For the Record

U.S. run by corporations, hysterical lunatics; administered by craven capitulators

The latest bit of evidence here.

More evidence here.

I think I'll just keep the list going for a while.  What fun!

Bank-friendly Dems threaten to block Financial Regulatory reform bill.

Death of public option causes health insurance stocks to climb 20-30% to a 52-year peak.

Obama sells out, and then sells out some more.

Follow the money.

Wheee!

Want the good life? Live in a social democratic country

Call it what you want, but on indexes of what everyone wants the SD-ers knock it down cold.

Read this book (or at least the review!)

Larry Bartels's 'Unequal Democracy' reviewed here. Looks to be a treasure trove of interesting and/or surprising and/or hopeful info about the attitudes Americans hold about various political issues -- eg the alleged "rightward shift" in the US is pretty much entirely at upper income strata. (Not too surprising, when was the last time any high profile sources paid the slightest bit of attention to the "little guy"?)

"fingernails on the cliff"

Great lecture here by Harvard's Elizabeth Warren. It's an hour long so I'll summarize. She's compared household expenses today and in momndad-time, finds all sorts of creepy stuff. Eg, spending is down on all fun stuff, way up on unfun stuff; the latter eats up all the $ from working women and much from dad. Unfun stuff hasta be paid so need two jobs to avoid fail. Add decreased safety net and increased ed costs and you get rise in bankruptcy, esp for fam with kids. Scary portent: the lucky pull away from the unlucky, eventually Brazil.

Obama's speeches

The MLK day/economic justice speech here.

"A More Perfect Union" here.

Bush wars to cost 40 times estimates

8K for every man, woman, and child in the U.S.

When the basic illusions have been exhausted...

[What follows is from John Cusack's interview with Naomi Klein, a journalist in the tradition of Robert Fisk and Seymour Hersh, and author of recent articles and a book on Disaster Capitalism.]

Cusack: One of my favorite quotes is from Arthur Miller, who said: "An era can be considered over when its basic illusions have been exhausted."  And with The Shock Doctrine, you are basically trying to shatter and obliterate the illusion of the neo-liberal or neo-con fundamentalist free market -- this official narrative wherein we not only are supposed to worship free markets that really aren't free, we must actually kill to feed them.

What the book rightly asks is what many have felt for a very long time: shouldn't we make a moral choice that you either make defense policy or you profit from it? I think that kind of transparency would be very important to have in the public sphere. Those people who go on CNN and are treated as impartial statesmen when, in reality, the book -- which is triple footnoted and sourced -- suggests otherwise. They did hold their former jobs...I guess by defintion they are statesmen....but if we are compelled to be honest we know they are other things as well... I'm speaking of people like George Shultz or Richard Perle.

Klein: Right.  If we look at who the real intellectual engines of this war are, we'd see a web of people who are not simply the statesmen they appear to me but card-carrying members of the disaster capitalism complex -- shareholders, board-members and directors of companies that profit directly and enormously from war and other disasters --

Cusack: Who would these people be..?

Klein: Well, for instance, the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq was a propaganda arm of the Bush administration, publicly making the case for the invasion of Iraq.  And it was founded by Bruce Jackson, a vice president of Lockheed Martin who had been out of his job for just three months.  Jackson stacked the committee with old colleagues from Lockheed -- Charles Kupperman, Lockheed Martin's vice president for space and strategic missiles was on it, and so was Douglas Graham, Lockheed's director of defense systems. And even though the committee was formed at the explicit request of the White House to make the case for war in the public mind, no one had to step down from Lockheed or sell his shares. Which was certainly good for committee members, since Lockheed's share price jumped 145 percent thanks to the war they helped engineer -- from $41 in March 2003 to $102 in February 2007. The Committee for the Liberation of Iraq was chaired by George Shultz, who wrote op-eds and went on TV beating the drums, and was presented just as this respected statesman. But Shultz hasn't been in office for decades.  And in the meantime, he'd been working for Bechtel -- at the time he was calling for the invasion, he was still on its board, and since Bechtel is a privately held company, we don't know anything about his holdings. We do know that Bechtel was one of the biggest winners of the reconstruction game in Iraq, landing $2.3-billion in contracts.

Cusack: How about James Baker and the $1 billion kickback that the Carlyle Group used him to try to get from the government of Kuwait, which you wrote about in The Nation?

Klein: Right.  I talk about the incredible power of the "formers." One of the distinguishing features of the Bush administration has been its reliance on outside advisers and freelance envoys to perform key functions: James Baker, Paul Bremer, Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Richard Perle, Bruce Jackson, and so on. So you have Congress playing a rubber-stamp role during the pivotal decision-making years, and Supreme Court rulings treated as little more than gentle suggestions, while these mostly volunteer advisers have wielded enormous influence, especially when it comes to Iraq. Their power stems from the fact that they used to perform key roles in government -- they are former secretaries of state, former ambassadors and former undersecretaries of defense. All have been out of government for years and, in the meantime, have set up lucrative careers in the disaster capitalism complex. And because they are freelance government contractors, they aren't subject to the same conflict-of-interest rules as elected or appointed politicians. The effect has been to eliminate the so-called revolving door between government and industry and allow the disaster industries to simply set up shop inside the government, using the reputations of these supposedly illustrious ex-politicians as cover.

As you say, in the press, they maintain their credibility as statesmen -- their current, far more relevant work in the corporate world is almost never mentioned. You brought up Baker. He was Bush's debt envoy to Iraq while he was still a partner in the Carlyle Group, which is a major arms trader whose fortunes have exploded since the war. He was also still a partner at Baker Botts, which represents some of the largest oil companies in the world, as well as Halliburton.  Kissinger is another classic example of the power of the formers because he's primarily been a businessman, not a statesman, now for some 25 years. He met with Bush and Cheney regularly making Iraq policy -- according to Bob Woodward, more than any other advisor. But who was he representing in those meetings? Kissinger has repeatedly put his business interests ahead of the public interest, most dramatically when he resigned as chair of the 9/11 Commission rather than disclose his list of corporate clients at Kissinger Associates.

Another example is Richard Perle.  Richard Perle headed the Defense Policy Board. Just two months after 9/11 he launched a venture capital firm called Trireme Partners that exists to invest in the homeland security and defense sectors.  One of his first investors was Boeing -- it sunk $20 million in Trireme. Meanwhile, Perle is using the Defense Policy Board to make the case for war. And of course Boeing was another one of the huge winners from the invasion of Iraq.

So I asked the question, "Why is it that we refer to Richard Perle merely as an ideologue -- rather than, say, as an arms dealer with an impressive vocabulary?"

Cusack: The question becomes one of intellectual honesty and basic morality. I wanted to talk about the players or the heirs of the Friedman legacy who are in the public sector today... The Grover Norquists and Bill Kristols of the world come to mind ...You also talk about the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute as pursuing the goal of the elimination of the public sphere and the total liberation of corporations.

Klein: I refer to the people in those think tanks as "the people who are paid to think by the makers of tanks" because a huge amount of the funding for these think tanks is coming directly from the weapons and homeland security industry. They are funded by some of the wealthiest families and the wealthiest corporations in this country so the question of intellectual honesty really has to come up. They exist in a strange intellectual gray zone where they get money in order to think. And besides, I'm not sure thinking really belongs in tanks.

Cusack: So you're saying that the Shultzes and the Perles and the Kissingers and the Jim Bakers of the world are embedded in the homeland security/privatized war economy?

Klein: More than embedded. I mean, they are it.

Cusack: I was trying to --

[laughter ]

Klein: Why are you trying to be polite?

Cusack: I don't know. I don't know. That's part of the problem, too: being polite with this immorality and not having the courage to call something what it is...The refusal of the Congress to challenge Bush in a meaningful way is proof of the Democratic complicity in the new economy. To name only right wing people is to ignore the central thesis of intellectual honesty as the first step in a long corrective march... So we'll have to talk about what Democrats are in on this game and name them, too...we'll have to get into that later.

Dem candidates on revamping U.S. health care

A nutshell take on the candidates' positions so far:

When Clinton offers her proposal next week to cover the 47 million                 Americans who lack insurance, she will probably stake out the                 middle ground, appearing bolder than Senator Obama of Illinois                 and more pragmatic than former Senator Edwards of North Carolina.              

Obama, 46, has proposed mandating health-care coverage only for                 children. Clinton, 59, will likely make coverage mandatory for                 everyone, said a campaign aide who declined to offer details because                 he didn't want to pre-empt her speech, scheduled for Sept. 17                 at a medical center in Des Moines, Iowa.

Edwards, 54, would go further and create a government-run system                 to compete with private insurance. Every American would have the                 option of signing up for a program similar to Medicare, the U.S.                 program for the elderly and disabled.

Edwards... the voice of reason, as usual.

The true measure of power

The true measure of power is how much you can get away with, which makes the gangsters running the U.S. effectively all-powerful.

Socialized health-care: what U.S.-ers are missing

We've spoken here before about our positive experiences with Canada's single-payer regional healthcare system.  The only complaint about the system that has been confirmed is that certain elective surgical procedures (e.g., ACL repair) require waiting times that all agree are too long; but even here concrete efforts are underway (see, e.g., here) to rectify the situation. 

Meanwhile, wait times for elective surgeries are the least of the concerns of several of my friends and family back in the States.  Some have gone for years with no insurance (a few of the 47 million), unable to afford either premiums or needed treatment for ailments considerably worse than an ACL tear, but making too much to qualify for Medicaid; some have stayed in jobs they hated primarily in order to retain insurance covering a preexisting condition; one spent months on endless paperwork fighting against company goons whose primary job was evidently to find ways of denying rightful claims.  Relatedly, health insurance is no defense against debilitating medical debt:

A recent study by Harvard University researchers found that the average out-of-pocket medical debt for those who filed for bankruptcy was $12,000. The study noted that 68 percent of those who filed for bankruptcy had health insurance. In addition, the study found that 50 percent of all bankruptcy filings were partly the result of medical expenses (14). Every 30 seconds in the United States someone files for bankruptcy in the aftermath of a serious health problem.

In retrospect it was crazy to think that a for-profit system would result in efficient, humane, high-quality care.  But who knew that it would be as bad as it is?  And who knew that socialized single-payer systems would be as good as they are?  In any case, the evidence has long been in, and continues to be confirmed by countless stories (see, for example, this story and comment thread).  So why does the U.S. continue along the clearly worse path?  In this fascinating article Jill Quadagno discusses the history (1945-1996) of efforts to implement national health care in the U.S., and argues that U.S.ers have powerful stakeholder groups---notably, the AMA and private insurance organizations---to thank:

The United States is the only western industrialized nation that fails to provide universal coverage and the only nation where health care for the majority of the population is financed by for-profit, minimally regulated private insurance companies. These arrangements leave one-sixth of the population uninsured at any given time, and they leave others at risk of losing insurance as a result of normal life course events. Political theorists of the welfare state usually attribute the failure of national health insurance in the United States to broader forces of American political development, but they ignore the distinctive character of the health care financing arrangements that do exist. Medical sociologists emphasize the way that physicians parlayed their professional expertise into legal, institutional, and economic power but not the way this power was asserted in the political arena. This paper proposes a theory of stakeholder mobilization as the primary obstacle to national health insurance. The evidence supports the argument that powerful stakeholder groups, first the American Medical Association, then organizations of insurance companies and employer groups, have been able to defeat every effort to enact national health insurance across an entire century because they had superior resources and an organizational structure that closely mirrored the federated arrangements of the American state. The exception occurred when the AFL-CIO, with its national leadership, state federations and union locals, mobilized on behalf of Medicare.

Of course, it's not exactly news that powerful lobbies have been at work here.  But the details are new (to me) and very illuminating: how physicians desiring professional autonomy teamed up with hospitals and insurance companies just long enough to shoot themselves in the foot; how post-war anti-Communist/Socialist propaganda led unions---the natural pro-single-payer lobby---to give up the fight for national health care and instead focus on fringe benefits; how the focus on benefits in turn led to the AFL/CIO's successfully lobbying for Medicare (basically, so they wouldn't have to worry about negotiating benefits for retirees); and much more.

A friend was asking the other day why someone should favor Edwards over Clinton or Obama for the Democratic nomination.  That powerful medical stakeholder groups are the primary barrier to socialized national health care in the U.S. provides one very good reason; for Edwards is a former trial lawyer who was brilliantly capable in putting these very sorts of groups in their place (see here for some illustrations).  That said, while Edwards advocates universal health care his proposal is a hodge-podge of measures still taken within the for-profit framework... a far cry from the single-payer proposal Ted Kennedy introduced in 1971.  Too bad!