Dateline Thu, 10/29/2009

Crossposted at http://blog.buzzflash.com/jonas/175

Steven Jonas, MD, MPH  [print_link]

we discussed why President Obama was heaven-sent for the GOP, pre-election. In my view (disagreed with by several commentators who made their cases very well I thought), he was the only prospective Democratic candidate who could have beaten John McCain. This was especially true if the Bush Administration had somehow been able to postpone the bursting forth of the economic crisis for less than two months. As is well known to BuzzFlash readers, it had of course been building for several years under Georgite economic policies. It is likely in retrospect that the “free-market” decision to let Lehman Brothers go bankrupt was, first, in their minds, the way to put things off. For if they had known what was going to happen both to the economy and their election chances, they would have done everything in their power to prevent that occurrence.

"Let me make this perfectly clear...'change' is just a slogan we used to get me elected." Ahh, if truth was finally heard in the corridors of power.

But anyway they didn’t. The global financial system did partially collapse. Stock market prices around the world dropped dramatically. And Barack Obama did win the election. Just to reprise my argument of last week, if McCain had won, things both domestic and foreign would have been even worse, in many cases much worse, than they are under Obama. After all, McCain would have for the most part following Georgite policy. (Oh, you think that a Democratic Congress would get in the way? Given what they are doing, rather not doing, with a Democratic President in the White House, I doubt it.) But then, just think. All the blame for our current problems caused by Georgite policy that is being tossed at Obama could be laid at the feet of — the Georgites. Ohmygosh. How much fun that would be (for us commentators, that is. Not for the millions, indeed potentially billions around the world who are suffering in many different ways because of them). Which leads us to a discussion of how Barack Obama has been heaven sent for the GOP since his election as President.

It begins with what was in retrospect a major mistake made by his campaign: to make a major feature of “why elect me?” “Looking ahead, with Hope, for Change” and “Changing the Way Washington Does Business.” And it was done without too much attention paid, and for the most part only in general terms, to change from “what” in terms of policy and from “whose” way of doing business. Some of us thought that was a Big Mistake at the time but we were not consulted for the most part, and if any of us were, our advice was not taken. It is so ironic that the biggest indicator that Obama was having nothing to do either with the Rev. Wright or Prof. Ayres was that both of them, had they actually been involved in the Obama campaign, would surely have been pushing him, very strongly, to take on BushCheney head-on. At any rate, his principal advisors obviously came to the conclusion that not to attack the Georgites very much was the way to go.

Whether following that path was the only way to go to win the election — we will never know. But we do know what the adoption of that strategy meant for the content of the election debate and for the projection/protection of Obama’s policies since he became President. It meant that during the campaign “hope” and “change” became highlights. What Bush/Cheney and Georgitism (the highest [or lowest] form of neoconned neoliberal Reaganism, otherwise known as “every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost,” from each individual to the family of nations as a whole) brought to/wreaked upon our nation and the world was not much discussed. For example, how Bush/Cheney military/’security’ policy actually weakened rather than strengthened our defenses and national security by, for example, ignoring the warnings of 9/11 and way overextending our armed forces in Iraq (to say nothing of lying us into that war) was little referred to. How Georgite policy made the financial crisis almost inevitable. How part of the motivation of the massive tax cuts for the rich and the resulting war-driven deficits was, in Grover Norquist’s term, to “starve the beast,” which is how they refer to the Federal government. For the most part, these issues didn’t come up.

Furthermore, the creation of “the negative atmosphere” in Washington was not a bipartisan creation. It was a Republican creation. What they have done since the election, from Limbaugh’s declaration “I want him to fail,” to Jim “No homosexual teachers in the classroom” DeMint’s declaration on “Obama’s Waterloo,” to the McConnell/Boehner Congressional strategy of “we will never say anything but no” is to prove the point.

So why has the President been heaven-sent for the GOP since he has been in office? Two reasons. Because of the way he ran his campaign, he removed from his arsenal all of those weapons he had for laying the blame for all of our current crises at the feet of George Bush.  Sure the Republican Scream Machine would have screaming “blame game.” (That of course is something they never engage in [ho, ho, ho]. If you can stomach it, listen sometime to Giuliani or Gingrich talking politics and just count the seconds until the word “Clinton,” Bill that is, appears. But that is really neither here nor there. Of course Republicans are hypocrites. It seems to be genetic with them.) And so what? That is exactly the game that Obama should be playing.

Who cares what Beckoning Savagely Le-vinitating O’RHannibaugh say? They will never make nice, nor will, for that matter, McConnell/Boehner, to say nothing of Cheney of course. Obama was left a zillion booby traps, major ones that are public, ranging from Afghanistan to (the loss of) Zoological diversity (and perhaps some not public ones, such as possible rogue right-wing cells in the military and the CIA). But he has almost totally prevented himself from talking about them, except on occasion almost in passing.

Finally he was heaven sent for the GOP because until very recently at least (and knows, he may get back to it) he has pursued the Impossible Dream of “bipartisanship” with a Party that simply will never say anything but “no,” not even “no thank you.” There are some elected Democrats, such as Congressmen Alan “the Republicans’ answer for ‘no insurance’ is die” Grayson of Florida and Anthony “Single-Payer” Wiener of Brooklyn, NY, and Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, who know which end is up, are ready for battle, and are in fact battling. But the President seems to shy away from doing so, whether by nature or by design it doesn’t matter.

Barack Obama is a very smart man, possibly one of the three smartest (Jefferson and Lincoln being the other two) to ever occupy the White House. But he is now in a position where being a professor of Constitutional Law and a community organizer doesn’t cut the mustard. He is faced by street-fighters, and very good ones. If he is going to be able to abandon his current role as heaven-sent for the GOP, he is going to have to undergo some major changes. If he does not, he stands in serious danger of becoming as I wrote on TPJmagazine.us recently, the next Democratic one-term President, and the country will be the worse for it.

Bush, Cheney and the Georgites planted the wind. Obama is reaping the whirlwind. He may not realize it. If that’s the case, he had better wake up pretty soon. If he does realize it, he really ought to tell the rest of us all about it, beginning with just who planted the wind that as a whirlwind is wreaking such havoc. And oh yes. Labeling Fox “News” as a GOP tool is a start. But it’s just a start.

TPJmagazine; a Featured Writer for Dandelion Salad; a Senior Columnist for The Greanville POST; a Contributor to TheHarderStuff newsletter; a Contributor to The Planetary Movement; and a Contributing Columnist for the Project for the Old American Century, POAC.

SELECT COMMENTS

Bush’s “Job” Was to “Disempower” the People:

Submitted by konopelli on Thu, 10/29/2009 – 12:14pm.

to gut the Constitution, to attack the infrastructures of justice and fairness, and to facilitate the Corporat take-over of the public’s political and economic ‘commons.’

Obama’s job is to make (“white”) people forget how much they hated and distrusted the Busheviks, and to displace those emotions onto himself and the Dims, thereby preparing the way for the next wave of Puke theo-fascism…

Wow friend,

Submitted by Start Loving on Thu, 10/29/2009 – 4:34pm.

I hope you don’t drown in that massive pile of sh*t you’ve just written.  I almost did.  Whew!

When the going gets tough the Left give up….

Submitted by imsloan on Thu, 10/29/2009 – 3:18pm.

God, your argument is so flawed on so many levels, where to begin? Let’s start with your wish that McCain/Palin had won…and that this somehow would be good news for progressives as the Right will be forced to own all the catastrophes that occurred on their watch. What a load of horse pucky! First thing that would happen would be the final marginalization of the Democratic Party… The obvious narrative would be that, given the horrendous job  the Republicans have done in the past eight years, if the Dems can’t, with an intelligent and attractive candidate, beat a half-senile fool and a dingbat whackjob from Alaska, then they will never EVER win the presidency again.

Your second big flaw is in thinking that somehow, the Republicans, given four more year of blithering idiocy will somehow take responsibility for their actions. I would wager that they would push back against culpability with even more ferocity than we’re seeing now.

And as far as your boilerplate disaffection with Obama is concerned, answer me this…would we even be discussing health care reform, the repeal of DOMA, DADT or a drawdown of troops in Iraq, or the fact that FOX is nothing but a propaganda arm of the far-right with McCrazy in the WH?

The point I think you are trying to make, without actually saying it in so many words is that if Obama wasn’t in charge, then our agenda wouldn’t get so criticized by those mean, mean Republicans. I’ve got advice to you and all of the other hand-wringing pie-in-the-sky liberals out there. IT’S TIME TO MAN UP!

Criticism, fair or unfair goes with the territory of governing. I suspect a lot of these people whining about where the hope is simply can’t get over the euphoria we all felt when we kicked the GOP out on their ass.

That was the fun part. This is the hard part. Obama campaigned on change we can believe in, not change that will happen painlessly and in an instant. Obama’s mistake was not to campaign under “You want change? Well change is hard, so roll up your sleeves and go to work and don’t whine that it’s all my fault. This is a DEMOCRACY which means we ALL have a stake in governing. Don’t put all of it one person to answer all your questions and solve all your problems. That’s what Republicans do.”

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.

Why the Public Option is Doomed To Fail, and What Can Be Done About It.

By Bruce A. Dixon, Managing Editor, Black Agenda Report

The AARP's wishful image of the President.

The generous, expansive public option on the lips of Congressional progressives, which would be open to all and compete to lower insurance prices is largely imaginary, while the president’s stingy, divisive and means-tested version is all too real.  But what about the third version of the public option?  What is the Congressional Progressive Caucus doing to promote it, and to allow states to pursue single payer on their own?

Some highly profitable and job creating industries simply can’t be reformed.  Slavery and child labor cannot not be made humane and reasonable, not with kind and solicitous masters or school and limited hours for the kids.  Both these practices were eventually cast aside. Allowing souless, greedy private insurance corporations to collect a toll for standing between patients and doctors may be next.

The president’s health care plan is designed to preserve the parasitic private insurance industry a little while longer. In this context, the public option is a cruel and cynical hoax, an excuse not to abolish the role of private insurance death panels and toll collectors in the nation’s health care system.

Nobody can read the president’s mind, but he did promise to construct health care legislation in an open and transparent manner, even “on C-SPAN.”  Instead, Obama handed off the drafting of health care legislation to five House and three Senate committees.  The most generous view is that he did this to give legislators a stake in the bills, and because there is this thing called the separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches.

Another view is that the embedded influence of Big Insurance, Big Pharma, and Big Medicine was easier to conceal when spread out over several committees, where the lobbyists are themselves former congressmen, senators and their top staffers, and many current members and staff look forward to the same career paths.  These are the men and women who wrote what is and will be the president’s health insurance reform legislation.  The result has been a half dozen versions of a thousand-plus page bill, chock full, as Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibi points out, of deliberately obscure references to other legislation.  Nobody can authoritatively claim to have read, much less understand all of it.  And that’s just the way insurance companies and the president like it.  HR 676, the Enhanced Medicare For All Act, which does provide universal coverage at reasonable cost, comes in at under thirty pages.

To begin with, there are no less than three versions of the public option.  The first is an imaginary public option first conceived by Political Science grad student Jacob Hatcher in 2001.  It was to postpone the death of private insurance companies by forcing them to compete with a publicly funded insurer open to all comers which would drive their prices downward.  This imaginary public option has never been written into law, and is not under consideration in Congress this year.  It lives pretty much in the minds of the public and the lips of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, MoveOn.Org and many others.  It’s in the mouth of Howard Dean, who says it will be just like Medicare, only available to everybody.  To distinguish it from the President Obama’s version, it is usually called “the robust public option.”

The second version of the public option is not imaginary, it is all too real.  President Obama explicitly outlined its contours in his health care address earlier this month.  Unlike the expansive and inclusive imaginary public option championed by MoveOn.Org, the president’s public option will be stingy, means-tested, socially divisive, actuarially unsound and doomed to failure, unless its objective is simply to discredit the word “public” in the term “public option.”  The president has said it will be limited to 5% of the nation’s population, those Americans too poor to afford the cheapest insurance available on his regulated “insurance exchanges” which won’t be fully implemented anyway till 2013.

Hence those making more than a very small wage will be ineligible for the president’s version of the public option, and those who currently get insurance from their employers, no matter how skimpy the coverage, how high the co-pays and deductibles, will also not qualify.  Those who receive relatively good (or maybe not so good) coverage from their employers will pay a special tax to support both the public option and the subsidies the government will pay to enable others not quite poor enough for the public option to fulfill their legal obligation to buy shoddy insurance from private vendors.

In a social culture where Americans have been taught to despise poverty and the poor, even when they themselves are poor and near poverty, this will be bitterly and inherently divisive.  It will provide economic incentive for the working poor to look down on and resent whatever benefits those even poorer than themselves receive.  It turns medical coverage for the poor into stigmatized welfare subsidized by the near-poor, and all to the continuing profit of insurance companies.

And since the pool accessed by the public option will be relatively older, poorer and thus more chronically ill, it will not be economically viable in and of itself, must less of the size needed to compete with private insurers and drive their prices downward.

The only good thing one can say about the president’s version of the public option is that even he is not firmly attached to it, and does not regard it as essential to his package. That’s actually good news.

Beyond the imaginary “robust public option” of MoveOn.Org, and the divisive, destructive public option of the president, there is a third public option, a very real one.  It;’s HR 676, the Enhanced Medicare For All bill, sponsored by John Conyers and Dennis Kucinich.  Unlike the mostly imaginary “robust public option” of MoveOn.Org, it actually exists and ordinary people can read and understand it.  Unlike the president’s public option, which does not take effect till 2013, a fact still ignored by most of the mainstream media, HR 676 can be put into effect almost immediately.  The first Medicare back in 1965-66 took only eleven months to send out the first cards and pay the first medical bills.

The White House of course, is not listening to the public outcry for Medicare For All.  For example, a group of Oregon physicians calling themselves the Mad As Hell Doctors put up a web site that included an email-the-president page.  After the White House received only about 5,000 emails in the first few days, it elected to block emails [1] coming from the Mad As Hell Doctors as spam.  Never mind that tracking polls as late as this June indicate majority support among the public for the simple extension of Medicare benefits to everybody.

And although the progressive caucus in Congress continues to wistfully describe its imaginary version of the public option as a line in the sand, it is neither lining up votes for a promised HR 676 floor vote, nor are they demanding that caucus members support amendments to let states to pursue their own versions of single payer in the near future.  Congress is being set up to accept anything with the name “public option” and be done with it, even the president’s cynical and divisive proposal.  The die is cast.  The Obama proposals, written by the health insurance lobbyists may pass, but they’re not worthwhile.  The president’s version of the public option, if it stays in the bill is doomed to fail, and the MoveOn version never existed.  The only possibility for the real public option, Medicare For All, this year is on the state level.  That door will be opened or closed by the Congress this year.

The Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Progressive Caucus can partially redeem their sorry capitulation to the president and Big Insurance by insisting that states be allowed to go their own way on single payer, the only real public option.

• health care. public option HR 676 single payer

Source URL: http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/why-public-option-doomed-fail-and-what-can-be-done-about-it

Links:
[1] http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=19691668991&topic=48439
[2] http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/why-public-option-doomed-fail-and-what-can-be-done-about-it

Dateline: September 14, 2009

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

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

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

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

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

It is absurd to mandate that people purchase what they cannot afford and to fine them for failing to do so.  A person who cannot pay a health insurance premium cannot pay the fine. These proposals are like solving the homeless problem by requiring the homeless to purchase a house.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The interest groups that finance political campaigns expect their bills to be sponsored and passed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Politicians are not going to allow that to happen.

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

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