The “nonprofit” AARP has long played both sides of the street, and often acted as a stealth partner of private insurers.
Seniors group makes millions from royalties on health plans

By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer // Dateline: Tuesday, October 27, 2009  [print_link]

The nation’s preeminent seniors group, AARP, has put the weight of its 40 million members behind health-care reform, saying many of the proposals will lower costs and increase the quality of care for older Americans.

But not advertised in this lobbying campaign have been the group’s substantial earnings from insurance royalties and the potential benefits that could come its way from many of the reform proposals.

The group and its subsidiaries collected more than $650 million in royalties and other fees last year from the sale of insurance policies, credit cards and other products that carry the AARP name, accounting for the majority of its $1.14 billion in revenue, according to federal tax records. It does not directly sell insurance policies but lends its name to plans in exchange for a tax-exempt cut of the premiums.

The organization, formerly known as the American Association of Retired Persons, also heavily markets the policies on its Web site, in mailings to its members and through ubiquitous advertising targeted at seniors.

The group’s dual role as an insurance reformer and a broker has come under increasing scrutiny in recent weeks from congressional Republicans, who accuse it of having a conflict of interest in taking sides in the fierce debate over health insurance. Three House Republicans sent a letter to AARP on Monday complaining that the group was putting its “political self-interests” ahead of seniors.

GOP lawmakers point to AARP’s thriving business in marketing branded Medigap policies, which provide supplemental coverage for standard Medicare plans available to the elderly. Democratic proposals to slash reimbursements for another program, called Medicare Advantage, are widely expected to drive up demand for private Medigap policies like the ones offered by AARP, according to health-care experts, legislative aides and documents.

Republicans also question the high salaries and other perks given to some top AARP executives, who would not be subject to limits on insurance executives’ pay included in the Senate Finance Committee’s health reform package. Former AARP chief executive William Novelli received more than $1 million in compensation last year.

“We are witnessing a disturbing trend of handouts to special interests like AARP,” said House Republican spokesman Matt Lloyd, referring to Democratic negotiations over health reform. “In return, AARP is lobbying for a government-run health-care bill that will pad their own executives’ pockets at the expense of its own members and other vulnerable seniors.”

AARP officials strongly dispute such allegations, arguing that the group’s heavy reliance on brand royalties allows it to offer members a wide range of benefits — from lobbying for seniors in Washington to discount travel packages and financial advice. The organization notes that even though it offers a Medicare Advantage plan, it has long advocated curbing waste in that federal program.

“We’re a consumer advocacy organization; we’re not an insurance firm,” said David Certner, AARP’s director of legislative policy. “That drives everything we do. It’s got to be good for our members, or we don’t endorse it.”

Added AARP spokesman Jim Dau: “We spend far more time at odds with private insurers than not.”

AARP’s ties to the insurance business date to its founding by former educator Ethel Percy Andrus, who started a group to help retired schoolteachers find health insurance in the years before Medicare; the effort led to the creation of AARP in 1958.

Now, the group relies more than ever on payments from auto, health and life insurers, according to financial statements. From 2007 to 2008, AARP royalties from insurance plans, credit cards and other branded products shot up 31 percent — from less than $500 million to $652 million — making such fees the primary source of revenue for the group last year, the records show. AARP’s annual financial report shows that 63 percent of that, or about $400 million, came from the nation’s largest health insurance carrier, UnitedHealth Group, which underwrites four major AARP Medigap policies. Other carriers with AARP-branded plans include Aetna Life Insurance, Genworth Life Insurance and Delta Dental.

AARP is also a major powerhouse in Washington, spending more than $37 million on lobbying since January 2008. The organization’s close ties with insurers have long attracted criticism from politicians of both parties.

During the health-care debate of the early 1990s, then-Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.) held hearings lambasting the group’s business operations. Some Democrats criticized the group for supporting the Bush administration’s expensive Medicare prescription-drug legislation in 2003.

Earlier this year, AARP and UnitedHealth said they were halting the sale of “limited benefit” health insurance policies after complaints from Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) that the plans were marketed in a misleading way.

Dean A. Zerbe, a former Grassley senior counsel who is now national managing director at the corporate tax firm Alliant Group, argues that AARP’s involvement in the sale of insurance plans “really hurts their credibility.”

“Either you’re a voice for the elderly or you’re an insurance company; choose one,” Zerbe said. “They put themselves forward in the public arena as nonbiased observers, but they’re very swayed by business interests.”

Republicans renewed their attacks on AARP this year after the group emerged as a vigorous defender of many of the reforms under consideration by the Democrat-controlled Congress. Nancy LeaMond, an AARP executive vice president, appeared at a press conference Friday alongside House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to announce a new proposal for plugging gaps in coverage of Medicare prescription benefits.

Rep. Dave Reichert (R-Wash.), who has asked AARP to provide him with more details about its insurance-related businesses, said he believes the group is “misleading” its members about the alleged benefits of Democratic reforms. “Right now there’s a feeling among seniors that AARP may not be entirely forthcoming,” he said.

AARP launched a “fact check” section on its Web site this year to counter GOP criticisms of reform, including the discredited “death panels” claim, and argues that wringing savings out of Medicare and closing gaps in prescription coverage will help older Americans.

Several top AARP officials also said they have no idea whether the group might gain insurance business as a result of the proposed reforms. “We wouldn’t know it, and we wouldn’t really care,” Certner said. “The advocacy is what drives what we do here, and not the other way around.”

“Many protesters expressed a sense that basic American freedoms of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are threatened by new Washington policies seen by many as more socialistic than capitalistic. The proposed taxpayer bailout of homeowners who may have inflated their earnings in order to secure mortgages is one example, says Jeff Crawford, a protester from Dacula, Ga. “The first year after the Mayflower arrived, the colonists tried a communal method of storing and sharing food and it failed miserably,” says Mr. Crawford. “Why are things any different now?”  Eighteenth-century symbolism was rife at the Atlanta event as speakers drew comparisons with the Boston patriots who dumped the King’s tea in Boston Harbor to protest taxation without representation, an act that began the American Revolution and the founding of the United States…”—via Michelle Malkin » A Tax Day Tea Party cheat sheet: How it all started.

I HAVE TO SAY, I’m really enjoying this whole teabag thing. It’s really inspiring some excellent daydreaming. For one thing, it’s brought together the words teabag and Michelle Malkin for me in a very powerful, thrilling sort of way. Not that I haven’t ever put those two concepts together before, but this is the first time it’s happened while in the process of reading her actual columns. Michelle Malkin doesn’t have that. She’s just a mean little dunce who’s wedged herself into a nicely paying career as a GOP spokesclown, and she’s going to ride that gig for as long as it keeps gas in her minivan.  And that’s fine, good for her. But that doesn’t make her readable. However, this move of hers to spearhead the teabag movement really adds an element to her writing that wasn’t there before. Now when I read her stuff, I imagine her narrating her text, book-on-tape style, with a big, hairy set of balls in her mouth. It vastly improves her prose. See for yourself; just put your thinking cap on and read this:

What and who exactly are President Obama’s homeland security officials afraid of these days? If you are a member of an active conservative group that opposes abortion, favors strict immigration enforcement, lobbies to protect Second Amendment rights, protests big government, advocates federalism or represents veterans who believe in any of the above, the answer is: You.”

[Note: I originally tried to redo that passage and phonetically sound out how the new, improved version might sound, but on the page it came out too offensive even for me. If anyone can figure out a way to do it more tastefully, I’d love to see it.]

Anyway this teabag thing has really gotten out of control. It’s amazing, literally amazing to me, that it wasn’t until Obama pushed through a package containing a massive public works package and significant homeowner aid that conservatives took to the streets. In other words, it wasn’t until taxes turned into construction jobs and mortgage relief that working and middle-class Americans decided to protest. I didn’t see anyone on the street when we forked over billions of dollars to help JP Morgan Chase buy Bear Stearns. And I didn’t see anyone on the street when Hank Paulson forked over $45 more billion to help Bank of America buy Merrill Lynch, a company run at the time by one of the world’s biggest assholes, John Thain. Moreover I didn’t see any street protests when the government agreed to soak up hundreds of billions in “troubled assets” from Citigroup, a company that just months later would lend out a jet furnished with pillows upholstered with Hermes scarves to former chief Sandy Weill so that he could vacation in Mexico over Christmas.

Look, I’m a taxpayer too. And I’m no less pissed off than any of these people about the taxes I have to pay. Just today I was reading hedge-fund manager David Einhorn’s book, Fooling Some of the People All of the Time, about his battles with a company called Allied Capital. Einhorn was shorting Allied because he found accounting irregularities in Allied’s books after analyzing the firm. Among other things, he found that an Allied subsidiary called BLX was irresponsibly handling tens of millions in Small Business Association loans, shoving this SBA money out to unworthy recipients and costing the taxpayer an enormous amount of money. When Einhorn went to the SBA, they basically blew him off. “We see this all the time; what’s so special about those?” was the SBA official’s response when Einhorn presented him with evidence of loan fraud. Einhorn pointed out that one of the reasons companies like BLX got away with bilking the government was because the enforcement agencies were so understaffed: he routinely found that agencies like the SEC and the OIG could not or would not investigate fraud against the taxpayer because they had no staff to pursue the investigations.

That attitude, that complete and total I-don’t-give-a-fuck attitude about taxpayer money, that’s endemic to almost every branch of the government. We saw in the last five years how contractors in Iraq nakedly robbed money from the you and me, running phantom convoys across the desert (some companies called that transporting “sailboat fuel”), systematically risking human life and gouging the taxpayer more or less right out in the open. There was over $100 billion in sole-source, non-competitive contracts in Iraq in 2006; a House Committee identified just 50 contracts totalling more than $21 billion that require “scrutiny,” but not much has been recovered so far. Why did they get away with it? Because there is basically no serious enforcement mechanism, in the military or anywhere else, for preserving taxpayer money given to contractors. In Iraq, the military auditor, SIGIR, had about seventy men in the entire military theater at the time I was there. We just bailed out AIG to the tune of more than $160 billion; its primary auditor, the Office of Thrift Supervision, had exactly one insurance expert on its staff while AIG was falling apart. There were staff cuts at the SEC several times in the last ten years; in fact there was a crucial cut of the SEC budget in an $821 billion Omnibus spending bill at the tail end of 2003 (just in time for the housing bubble) that was packed with plenty of pork and, again, inspired no protests from Joe Sixpack.

Meanwhile the federal government has systematically expanded a whole ecosystem of contractor-handout programs, most of them with names the public has never heard of. How many people out there are aware of all the millions in grants given to fortune 500 companies over the years through the Advanced Technology Program (ATP), which basically subsidizes the R&D departments of already rich firms while allowing those same companies to keep the benefits of those innovations? How about the nearly $5 billion in loan guarantees given to Boeing over the years through the Ex-Im Bank? How about the Foreign Military Financing Program, which gives millions of dollars to dozens of foreign countries every year so that they can buy American-made weapons?

Or how about the four or five billion dollars we spent annually for the last decade or so on Federal Housing Authority subsidies? Well, actually, the teabaggers probably would get riled up about those programs, which subsidize mortgage loans to low-income homeowners. The one constant in teabagger outrage is that the whatever wasteful government program they’re freaking out about has to benefit some poor slob, or else they usually don’t give a shit. What they forget, of course, is that FHA loans ultimately benefit the banks a lot more than the poor slobs — a homeowner defaulting on his FHA loan loses  his house, but the bank that irresponsibly issued the loan (without fear, knowing they are backed up by the government) is still fully compensated, with you picking up the tab.

So yeah, government waste sucks, it’s rampant at every level, and taxes are a vicious racket, and everyone should be pissed off . What’s hilarious about the teabaggers, though, is how they never squawk about waste until the spending actually has a chance of benefiting them. You will never hear of a teabagger crying about OPIC giving $50 million in free insurance to some mining company so that they can dig for silver in rural Bolivia. You won’t hear of a teabagger protesting the $2.5 billion in Ex-Im loans we gave to GE through the early part of this decade, even as GE was moving nearly a hundred thousand jobs overseas over the course of ten years. And Michelle Malkin’s readers didn’t seem to mind giving IBM millions in Ex-IM and ATP loans at the same time it was giving its former CEO, Lou Gerstner, $260 million in stock options.

In other words teabaggers don’t mind paying taxes to fund the salaries of Bolivian miners, Lou Gerstner’s stock options, deliveries of “sailboat fuel,” the Hermes scarves on Sandy Weill’s jet pillows, or even the export of their own goddamn jobs. But they do hate it when someone tries to re-asphalt their roads, or help bail their slob neighbor out of foreclosure. And God forbid someone propose a health care program, or increased financial aid for college. Hell, that’s like offering to share your turkey with the other Pilgrims! That’s not what America is all about! America is every Pilgrim for himself, dammit! Raise your own motherfucking turkey!

Oh, and there’s one other thing. I heard today from Steve Wamhoff of Citizens for Tax Justice. He had an interesting tidbit to offer on the teabagging movement. According to his research, 39% of respondents with incomes below $30,000 told the Gallup agency that they felt that federal income tax levels were “too high.” Which is interesting, because only 32% of respondents in that income category will pay any federal income taxes at all on their 2008 income. You can draw your own conclusions.

The really irritating thing about these morons is that, guaranteed, not one of them has ever taken a serious look at the federal budget. Not one has ever bothered to read an actual detailed study of what their taxes pay for. All they do is listen to one-liners doled out by tawdry Murdoch-hired mouthpieces like Michelle Malkin and then repeat them as if they’re their own opinions five seconds later. That’s what passes for political thought in this country. Teabag on, you fools.

MATT TAIBBI’S articles have shed clarity on many complex issues. He writes frequently for many venues, including his home base, Rolling Stone.

Moore: A bit softheaded about Obama’s true nature. A case of cynical calculation or terminal naiveté?

You’ve Seen the Movie — Now It’s Time to ACT!

Editor’s Note: We fully appreciate and support Michael Moore’s social change efforts via mass education, but we also categorically disagree with his misguided confidence in the Democratic party as a tool for progress, and, especially, Barack Obama. We also have quite a few doubts about the notion that activists might take over the Party, a “boring from within strategy” that has often proven illusory.

Thursday, October 22, 2009  [print_link]

Friends,

It’s the #1 question I’m constantly asked after people see my movie: “OK — so NOW what can I DO?!”

You want something to do? Well, you’ve come to the right place! ‘Cause I got 15 things you and I can do right now to fight back and try to fix this very broken system.

Here they are:

FIVE THINGS WE DEMAND THE PRESIDENT AND CONGRESS DO IMMEDIATELY:

1. Declare a moratorium on all home evictions. Not one more family should be thrown out of their home. The banks must adjust their monthly mortgage payments to be in line with what people’s homes are now truly worth — and what they can afford. Also, it must be stated by law: If you lose your job, you cannot be tossed out of your home.

2. Congress must join the civilized world and expand Medicare For All Americans. A single, nonprofit source must run a universal health care system that covers everyone. Medical bills are now the #1 cause of bankruptcies and evictions in this country. Medicare For All will end this misery. The bill to make this happen is called H.R. 3200. You must call AND write your members of Congress and demand its passage, no compromises allowed.

3. Demand publicly-funded elections and a prohibition on elected officials leaving office and becoming lobbyists. Yes, those very members of Congress who solicit and receive millions of dollars from wealthy interests must vote to remove ALL money from our electoral and legislative process. Tell your members of Congress they must support campaign finance bill H.R.1826.

4. Each of the 50 states must create a state-owned public bank like they have in North Dakota. Then congress MUST reinstate all the strict pre-Reagan regulations on all commercial banks, investment firms, insurance companies — and all the other industries that have been savaged by deregulation: Airlines, the food industry, pharmaceutical companies — you name it. If a company’s primary motive to exist is to make a profit, then it needs a set of stringent rules to live by — and the first rule is “Do no harm.” The second rule: The question must always be asked — “Is this for the common good?” (Click here for some info about the state-owned Bank of North Dakota.)

5. Save this fragile planet and declare that all the energy resources above and beneath the ground are owned collectively by all of us. Just like they do it in Sarah Palin’s socialist Alaska. We only have a few decades of oil left. The public must be the owners and landlords of the natural resources and energy that exists within our borders or we will descend further into corporate anarchy. And when it comes to burning fossil fuels to transport ourselves, we must cease using the internal combustion engine and instruct our auto/transportation companies to rehire our skilled workforce and build mass transit (clean buses, light rail, subways, bullet trains, etc.) and new cars that don’t contribute to climate change. (For more on this, here’s a proposal I wrote in December.) Demand that General Motors’ de facto chairman, Barack Obama, issue a JFK man-on-the-moon-style challenge to turn our country into a nation of trains and buses and subways. For Pete’s sake, people, we were the ones who invented (or perfected) these damn things in the first place!!

FIVE THINGS WE CAN DO TO MAKE CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT LISTEN TO US:

1. Each of us must get into the daily habit of taking 5 minutes to make four brief calls: One to the President (202-456-1414), one to your Congressperson (202-224-3121) and one to each of your two Senators (202-224-3121). To find out who represents you, click here. Take just one minute on each of these calls to let them know how you expect them to vote on a particular issue. Let them know you will have no hesitation voting for a primary opponent — or even a candidate from another party — if they don’t do our bidding. Trust me, they will listen. If you have another five minutes, click here to send them each an email. And if you really want to drop an anvil on them, send them a snail mail letter!

2. Take over your local Democratic Party. Remember how much fun you had with all those friends and neighbors working together to get Barack Obama elected? YOU DID THE IMPOSSIBLE. It’s time to re-up! Get everyone back together and go to the monthly meeting of your town or county Democratic Party — and become the majority that runs it! There will not be many in attendance and they will either be happy or in shock that you and the Obama Revolution have entered the room looking like you mean business. President Obama’s agenda will never happen without mass grass roots action — and he won’t feel encouraged to do the right thing if no one has his back, whether it’s to stand with him, or push him in the right direction. When you all become the local Democratic Party, send me a photo of the group and I’ll post it on my website.

3. Recruit someone to run for office who can win in your local elections next year — or, better yet, consider running for office yourself! You don’t have to settle for the incumbent who always expects to win. You can be our next representative! Don’t believe it can happen? Check out these examples of regular citizens who got elected: State Senator Deb Simpson, California State Assemblyman Isadore Hall, Tempe, Arizona City Councilman Corey Woods, Wisconsin State Assemblyman Chris Danou, and Washington State Representative Larry Seaquist. The list goes on and on — and you should be on it!

4. Show up. Picket the local branch of a big bank that took the bailout money. Hold vigils and marches. Consider civil disobedience. Those town hall meetings are open to you, too (and there’s more of us than there are of them!). Make some noise, have some fun, get on the local news. Place “Capitalism Did This” signs on empty foreclosed homes, closed down businesses, crumbling schools and infrastructure. (You can download them from my website.)

5. Start your own media. You. Just you (or you and a couple friends). The mainstream media is owned by corporate America and, with few exceptions, it will never tell the whole truth — so you have to do it! Start a blog! Start a website of real local news (here’s an example: The Michigan Messenger). Tweet your friends and use Facebook to let them know what they need to do politically. The daily papers are dying. If you don’t fill that void, who will?

FIVE THINGS WE SHOULD DO TO PROTECT OURSELVES AND OUR LOVED ONES UNTIL WE GET THROUGH THIS MESS:

1. Take your money out of your bank if it took bailout money and place it in a locally-owned bank or, preferably, a credit union.

2. Get rid of all your credit cards but one — the kind where you have to pay up at the end of the month or you lose your card.

3. Do not invest in the stock market. If you have any extra cash, put it away in a savings account or, if you can, pay down on your mortgage so you can own your home as soon as possible. You can also buy very safe government savings bonds or T-bills. Or just buy your mother some flowers.

4. Unionize your workplace so that you and your coworkers have a say in how your business is run. Here’s how to do it (more info here). Nothing is more American than democracy, and democracy shouldn’t be checked at the door when you enter your workplace. Another way to Americanize your workplace is to turn your business into a worker-owned cooperative. You are not a wage slave. You are a free person, and you giving up eight hours of your life every day to someone else is to be properly compensated and respected.

5. Take care of yourself and your family. Sorry to go all Oprah on you, but she’s right: Find a place of peace in your life and make the choice to be around people who are not full of negativity and cynicism. Look for those who nurture and love. Turn off the TV and the Blackberry and go for a 30-minute walk every day. Eat fruits and vegetables and cut down on anything that has sugar, high fructose corn syrup, white flour or too much sodium (salt) in it (and, as Michael Pollan says, “Eat (real) food, not too much, mostly plants”). Get seven hours of sleep each night and take the time to read a book a month. I know this sounds like I’ve turned into your grandma, but, dammit, take a good hard look at Granny — she’s fit, she’s rested and she knows the names of both of her U.S. Senators without having to Google them. We might do well to listen to her. If we don’t put our own “oxygen mask” on first (as they say on the airplane), we will be of no use to the rest of the nation in enacting any of this action plan!

I’m sure there are many other ideas you can come up with on how we can build this movement. Get creative. Think outside the politics-as-usual box. BE SUBVERSIVE! Think of that local action no one else has tried. Behave as if your life depended on it. Be bold! Try doing something with reckless abandon. It may just liberate you and your community and your nation.

And when you act, send me your stories, your photos and your video — and be sure to post your ideas in the comments beneath this letter on my site so they can be shared with millions.

C’mon people — we can do this! I expect nothing less of all of you, my true and trusted fellow travelers!

Yours,

Michael Moore

MMFlint@aol.com

MichaelMoore.com

The mask of legitimacy is slowly crumbling, as the current world paradigm, based on lies, selfishness and short-term thinking continues to spawn crisis after crisis and war after infernal war…

BY PETER PAVIMENTOV [print_link]

It is interesting that some of the banking community abroad are running scared of the people’s moral opinion on the bank rescue by public funds and its resulting recovery of the speculative sector whereby enormous bonuses are once again being paid. Even the Governor of the Bank of England, not a minor office holder, counsels a breaking up of those banks too large to fail. And the American president makes again misleading compensatory noises about the salaries of the officers in those institutions who apparently did not pay the government back.

This unease is also slowly penetrating to the Wall Streeters, who as usual remain fully blind to public opinion. But one must expect here the normal psycho-terrorism to be applied, scaring those whose life existence is threatened and already diminished by the drain of the economic strength of this country. What do the financial rapists care how many businesses go out of existence, or how much government reduces social support for those who worked hard most of their lives for these benefits? War and a strenuous effort to keep the creaking colossus of capitalism going, informs the leading lights of extortion whether in lower Manhattan or in Washington, D.C.

Never has the misalignment of the economy been so starkly evident as today, much more so than in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when the masses of the poor were less informed and less educated than now. That is the threat with which the present power holders must cope and all their propaganda in the pre-bought media will not save them, because the carefully constructed edifice of received opinion is now dangerously leaning over.

America has ever been the country of personal anarchism, where individual assertion was part of the national character, where a basic cynicism underlies reluctant acceptance of imposed rules and where one may hope this contrariness may save this nation and the world. Though nationhood is a misnomer as well as an outdated notion, despite its lingering on more people become aware that there is little difference in humanity whether one is born in Topeka, Kansas or in Isfahan, Iran, but artificial borders between countries remain in place as ordained by the military and economic overlords.

However the realization that propagandized thinking is a thing of the past penetrates more and more Western minds which can only be to the benefit of those submitted to Western aggression. Colonialism in whatever form is over and the sooner this will be clear to the oppressor classes, the easier and quicker their fate will be, because rebellion is in the air. It is a process that unlike previous eruptions of class societies will move slower like tectonic plates shifting in our earth, a slowness which could be unfortunate for the health of our planet, but come it will. The suspension of belief is a process that cannot be forced but must be allowed to grow by itself, even though it can reach spontaneous combustion at a certain point. Like the nefarious warlords in the Pentagon, who for their reason to exist like nothing better than to create international tension, the many profiteers and others who push their own idealistic conservative programs in this corrupt government, are appearing to be more and more redundant.

This is because there are sure signs that voters have become aware that the two factions of the same power cabal play footsie with each other and that the one faction called misleadingly the Democrats is in fact the one possibly most deleterious to the public’s economic welfare.  No rational government has laws that politicize the judiciary nor should such excesses be tolerated like a Supreme Court of judges appointing a president. Therefore as this government has proven to be inimical to the people’s interests, it needs to be removed, not by votes as it is clear that voting is a spurious exercise, but by popular mobilization. How this will be effected is unpredictable, but it is a historical imperative. One cannot unfortunately predict or even steer popular movements with certitude, and each has its own impetus and character. The breaking up of Federal power is very much needed at this late stage and a breaking up of the United States into smaller units desirable because smaller units allow for more egalitarianism and input from the people. States by themselves never declare war, nor can they exert undue economic pressure. How then true democracy and equality can be reached is left to common consent in each state after this suffocating and all pervasive structure of capitalism is abandoned with its extortionate first commandment to compete, a slave ring around everyone’s neck causing antagonism and alienation unworthy of the human soul.

Should humanity finally see the light despite the dense fog of propaganda, rewarding some and abandoning most in our social world will be a thing of the past and when everyone is allowed input in how societal rules are constructed and applied, the ills of capitalism will be gone. Transforming the Res Publica into a form of tribalism is truly the most rational goal at present, even if perceived by a mere handful. After this difficult stage is completed we may at last deal with the problems such a transformation will undoubtedly bring with it. No human social organization is ever ideal, expecting that would be a step backwards, but maybe now the swell of discontent is rising, the breaking up of institutional injustice could be a near event for this country as well as a salvation for all those it now attacks and tortures unrelentingly.

PETER PAVIMENTOV is a senior columnist with The Greanville Post.