Fold/Spindle/Mutilate 2.1

The talk in Washington is that Senate Democrats are preparing to push through health care reforms using parliamentary procedures that will allow a simple majority to prevail in their chamber, as it does in the House, instead of the 60 votes needed to overcome the filibuster that Senate Republicans are sure to mount.

With the death of Senator Edward Kennedy, the Democrats do not have the votes just among their 57 members (and the two independents) to break a filibuster, and not all of these can be counted on to vote in lock step. If the Democrats want to enact health care reform this year, they appear to have little choice but to adopt a high-risk, go-it-alone, majority-rules strategy.

We say this with considerable regret because a bipartisan compromise would be the surest way to achieve comprehensive reforms with broad public support. But the ideological split between the parties is too wide — and the animosities too deep — for that to be possible.

In recent weeks, it has become inescapably clear that Republicans are unlikely to vote for substantial reform this year. Many seem bent on scuttling President Obama’s signature domestic issue no matter the cost. As Senator Jim DeMint, Republican of South Carolina, so infamously put it: “If we’re able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him.”

•

Superficially seductive calls to scale down the effort until the recession ends or to take time for further deliberations should be ignored. There has been more than enough debate and the recession will almost certainly be over before the major features of reform kick in several years from now. Those who fear that a trillion-dollar reform will add to the nation’s deficit burden should remember that these changes are intended to be deficit-neutral over the next decade.

Delay would be foolish politically. The Democrats have substantial majorities in the House and the Senate this year. Next year, as the midterm elections approach, it will be even harder for legislators to take controversial stands. After the elections, if history is any guide, the Democratic majorities could be smaller.

Mr. Obama should know from sad experience the pitfalls of seeking bipartisan cooperation from a Republican Party that has sloughed off most of its moderates and is dominated by its right wing. His stimulus package was supported by no Republicans in the House and only three Republicans in the Senate, so-called moderates whose support was won by shrinking the package below the size at which it would have done the most good.

Now the same sort of damaging retreat may be happening in the Senate Finance Committee. Three committees in the House and one in the Senate have used their Democratic majorities to approve liberal health reform bills. The only bipartisan negotiations are between a rump group of three Democrats and three Republicans on the Finance Committee who hail from largely rural states with small populations, namely Iowa, Maine, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota and Wyoming. Somehow this small, unrepresentative group has emerged as the focal point for bipartisan health care reform.

(Read the article)

Comments(0) |  Print This Post

The Business Review (Albany) – by Steven E.F. Brown

A report on Internet speed in the United States says the country isn’t likely to catch world leader South Korea for 15 years.

Or for much longer — at current growth rates, the United States will only reach South Korea’s speed today in 15 years.

The report, by the Communications Workers of America, details Internet download and upload speeds all over the United States and some of its affiliated territories. In the last year, the average upload speed in the United States “barely changed,” the report said, and download speed only grew a little, from 4.2 megabits per second in 2008 to 5.1 megabits per second in 2009.

In South Korea, average download speed is four times faster — 20.4 megabits per second. The United States also lags Japan (15.8 mbps), Sweden (12.8 mbps), the Netherlands (11 mbps) and 24 other countries.

At average U.S. speed it takes about 35 minutes to download 100 family vacation photos, and four hours to upload them.

The report said U.S. speeds aren’t sufficient for the needs of in-home medical monitoring, distance learning programs, or to run a modern business from home.

“People in Japan can upload a high-definition video in 12 minutes, compared to a grueling 2.5 hours” at the average U.S. speed, the report said.

(Read the article)

Comments(0) |  Print This Post

The Arrowhead Landfill in Uniontown, Ala., where coal ash from a spill in Tennessee has created more than 30 jobs and is expected to add more than $3 million to the county’s coffers.

By SHAILA DEWAN

UNIONTOWN, Ala. — Almost every day, a train pulls into a rail yard in rural Alabama, hauling 8,500 tons of a disaster that occurred 350 miles away to a final resting place, the Arrowhead Landfill here in Perry County, which is very poor and almost 70 percent black.

James Murdock, left, a minister, and Robert Bamberg, a catfish farmer, oppose the ash.
To county leaders, the train’s loads, which will total three million cubic yards of coal ash from a massive spill at a power plant in east Tennessee last December, are a tremendous financial windfall. A per-ton “host fee” that the landfill operators pay the county will add more than $3 million to the county’s budget of about $4.5 million.

The ash has created more than 30 jobs for local residents in a county where the unemployment rate is 17 percent and a third of all households are below the poverty line. A sign on the door of the landfill’s scale house says job applications are no longer being accepted — 1,000 were more than enough.

But some residents worry that their leaders are taking a short-term view, and that their community has been too easily persuaded to take on a wealthier, whiter community’s problem. “Money ain’t worth everything,” said Mary Gibson Holley, 74, a black retired teacher in Uniontown. “In the long run, they ain’t looking about what this could do to the community if something goes wrong.”

County leaders, who are mostly black, bristle at accusations of environmental injustice, saying that the ash is perfectly safe and that criticism has been fostered by outsiders, or even competitors who wanted the ash disposal contract for themselves.

The fears include contaminated catfish ponds.

“That’s the means to their end, that they can keep it out of black communities on the charge of environmental racism,” said Albert Turner Jr., a black county commissioner, inviting a visitor to sniff a sample of the heavy, mudlike ash in a souvenir glass jar. “They would benefit on the backs of the stupidity of African-Americans who let this trail of money get away.”
Bob Deacy, vice president of clean strategies and project development for the Tennessee Valley Authority, whose Kingston Fossil Plant was the site of the ash spill that covered almost 300 acres of land and waterways, said Arrowhead was chosen because it was reachable by train instead of truck, because it underbid other sites and because, unlike closer landfills, it had the capacity to handle all the ash.

The Environmental Protection Agency, which is overseeing the cleanup and is supposed to ensure that its own decisions do not harm minority communities, defended its approval by saying that the site was “isolated” and that six local elected officials, including a majority of the county commissioners, “strongly supported” the ash contract.

(Read the article)

Comments(0) |  Print This Post

By Jerry Markon
Washington Post Staff Writer

The founder of Blackwater USA deliberately caused the deaths of innocent civilians in a series of shootings in Iraq, attorneys for Iraqis suing the security contractor told a federal judge Friday.

The attorneys singled out Erik Prince, a former Navy SEAL who is the company’s owner, for blame in the deaths of more than 20 Iraqis between 2005 and 2007. Six former Blackwater guards were criminally charged in 14 of the shootings, and family members and victims’ estates sued Prince, Blackwater (now called Xe Services LLC) and a group of related companies.

“The person responsible for these deaths is Mr. Prince,” Susan L. Burke, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said in U.S. District Court in Alexandria. “He had the intent, he provided the weapons, he provided the instructions, and they were done by his agents and they were war crimes.”

Judge T.S. Ellis III expressed deep skepticism about the claims. “Are you accusing Mr. Prince of saying ‘I want our boys to go out and shoot innocent civilians?’ ” he asked the attorneys.”These are certainly allegations of not engaging in very nice conduct, but where are the elements that meet the elements of murder? I don’t have any doubt that you can infer malice. What you can’t infer, as far as I can tell, is intent to kill these people.”

Attorneys for the former Blackwater company denied the allegations at the hearing, which was called to consider their motion to dismiss the lawsuit. Ellis said he would issue a ruling “promptly.’

The hearing — combative in its words but respectful in tone — was the latest fallout from Blackwater’s controversial actions in Iraq. The North Carolina company, which has provided security under a lucrative State Department contract, has come under scrutiny for a string of incidents in which its heavily armed guards were accused of using excessive force.

The deadliest was a September 2007 shooting in central Baghdad in which Blackwater guards opened fire on Iraqis in a crowded street, killing 17 civilians. The company has said the guards’ convoy came under fire. Five former Blackwater guards have been indicted on federal charges in 14 of those shootings. A sixth guard pleaded guilty.

(Read the article)

Comments(0) |  Print This Post

“We Believe In Controlling Utilization

“In a New York Times story today about health insurance executives and their employees complaining about criticism of the health insurance industry, one executive acknowledges that the industry is all about rationing care:

“I believe we’re getting the pushback because we are standing up for what we believe in,” said Cheryl Tidwell, 45, Humana’s director of commercial sales training. “We believe there’s a better way to control costs by controlling utilization and getting people involved in their health care.”

Now, I know we’re supposed to think that private for-profit health care companies don’t ration care, while government-run programs like Medicare do – but as the insurance industry admits right here for all to see, that’s just not the case. The obvious truth is that the health insurance industry works hard to “control utilization” – that is, it works hard to make sure that when you need a costly medical service, you are “controlled” (read: prevented) from getting it.

Sure, we’re all against excessive testing – and there are good ways to deal with those inefficiencies. But that’s not what the insurance industry is talking about. It is talking about its practice of rationing care – and now that reality is right there in black and white for all to see.

Comments(0) |  Print This Post

A rally against legislation to set a limit on greenhouse gas emissions in Houston on Tuesday. Oil companies bused in their employees.

By CLIFFORD KRAUSS and JAD MOUAWAD

HOUSTON — Hard on the heels of the health care protests, another citizen movement seems to have sprung up, this one to oppose Washington’s attempts to tackle climate change. But behind the scenes, an industry with much at stake — Big Oil — is pulling the strings.

Hundreds of people packed a downtown theater here on Tuesday for a lunchtime rally that was as much a celebration of oil’s traditional role in the Texas way of life as it was a political protest against Washington’s energy policies, which many here fear will raise energy prices.

“Something we hold dear is in danger, and that’s our future,” said Bill Bailey, a rodeo announcer and local celebrity, who was the master of ceremonies at the hourlong rally.

The event on Tuesday was organized by a group called Energy Citizens, which is backed by the American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry’s main trade group. Many of the people attending the demonstration were employees of oil companies who work in Houston and were bused from their workplaces.

This was the first of a series of about 20 rallies planned for Southern and oil-producing states to organize resistance to proposed legislation that would set a limit on emissions of heat-trapping gases, requiring many companies to buy emission permits. Participants described the system as an energy tax that would undermine the economy of Houston, the nation’s energy capital.

Mentions of the legislation, which narrowly passed the House in June, drew boos, but most of the rally was festive. A high school marching band played, hot dogs and hamburgers were served, a video featuring the country star Trace Adkins was shown, and hundreds of people wore yellow T-shirts with slogans like “Create American Jobs Don’t Export Them” and “I’ll Pass on $4 Gas.”

The buoyant atmosphere belied the billions of dollars at stake for the petroleum industry. Since the House passed the bill, oil executives have repeatedly complained that their industry would incur sharply higher costs, while federal subsidies would flow to coal-fired utilities and renewable energy programs.

“It’s just a sense of outrage and disappointment with the bill passed by the House,” said James T. Hackett, chief executive of Anadarko Petroleum, who attended the rally. He defended, as an environmental measure, the use of buses financed by oil companies and Energy Citizens to carry employees to the rally. “If we all drove in cars, it wouldn’t look good,” he said.

(Read the article)

Comments(0) |  Print This Post

While most people know the names of the principal players on the “Torture Team” – Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice – there are many more members of the team who must be investigated and prosecuted. We’ve created 20 “Torture Team” trading cards (“collect and prosecute them all!!”) and a matching website to push the attorney general to allow the Special Prosecutor to investigate as far up the chain of command as the evidence leads.

It was thanks to your help that we saw the appointment of a Special Prosecutor this week at all. A year ago, they said it would never happen, but we persevered because we knew it was the only way to make sure we never went down this dark path again.

All of us have been calling for accountability for those at all levels of government who developed, provided (il)legal cover for, and participated in the torture program. The 2004 report re-released this week by the CIA’s Inspector General’s office and the rest of the documents that came out on Monday, while still redacted, paint a chilling picture of the illegal acts committed by agency interrogators.

The “Torture Team” – the former government officials, lawyers and military leadership – who are really responsible shouldn’t enjoy impunity while a few low-level operatives take the fall.
We want to reach as many people as possible. The Center for Constitutional Rights has  partnered with CREDO Mobile to distribute the cards,  and are writing to ask you to participate by informing your friends about the cards and sending them to the website.

In addition to ordering the physical cards, while on the website, you can:

• Write Holder to demand the entire Torture Team be held accountable
• Find more information about the government’s torture program and the role of the Torture Team members
• Create your own Team Justice trading card with your photo and message, and forward it to friends

The purpose of the cards is to bring attention to the people who should really be under investigation and  to pressure Holder to do the right thing and provide the special prosecutor with  as much authority as he needs and a broader mandate. Pass it on!

Investigate the Entire Torture Team

(Read the article)

Comments(0) |  Print This Post

Ron Reagan was on Hardball to talk with Chris Matthews and Tony Blankley about the CIA documents from 2004. Should the folks who carried out orders be charged for crimes, or George W Bush and Dick Cheney? Ron thinks everyone should go to jail, and that Dick and Dubya can duke it out for the top bunk.

Comments(0) |  Print This Post

by: Favilla |  Visit article original @ Les Echos

The authors writing as Favilla for France’s premier business paper, Les Echos, deem that President Obama cannot yield to the “immoral coalition” of vested interests arrayed against health care reform, since “it would then destroy American society.”

Barack Obama is laboring mightily. After a state of grace, he now must confront virulent opposition to his great plan to reform the American health care system. Yet, his goal is indisputable and was featured in the program for his candidacy: assuring health insurance coverage for the 46 million Americans who are excluded from it by the present system, a system obviously unworthy of a country that purports to be developed. Moreover, at the beginning of the summer, 70 percent of Americans declared themselves to be in favor of it. In mid-August, they are but 43 percent versus 49 percent against. This collapse of popular support may be put down to an unprecedented unleashing of imprecations and abuse, orchestrated by conservative extremists and pressure groups unremitting in the defense of their own rents. On the pretext that the plan tries to introduce a bit of morality and general interest, it is accused of collectivism and an attack on individual freedoms. Untruths and outrageous allegations abound, to the point that it is useless to quote them. The regressive evolution of public opinion confirms the effectiveness of even the false propaganda.

Yet, the issue is one of blinding clarity. The United States devotes 18 percent of its GDP to health care expenses, even as a sixth of its population is not covered, while France or Germany pay 12 percent and cover everyone. For once, American democracy is adding the prize of injustice to the red light on competitiveness. But one must reckon with the impressive parasitic architecture of vested interests and received ideas. With respect to ideas, there’s the visceral distrust of any collective organization and blind devotion to individual freedom in principle. With respect to vested interests – an even more solid base – it’s the profits reaped from the present system by laboratories, doctors, auxiliary health services, insurance companies; without counting the activism of “lawyers,” who, by increasing juicy suits against care providers, raise the price of their insurance. This coalition, which one may well call immoral, that costs at least 6 percent of GDP (the low estimate), threatens the president himself. He cannot yield to it, since it would then destroy American society. This will be his most difficult, but most noble fight.

——–

Translation: Truthout French language editor Leslie Thatcher.

(Read the article)

Comments(0) |  Print This Post

From astroturfing to seminar callers to Obama-porn, the language of the health care debate is ever-changing. Here’s a primer

Comments(0) |  Print This Post

Atrazine, 2-chloro-4-(ethylamine)-6-(isopropylamine)-s-triazine, an organic compound consisting of an s-triazine-ring is a widely used herbicide. Its use is controversial due to its effects on nontarget species, such as on amphibians.^[1] Like many commercial products, it is sold under numerous trade names. Its use is banned in the European Union but is still one of the most widely used herbicides in the U.S. with 77 million lb applied in 2003.

One of the nation’s most widely-used herbicides has been found to exceed federal safety limits in drinking water in four states, but water customers have not been told and the Environmental Protection Agency has not published the results.

Records that tracked the amount of the weed-killer atrazine in about 150 watersheds from 2003 through 2008 were obtained by the Huffington Post Investigative Fund under the Freedom of Information Act. An analysis found that yearly average levels of atrazine in drinking water violated the federal standard at least ten times in communities in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Kansas, all states where farmers rely heavily on the herbicide.

In addition, more than 40 water systems in those states showed spikes in atrazine levels that normally would have triggered automatic notification of customers. In none of those cases were residents alerted.

In interviews, EPA officials did not dispute the data but said they do not consider atrazine a health hazard and said they did not believe the agency or state authorities had failed to properly inform the public. “We have concluded that atrazine does not cause adverse effects to humans or the environment,” said Steve Bradbury, deputy office director of the EPA’s Office of Pesticide Programs.

WATCH:

Officials at Syngenta, the Swiss company that manufactures atrazine, declined requests for interviews about the testing results. In a statement on its Web site, the company says that atrazine “poses no threat to the safety of our drinking water supplies. In 2008, none of the 122 Community Water Systems monitored in 10 states exceeded the federal standards set for atrazine in drinking water or raw water.”

Atrazine has become an issue of concern for environmentalists and consumer groups as the use of the herbicide has soared in the United States over the past few decades. Some scientists who have studied atrazine said the information about its higher levels in drinking water should be made public.

“This is an issue of the EPA not being forthright about what they know,” said Robert Denver, a neuroendocrinologist at the University of Michigan who has served on two of the EPA’s scientific advisory panels on atrazine.

(Read the article)

Comments(0) |  Print This Post

By Daniel Tencer

A public relations firm that organized the opposition to Saddam Hussein during the 1990s and “coerced” journalists during the run-up to the Iraq war is now vetting at least some embedded journalists in war zones to keep out those who have a history of writing negative stories about the US military, a new report claims.

“Any reporter seeking to embed with US forces is subject to a background profile by The Rendon Group, which gained notoriety in the run-up to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq for its work helping to create the Iraqi National Congress,” the military newspaper Stars & Stripes reports.

The Iraqi National Congress was a dummy parliament composed of opponents of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. It was headed up by Ahmed Chalabi, who would later serve as Iraq’s oil minister after the US invasion.

The Rendon Group was founded by John Rendon, a public-relations expert whose links to government PR efforts date back at least as far as the Reagan administration.

The news that the Rendon Group is now in charge of vetting war reporters is certain to raise concerns about government censorship and propaganda among the media watchdog community, many of whom are familiar with John Rendon’s track record in dealing with journalists.

A 2005 Rolling Stone article says that the Rendon Group was given a government contract three weeks after 9/11 to wage a public relations campaign against media that were perceived as hostile to the Bush administration’s war efforts.

According to the New York Times, Rendon was involved in the development of the Office of Strategic Influence, whose “mission was to conduct covert disinformation and deception operations — planting false news items in the media and hiding their origins,” as the Rolling Stone article put it.

Rolling Stone’s James Bamford reported:

According to the Pentagon documents, the Rendon Group played a major role in the IOTF. The company was charged with creating an “Information War Room” to monitor worldwide news reports at lightning speed and respond almost instantly with counterpropaganda. A key weapon, according to the documents, was Rendon’s “proprietary state-of-the-art news-wire collection system called ‘Livewire,’ which takes real-time news-wire reports, as they are filed, before they are on the Internet, before CNN can read them on the air and twenty-four hours before they appear in the morning newspapers, and sorts them by keyword. The system provides the most current real-time access to news and information available to private or public organizations.”

The top target that the pentagon assigned to Rendon was the Al-Jazeera television network. The contract called for the Rendon Group to undertake a massive “media mapping” campaign against the news organization, which the Pentagon considered “critical to U.S. objectives in the War on Terrorism.” According to the contract, Rendon would provide a “detailed content analysis of the station’s daily broadcast . . . [and] identify the biases of specific journalists and potentially obtain an understanding of their allegiances, including the possibility of specific relationships and sponsorships.”

The Rendon Group denies much of this. In a rebuttal to the Rolling Stone article, it says it had “no role whatsoever in making the case for the Iraq war, here at home or internationally.” The group also contends it had “nothing to do with the Office of Strategic Influence.”

SINISTER PURPOSE

“The secret targeting of foreign journalists may have had a sinister purpose,” Bamford wrote. “Among the missions proposed for the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Influence was one to ‘coerce’ foreign journalists and plant false information overseas. Secret briefing papers also said the office should find ways to ‘punish’ those who convey the ‘wrong message.’ One senior officer told CNN that the plan would ‘formalize government deception, dishonesty and misinformation’.”

John Rendon himself has reportedly admitted that the purpose of embedding reporters within army units is to control the media.

(Read the article)

Comments(0) |  Print This Post

By Scott Horton

You can catch my review of the CIA Inspector General John Helgerson’s report on BBC’s “The World” or on MSNBC’s Live with Carlos Watson today at 11 ET. Here, in the meantime, are seven points that I draw from it:

1. The worst is yet to come. Yesterday the CIA released a fresh copy of the report with roughly half of the “case study” discussion now unmasked. But context and placement suggest that the material that remains concealed contains some of the worst discussion of abuse in the report. The heavy redactions start around page 25, and the redactions cover discussion of the origins of the program and the approval process, as well as the discussion of specific prisoners, notably Abu Zubaydah, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, and Khalid Shaikh Mohammad. Although cases in which the guidelines provided by the Justice Department were exceeded have been discussed, it’s likely the case that the still blacked-out passages cover instances where Justice gave a green light but the conduct was so gruesome that CIA wants to keep it under wraps. That means we haven’t heard the last of the Helgerson report, and further disclosures are likely.
2. Opposition from within. For years the CIA has said that CIA personnel would be demoralized and the reputation of the agency would be damaged by disclosure of the contents of the report. But the report documents just the opposite. The Inspector General’s review was launched by complaints coming from valued senior employees who felt that the Bush Program (as John Yoo has dubbed it) was wrong. One of them actually expresses his worry that those involved will be hauled before the World Court at some point because of [and that’s redacted!] This makes clear that good employees of the agency opposed the Bush Program, were vocal in their opposition, and focused concern on the program’s illegality. The OLC memos were intended to silence these complaints, but they only accentuated the agency’s morale problems by enmeshing it in obviously illegal and immoral conduct. By contrast, the number of CIA personnel involved in pushing it through and supporting it is tiny—probably not many more than two dozen—though their voices are heard very loudly. It’s interesting that in a stream of appearances by CIA personnel on TV yesterday—Tyler Drumheller, Jack Rice, Bob Baer and others—all said that a criminal investigation was a good idea. The official spokesman of the CIA torture team remains, as for the last seven years, David Ignatius.
3. George Tenet and Michael Hayden misled the public. Both directors from the Bush years made numerous statements in which they argued that all the procedures used were closely policed and clearly legal. Previously I discussed Hayden’s appearance before the Council on Foreign Relations, in which he gave broad assurance that the law was carefully studied and enforced. But the IG report, which Tenet and Hayden read, makes clear that these claims are false. Tenet and Hayden were put on notice that internal efforts to police the process had collapsed and that there were serious legal issues surrounding what was done. We know that Tenet and Hayden vehemently opposed release of the Helgerson report. It’s now evident why. This report casts them as liars.
4. All trails lead to the Vice President’s office. At several points, redactions begin just when the discussion is headed toward the supervision or direction of the program and context suggests that some figure far up the Washington food chain is intervening. Moreover, as Jane Mayer recounts in Dark Side, Helgerson’s report was shut down when he was summoned, twice, to meet with Dick Cheney, who insisted that the report be stopped. Cheney had good reason to be concerned. This report shows that the vice president intervened directly in the process and ensured that the program was implemented. The OPR report likewise shows Cheney’s office commissioning the torture memos and carefully supervising the process. It is increasingly clear that torture was Dick Cheney’s special project and that he was personally and deeply involved in it. And the CIA report has some amazing nuggets that show Cheney’s hand. In 2003, after Jay Bybee departed OLC, Cheney struggled to have John Yoo installed as his successor, but ultimately John Ashcroft’s candidate, Jack Goldsmith, prevailed. Goldsmith quickly backtracked on the torture authorizations that Yoo and Bybee gave. The result? The CIA stopped taking its cue from OLC and instead turned to the White House for guidance. It is remarkably vague on the particulars, and blackouts emerge just as passages seem to be getting interesting. But there’s little doubt that Dick Cheney and his staff were pushing the process from behind the scenes.

(Read the article)

Comments(0) |  Print This Post

Thomas Heffner -

Today there are fewer manufacturing employees than in 1955, and over the past 20 years 3.7 million manufacturing jobs has been lost. These figures are a grim reminder that America can no longer manufacture competitively.

How did this happen? Two causes stand out: low international wage rates in countries like China and Mexico that America will not and can not compete with, and America’s abandonment of capital and knowledge intensive industries.

American workers can not and should not have to compete with third world wage rates. Some Chinese manufacturers are paid 33 cents an hour according to a 2005 AFLCIO report. This cents-an-hour pay in many countries around the world has caused American companies and entire industries to move abroad (see the lost industry list here). It also lead Princeton economist Alan Blinder to estimate 42-56 million jobs could potentially be sent overseas.

Japan has successfully navigated the problem of China’s low wage rates. China is one of Japan’s biggest trading partners and yet Japan maintains a trade surplus with them. The labor in Japan is leveraged; one person operates equipment that can do the work of 100 ordinary laborers. America used to manufacture this way but now produces little by comparison and increasingly depends on imports at a net cost of $1.5 million per minute ($765 billion per year) to maintain our standards of living.

Auto and other manufacturing industries were once proud centers of American productivity, but have since seen their superiority usurped by technology based economies like that of Japan. The Japanese realized the gains of encouraging industrial growth and with hardly any natural resources turned their economy into an economic superpower that last year alone generated an $88 billion trade surplus with America and a $170 billion current account surplus with the rest of the world, the second largest next to China.

Meanwhile, the U.S. has resigned itself to live on increasing debts. Since 1987 home mortgages have gone from $1.8 trillion to $8.2 trillion, consumer debt from $2.7 trillion to $11 trillion and household debt has quadrupled. Add to that a national debt approaching $9 trillion and you do not have to be an economist to realize the economy may not be as rosy as America’s GDP rating system would deceptively lead you to believe.

Increasing debt, decreasing savings and selling off America’s principal assets, its wealth producing companies abroad. This is not a sustainable or responsible long-term economic policy.

America can, and must, do better. How do we get out of this debt-ridden rut? The solution is to copy Japan’s model. Taiwan, Korea and many other Asian countries have adopted the Japanese East Asian economic model and are extremely successful.

(Read the article)

Comments(0) |  Print This Post

Man with a health care plan?: House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Rep. Henry Waxman.

By Bill Boyarsky

By the time Congress returns from its recess and takes another whack at the health insurance mess, Rep. Henry Waxman will have started revealing the deceit that protects health business profiteers.

Waxman has already begun by demanding that major insurance companies reveal how much they pay top executives and board members and, most important, the size of their profits from selling policies.

He is getting to the heart of the health insurance debate. It’s all about the health business—insurance, hospitals, pharmaceutical and biotech companies, medical equipment makers and others.

Their economic goal is bigger profits. Their political goal is to protect their interests by making sure the 2010 election puts enough Republicans and sympathetic Democrats in Congress. Even if the Democrats retain control of the House and Senate, health care lobbyists will pour celebratory drinks as long they have enough power to shape legislation. That’s how it works. Don’t be deluded by party labels.

Last week, I talked to Waxman about what’s happening in health care. I found him at UCLA, at a forum on another of his interests, preventing climate change.

If you’re a reporter looking for a hot quote, Waxman’s the wrong man to see. Anyone watching his “Daily Show” appearance with Jon Stewart could tell you that. Waxman is all policy, determined to explain everything in detail. But he’s smart, tough and knows how to get results. He showed that last year when he went against the House seniority system and took over the Energy and Commerce Committee by unseating John Dingell, its longtime chairman.

I asked Waxman whether he expected the insurance companies to reply to his letters. “Oh yes,” he said. “When we write letters, we expect to get answers.” And what was his purpose in seeking the information? At first, he was reluctant to discuss the investigation. Finally, he gave a guarded reply: that many folks perhaps take too benign a view of private insurance companies.

Perhaps his findings will open their eyes.

The letters from Waxman and his colleague, Bart Stupak, chairman of the House Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, went to every major insurance company, ranging from Aetna to Wellpoint. The lawmakers want to know the pay, stock options, perks, incentives, retirement and other financial information concerning executives earning more than $500,000 a year. They are curious about the cost of promotional junkets. They are seeking disclosure of premiums, revenue, claims payments and sales expenses for health insurance policies. This includes sales to employers, individuals and the government. Interestingly, while insurance companies rail against the federal government, they earn money from participating in a number of federal programs, such as Medicare.

Hopefully, the investigation will also reveal more about another source of insurance company and hospital revenue—their monopoly status. Professor Jacob Hacker of Yale shed some light on this last week with the release of a detailed paper on pending congressional health care plans.

Hacker cited an American Medical Association study which said that in 314 metropolitan areas in the United States, 94 percent have one or two insurers dominating the market. The same is true for the hospitals. Hacker reported that one or two hospitals dominate the market in 83 percent of metropolitan areas.

And the hospitals and insurance companies work together. He said insurance companies pay monopoly or prestigious hospitals “well above costs” to ensure they will work with the big firms. And costs, he noted, “are often excessive” because of hospital inefficiency.

(Read the article)

Comments(0) |  Print This Post

By Marie Cocco

The summer of disinformation seems to have accomplished its goal: to preserve for the private insurance industry an effective monopoly over how much most Americans pay for health care, and on what terms they can buy it.

No one will come out and say this. But that will be the result if the so-called public option is dropped from the proposed menu of choices in a new health “exchange” envisioned in reform proposals being considered on Capitol Hill.

It was predictable that the right wing would declare a voluntary public option a scary “government takeover” of health care. That’s what they always say. Only a few years ago, the same crowd was in a full-throated roar about how government-guaranteed Social Security benefits had to be turned into private investment accounts. They claimed—with perfectly straight faces—that we’d all do better if we retired on our Wall Street riches.

Does anyone still believe that?

It’s one thing to say the right wing is low on the believability scale and quite another to claim that those who favor a public option in health care are left-wing crazies who cling to it for ideological comfort. But this is what several otherwise level-headed media commentators have suggested lately, and worse, it’s what an anonymous White House adviser told The Washington Post when he expressed annoyance that the “left of the left has decided that this is their Waterloo.”

Really, now.

The “left of the left” doesn’t want the type of public option currently under discussion. It wants a national, single-payer health care system modeled on Medicare. But the “left of the left” has essentially been told to shut up about a single-payer health plan because it isn’t politically feasible.

The public option already is a watered-down compromise. And it’s screwy to suggest that it’s supported only as a tenet of ideological faith. It’s actually supported by a common-sense look at what the military might call the facts on the ground.

Right now, the private insurance industry operates regional monopolies in which employers, individual consumers, doctors and other medical providers have virtually no option but to deal with one or two big insurers. The American Medical Association has estimated that 94 percent of commercial markets for health insurance are “highly concentrated” according to federal antitrust guidelines. While the insurance industry takes issue with the AMA’s findings, they’re supported by independent research, and they’re not new: A 2004 study in the peer-reviewed journal Health Affairs found similar market dominance.

(Read the article)

Comments(0) |  Print This Post

Glenn Greenwald

I wrote earlier today about Eric Holder’s decision to ”review” whether criminal prosecutions are warranted in connection with the torture of Terrorism suspects — that can be read here — but I want to write separately about the release today of the 2004 CIA’s Inspector General Report (.pdf), both because it’s extraordinary in its own right and because it underscores how unjust it would be to prosecute only low-level interrogators rather than the high-level officials who implemented the torture regime.  Initially, it should be emphasized that yet again, it is not the Congress or the establishment media which is uncovering these abuses and forcing disclosure of government misconduct.  Rather, it is the ACLU (with which I consult) that, along with other human rights organizations, has had to fill the void left by those failed institutions, using their own funds to pursue litigation to compel disclosure.  Without their efforts, we would know vastly less than we know now about the crimes our government committed.

Before saying anything about the implications of this Report, I want to post some excerpts of what CIA interrogators did.  Every American should be forced to read and learn this in order to know what was done in their names (click images to enlarge):

Threats of execution

Threats to kill detainee and his children:

Pressure points on carotid artery:

Threats to rape detainee’s female relatives in front of him:

(Read the article)

Comments(0) |  Print This Post

Cam Simpson reports on declassified records.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, known inside the government as KSM, is the archetype of the evil genius, the man whose imagination gave birth to the twisted dream of crashing airliners packed with passengers into buildings packed with workers.

Formerly secret Central Intelligence Agency reports released this evening offer a couple of intriguing details into the mind of the al Qaeda operations chief and self-described mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

For starters, one of the CIA reports states that KSM intentionally avoided swearing a religious oath of allegiance, known as bayat, to al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden so that KSM “could have ignored a [potential] decision by the al Qaeda leadership to cancel the 11 September attacks.” He was captured in Pakistan in 2003 and ended up in the military prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

A brief CIA biography of KSM also says that the time he spent studying engineering at North Carolina A&T University during the mid-1980s “almost certainly helped propel him on his path to become a terrorist.” The university is one of the nation’s historically black schools.

The report says that KSM told his interrogators “that his contacts with Americans, while minimal, confirmed his view that the United States was a debauched and racist country.”

• « Previous
  Documents From CIA Don’t Clear Up Clash on Interrogation Tactics

Comments(0) |  Print This Post

Protesters, in front of health insurer Aetna’s headquarters, hold signs with the company’s profit for 2007’s first quarter, $434 million. The company would report $27.6 billion in revenue for the year and $31 billion for the following year.

By Chris Hedges

Percentage change since 2002 in average premiums paid to large US health-insurance companies: +87%

Percentage change in the profits of the top ten insurance companies: +428%

Chances that an American bankrupted by medical bills has health insurance: 7 in 10

—Harper’s Index, September 2009

Capitalists, as my friend Father Michael Doyle says, should never be allowed near a health care system. They hold sick children hostage as they force parents to bankrupt themselves in the desperate scramble to pay for medical care. The sick do not have a choice. Medical care is not a consumable good. We can choose to buy a used car or a new car, shop at a boutique or a thrift store, but there is no choice between illness and health. And any debate about health care must acknowledge that the for-profit health care industry is the problem and must be destroyed. This is an industry that hires doctors and analysts to deny care to patients in order to increase profits. It is an industry that causes half of all bankruptcies. And the 20,000 Americans who died last year because they did not receive adequate care condemn these corporations as complicit in murder.

The current health care debate in Congress has nothing to do with death panels or public options or socialized medicine. The real debate, the only one that counts, is how much money our blood-sucking insurance, pharmaceutical and for-profit health services are going to be able to siphon off from new health care legislation. The proposed plans rattling around Congress all ensure that the profits for these corporations will increase and the misery for ordinary Americans will be compounded. The corporate state, enabled by both Democrats and Republicans, is yet again cannibalizing the Treasury. It is yet again pushing Americans, especially the poor and the working class, into levels of despair and rage that will continue to fuel the violent, proto-fascist movements leaping up around the edges of American society. And the traditional watchdogs—those in public office, the press and citizens groups—are as useless as the perfumed fops of another era who busied their days with court intrigue at Versailles. Canada never looked so good.

The Democrats are collaborating with lobbyists for the insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry and for-profit health care providers to craft the current health care reform legislation. “Corporate and industry players are inside the tent this time,” says David Merritt, project director at Newt Gingrich’s Center for Health Transformation, “so there is a vacuum on the outside.” And these lobbyists have already killed a viable public option and made sure nothing in the bills will impede their growing profits and capacity for abuse.

“It will basically be a government law that says you have to buy their defective product,” says Dr. David Himmelstein, a professor at Harvard Medical School and a founder of Physicians for a National Health Plan. “Next the government will tell us a Pinto in every garage, a lead-coated toy to every child and melamine-laced puppy chow for every dog.”

“Health insurance is not a race to the top; it is a race to the bottom,” he told me from Cambridge, Mass. “The way you make money is by abusing people. And if a public-option plan is not ready and willing to abuse patients it is stuck with the expensive patients. The premiums will go up until it is noncompetitive. The conditions that have now been set for the plans include a hobbled public option. Under the best-case scenario there will be tens of millions [who] will remain uninsured at the outset, and the number will climb as more and more people are priced out of the insurance market.”

The inclusion of these corporations in the crafting of health care legislation has not stopped figures like Rick Scott, the former head of the Columbia/HCA health care company, from attempting to sabotage any plan. Scott’s company was forced to pay a $1.7 billion fraud settlement—the largest health care fraud settlement in U.S. history—for stealing hundreds of millions from taxpayers by overbilling for medical care. Scott, who made his money primarily from Medicare, is now saturating the airwaves in a reputed $20 million ad campaign that is stoking the anger and fear of many Americans. His ads are coordinated by CRC Public Relations, the group that masterminded the “Swift boat” attacks against 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry.

(Read the article)

Comments(0) |  Print This Post

Occidental College Offers Course In Stupidity

We honestly don’t know what’s funnier the class title or the hyper-deconstructionist language used in the course description. Only in the bubble of the academy is it acceptable to use these words and phrases: organicity, postmodern discourse, Beevis and Butthead.

180. STUPIDITY. Stupidity is neither ignorance nor organicity, but rather, a corollary of knowing and an element of normalcy, the double of intelligence rather than its opposite. It is an artifact of our nature as finite beings and one of the most powerful determinants of human destiny. Stupidity is always the name of the Other, and it is the sign of the feminine. This course in Critical Psychology follows the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze, and most recently, Avital Ronell, in a philosophical examination of those operations and technologies that we conduct in order to render ourselves uncomprehending. Stupidity, which has been evicted from the philosophical premises and dumbed down by psychometric psychology, has returned in the postmodern discourse against Nation, Self, and Truth and makes itself felt in political life ranging from the presidency to Beevis and Butthead. This course examines stupidity.

Comments(0) |  Print This Post