defies ideological classification will pass muster in the uberideological Beltway. If anything passes, my money is on one of the following:

1) The Baucus Compromise: Includes expansion of Medicare and SCHIP, elimination of pre-existing condition rules, tax credits, and a national health care exchange with a public option. Personally, I’m not seeing the compromise here. The proposed expansion of Medicare and SCHIP is only likely to increase Republican opposition, especially given the former’s impending solvency crisis.

2) The Snowe Compromise: Features a “trigger” proposal that will specify a time period in which the private for-profit system must improve quality and decrease costs or face the automatic creation of a public competitor. There are two problems that I immediately see. The first is that there would be no mechanism that would force the private system to permanently improve quality and lower costs; after the designated time period private health care could, in theory, go back to business as usual. The second is that there is no “trigger” to abolish the public system if it proves to be as bad as private health care or worse.

If I had to bet on which of these two compromises will actually become law, I would go with the Snowe Compromise. It would give the illusion of giving the private for-profit system an opportunity to shape up, without giving private health care the tools it would in theory need to lower costs (like opening an interstate market and legislating tort reform). The Snowe Compromise would also give the Obama administration the illusion of bipartisan compromise that it so badly needs. After all, if the compromise bears the name of a Republican senator then it must be bipartisan, right?

Meanwhile, as we end up with a health care system that will likely increase the power of big government and big business over our health care, you have to wonder if we’ll ever see reform that will increase the power of the “little guy” over his own health care.

Of course those who raise these criticisms are right, to some extent. The real problem lies in their failure to realize that the right to life is the foundation of all other rights. Any quest for a more just society that does not first and very strongly demand the right to life is doomed to failure because it lacks foundation. What happens if you build without a strong foundation? Jesus knew a little something about carpentry, and he concluded that when the rain falls, and the floods come, and the winds blow, that which lacks foundation will collapse completely (cf. Matthew 7:24-27).

So what happens to the poor while their advocates — many of whom are very well-meaning — ignore abortion? A form of cleansing, like ethnic cleansing. But since the poor cross ethnic lines, what should we call it? Class cleansing?

Whatever one wants to call it, it’s happening. A study last September found that there has been a significant shift in abortion demographics. This is no longer an issue that primarily affects teenage white girls; rather, there are now more Latina and black women getting abortions today, and while abortion rates have dropped for those under twenty years old they have increased for women in their 20s and 30s. It’s no secret to anyone on the left that women of color are often among the poorest of the poor in this country, and in fact a senior research associate at the Guttmatcher Institute (affiliated with America’s leading abortion provider, Planned Parenthood) made the connection between these abortion rate increases and poverty.

But here are the solutions offered by the Guttmatcher Institute and Planned Parenthood, and this is where advocates of the preferential option for the poor need to take heed:

The findings indicate “we need to figure out efforts to reduce unintended pregnancy, not only among teenagers but among all women, and in particularly women of color,” she said. “A lot of policymakers are stuck 30 years back when most women getting abortions are teenagers and college students, and that isn’t so much the case these days.”

Others said the findings underscore the need to increase access to contraception for poor women.

“Birth control is the best way to prevent unwanted pregnancies,” said Laurie Rubiner, vice president for public policy at the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. “Unfortunately there’s a large number of uninsured people in this country, and if you are uninsured you are less likely to have access to affordable health care, including affordable birth control.”

Read that a couple of times if it doesn’t sink in right away. If you’re still not getting it, I’ll explain. There is no choice here. Neither of these women — not the researcher from the Guttmatcher Institute, nor the policy wonk from Planned Parenthood — even consider what can be done for a poor woman who might actually want to have her child but can’t afford to do so. That’s not even on the table here. Their focus is on making sure that poor women, many of whom are women of color, get what is needed to prevent procreation. They’re not even thinking about what needs to be done to make sure these women can have babies if they want to. I suppose the choice they’re offering is what kind of birth control to use, or failing that, which type of abortion procedure.

They’re not coming right out and saying it, but this is eugenics. This is a case of people playing God, deciding who’s “undesirable” and weeding them out. In this case, it seems that poor people — especially if they’re black or Latina — are the undesirables. If we were talking about this in any other context, the left would be up in arms beyond all imagination. But because we’re talking about this in the context of abortion, it’s fine. This kind of cleansing of the poor is a-okay. This kind of ethnic cleansing — what else do you call it, with so many black and Latina women disproportionately affected? — is all right in this context.

I can’t help but think back on the Kennedy funeral this past weekend. I think one of the commentators said there’s something like 85 Kennedies now. I think it’s great they have such a large family, and I know that the late Sen. Kennedy did more than his fair share to help the poor. But when I think about how large the Kennedy family is, and when I think about Sen. Kennedy’s record on abortion, I can’t help but detect some hypocrisy. Sure, they have a large family because they have the wealth to sustain it. But what about the poor?

It’s nice that the Kennedy family is so large. I just wonder, if Sen. Kennedy had applied the social teachings of his faith more consistently, if less privileged families today might be able to have similarly large families. According to the researcher at the Guttmatcher Institute that I quoted above, abortions for women who already have a child have jumped from 46% in 1974 to 60% in just thirty years and that’s because they can’t afford more than one child. And that seems fine with our complacent society because, after all, poor women always have a choice. That’s a shame. Where’s the right to choose a large family for the poor woman living in Harlem or Los Angeles?

Richard Stith has written an article for the current edition of First Things in which he obliterates the “feminist” argument for abortion. Stith argues that women are actually demeaned by abortion and that their choices are diminished, in that abortion has actually empowered men to have more irresponsible sex without real consequences for them while putting more pressure on women to have unprotected sex with them. And it’s clear from what I’ve written here that abortion is acting as a form of de facto cultural cleansing that targets poor women in general and women of color specifically.

Stith wants to know, and rightly so, when feminists are going to wake up and realize that abortion oppresses women. It’s a good question. I’m wondering when the “preferential option for the poor” folks, most of whom are well-meaning, are going to realize that their fight is futile while our culture is still quite comfortable with killing babies in the womb, especially if those babies might be poor or black or Latino. How do you argue for greater respect for poor women and women of color in a culture that turns a blind eye toward contraceptive and abortive cleansing of these same people? The rains are falling, the flood has come, and the wind is blowing. How long do you think your house can stand?