FDR: “Our greatest primary task is to put people to work.” Obama Doesn't Get It.

Bring the troops home, we need to spend those trillions here on our own jobless economy and infrastructure. Sure we can proceed on our present course; but do you remember Pyrrhus of Epirus?

When Pyrrhus invaded Apulia (279 BC), the two armies met in the Battle of Asculum where Pyrrhus won a very costly victory. The consul Publius Decius Mus was the Roman commander, and his able force, though defeated, broke the back of Pyrrhus' Hellenistic army, and guaranteed the security of the city itself. The battle foreshadowed later Roman victories over more numerous and well armed successor state military forces and inspired the term "Pyrrhic victory", meaning a victory which comes at a crippling cost." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrhus_of_Epirus)



By BOB HERBERT
Published: October 5, 2009, NYT

The big question on the domestic front right now is whether President Obama understands the gravity of the employment crisis facing the country. Does he get it? The signals coming out of the White House have not been encouraging.

The Beltway crowd and the Einsteins of high finance who never saw this economic collapse coming are now telling us with their usual breezy arrogance that the Great Recession is probably over. Their focus, of course, is on data, abstractions like the gross domestic product, not the continued suffering of living, breathing human beings struggling with the nightmare of joblessness.

Even Mr. Obama, in an interview with The Times, gave short shrift to the idea of an additional economic stimulus package, telling John Harwood a few weeks ago that the economy had likely turned a corner. “As you know,” the president said, “jobs tend to be a lagging indicator; they come last.”

The view of most American families is somewhat less blasé. Faced with the relentless monthly costs of housing, transportation, food, clothing, education and so forth, they have precious little time to wait for this lagging indicator to come creeping across the finish line.

Americans need jobs now, and if the economy on its own is incapable of putting people back to work — which appears to be the case — then the government needs to step in with aggressive job-creation efforts.

Nearly one in four American families has suffered a job loss over the past year, according to a survey released by the Economic Policy Institute. Nearly 1 in 10 Americans is officially unemployed, and the real-world jobless rate is worse.

We’re running on a treadmill that is carrying us backward. Something approaching 10 million new jobs would have to be created just to get back to where we were when the recession began in December 2007. There is nothing currently in the works to jump-start job creation on that scale.

A massive long-term campaign to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure — which would put large numbers of people to work establishing the essential industrial platform for a truly 21st-century American economy — has not seriously been considered. Large-scale public-works programs that would reach deep into the inner cities and out to hard-pressed suburban and rural areas have been dismissed as the residue of an ancient, unsophisticated era.

We seem to be waiting for some mythical rebound to come rolling in, magically equipped with robust job creation, a long-term bull market and paradise regained for consumers.

It ain’t happening.

While the data mavens were talking about green shoots in September, employers in the real world were letting another 263,000 of their workers go, bringing the jobless rate to 9.8 percent, the highest in more than a quarter of a century. It would have been higher still but 571,000 people dropped out of the labor market. They’re jobless but not counted as unemployed. The number of people officially unemployed — 15.1 million — is, as The Wall Street Journal noted, greater than the population of 46 of the 50 states.

The Obama administration seems hamstrung by the unemployment crisis. No big ideas have emerged. No dramatically creative initiatives. While devoting enormous amounts of energy to health care, and trying now to decide what to do about Afghanistan, the president has not even conveyed the sense of urgency that the crisis in employment warrants.

If that does not change, these staggering levels of joblessness have the potential to cripple not just the well-being of millions of American families, but any real prospects for sustained economic recovery and the political prospects of the president as well. An unemployed electorate is an unhappy electorate.

The survey for the Economic Policy Institute was conducted in September by Hart Research Associates. Respondents said that they had more faith in President Obama’s ability to handle the economy than Congressional Republicans. The tally was 43 percent to 32 percent. But when asked who had been helped most by government stimulus efforts, substantial majorities said “large banks” and “Wall Street investment companies.”

When asked how “average working people” or “you and your family” had benefited, very small percentages, in a range of 10 percent to 13 percent, said they had fared well.

The word now, in the wake of last week’s demoralizing jobless numbers, is that the administration is looking more closely at its job creation options. Whether anything dramatic emerges remains to be seen.

The master in this area, of course, was Franklin Roosevelt. His first Inaugural Address was famous for the phrase: “The only thing we have to fear. ...” But he also said in that speech: “Our greatest primary task is to put people to work.” And he said the country should treat that task “as we would treat the emergency of a war.”

Now that’s the sense of urgency we need.

The Politics of Spite

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: October 4, 2009, NYT
There was what President Obama likes to call a teachable moment last week, when the International Olympic Committee rejected Chicago’s bid to be host of the 2016 Summer Games.


“Cheers erupted” at the headquarters of the conservative Weekly Standard, according to a blog post by a member of the magazine’s staff, with the headline “Obama loses! Obama loses!” Rush Limbaugh declared himself “gleeful.” “World Rejects Obama,” gloated the Drudge Report. And so on.

So what did we learn from this moment? For one thing, we learned that the modern conservative movement, which dominates the modern Republican Party, has the emotional maturity of a bratty 13-year-old.

But more important, the episode illustrated an essential truth about the state of American politics: at this point, the guiding principle of one of our nation’s two great political parties is spite pure and simple. If Republicans think something might be good for the president, they’re against it — whether or not it’s good for America.

To be sure, while celebrating America’s rebuff by the Olympic Committee was puerile, it didn’t do any real harm. But the same principle of spite has determined Republican positions on more serious matters, with potentially serious consequences — in particular, in the debate over health care reform.

Now, it’s understandable that many Republicans oppose Democratic plans to extend insurance coverage — just as most Democrats opposed President Bush’s attempt to convert Social Security into a sort of giant 401(k). The two parties do, after all, have different philosophies about the appropriate role of government.

But the tactics of the two parties have been different. In 2005, when Democrats campaigned against Social Security privatization, their arguments were consistent with their underlying ideology: they argued that replacing guaranteed benefits with private accounts would expose retirees to too much risk.

The Republican campaign against health care reform, by contrast, has shown no such consistency. For the main G.O.P. line of attack is the claim — based mainly on lies about death panels and so on — that reform will undermine Medicare. And this line of attack is utterly at odds both with the party’s traditions and with what conservatives claim to believe.

Think about just how bizarre it is for Republicans to position themselves as the defenders of unrestricted Medicare spending. First of all, the modern G.O.P. considers itself the party of Ronald Reagan — and Reagan was a fierce opponent of Medicare’s creation, warning that it would destroy American freedom. (Honest.) In the 1990s, Newt Gingrich tried to force drastic cuts in Medicare financing. And in recent years, Republicans have repeatedly decried the growth in entitlement spending — growth that is largely driven by rising health care costs.

But the Obama administration’s plan to expand coverage relies in part on savings from Medicare. And since the G.O.P. opposes anything that might be good for Mr. Obama, it has become the passionate defender of ineffective medical procedures and overpayments to insurance companies.

How did one of our great political parties become so ruthless, so willing to embrace scorched-earth tactics even if so doing undermines the ability of any future administration to govern?

The key point is that ever since the Reagan years, the Republican Party has been dominated by radicals — ideologues and/or apparatchiks who, at a fundamental level, do not accept anyone else’s right to govern.

Anyone surprised by the venomous, over-the-top opposition to Mr. Obama must have forgotten the Clinton years. Remember when Rush Limbaugh suggested that Hillary Clinton was a party to murder? When Newt Gingrich shut down the federal government in an attempt to bully Bill Clinton into accepting those Medicare cuts? And let’s not even talk about the impeachment saga.

The only difference now is that the G.O.P. is in a weaker position, having lost control not just of Congress but, to a large extent, of the terms of debate. The public no longer buys conservative ideology the way it used to; the old attacks on Big Government and paeans to the magic of the marketplace have lost their resonance. Yet conservatives retain their belief that they, and only they, should govern.

The result has been a cynical, ends-justify-the-means approach. Hastening the day when the rightful governing party returns to power is all that matters, so the G.O.P. will seize any club at hand with which to beat the current administration.

It’s an ugly picture. But it’s the truth. And it’s a truth anyone trying to find solutions to America’s real problems has to understand.

The Rabbit Ragu Democrats

By FRANK RICH
Published: October 3, 2009, NYT

IN the annals of American excess, there often arrives a moment when those with too much money, too much clout and too much hubris just can’t stop themselves from tempting the fates. They throw an over-the-top party in public, or parade their wealth and power before the press, and the next thing you know their world, and sometimes ours, has crashed.

In the go-go Reagan 1980s, the junk bond king Michael Milken bedazzled investors with lavish Predators’ Balls in Beverly Hills. Sure enough, he and Wall Street would end the decade in ruin. Back East, the financier Saul Steinberg celebrated his 50th birthday in 1989 with a $1 million party in the Hamptons. “Honey, if this moment were a stock, I’d short it,” he said when toasting his wife. He would soon suffer a stroke and see his company go bankrupt.

Steinberg sold his vast New York apartment to the private equity titan Stephen Schwarzman. In February 2007, Schwarzman marked his 60th birthday with a highly visible multimillion-dollar bacchanal in the Park Avenue Armory. Though Schwarzman hasn’t suffered much since — he is tied for 50th on the new Forbes list of the 400 wealthiest Americans — his bash presaged the bust to come. He became, as James Stewart wrote in The New Yorker, “the designated villain of an era on Wall Street — an era of rapacious capitalists and heedless self-indulgence.”

It’s in this context that you have to wonder what some of the Obama era’s most moneyed and White House-connected lobbyists were thinking as they preened before a Washington Post reporter recently for two lengthy articles. We’re not even nine months into the new administration, yet these swaggering, utterly un-self-aware influence peddlers seem determined to prove that nothing except the party affiliations has changed in the Beltway’s pay-for-play culture since Tom DeLay. If these lobbyists were stocks, I’d short them.

One of the articles focused on Heather Podesta — “The It Girl of a New Generation of Lobbyists” — who lobbies for health care players like Eli Lilly, HealthSouth and Cigna. Podesta is half of what The Post has called a “mega-lobbying” couple. Her husband, with his own separate (and larger) lobbying shop, is Tony Podesta, the brother of John Podesta, the Clinton White House chief of staff who ran the Obama transition. Back in November, Tony Podesta told The Times that only “very unsophisticated” clients would hire his firm because of his brother’s role in assembling the new administration. That encyclopedic and ever-expanding list of “unsophisticated” clients includes Amgen and the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity — and that’s just among the A’s. His business was up 57 percent from last year in the first six months of 2009. Heather Podesta’s was up 65 percent.

When we first meet Heather Podesta in The Post, she is being bussed on the cheek by Charles Rangel at his August birthday party at New York’s Tavern on the Green. In keeping with the usual pattern of blowback, it took only one day after the article appeared for The Times to report that Rangel, the ethically challenged chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, was guilty of yet another lapse: He’d neglected to list at least $500,000 in assets on his 2007 Congressional disclosure form. As if that were not karmic retribution enough, Tavern on the Green filed for bankruptcy just days after that.

The second Post article, on the front page two weeks ago, described the scene, as well as the rabbit ragu, at Ristorante Tosca, the lobbyists’ hangout on F Street in downtown Washington. The Post did not mention that it is just four blocks away from the location of the now defunct Signatures, the restaurant whose owner, Jack Abramoff, was the go-to fixer of the DeLay “K Street project” before scandal brought him down.

The stars of Tosca’s “Power Section,” we learned, include the Podestas, Tom Daschle (“not technically a registered lobbyist” but, as The Post put it, “a ‘special policy adviser’ — wink wink”) and Steve Elmendorf (who “eats lunch out only at Tosca”). Elmendorf was chief of staff to the former Democratic House leader Dick Gephardt. A quick visit to opensecrets.org reveals that Elmendorf Strategies’ client list includes Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, among other players in the coming battle over financial regulation reform. Then again, as The Nation details in its current issue, Gephardt has also lobbied for Goldman, among many other corporate clients in opposition to the populist policies he once championed.

Barack Obama promised a change from this revolving-door, behind-closed-doors collaboration between special interests and government. He vowed to “do our business in the light of day” — with health care negotiations broadcast on C-Span — and to “restore the vital trust between people and their government.” He said, “I intend to tell the corporate lobbyists that their days of setting the agenda in Washington are over.” That those lobbyists would so extravagantly flaunt their undiminished role shows just how little they believe that a new sheriff has arrived in Dodge.

In his scathing Wall Street Journal column on The Post articles last week, Thomas Frank crystallized the gap between Obama’s pledge and this reality. “There is something uniquely depressing about the fact that the National Portrait Gallery’s version of the Barack Obama ‘Hope’ poster previously belonged to a pair of lobbyists.” That’s no joke: It was donated by Tony and Heather Podesta.

Obama’s promise to make Americans trust the government again was not just another campaign bullet point; it’s the foundation of his brand of governance and essential to his success in office. At the first anniversary of the TARP bailout of the banks, we can see how far he has to go. Americans’ continued suspicion that Washington is in cahoots with powerful interests in joints like Tosca is contributing to their confusion and skepticism about what’s happening out of view in the battle over health care reform.

The public is not wrong. The administration’s legislative deals with the pharmaceutical companies were made in back rooms. Business Week reported in early August that the UnitedHealth Group and its fellow insurance giants had already quietly rounded up moderate Democrats in the House to block any public health care option that would compete with them for business. UnitedHealth’s hired Beltway gunslingers include both Elmendorf Strategies and Daschle, a public supporter of the public option who nonetheless does some of his “wink, wink” counseling for UnitedHealth. The company’s in-house lobbyist is a former chief of staff to Steny Hoyer, the House majority leader. Gephardt consults there too.

But it’s not as if the Republicans now have the public’s back. DeLay may be reduced these days to violating public taste rather than the public trust on “Dancing With the Stars,” but back on Capitol Hill, his successors keep the K Street faith. In their campaign to kill the public option, G.O.P. leaders often cite data from the Lewin Group, a research company, which has projected that 88 million Americans might quit their private insurance plans if given a government alternative. (The Congressional Budget Office puts the figure at the far less earthshaking 10 to 11 million.) Lewin, which repeatedly insists it’s still a nonpartisan outfit, was actually bought by a subsidiary of UnitedHealth in 2007. The Huffington Post reported in August that John Boehner and Eric Cantor — who use Lewin’s findings to scare voters about a “government takeover” of health care — are big recipients of UnitedHealth campaign cash.

Next up will be the overhaul of financial regulations. With job seekers now outnumbering job openings 6 to 1 in America, many still wonder why most of the big-dog culprits who helped speed the national meltdown — from lying and gambling bankers to shyster subprime mortgage packagers to executives at delinquent ratings agencies — have not shared their pain. In his speech marking the anniversary of Lehman Brothers’ failure, Obama chastised Wall Street for having taken irresponsible risks. But of course it is already back doing exactly that.

Meanwhile, we’re hearing of behind-the-scenes Congressional softening of perhaps the most promising component of the White House’s modest financial regulatory package, a Consumer Financial Protection Agency. Real-estate brokerages are being exempted from its purview, and banks will not be required to offer “plain vanilla” mortgages. As in health care, the question of what the White House will really fight for in financial reform remains open. While the ostentatious daily predators’ ball at Ristorante Tosca is a bad omen, we don’t know yet whether that omen is for the lobbyists, or the Obama administration, or both.

This is history that the president still has the power to write. It will be written in the bills he will or won’t sign into law. We can only hope that he learned an important lesson from his stunning failure to secure Olympic gold for his political home of Chicago last week. If the Olympic committee has the audacity to stand up to a lobbyist as powerful as the president of the United States, then surely the president of the United States can stand up to the powerful interests angling to defeat his promise of reform.

Dad’s Life or Yours? You Choose

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: October 3, 2009, NYT

So what would you do if your mom or dad, or perhaps your sister or brother, needed a kidney donation and you were the one best positioned to donate?

Most of us would worry a little and then step forward. But not so fast. Because of our dysfunctional health insurance system, a disgrace that nearly half of all members of Congress seem determined to cling to, stepping up to save a loved one can ruin your own chance of ever getting health insurance.

That wrenching trade-off is another reminder of the moral bankruptcy of our existing insurance system. It’s one more reason to pass robust reform this year.

Over the last week I’ve been speaking to David Waddington, a 58-year-old wine retailer in Dallas, along with his wife and two sons. I’d love to know what the opponents of health reform think families like this should do.

Mr. Waddington has polycystic kidney disease, or PKD, a genetic disorder that leads to kidney failure. First he lost one kidney, and then the other. A year ago, he was on dialysis and desperately needed a new kidney. Doctors explained that the best match — the one least likely to be rejected — would perhaps come from Travis or Michael, his two sons, then ages 29 and 27.

Travis and Michael each had a 50 percent chance of inheriting PKD. And if pre-donation testing revealed that one of them had the disorder, that brother might never be able to get health insurance. As a result, their doctors had advised not getting tested. After all, new research suggests that lack of insurance increases a working-age person’s risk of dying in any given year by 40 percent.

“At the time David needed a transplant, the people closest to him couldn’t even offer a lifesaving donation — for insurance reasons,” said Mr. Waddington’s wife, Susan.

Travis, who is living in New York and working toward a math doctorate, is anguished at having to weigh insurance obstacles against the chance to save his dad.

“Can you put a price on your father’s life?” he asked. “My brother and I talked it over privately, and agreed that we should both go ahead and get tested anyway. It seemed like the only course of action. We presented our plan to our parents, and of course Mom immediately shot it down, with Dad firmly behind her.

“We had to respect their right to want to protect us. But it was enraging to be in that situation, and to be completely impotent to do anything to help. I told myself a number of times that we would reconsider the issue of testing if Dad’s dialysis stopped working before he got a transplant.”

David Waddington finally got that transplant when a kidney from a deceased donor became available. But our insurance system has had other excruciating consequences for the Waddingtons. Though PKD has no cure as such, there are experimental medications that may delay kidney problems. To get access to the medications, a patient must be tested — and since Travis and Michael Waddington don’t dare get tested, they don’t have access to these medications.

“The only way to do it is to lie about your name during testing, to use a fictitious name,” Susan Waddington said. “That was the advice we got from a major person in the field. We didn’t do that.”

The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, passed last year, should eventually help people get access to health insurance even if they have a genetic predisposition to a disease. But insurance companies will still be free to discriminate against people who show symptoms of those diseases.

That’s what’s happening now with Michael. For years, he and Travis were afraid to mention to physicians their 50 percent chance of inheriting PKD, but recently Michael began suffering pains and went to the emergency room. After examining him and ordering tests, the doctor asked him, “Have you ever heard of PKD?”

“I felt the jig was up, and I could disclose my knowledge,” Michael said, so he told the doctor about his father.

The broader problem is this: Our broken system leads Americans to spend 16 percent of our national income on health care, twice as much as in parts of Europe, yet with maternal mortality rates and child mortality rates twice those of the best-performing countries. Lack of insurance is linked to nearly 45,000 unnecessary deaths a year, according to a peer-reviewed study to be published in the December issue of The American Journal of Public Health.

None of this seems to move members of Congress who oppose health reform. They have first-rate health care for themselves and so perhaps don’t appreciate how their posturing forces people like the Waddingtons into impossible situations. Let’s hope they find it in their hearts to overhaul an existing insurance system that is the disgrace of the industrialized world.

The Forbes 400 Shows Why Our Nation Is Falling Apart

Les Leopold
Author of The Looting of America
Posted: October 1, 2009 10:56 AM
Huffpo

It's great to know that during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the wealth of the 400 richest Americans, according to Forbes, actually increased by $30 billion. Well golly, that's only a 2 percent increase, much less than the double digit returns the wealthy had grown accustomed to. But a 2 percent increase is a whole lot more than losing 40 percent of your 401k. And $30 billion is enough to provide 500,000 school teacher jobs at $60k per year.
Collectively, those 400 have $1.57 trillion in wealth. It's hard to get your mind around a number like that. The way I do it is to imagine that we were still living during the great radical Eisenhower era of the 1950s when marginal income tax rates hit 91 percent. Taxes were high back in the 1950s because people understood that constraining wild extremes of wealth would make our country stronger and prevent another depression. (Well, what did those old fogies know?)
Had we kept those high progressive taxes in place, instead of removing them, especially during the Reagan era, the Forbes 400 might each be worth "only" $100 million instead of $3.9 billion each. So let's imagine that the rest of their wealth, about $1.53 trillion, were available for the public good.
What does $1.53 trillion buy?
It's more than enough to insure the uninsured for the next twenty years or more.
It's more than enough to create a Manhattan Project to solve global warming by developing renewable energy and a green, sustainable manufacturing sector.
And here's my favorite: It's more than enough to endow every public college and university in the country so that all of our children could gain access to higher education for free, forever!
Instead, we embarked on a grand experiment to see what would happen if we deregulated finance and changed the tax code so that millionaires could turn into billionaires. And even after that experiment failed in the most spectacular way, our system seems trapped into staying on the same deregulated path.
Instead of free higher education, health care and a sustainable economy, we got a fantasy finance boom and bust on Wall Street which crashed the real economy. We have our 400 billionaires, and we have 29 million unemployed and underemployed Americans. We have an infrastructure in shambles. We have an environment in crisis. We have a health care system that would make Rube Goldberg proud. And we have the worst income distribution since 1929.
I hazard to guess that each and every Forbes 400 member could get by with a net worth of $100 million. I don't think that would kill their entrepreneurial drive or harm our economy--in fact it would be a major boon to the economy to step back from the edge of such massive concentration of wealth. The real problem is getting there form here. A wealth tax that kicks in when you become worth more than $100 million would be a good start. The Eisenhower tax rate on adjustable gross income over $3 million a year would help as well.
And please let's not call it socialism, now that we've placed the entire financial sector on welfare to the tune of over $13 trillion in subsidies and guarantees. (By the way, the yearly budget outlays for means tested programs for low income citizens is about $350 billion per year. So Wall Street's welfare is about 37 times as large as welfare for poor.)
So if narrowing the income/wealth gap isn't socialism, what is it? It's the America that thrived in the 1950s and 1960s. It's the America that created a middle-class and vowed never to let the financial gamblers return us to another depression. It's an America that put its people to work and built an infrastructure that was the envy of the world.
Where's Dwight David Eisenhower when we need him?

Les Leopold is the author of The Looting of America: How Wall Street's Game of Fantasy Finance destroyed our Jobs, Pensions and Prosperity, and What We Can Do About It, Chelsea Green Publishing, June 2009.


Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/les-leopold/the-forbes-400-shows-why_b_306228.html

All The President's Values

Huffpo: Drew Westen
Psychologist and neuroscientist; Emory University Professor


I'm starting to gain new respect for President Bush. Wow, that's a scary thought.
Sure, he was an impulsive, narcissistic little man of at-best average intellect, who acted on his "gut" even when it was as empty as his head. Sure, he had a Manichean world-view and split the world into those who are "with us" or "against us." Sure, he pursued an economic philosophy (if you can call three or four words strung together at a time, usually with improper syntax, the rudiments of a philosophy) that led to the Great Recession and a trillion dollar deficit to support a massive redistribution of income from the middle class to the super-rich. Sure, he loved cowboys so much he bought a ranch as a prop for his first presidential campaign and confused world leadership with a John Wayne movie. And sure, when he listened to his psychopathic sidekick, Karl Rove, he did some pretty shady things -- which was a lot of the time.
OK, so W. had his flaws.
But even when he was lying through his teeth, lying through somebody else's teeth (like Colin Powell's at the United Nations), or bombing the wrong country, you knew where he stood. He had beliefs. He had principles. He had values.
Mind you, I didn't agree with any of those beliefs, principles, or values. But once Bush took off the "compassionate conservative" Halloween costume he wore for the 2000 election, he generally told us what he believed in and pursued it as vigorously as he asserted it.
For example, Bush thought gay people like his vice president's daughter were a threat to civilization (okay, maybe he had a point about Liz Cheney), so he tried to sell a Constitutional amendment to make them the official lepers of the United States (since both he and Jeb still needed Hispanics, and we already had a national flower).
He believed abortion was murder and that premarital sex was a sin (once he was no longer premarital, of course), so he used the big stick of both U.S. aid abroad and the federal government at home to prevent everyone he could from getting an abortion, a condom, or accurate information about birth control.
He thought everyone should be able to carry an AK-47 into church, so he opened an office of faith-based initiatives and let the ban on assault weapons sunset.
And he believed that monopolies constitute a free market and that profits are good no matter how you get them, so he gave taxpayer subsidies to oil companies while gas was at $4.00 a gallon and handed the national car keys to Wall Street traders along with a fifth of Jack Daniels and a race track.
Okay, so he wasn't among, say, our top 43 presidents.
But I wouldn't mind hearing about values from our current president. And more importantly, I wouldn't mind seeing him act on them, whatever they are.
No, compromise doesn't count as a value. And personally, I'm over "let me talk about personal responsibility in front of a black audience because everybody likes that." It was inspiring the first couple of times, but it's starting to reinforce white people's stereotypes that all black people need a talking-to about personal responsibility.
Speaking of personal responsibility, let's set aside for a moment the fact that Obama brought on the fellas who crashed the economy to fix it and hasn't fired or investigated anyone who caused the Great Recession or who continues to suck bonuses from the blood of our 401(k)s. That would be looking backward, and we're supposed to look forward. And forget about the wiretapping, the extraordinary renditions, all that civil liberties stuff. That would be looking forward, and we're supposed to be looking away. No one really knows why he's taken the positions he has on those issues because the reasons are all either classified or locked up in some jail cell in some country far away with duct tape over its mouth.
Let's just stick with one issue, health care. The president is right: we can all agree on about 80 percent. Insurance companies should have to reimburse doctors for the KY if they're going to allow prostate exams during men's yearly physicals. That's preventive care, and we're all for that. Nor should they be able to exclude people for coverage who have pre-existing conditions, cut people off on a pretext when they're in the middle of a costly illness, or impose annual or lifetime caps on medical expenses, especially when they're going to get 46 million new customers. And pharmaceutical companies should be able to set their own prices without negotiation if they agree not to oppose health care reform the way they did in 1994, continue giving millions to members of Congressional committees that deal with health care, and run $150 million in ads for the president's plan produced by the firms that ran his campaign so they have some cash to tide them over until 2012. Well, maybe we don't all agree on that last one.
But then there's the other 20 percent. Let's set aside for a moment how we're going to keep costs down if we don't ask anything much of the insurance companies, the pharmaceutical industry, or the upper 1 percent of Americans, for whom tax increases somehow got off the table. (The answer: tax the health care benefits of middle class Americans and cut the waste from Medicare and hope you don't accidentally cut essential benefits to seniors.)
No one seems to notice that the president who believes social issues are so "90's," "retro," and "distracting" that he can just avoid them until the "real" issues have been settled (by which point he will likely have lost his super-majorities in one or both houses of Congress) has actually been steadily reinforcing the conservative position on every one of them.
Never mind that he threw gays under the bus on health care long ago (while his Justice Department likened them to practitioners of bestiality and his Defense Department continues to toss them out of the military), reinforcing the conservative position that gay relationships aren't real relationships, so gay couples don't deserve health insurance.
There was, of course, an alternative. The president could have used this as a "teachable moment" to move the political center, with a values statement as simple as, "When you sign up for health benefits, it's none of the government's, your employer's, or anyone else's damned business who you your husband, wife, or partner is." That's as much a libertarian message as a liberal one.
Obama's assumption of the conservative position on abortion seems to have gone equally unnoticed as he "reassured" Americans in his speech to the joint session of Congress that abortion wouldn't be covered, followed up by a categorical statement by his Secretary of Health and Human Services the following Sunday morning in case anyone missed it. If he's going to take the conservative position, he should be consistent and take it all the way: health insurance shouldn't cover birth control, either, because the Pope doesn't like it and nor do a lot of fundamentalist Christians. You certainly can't have taxpayer money going to block procreation. And perhaps we should mandate separate emergency rooms for men and women, at least on the Sabbath, because some women might be menstruating, and if government is going to enforce one group's religious preferences on the rest of us, it should enforce them all. (Well, maybe not the Book of Mormon, which had to change a little when Utah wanted to become a state. Anyway, multiple wives would be too expensive for the health insurance industry -- those are really big families.)
But Obama didn't need to take the position of the right to "avoid controversy." He might instead have stated a clear, values-based position -- "that government is not going to be in the business of deciding when or whether a woman or couple should or shouldn't start their family" -- and simply reiterated what is both the law and the mainstream view in this country, that in America, we don't force one person to live by another person's religious faith. That's a progressive message, but it's hardly "far left." If anything, it's "far middle."
Then there's the immigration attack on health care reform. Following Joe Wilson's rousing tea-party rendition of "Hail to the Chief" ("You lie!") in response to the president's joint-session "reassurance" that "illegals" with appendicitis will get a one-way bus-ticket to Mexico instead of (North) American health care, the president, who had just promised to "call out" those who used issues just like this one to try to obstruct health care reform, instead rewarded Wilson for his incivility. Following Wilson's outburst, the White House "toughened up" the president's proposal to prevent illegal immigrants from even buying their own insurance in the health exchange that will come online after the next presidential election -- in time for a Republican candidate to re-litigate the whole health care debate and derail it if he wins the election, claiming (and perhaps legitimately) a mandate for doing so.
President Obama could, of course, have responded differently, for example, by saying, "I have no intention of letting politicians who want to score political points hold the health care of our own citizens hostage to the immigration problem. We need common sense solutions to immigration that respect both our borders and our values, like increasing the number of border guards, cracking down on employers who hire illegal immigrants, and requiring those who are here already to earn citizenship by obeying our laws, paying taxes, learning English, and paying for their health care like everybody else. But with all the partisan bickering, immigration reform isn't going to happen overnight, and Americans want leadership on health care reform, and they want it now." I happen to know he would have gotten the better of Wilson and his ilk by double digits with that response because we polled it last year against a tough anti-immigrant attack on health care.
What makes the president's actions and "reassurances" during the health care debate so disturbing is their common thread: If this president has values, he doesn't want to talk about them, except in vague generalities, and when push comes to shove, it's hard to find many that he isn't willing to give up to avoid a confrontation.
Does he believe gay people should be second-class citizens the same way black people were when he was born? Don't watch the rabbit, watch the hands. We've heard him lecture black audiences on the virtues of reading to their children -- something he is uniquely positioned to do as a black president, and an important message to convey -- but have we heard him lecture black clergy about their bigotry toward their gay and lesbian brothers and sisters? Have we heard him remind them that white people made precisely the same arguments they have been making from the pulpit about gay unions 40 years ago about the "mixing of the races," based on the same biblical references?
On abortion and family planning, does he believe government should impose a vocal minority's religious beliefs on the majority in the most important decision people can make, about when to have a child? Or does he believe women and couples should decide for themselves, based on their own values and beliefs, when to start their families, whether to abort a rapist's baby, or whether they really want to bring a child into the world with a disease that will kill her before she ever turns 18? He and Kathleen Sebelius have "reassured" Americans that they need not fear the specter of government-funded abortions if health care reform passes. So what about health care plans that include it now? Watch the hand, not the rabbit.
And does the president really want to see the kind of comprehensive immigration reform he so eloquently spoke of during the campaign? Or does he prefer to continue stepping up Bush-era raids and promising Joe Wilson that illegal immigrants will die before they get health care in the U.S. of A., and that they will be denied care even if their husbands, wives, or children are American citizens (or if they are likely to infect American citizens with diseases for which they or their children are not immunized or treated)?
The reality is that there are competing value systems in "post-partisan" America, which are reflected broadly by the two parties, and both should be articulated clearly so voters can make educated choices.
The president and his team believe they can sidestep values and sell voters specific policies, with one "carve-out" after another for people on the other side who have strongly held value commitments and aren't afraid to voice them. But perhaps they should stop carving their values out of their policies and learn something from those people on the other side: If you offer the American people a compelling vision of the future, they just might follow you there. That's what leadership is all about.
Drew Westen, Ph.D., is Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at Emory University, founder of Westen Strategies, and author of The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation.


Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/drew-westen/all-the-presidents-values_b_304087.html

NPR Poll: Congress NOT listening to "We the People"

September 30, 2009

NPR Morning Edition:

Perhaps no other issue Congress deals with touches every American as intimately as health care. Yet a new poll by NPR, the Kaiser Family Foundation, and the Harvard School of Public Health finds that, so far, the public feels profoundly shut out of the current health overhaul debate.

"Most people don't feel that they personally have a voice in this debate," said Mollyann Brodie, director of public opinion and survey research for the Kaiser Family Foundation. "In fact, 71 percent told us that Congress was paying too little attention to what people like them were saying."

Nancy Turtenwald is one of those people. The tourist from Milwaukee was walking around the sparkling new visitor center at the U.S. Capitol Tuesday. She was quick to agree with poll findings that the lawmakers debating the massive health overhaul bill just a few blocks away weren't much interested in problems like hers.

"I don't think they are people like us, you know?" she said. She thinks Congressional lawmakers know very little about the daily lives of the average American — and the health care costs they face. "How often do they go and buy gas and bread and stuff to see what it's really like for the people like us?"

So who does Turtenwald think Congress is listening to? "Lobbyists, and people who will get them reelected."

Still, according to the poll, the public is nearly evenly split about whether interest groups are a good or bad thing when it comes to health care.

Just over half — 51 percent — agree with the poll question "health care interest groups will play an important role in carrying out changes to the health care system, so it's important to have them on board with the legislation."

A somewhat smaller, but still substantial group (39 percent) agree, however, that "Congress should design the best health care legislation it can and not worry if health care interest groups support it or not."

And who does the public trust when it comes to health care interest groups?

Nurses got the highest vote of confidence, with 79 percent of those polled saying they have at least a fair amount of confidence that groups representing nurses would "recommend the right thing for the country when it comes to health care." Groups representing patients, doctors and seniors were next on the list.

Groups trusted the least were those representing insurance companies, drugmakers and large corporations.

Insurance companies and drugmakers were also among those respondents said were most responsible for the current problems facing health care. But so was the federal government.

That presents no small obstacle for lawmakers. "Half the public says that the federal government bears a lot of the responsibility for the problems that we face in our health care system," said Mollyann Brodie of the Kaiser Family Foundation. "So you know, certainly there is a challenge as the federal government is trying to address these problems, as they are also seen as one of the pieces of the challenge to start with."

Another challenge, says Bob Blendon of the Harvard School of Public Health, is who the public does not blame — doctors, hospitals and patients themselves. Many experts say those are the groups most guilty of overusing the health care system. Thus, they are also the groups whose behavior is most targeted for change in the pending health care bills.

Yet "people are not focused on, 'Is something wrong with the delivery system?'" Blendon said. According to the poll, the public is focused on the insurance and pharmaceutical industry. And they very much think government is part of the problem

Insurance Companies in Control

On 9/27/2009 we saw what happens when the primary concern of decision makers is corporate profits. Insurance companies are the only beneficiaries of the actions of the Senate Finance Committee.
This just highlights the problem of the current debate, one that we set out to change three weeks ago: the focus should be on providing medical care to keep everyone healthy, not how to expand insurance schemes.
FIGHT BACK: RALLY IN DC & LA
Join us tomorrow (Sep. 30th) in California or Washington for two major events
Washington:
• 3pm at McPherson Square (15th St NW and K Street)
• 4pm at Lafayette Square Park in front of the White House
Los Angeles:
• 6pm-8pm at the NW corner of Hollywood & Highland
More details at: https://madashelldoctorstour.com/Home_Page.html
We may not have another opportunity like this in our lifetime.
We must replace our current pay-or-die system and with a comprehensive, publicly financed, privately delivered, Single Payer system that puts people first.
Our moment to take a stand for Single Payer is NOW.
Get Mad, Stay Mad, Make History,
The Doctors

Brooks in Perfect Focus: The Next Culture War

nyt September 29, 2009
By DAVID BROOKS, OP-ED COLUMNIST

Centuries ago, historians came up with a classic theory to explain the rise and decline of nations. The theory was that great nations start out tough-minded and energetic. Toughness and energy lead to wealth and power. Wealth and power lead to affluence and luxury. Affluence and luxury lead to decadence, corruption and decline.

“Human nature, in no form of it, could ever bear prosperity,” John Adams wrote in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, warning against the coming corruption of his country.

Yet despite its amazing wealth, the United States has generally remained immune to this cycle. American living standards surpassed European living standards as early as 1740. But in the U.S., affluence did not lead to indulgence and decline.

That’s because despite the country’s notorious materialism, there has always been a countervailing stream of sound economic values. The early settlers believed in Calvinist restraint. The pioneers volunteered for brutal hardship during their treks out west. Waves of immigrant parents worked hard and practiced self-denial so their children could succeed. Government was limited and did not protect people from the consequences of their actions, thus enforcing discipline and restraint.

When economic values did erode, the ruling establishment tried to restore balance. After the Gilded Age, Theodore Roosevelt (who ventured west to counteract the softness of his upbringing) led a crackdown on financial self-indulgence. The Protestant establishment had many failings, but it was not decadent. The old WASPs were notoriously cheap, sent their children to Spartan boarding schools, and insisted on financial sobriety.

Over the past few years, however, there clearly has been an erosion in the country’s financial values. This erosion has happened at a time when the country’s cultural monitors were busy with other things. They were off fighting a culture war about prayer in schools, “Piss Christ” and the theory of evolution. They were arguing about sex and the separation of church and state, oblivious to the large erosion of economic values happening under their feet.

Evidence of this shift in values is all around. Some of the signs are seemingly innocuous. States around the country began sponsoring lotteries: government-approved gambling that extracts its largest toll from the poor. Executives and hedge fund managers began bragging about compensation packages that would have been considered shameful a few decades before. Chain restaurants went into supersize mode, offering gigantic portions that would have been considered socially unacceptable to an earlier generation.

Other signs are bigger. As William Galston of the Brookings Institution has noted, in the three decades between 1950 and 1980, personal consumption was remarkably stable, amounting to about 62 percent of G.D.P. In the next three decades, it shot upward, reaching 70 percent of G.D.P. in 2008.

During this period, debt exploded. In 1960, Americans’ personal debt amounted to about 55 percent of national income. By 2007, Americans’ personal debt had surged to 133 percent of national income.

Over the past few months, those debt levels have begun to come down. But that doesn’t mean we’ve re-established standards of personal restraint. We’ve simply shifted from private debt to public debt. By 2019, federal debt will amount to an amazing 83 percent of G.D.P. (before counting the costs of health reform and everything else). By that year, interest payments alone on the federal debt will cost $803 billion.

These may seem like dry numbers, mostly of concern to budget wonks. But these numbers are the outward sign of a values shift. If there is to be a correction, it will require a moral and cultural movement.

Our current cultural politics are organized by the obsolete culture war, which has put secular liberals on one side and religious conservatives on the other. But the slide in economic morality afflicted Red and Blue America equally.

If there is to be a movement to restore economic values, it will have to cut across the current taxonomies. Its goal will be to make the U.S. again a producer economy, not a consumer economy. It will champion a return to financial self-restraint, large and small.

It will have to take on what you might call the lobbyist ethos — the righteous conviction held by everybody from AARP to the agribusinesses that their groups are entitled to every possible appropriation, regardless of the larger public cost. It will have to take on the self-indulgent popular demand for low taxes and high spending.

A crusade for economic self-restraint would have to rearrange the current alliances and embrace policies like energy taxes and spending cuts that are now deemed politically impossible. But this sort of moral revival is what the country actually needs.

Get Informed. Then take action. Baucus sold out.

We need your support for a new campaign of non-violent, civil disobedience targeting the private health insurance industry.

Go here for information: http://www.mobilizeforhealthcare.org/

This past spring, 13 brave individuals were arrested for disrupting Senate Finance hearings on health reform, chaired by Sen. Max Baucus. They were disgusted with witness panels, filled with private insurance execs and their cronies, that did NOT include even one single-payer expert.

Since Baucus only listened to the interests of millionaire CEOs and their lobbyists, it should be no surprise that a former CIGNA exec. called the Senate Finance Committee’s recently released bill, “a gift to the private health insurance industry that should be renamed the ‘Insurance Industry Profit Protection and Enhancement Act.’”

We can’t stand for this disaster. The Mobilization for Health Care for All is launching a campaign of nonviolent sit-ins at insurance company offices so we can stand up to end a system that profits by denying people care and puts insurance company bureaucrats between doctors and patients. Time for Medicare for all, a single-payer, national healthcare system.

Healthcare-NOW! has decided to support this effort, and to encourage local coalitions in our network that are ready and willing to participate.

The PHIMG (Private Health Insurance Must Go) coalition in NYC will begin this campaign on September 29th. Other local groups are planning subsequent actions.

Actions may vary, but the central idea is to target major private insurance companies because they must not, and can not, be part of any solution to our healthcare crisis.

We need your help. Let us know if you’d like to participate in, or organize, a civil disobedience action near you. Sign up to sit in and join the nonviolent resistance today! Go here: http://www.mobilizeforhealthcare.org/

Cassandras of Climate

NYT
September 28, 2009
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Cassandras of Climate

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Every once in a while I feel despair over the fate of the planet. If you’ve been following climate science, you know what I mean: the sense that we’re hurtling toward catastrophe but nobody wants to hear about it or do anything to avert it.

And here’s the thing: I’m not engaging in hyperbole. These days, dire warnings aren’t the delusional raving of cranks. They’re what come out of the most widely respected climate models, devised by the leading researchers. The prognosis for the planet has gotten much, much worse in just the last few years.

What’s driving this new pessimism? Partly it’s the fact that some predicted changes, like a decline in Arctic Sea ice, are happening much faster than expected. Partly it’s growing evidence that feedback loops amplifying the effects of man-made greenhouse gas emissions are stronger than previously realized. For example, it has long been understood that global warming will cause the tundra to thaw, releasing carbon dioxide, which will cause even more warming, but new research shows far more carbon dioxide locked in the permafrost than previously thought, which means a much bigger feedback effect.

The result of all this is that climate scientists have, en masse, become Cassandras — gifted with the ability to prophesy future disasters, but cursed with the inability to get anyone to believe them.

And we’re not just talking about disasters in the distant future, either. The really big rise in global temperature probably won’t take place until the second half of this century, but there will be plenty of damage long before then.

For example, one 2007 paper in the journal Science is titled “Model Projections of an Imminent Transition to a More Arid Climate in Southwestern North America” — yes, “imminent” — and reports “a broad consensus among climate models” that a permanent drought, bringing Dust Bowl-type conditions, “will become the new climatology of the American Southwest within a time frame of years to decades.”

So if you live in, say, Los Angeles, and liked those pictures of red skies and choking dust in Sydney, Australia, last week, no need to travel. They’ll be coming your way in the not-too-distant future.

Now, at this point I have to make the obligatory disclaimer that no individual weather event can be attributed to global warming. The point, however, is that climate change will make events like that Australian dust storm much more common.

In a rational world, then, the looming climate disaster would be our dominant political and policy concern. But it manifestly isn’t. Why not?

Part of the answer is that it’s hard to keep peoples’ attention focused. Weather fluctuates — New Yorkers may recall the heat wave that pushed the thermometer above 90 in April — and even at a global level, this is enough to cause substantial year-to-year wobbles in average temperature. As a result, any year with record heat is normally followed by a number of cooler years: According to Britain’s Met Office, 1998 was the hottest year so far, although NASA — which arguably has better data — says it was 2005. And it’s all too easy to reach the false conclusion that the danger is past.

But the larger reason we’re ignoring climate change is that Al Gore was right: This truth is just too inconvenient. Responding to climate change with the vigor that the threat deserves would not, contrary to legend, be devastating for the economy as a whole. But it would shuffle the economic deck, hurting some powerful vested interests even as it created new economic opportunities. And the industries of the past have armies of lobbyists in place right now; the industries of the future don’t.

Nor is it just a matter of vested interests. It’s also a matter of vested ideas. For three decades the dominant political ideology in America has extolled private enterprise and denigrated government, but climate change is a problem that can only be addressed through government action. And rather than concede the limits of their philosophy, many on the right have chosen to deny that the problem exists.

So here we are, with the greatest challenge facing mankind on the back burner, at best, as a policy issue. I’m not, by the way, saying that the Obama administration was wrong to push health care first. It was necessary to show voters a tangible achievement before next November. But climate change legislation had better be next.

And as I pointed out in my last column, we can afford to do this. Even as climate modelers have been reaching consensus on the view that the threat is worse than we realized, economic modelers have been reaching consensus on the view that the costs of emission control are lower than many feared.

So the time for action is now. O.K., strictly speaking it’s long past. But better late than never.

The New Sputnik

I can still hear the beeping of that first Sputnik as it passed overhead, broadcasting on our AM radio. Friedman gets it correct in his article. Hugs from the Heart, R

September 27, 2009
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
NYT OP-ED COLUMNIST

Most people would assume that 20 years from now when historians look back at 2008-09, they will conclude that the most important thing to happen in this period was the Great Recession. I’d hold off on that. If we can continue stumbling out of this economic crisis, I believe future historians may well conclude that the most important thing to happen in the last 18 months was that Red China decided to become Green China.

Yes, China’s leaders have decided to go green — out of necessity because too many of their people can’t breathe, can’t swim, can’t fish, can’t farm and can’t drink thanks to pollution from its coal- and oil-based manufacturing growth engine. And, therefore, unless China powers its development with cleaner energy systems, and more knowledge-intensive businesses without smokestacks, China will die of its own development.

What do we know about necessity? It is the mother of invention. And when China decides it has to go green out of necessity, watch out. You will not just be buying your toys from China. You will buy your next electric car, solar panels, batteries and energy-efficiency software from China.

I believe this Chinese decision to go green is the 21st-century equivalent of the Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of Sputnik — the world’s first Earth-orbiting satellite. That launch stunned us, convinced President Eisenhower that the U.S. was falling behind in missile technology and spurred America to make massive investments in science, education, infrastructure and networking — one eventual byproduct of which was the Internet.

Well, folks. Sputnik just went up again: China’s going clean-tech. The view of China in the U.S. Congress — that China is going to try to leapfrog us by out-polluting us — is out of date. It’s going to try to out-green us. Right now, China is focused on low-cost manufacturing of solar, wind and batteries and building the world’s biggest market for these products. It still badly lags U.S. innovation. But research will follow the market. America’s premier solar equipment maker, Applied Materials, is about to open the world’s largest privately funded solar research facility — in Xian, China.

“If they invest in 21st-century technologies and we invest in 20th-century technologies, they’ll win,” says David Sandalow, the assistant secretary of energy for policy. “If we both invest in 21st-century technologies, challenging each other, we all win.”

Unfortunately, we’re still not racing. It’s like Sputnik went up and we think it’s just a shooting star. Instead of a strategic response, too many of our politicians are still trapped in their own dumb-as-we-wanna-be bubble, where we’re always No. 1, and where the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, having sold its soul to the old coal and oil industries, uses its influence to prevent Congress from passing legislation to really spur renewables. Hat’s off to the courageous chairman of Pacific Gas and Electric, Peter Darbee, who last week announced that his huge California power company was quitting the chamber because of its “obstructionist tactics.” All shareholders in America should ask their C.E.O.’s why they still belong to the chamber.

China’s leaders, mostly engineers, wasted little time debating global warming. They know the Tibetan glaciers that feed their major rivers are melting. But they also know that even if climate change were a hoax, the demand for clean, renewable power is going to soar as we add an estimated 2.5 billion people to the planet by 2050, many of whom will want to live high-energy lifestyles. In that world, E.T. — or energy technology — will be as big as I.T., and China intends to be a big E.T. player.

“For the last three years, the U.S. has led the world in new wind generation,” said the ecologist Lester Brown, author of “Plan B 4.0.” “By the end of this year, China will bypass us on new wind generation so fast we won’t even see it go by.”

I met this week with Shi Zhengrong, the founder of Suntech, already the world’s largest manufacturer of solar panels. Shi recalled how, shortly after he started his company in Wuxi, nearby Lake Tai, China’s third-largest freshwater lake, choked to death from pollution.

“After this disaster,” explained Shi, “the party secretary of Wuxi city came to me and said, ‘I want to support you to grow this solar business into a $15 billion industry, so then we can shut down as many polluting and energy consuming companies in the region as soon as possible.’ He is one of a group of young Chinese leaders, very innovative and very revolutionary, on this issue. Something has changed. China realized it has no capacity to absorb all this waste. We have to grow without pollution.”

Of course, China will continue to grow with cheap, dirty coal, to arrest over-eager environmentalists and to strip African forests for wood and minerals. Have no doubt about that. But have no doubt either that, without declaring it, China is embarking on a new, parallel path of clean power deployment and innovation. It is the Sputnik of our day. We ignore it at our peril.

C'mon Barack, we need FDR moments from you. Get it?

Bill Maher from Huffpo:

New Rule: If America can't get its act together, it must lose the bald eagle as our symbol and replace it with the YouTube video of the puppy that can't get up. As long as we're pathetic, we might as well act like it's cute. I don't care about the president's birth certificate, I do want to know what happened to "Yes we can."

Can we get out of Iraq? No. Afghanistan? No. Fix health care? No. Close Gitmo? No. Cap-and-trade carbon emissions? No. The Obamas have been in Washington for ten months and it seems like the only thing they've gotten is a dog.

Well, I hate to be a nudge, but why has America become a nation that can't make anything bad end, like wars, farm subsidies, our oil addiction, the drug war, useless weapons programs - oh, and there's still 60,000 troops in Germany - and can't make anything good start, like health care reform, immigration reform, rebuilding infrastructure.

Even when we address something, the plan can never start until years down the road. Congress's climate change bill mandates a 17% cut in greenhouse gas emissions... by 2020! Fellas, slow down, where's the fire? Oh yeah, it's where I live, engulfing the entire western part of the United States!

We might pass new mileage standards, but even if we do, they wouldn't start until 2016. In that year, our cars of the future will glide along at a breathtaking 35 miles-per-gallon. My goodness, is that even humanly possible? Cars that get 35 miles-per-gallon in just six years? Get your head out of the clouds, you socialist dreamer! "What do we want!? A small improvement! When do we want it!? 2016!"

When it's something for us personally, like a laxative, it has to start working now. My TV remote has a button on it now called "On Demand". You get your ass on my TV screen right now, Jon Cryer, and make me laugh. Now! But when it's something for the survival of the species as a whole, we phase that in slowly.

Folks, we don't need more efficient cars. We need something to replace cars. That's what's wrong with these piddly, too-little-too-late half-measures that pass for "reform" these days. They're not reform, they're just putting off actually solving anything to a later day, when we might by some miracle have, a) leaders with balls, and b) a general populace who can think again. Barack Obama has said, "If we were starting from scratch, then a single-payer system would probably make sense." So let's start from scratch.

Even if they pass the shitty Max Baucus health care bill, it doesn't kick in for 4 years, during which time 175,000 people will die because they're not covered, and about three million will go bankrupt from hospital bills. We have a pretty good idea of the Republican plan for the next three years: Don't let Obama do anything. What kills me is that that's the Democrats' plan, too.

We weren't always like this. Inert. In 1965, Lyndon Johnson signed Medicare into law and 11 months later seniors were receiving benefits. During World War II, virtually overnight FDR had auto companies making tanks and planes only. In one eight year period, America went from JFK's ridiculous dream of landing a man on the moon, to actually landing a man on the moon.

This generation has had eight years to build something at Ground Zero. An office building, a museum, an outlet mall, I don't care anymore. I'm tempted to say that, symbolically, all America can do lately is keep digging a hole, but Ground Zero doesn't represent a hole. It is a hole. America: Home of the Freedom Pit. Ironically, it's spitting distance from Wall Street, where they knock down buildings a different way - through foreclosure.

That's the ultimate sign of our lethargy: millions thrown out of their homes, tossed out of work, lost their life savings, retirements postponed - and they just take it. 30% interest on credit cards? It's a good thing the Supreme Court legalized sodomy a few years ago.
Why can't we get off our back? Is it something in the food? Actually, yes. I found out something interesting researching last week's editorial on how we should be taxing the unhealthy things Americans put into their bodies, like sodas and junk foods and gerbils.

Did you know that we eat the same high-fat, high-carb, sugar-laden shit that's served in prisons and in religious cults to keep the subjects in a zombie-like state of lethargic compliance? Why haven't Americans arisen en masse to demand a strong public option? Because "The Bachelor" is on. We're tired and our brain stems hurt from washing down French fries with McDonald's orange drink.

The research is in: high-fat diets makes you lazy and stupid. Rats on an American diet weren't motivated to navigate their maze and once in the maze they made more mistakes. And, instead of exercising on their wheel, they just used it to hang clothes on. Of course we can't ban assault rifles - we're the first generation too lazy to make its own coffee. We're the generation that invented the soft chocolate chip cookie: like a cookie, only not so exhausting to chew. I ask you, if the food we're eating in America isn't making us stupid, how come the people in Carl's Jr. ads never think to put a napkin over their pants?

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-maher/new-rule-if-america-cant_b_299383.html

Health Care Truth 'Jes Rockin' Out

This is just the best! Enjoy.

Death Panels? Yes, The Insurance Companies

I got a phone call from my oldest friend yesterday. We've been friends since nursery school, stayed best friends in grade school, high school, college and beyond. We were the kind of friends that had hundreds of "in jokes" and we passed notes and talked on the phone more than we should have, and drove our parents crazy.

We survived Mrs. Nemchek's geometry class together. We liked the same music. Neither of us were the "popular" girls, but we didn't want to be. We marched to our own drummer. We had each other, and we made each other laugh and we were always there for each other without reservation. We got a kick out of the fact that people would routinely ask us if we were sisters, when we looked absolutely nothing alike.

So, it wasn't unusual to get a call from her. There are times when we talk every other day. Sometimes we seem to go for weeks without a call, but we're always there in spirit.
"I need to tell you something," she said. I wasn't sure whether this was going to be good or bad, but "I need to tell you something" is always important. "I went to the doctor, and there's something wrong with my heart."
I wasn't expecting that one.

My friend has had a series of health problems -- a bad car accident resulting in two painful spinal surgeries, asthma, a breast cancer scare, but this was different. Her matter-of-fact tone quickly dissolved into tears of fear and vulnerability. "I can't believe this. I'm only 43!" This wasn't supposed to happen.

After her breast cancer scare, the doctor recommended a preventative regimen of tamoxifen, a drug which would help ward off the risk of cancer that her condition indicated might be a problem. But before they started her on the potent drug, they wanted to make sure she had a good healthy heart. A family history of heart disease put her in a high risk group, so the cardiologist insisted on a stress test.

She's been living through multiple problems with her insurance provider, Horizon Blue Cross/Blue Shield, so she wasn't surprised when they refused to pay for the test. She was surprised when the doctor decided to call the insurance company himself. He explained why it was important, and that he felt very strongly and in no uncertain terms that it needed to be done. They still refused to pay for the test. And then the cardiologist did an amazing thing. Outraged at the insurance company, he said that he would pay for the test himself, out of his own pocket. It was important, too important to cow to the insurance company representative whose job it was to deny claims just to increase the profits for the company.

My friend wasn't even able to complete the stress test. After a few minutes on the treadmill, they stopped it and wouldn't allow her to continue. Shortness of breath. Chest pain. She'd been experiencing these symptoms lately. She was mowing the lawn this week, and had to stop half way through because she couldn't catch her breath. She chalked it off to asthma. But it was, in fact, a coronary blockage that was keeping one of the chambers of her heart from getting enough oxygen.

So, instead of starting a regimen of tamoxifen next week, she will be getting a stent in her heart tomorrow. She's home right now, trying to "do nothing," and trying not to get too stressed out by the thought that she'll be in surgery in just a few hours, and never even knew anything was wrong.

If her insurance company had gotten its way, she would never have had that test. The next time she was out mowing the lawn, it could have killed her. "He saved my life," she said, just as I was thinking the same thing. Yes, doctors are in the business of saving lives from disease, and illness and injury, but they shouldn't have to be in the business of saving lives from business. "He saved my life from the insurance company, she continued. "The insurance company... there's your Death Panel."

I didn't even ask her his name, but I'm grateful to that cardiologist in the kind of way it's difficult to express in words. He saved a wonderful, beautiful life. But how many people are not so lucky? A recent study found out that 45,000 people every year die because they are uninsured. And each one of those 45,000 has a story, too. They are someone's husband, or wife, or parent, or best friend since nursery school.

But my friend has health insurance. She pays $600 every month for it, and yet her coverage denied a test that saved her life. How many fully-insured Americans die every year because we allow the insurance industry to be a for-profit enterprise, making money off of people's lives? How many die because our current system says that the money made for salaries and bonuses for insurance company executives is more important than they are? More important than your mother. More important than your son. More important than my friend. How long will we accept the harsh reality that the insurance company looks at human beings and sees nothing but a spreadsheet?
"We need a revolution in the health care industry," my friend agreed. "We should not allow them to profit from our own illness."

Until then, if you have insurance, get in line. Because whatever you are paying them, it's only a matter of time before your number is up, and it's you or someone you love that gets to stand in front of the Death Panel and plead your case. And guess what? They'd much rather pay politicians than pay to save your life.

It's cheaper.


Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/akmuckraker/welcome-to-the-death-pane_b_292859.html

Afghanis-nam

Interesting perspective by Daniel Ellsberg, the whistle blower for the Vietnam fiasco. He sees clear parallels and encourages those now on the inside not to wait to tell what they know. It's worth a reflective listen.

Where Are We Going? How Fast? (Something fun)

Edwin Hubbell (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Hubble) was poking around in the corners of the cosmic closet and discovered he couldn’t quite reach the corners & then discovered he wouldn’t - ever. The continuously expanding closet; it was a game changer.

Next, a quick grade school astronomy review. We know the earth is spinning away on its polar axis. We know the moon doesn’t spin in that way, but is on a just-right-orbit around earth to give us those beautiful full moons every 28 days. We also know this earth-moon duo dances around our sun once a year. OK; we’re starting to get a lot of things in motion here.

Add to that, we know our little solar system has a handful of other solar orbiters and the whole lot is part of our galaxy, the Milky Way. And of course, thanks to Edwin, we know it’s all headed away from everything else out there, including the starting gate.
But wait! Turns out the earth, our solar system, our galaxy (Milky Way) and our Local Group; whoa! Local Group? (Thank you again Edwin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Group). In his poking around, Edwin discovered that the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxies are the main players in our Local Group and each have a series of smaller satellite galaxies. Don’t forget! Everything’s moving. Hmmmm; the synapses aren’t firing quite fast enough to keep up the mental model. Neo, where are you?

How fast is fast? Well for the earth’s solar orbit: it turns out that we’re travelling around the sun at a mere 66,700 miles per hour. So at the end of a day we’ve trotted about 1,600,800 miles. Keep up your electrolytes! And for the year: 584,292,000 miles.

But wait, everything else is moving too. How fast? Well turns little speck earth & companions are going about 600Km/s or 372.823 miles in one second. Ummm, that’s 16,369.38 miles per minute and 982,162.8 miles in one hour. Look out Jackie Joyner!

Holy cow! That means the mileage for 24 hours = 23,211,907.2 miles; and that extrapolates to an annual rate of 8,603,746,128 miles. Toyota, we need a different odometer and the Gatorade truck doesn’t seem to be keeping up.

Now for the where part; the spot, place, location we were just in when you started to read this, well, we were never there before and never will be again. It’s always new and changing. Never have to visit the boring places twice. Ever! So long before Scotty, Kirk, Spock et al showed up, we’d been doing this “places never gone before” thing, a long, long time. And never going back. Talk about "The Wanderer". It's the peripatetic earth.

And contrary to things appearing to be the same, they’re always changing. Everything. Always.

Here's What We're Supporting in Afghanistan

The Rule of the Rapists

WOMEN’S RIGHTS IN AFGHANISTAN
The Effects of the Afghan Government and the War on Women

A recent report by the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, Silence is Violence, disclosed that rape is not even a crime under the laws of Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.

However, a woman who reports a rape to the authorities will find that sex outside of
marriage is a crime, and she will probably be convicted of that crime unless she can
produce four male witnesses that corroborate her claim that the sexual intercourse was not consensual. If imprisoned, she may find herself at the mercy of detention facility officials who “are said to have forced female detainees into prostitution...”

If she manages to avoid punishment from the legal system, cultural mores (not Taliban
decrees) often dictate acceptable resolutions of the conflict between her family and that of her assailants, including:
• killing both the victim and the rapist,
• forcing the victim to marry the rapist, or
• giving girl(s) from the rapist’s family to the victim’s family as compensation for lost honor (UNAMA).

Readers might recall the international outcry in response to the passage of a law by the Afghan national government enshrining a husband’s legal right to demand sex from his wife four times a week–essentially, legally protecting rape. Under intense pressure, the law was changed. Now, rather than legalizing outright rape, the law makes it legal for husbands to starve their wives until they submit to sexual intercourse (Vogt).

Worse, powerful government officials and their cohorts frequently sexually assault women with impunity: “In the northern region for example, 39 percent of the cases analyzed by UNAMA Human Rights, found that perpetrators were directly linked to
power brokers who are, effectively, above the law and enjoy immunity from arrest as well as immunity from social condemnation” (UNAMA).

This toxic atmosphere for women’s sexual rights under the Kabul regime led local women’s rights groups to coin a new phrase for the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan: “The Rule of the Rapists” (Rawi).

War erodes the rights of women and girls. Supporters of the war in Afghanistan often
cite the Taliban’s assault on women’s rights as a justification for continued military action.

However, the behavior of the Afghan government and the effects of war on women in general falsify this justification.

War’s Effects on Women From UNICEF.org: “‘…[G]ender-based inequity is usually exacerbated during situations of extreme violence such as armed conflict.’ ...Examples...include: • violence...including rape and sexual slavery; • hunger and exploitation in camps for refugees and internally displaced persons, when men take
control of food distribution; • malnutrition, when food aid neglects [their] special nutritional requirements; and • culturally inappropriate and/or inadequate access to health services, including...reproductive health services. “…Health services for women, girls and the children in their charge break down in wartime…Often health services available in emergency situations are dominated by men, so many women and girls, for cultural or religious reasons, underutilize these services despite
their need of them.

“The population movements and breakdown of social controls engendered by armed conflict encourage, in their turn, rape and prostitution as well as sexual slavery
to serve combatants. Unwanted pregnancies and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases...are the collateral physical effects of this human degradation.”

Kabul’s (Lack of) Response to Threats Against Women Women in Afghan public life often face threats--in many cases from inside the Afghan government. The government
frequently fails to respond when such threats are reported and often becomes
complicit in shutting women out of the public discourse. By failing to act on reports
of threats against women because they are women, the government reinforces the
perception that regressive actors can target women with impunity.

According to the U.N. report, “Chauvinist attitudes, conservative religious viewpoints and the domination of Parliament by MPs with a history of warlordism, means that women [in government] are silenced; they actually face attacks – both verbal and physical – if they speak their minds.

“…Afghan women have repeatedly reported that they have lost faith in the law enforcement and judicial institutions that they consider ineffective, incompetent, dysfunctional and corrupt...Ultimately,
authorities are not willing or are not in a position to provide women at risk with any form of protection to ensure their safety. “For instance, the...head of a district office of a department of women’s affairs told UNAMA that following threats from the Taliban over a period of several months in 2008, her request for security guards for her office was turned down, including by the provincial governor, who she reported had told her: ‘if you are under threat, just go home’” (UNAMA).

Learn more about the effect of the war in Afghanistan on women at http://rethinkafghanistan.com/blog/?p=604.
Prepared by Derrick Crowe, Afghanistan blog fellow for Brave New Foundation / The Seminal.

Sources
Machel, Graça. “Impact of Armed Conflict on Children: War hits home when it hits women and
girls.” UNICEF, 1996. http://www.unicef.org/graca/women.htm. Last accessed August 27, 2009.
Rawi, Mariam. “Rule of the Rapists.” The Guardian / UK, February 12, 2004. http://
www.commondreams.org/views04/0212-10.htm. Last accessed August 27, 2009.

“SILENCE IS VIOLENCE: End the Abuse of Women in Afghanistan.” Human Rights, United
Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan / Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, July 8, 2009. http://bit.ly/IYgH3. Last accessed August 27, 2009. Vogt, Heidi. “Marital law is still bad, Afghan activists say.” Associated Press. July 14, 2009. http://www.philly.com/inquirer/world_us/
20090714_Marital_law_still_bad__Afghan_activists_say.html. Last accessed August 27, 2009.

Learn more about the effect of the war in Afghanistan on women at http://rethinkafghanistan.com/blog/?p=604.
Prepared by Derrick Crowe, Afghanistan blog fellow for Brave New Foundation / The Seminal.

Fascinating Video Message From Canada

The Health Care Deceit

It is the War in Afghanistan Obama Declared a "Necessity," Not Health Care

The Health Care Deceit

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

The current health care “debate” shows how far gone representative government is in the United States. Members of Congress represent the powerful interest groups that fill their campaign coffers, not the people who vote for them.

The health care bill is not about health care. It is about protecting and increasing the profits of the insurance companies. The main feature of the health care bill is the “individual mandate,” which requires everyone in America to buy health insurance. Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont), a recipient of millions in contributions over his career from the insurance industry, proposes to impose up to a $3,800 fine on Americans who fail to purchase health insurance.

The determination of “our” elected representatives to serve the insurance industry is so compelling that Congress is incapable of recognizing the absurdity of these proposals.

The reason there is a health care crisis in the US is that the cumulative loss of jobs and benefits has swollen the uninsured to approximately 50 million Americans. They cannot afford health insurance any more than employers can afford to provide it.

It is absurd to mandate that people purchase what they cannot afford and to fine them for failing to do so. A person who cannot pay a health insurance premium cannot pay the fine.

These proposals are like solving the homeless problem by requiring the homeless to purchase a house.

In his speech Obama said “we’ll provide tax credits” for “those individuals and small businesses who still can’t afford the lower-priced insurance available in the exchange” and he said low-cost coverage will be offered to those with preexisting medical conditions. A tax credit is useless to those without income unless the credit is refundable, and subsidized coverage doesn’t do much for those millions of Americans with no jobs.

Baucus masquerades as a defender of the health impaired with his proposal to require insurers to provide coverage to all comers as if the problem of health care can be reduced to preexisting conditions and cancelled policies. It was left to Rep. Dennis Kucinich to point out that the health care bill ponies up 30 million more customers for the private insurance companies.

The private sector is no longer the answer, because the income levels of the vast majority of Americans are insufficient to bear the cost of health insurance today. To provide some perspective, the monthly premium for a 60-year old female for a group policy (employer-provided) with Blue Cross Blue Shield in Florida is about $1,200. That comes to $14,400 per year. Only employees in high productivity jobs that can provide both a livable salary and health care can expect to have employer-provided coverage. If a 60-year old female has to buy a non-group policy as an individual, the premium would be even higher. How, for example, is a Wal-Mart shelf stocker or check out clerk going to be able to pay a private insurance premium?

Even the present public option--Medicare--is very expensive to those covered. Basic Medicare is insufficient coverage. Part B has been added, for which about $100 per month is deducted from the covered person’s Social Security check. If the person is still earning or has other retirement income, an “income-related monthly adjustment” is also deducted as part of the Part B premium. And if the person is still working, his earnings are subject to the 2.9 percent Medicare tax.

Even with Part B, Medicare coverage is still insufficient except for the healthy. For many people, additional coverage from private supplementary policies, such as the ones sold by AARP, is necessary. These premiums can be as much as $277 per month. Deductibles remain and prescriptions are only 50% covered. If the drug prescription policy is chosen, the premium is higher.

This leaves a retired person on Medicare who has no other retirement income of significance paying as much as $4,500 per year in premiums in order to create coverage under Medicare that still leaves half of his prescription medicines out-of-pocket. Considering the cost of some prescription medicines, a Medicare-covered person with Part B and a supplementary policy can still face bankruptcy.

Therefore, everyone should take note that a “public option” can leave people with large out-of-pocket costs. I know a professional who has chosen to continue working beyond retirement age. His Medicare coverage with supplemental coverage, Medicare tax, and income-related monthly adjustment comes to $16,400 per year. Those people who want to deny Medicare to the rich will cost the system a lot of money.

What the US needs is a single-payer not-for-profit health system that pays doctors and nurses sufficiently that they will undertake the arduous training and accept the stress and risks of dealing with illness and diseases.

A private health care system worked in the days before expensive medical technology, malpractice suits, high costs of bureaucracy associated with third-party payers and heavy investment in combating fraud, and pressure on insurance companies from Wall Street to improve “shareholder returns.”

Despite the rise in premiums, payments to health care providers, such as doctors, appear to be falling along with coverage to policy holders. The system is no longer functional and no longer makes sense. Health care has become an incidental rather than primary purpose of the health care system. Health care plays second fiddle to insurance company profits and salaries to bureaucrats engaged in fraud prevention and discovery. There is no point in denying coverage to one-sixth of the population in the name of saving a nonexistent private free market health care system.

The only way to reduce the cost of health care is to take the profit and paperwork out of health care.

Nothing humans design will be perfect. However, Congress is making it clear to the public that the wrong issues are front and center, such as the belief of Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) and others that illegal aliens and abortions will be covered if government pays the bill.

Debate focuses on subsidiary issues, because Congress no longer writes the bills it passes. As Theodore Lowi made clear in his book, The End of Liberalism, the New Deal transferred law-making from the legislative to the executive branch. Executive branch agencies and departments write bills that they want and hand them off to sponsors in the House and Senate. Powerful interest groups took up the same practice.
The interest groups that finance political campaigns expect their bills to be sponsored and passed.

Thus: a health care reform bill based on forcing people to purchase private health insurance and fining them if they do not.

When bills become mired in ideological conflict, as has happened to the health care bill, something usually passes nevertheless. The president, his PR team, and members of Congress want a health care bill on their resume and to be able to claim that they passed a health care bill, regardless of whether it provides any health care.

The cost of adding public expenditures for health care to a budget drowning in red ink from wars, bank bailouts, and stimulus packages means that the most likely outcome of a health care bill will benefit insurance companies and use mandated private coverage to save public money by curtailing Medicare and Medicaid.

The public’s interest is not considered to be the important determinant. The politicians have to please the insurance companies and reduce health care expenditures in order to save money for another decade or two of war in the Middle East.

The telltale part of Obama’s speech was the applause in response to his pledge that “I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits.” Yet, Obama and his fellow politicians have no hesitation to add trillions of dollars to the deficit in order to fund wars.

The profits of military/security companies are partly recycled into campaign contributions. To cut war spending in order to finance a public health care system would cost politicians campaign contributions from both the insurance industry and the military/security industry.

Politicians are not going to allow that to happen.

It was the war in Afghanistan, not health care, that President Obama declared to be a “necessity.”

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. His new book, War of the Worlds: How the Economy Was Lost, will be published next month by AK Press/CounterPunch. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

The Afghanistan Abyss

OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Afghanistan Abyss, By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF, Published: September 6, 2009
Sending more American troops into ethnic Pashtun areas in the Afghan south may only galvanize local people to back the Taliban. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/opinion/06kristof.html

This is sounding so familiar; the military trying so earnestly & valiantly to fulfill a flawed & mis-handled mission given it given it by Idiot - Bush. The opportunity for modest success disappeared when The Idiot went to Iraq.

It's time for more AP photos that show the true costs of this mis-handled mission. In large part it was the photo journalists' work in Vietnam that let us measure cost/sacrifice/benefit ratios. Lt. Calley was convicted for the murder of civilians; we saw the images. Once again, we need to see pics of the children, women & men; maimed and killed by our air strikes, when whole Afghan villages are leveled. Ask questions. Require answers. Hold accountable.

Remember the Vietnamese girl running toward the photographer, mouth wide open in a scream? I do; can't forget.

Read this piece by Thomas Friedman: OP-ED COLUMNIST
From Baby-Sitting to Adoption, By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, Published: September 6, 2009
After eight years of work in Afghanistan, we still do not have a reliable Afghan partner to hand off to. It’s time to discuss if nation building is still worth doing and at what cost: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/opinion/06friedman.html.

Then google Malalai Joya and read some of her bio and her speeches. Watch the dvd "View From a Grain of Sand". And then speak out and act.

I remember Vietnam. I lived then. Echoes of that past return.

Slogan ideas:


My Other Car is a Health Insurance Payment
My Car Has Better Insurance Than I Do
My Death Panel is an HMO
Underinsured Baby on Board
Hate Socialism? Repeal Medicare!!
Sanctity of Life should not end at Birth! Support Healthcare Reform!
WWJD: Who Would Jesus Deny? (Healthcare Reform Now!)
My single prayer is single payer
The Public GOPtion: Don't Get Sick
GOP: Rest Uninsured America
Your Health Care Comes Off your Insurance Company’s Bottom Line
It’s OK..Congress Has GREAT Insurance
I’d Rather Have a Public Option Than Be Dead Right
GOP: We won't let your health come between your insurer & his profits!
Democrat: A Republican with a Pre-existing Condition
Before Jesus healed the leper...did He check his insurance coverage?
Public Option: Putting People Before Profit
Democrat: A Republican Who Lost His Health Insurance
What's Wrong With Expanding Medicare for Those UNDER 65?
ONLY Industrialized Nation without Universal Healthcare? USA Spends More Than ANY other Nation on Healthcare? USA WE'RE NUMBER ONE!!
We Can't Fix the Economy Until We Fix Health Care!
Healthcare Reform...Your Life Depends On It!
Jesus didn’t ask for a co-pay
All I Wanted Was Real Health Care Reform, and All I Got Was This Lousy Bumper Sticker
GOP: Cancer Happens!
Coming to a Hospital Near You: Attack of the Wingnuts Socialized Health Scare
Put health back in healthcare
Life is a pre-existing condition
What value does the insurance company add?
Doctors prescribe healthcare, insurance companies proscribe healthcare.
USA: Third World Country. No Universal Healthcare.
Health Insurance Profits Up 400%
Kill Healthcare! 30,000 Lobbyists Can’t Be Wrong!
Universal Health Care Is a Family Value
GOP: Defending Your Right to Higher Dedutibles
America’s Healthcare Is Like Shopping for an Ambulance
Government run military = #1 Private Health Care = #37
Support the Health Care Bill - Or We'll Focus on Passing Strict Gun Control"
"Pass Healthcare - Or the Terrorists Win"
Public option not public optional.
POTUS+60 Senators+80seat House majority No public option in health care means there is NO PUBLIC OPTION IN DEMOCRACY!
1.4 Million Bucks A Day - Keeps Healthcare Away
"Letting Americans Die For Profit?"
"For Profit Healthcare Makes Me Sick"
Health Insurance Premiums: its where 7 of your last 10 raises went
Take My High Premiums From My Cold, Dead Hands
Have You Teabagged For Your Insurance Agent Today
You Die, They Profit, and GOP gets Paid. Reform Healthcare Now!
One Nation, Underinsured.
Republican Healthcare Reform: Be Rich or Die
My Boss Bussed Me to the Town Hall, and I Didn't Even Get on You Tube
Health care should be a right...not a privilege
Single Payer Is Pro-Life
Guns Don't Kill People. Spreadsheets Do. Support Healthcare Reform.
Take My High Premiums from my Cold Dead Hands.
Health Care - Not just for the rich anymore.
I've got mine, and you've got yours!
Health Care is a Human Right
Public Health Care will succeed where Private Health Care has failed
Put Public Health before Private Profits
Cure Health Care from Profititis
Having insurance today does not mean you're covered.
Support the Public Option, our lives depend on it.

An Unsettetling Direction

Justices to Revisit ‘Hillary’ Film, and Corporate Cash in Politics - NYTimes.com
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/us/30scotus.html.

The re-argument of this momentous case could transform the way political campaigns are conducted.(NYT)

This signals trouble. If the court rules for free speech in this case, corporate power will be unchecked in campaigns. This is actually more important than health care. Read David Korton, "When Corportations Rule the World" & Thom Hartmann, "Screwed" to understand. It will open the door to unchecked "Swift-Boating" and make the sound-bite bashing of health care reform kindergarten stuff.

Inform yourself and then get involved.

Namaste

Peace and kindness to all who may pass here today.

Peace and pleasantness two all who may pass here today.

Forget Survival of the Fittest: It Is Kindness that Counts: Scientific American

Forget Survival of the Fittest: It Is Kindness that Counts: Scientific American

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