Dateline: Mon, 09/21/2009  [print_link]

BY DAVE LINDORFF

NYT's Katherine Seelye. The stiletto leaves fewer traces than the mallet.

In an article in the Sunday New York Times, headlined “Medicare for All? ‘Crazy,’ ‘Socialized’ and Unlikely,”reporter Katherine Q. Seelye did her best to damn the idea of government insurance for all with faint praise.

To begin her article, Seelye appropriately went first to the land of make-believe and quoted from a 2005 episode of the NBC drama “West Wing,” in which two presidential candidates, a Democrat played by Jimmy Smits and a Republican played by the always loveable Alan Alda, are discussing health care reform. The almost Nixonian-looking Smits character says his “ideal plan” would be Medicare for all. “That’s crazy” counters the Republican Alda, finishing off that idea handily.

Then Seelye segued to an opinion piece recently penned by real-life one-time Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern (a noble figure who nonetheless has long-since been type-cast in our national mythology as an out-of-touch, extreme liberal loser), who favors expansion of Medicare into a national single-payer system.

Turning to the real world, Seelye then trotted out several economists, ostensibly to give a broad spectrum of arguments about the idea of single-payer, but in fact carefully avoiding including anyone who actually supports the idea of expanding Medicare.

But where was an economist from the real left end of the political spectrum, over in the single digits of that yardstick? Altaman, representing the private insurance-based Obama approach, was hardly it!

Seelye might have gone to her colleague, columnist Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at Princeton, who has on a number of occasions written and stated that a single-payer system such as Medicare for all would be “far cheaper” than any private insurance-based system. Krugman is no leftist, but at least he would be over by the 10” or 12” line on a political yardstick.

Never has the Times really analyzed the true costs and benefits of the plan espoused in a bill, HR 676, authored by House Judiciary Chair John Conyers (D-MI), which would expand Medicare to cover every American. Seelye mentions Rep. Conyers’ bill, but dismisses it as “going nowhere” in the House. In fact, his bill, despite having been co-sponsored by 86 members of the House, has been blocked from getting a public hearing in committee by Nancy Pelosi and the House leadership, at the behest of the Obama White House, which is dead-set against a single-payer reform of health care.

Sure expanding Medicare would mean higher Medicare taxes, but consider the following:

Medicaid, the program that pays for medical care for the poor, and is funded by federal and state taxes, would be eliminated, saving $400 billion a year.

Veterans’ care, currently running at $100 billion a year, would be eliminated.

Perhaps two-thirds of the $300 billion a year spent by federal, state and local governments to reimburse hospitals for so-called “charity care” for treatment of people who have no insurance but don’t qualify for Medicaid, would be eliminated.

Several hundred billion dollars currently spent on paperwork by private insurers would be eliminated.

Car insurance would be cheaper as there would no longer have to be coverage for medical bills.

Federal, state and local governments would no longer have to pay to insure public employees.

In short, if every person were on Medicare, the overall savings would overwhelm the small increase in the Medicare payroll tax of 5.8%. Even just looking at taxes, the net result would be a savings, when federal, state and local tax savings are considered.

The bottom line is that Canadians, who have Medicare for all, devote 10% of GDP to health care. Americans, who have private-insurance-based health care except for the elderly, devote 17% of GDP to health care.

Seelye and the Times have never mentioned any of this. Neither does President Obama or the Democratic Congress.

And of course, all we really need to know is that the insurance industry bitterly opposes the idea of Medicare for all, which would put it out of the health care business.

The deeper the world’s elites sink into criminality, the more outrageous the hypocrisy, and as usual the US leads the parade

BY JOHN STEPPLING   [print_link]

The response in the US to Roman Polanski’s arrest in Switzerland … as he was on his way to receive an award………is typical of a resentful, angry, and most significantly, a puritanical society.

This case is almost laughable actually, the girl was sexually mature and active, the mom an almost pimp, and the sex consensual. Oh, oh, oh, it can never be consensual with a minor. Well, this is more puritanism, and more hatred of pleasure. A society that so criminalizes, pleasure (drugs, sex, etc) and is simultaneously addicted to all forms of illicit activities….. is a very unhealthy place.

I do wonder where the outcry is about Henry Kissinger still walking around? Or Ollie North (who is gainfully employed at FOX) or any number of priests, who havent done time but were merely shuttled off to a new parish. Why no moral indignation?

Actually, I think the reason Polanski is being piled on this way is that he has never apologized. In the Oprah era of public confessional that is the modern US, *not showing remorse* is the ultimate sin.

The question of Polanski as an artist is an interesting one, too. In the culture of the US, being an artist makes you a target of hate, unless (!) you manage to neuter yourself like a Tom Hanks or are, in fact, just a celebrity (like Hanks).  But a serious artist, the Pinters or the like, are never going to find a home in the US.  [Chaplin was hounded by the same puritanical battalions, as was Ingrid Bergman and many others). Real uncompromising artists are important people, they provide the much needed disruption in this sleepwalking culture, they provide a tacit conscience for the various cantons of encapsulated narcissism that passes for a civilized society. In the US they have always been distrusted and denounced.

Ads like these are all too common on US media.

This case is almost laughable actually, the girl was sexually mature and active, the mom an almost pimp, and the sex consensual. Oh, oh, oh, it can never be consensual with a minor. Well, this is more puritanism, and more hatred of pleasure. A society that so criminalizes, pleasure (drugs, sex, etc) and is simultaneously addicted to all forms of illicit activities….. is a very unhealthy place. Check the internet for swingers sites, and ads for tranny prostitutes, and ask yourselves how many of the people involved (and I have no issue with such activities at all) are also condemning Polanski.  The girl, the *victim* wants the case forgotten (she got her settlement) and so what is the DA of LA county doing in a cash-strapped time, having this man arrested and wanting an expensive extradition ?  One wonders, might it have to do with publicity?  Gee, ya’ think?

Spare me the moral indignation over a thirty-year-old statutory rape case and give me investigations into torture. Give me Kissinger and war criminals like Wes Clark, give me those behind Iran Contra and give me the guys still tutoring death squads for the most repressive but business friendly regimes in the world. Give me the Catholic church, a foul and rotting institution of hypocricy and duplicity, give me the whole damn church, and give me all the bad cops who routinely abuse their power (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQSv88bdsbQ).  Give me Blackwater and give me Dick Cheney.

JOHN STEPPLING‘s last film credit was Animal Factory (directed by Steve Buscemi 2000). Expat Steppling lived until recently in Lodz with Norwegian director Gunnhild Skrodal, while teaching at the Polish National Film School.

US paid reward to Lockerbie witness, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi papers claim

Scottish detectives discussed secret payments of up to $3m made to witness and his brother, documents claim

BACKGROUND:  On 21 December 1988, a terrorist bomb exploded on board Pan Am flight 103, destroying the aircraft over the Scottish town of Lockerbie and killing 270 people. Anglo-American authorities soon accused Libya of being behind the terrorist act, fingering a Libyan, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, as the key man behind the plot.

Reconstructed fuselage of doomed plane.

The claims about the payments were revealed in a dossier of evidence that was intended to be used in an appeal by Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the Libyan convicted of murdering 270 people in the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 in 1988.

“I continue to protest my innocence – how could I fail to do so?,” he said. “I have no desire to add to the upset of many people I know are profoundly affected by what happened in Lockerbie. My intention is only for the truth to be made known.”

Weekend Edition
September 25-7, 2009

Reflections on the Degradation of Politics and the Ecosystem

Is Obama a Socialist?

By ROBERT JENSEN  // [print_link]

Corrupt GOP pols like Eric Cantor cynically spread the confusing lies that agitate a clueless population.

For months, leftists have been pointing out the absurdity of the claim that Barack Obama is a socialist. But no matter how laughable, the claim keeps popping up, most recently in the form of the Republican Party chairman’s warning of “a socialist power grab” by Democrats.

Within the past year, Republican Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina has called Obama “the world’s best salesman of socialism.” Conservative economist Donald J. Boudreaux of George Mason University has acknowledged that Obama isn’t really a socialist, but warns that the “socialism lite” of such politicians “is as specious as is classic socialism.”

Silly as all this may be, it does provide an opportunity to continue talking about the promise and the limits of socialism in a moment when the economic and ecological crises are so serious. So, let’s start with the basics.

Obama has never argued for such principles, and in fact consistently argues against them, as do virtually all politicians who are visible in mainstream U.S. politics. This is hardly surprising, given the degree to which our society is dominated by corporations, the primary institution through which capitalism operates.

Obama is not only not a socialist, he’s not even a particularly progressive capitalist. He is part of the neo-liberal camp that has undermined the limited social-democratic character of the New Deal consensus, which dominated in the United States up until the so-called “Reagan revolution.” While Obama’s stimulus plan was Keynesian in nature, there is nothing in administration policy to suggest he is planning to move to the left in any significant way. The crisis in the financial system provided such an opportunity, but Obama didn’t take it and instead continued the transfer of wealth to banks and other financial institutions begun by Bush. Looking at his economic advisers, this is hardly surprising. Naming neo-liberal Wall Street boys such as Timothy Geithner as secretary of the treasury and Lawrence Summers as director of the National Economic Council was a clear signal to corporate America that the Democrats would support the existing distribution of power and wealth. And that’s where his loyalty has remained.

In reaction to the issues of the day, a socialist would fight to nationalize the banks, create a national health system, and end imperialist occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. That the right wing can accuse Obama of being a socialist when he does none of those things is one indication of how impoverished and dramatically skewed to the right our politics has become. In most of the civilized world, discussions of policies based in socialist principles are part of the political discourse, while here they are bracketed out of any serious debate. In a recent conversation with an Indonesian journalist, I did my best to explain all this, but she remained perplexed. How can people take seriously the claim that he’s socialist, and why does applying that label to a policy brand it irrelevant? I shrugged. “Welcome to the United States,” I said, “a country that doesn’t know much about the world or its own history.”

Business leaders saw this as a threat and responded with private and state violence. The Red Scare of the 19-teens and ‘20s tried to wipe out these movements, with considerable success. But radical movements rose again during the Great Depression, eventually winning the right to organize. In the boom times after WWII, management was willing to buy off labor (for a short time, it turned out) with a larger slice of the pie in a rapidly expanding economy, and in the midst of Cold War hysteria the radical elements of the mainstream labor movement were purged. But radical ideas remain, nurtured by small groups and individuals around the country.

To demand that we continue on this path is to embrace a kind of collective death wish. So, while I endorse socialist principles, I don’t call myself a socialist, to mark a break with the politics associated with industrial model that shapes our world. I am a radical feminist anti-capitalist who opposes white supremacy and imperialism, with a central commitment to creating a sustainable human presence on the planet. I don’t know any single term to describe those of us with such politics.

I do know that the Republican Party is not interested in this kind of politics, and neither is the Democratic Party. Both are part of a dying politics in a dying culture that, if not radically changed, will result in a dead planet, at least in terms of a human presence.

So, socialism alone isn’t the answer. In addition to telling the truth about the failures of capitalism we have to recognize the failures of the industrial model underlying traditional notions of socialism. We have to take seriously the deep patriarchal roots of all this and the tenacity of white supremacy. We have to condemn imperialism, whether the older colonial style or the contemporary American version, as immoral and criminal. We have to face the chilling facts about the degree to which humans have degraded the capacity of the ecosystem to sustain our own lives.

I end with Scripture not because I think everyone should look to my particular brand of radical, non-orthodox Christianity for inspiration, but because I think the task before us demands more than new policies. To face this moment in history requires a courage that, for me, is bolstered by tapping into the deepest wisdom in our collective history, including that found in various religious traditions. We have to ask ourselves what it means to be human in this moment, a question that is deeply political and at the same time beyond politics.

At the core of these traditions is the call for humility about the limits of human knowledge and a passionate commitment to justice, both central to finding within ourselves the strength to pass through that narrow gate.

My advice to any of you who want to be part of a decent future: Find that strength wherever you find it, and step up to the narrow gate.

rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu and his articles can be found online at http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/index.html.