The Other Warren Report

WE'RE NUMBER 37!! WE'RE NUMBER 37!!

2009-06-27T06:57:00.000-07:00

Democratic Underground member and all around smart guy "and_justice_for_all" offers an opening post entitled "A Global Perspective of Universal Health Care Systems."

As prologue, he writes:

I think we all know what drives this country into a wall, the same thing over and over again... Profits. American greed is prevalent in many, if not most, sectors of our industries and this includes health care. Which, to me, is one of several sectors that should in fact not be for profit.

I would like to say "why do we learn the hard way?", but the fact of the matter is, that WE did not decide how our health care system was to be run. Instead of learning from those countries that made universal health care a priority and a not for profit system, our fearless leaders chose to do the complete opposite. If some one is doing something that clearly works and works well, it is a good idea to follow suit and lose the macho bullshit.

After listing 10 countries with highly efficient, functional and successful single-payer systems in place now, he ends with this spot-on comment:

For any Senator, especially for the Cons, to tell us that Universal Health Care is a "no" is complete and utter bullshit. It is sad and appalling that this country is run by corporations and not its citizenry. For Reps to deny us all Health Care for the sake of profits, when it is very much obtainable, is equivalent to murder.

Yup... the only one among the World Health Organization's list of 19 "wealthy, industrialized countries " where lack of medical insurance is a capital crime.

USA!! USA!! USA!!

We're Number 37!! We're Number 37!! We're Number 37!!

Just keep repeating it and maybe eventually it'll lose its sting. But not its effects on the great American death machine.

Meanwhile, here's a few stats that describe the intrinsic wonderfulness of the US medical insurance scam:

Overall quality, fairness of access to and effectiveness of medical system -- 37th -- just ahead of that medical nirvana, Slovenia and behind Costa Rica, where there may not be an ATM in every little wide spot in the road, but there's nearly always a medical clinic, open to all, regardless of ability to pay -- UN/World Health Organization summary of a 2000 study comparing the medical systems of 190 countries.

Annual per capita cost of funding medical system -- 1st (around $6,400 then; approaching $8,200 today; inevitably more next year). Nobody's even close. All this great news comes from a 2005 study comparing health expenditures per capita among 31 countries tracked by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Preventable deaths per year due solely to lack of medical insurance -- 22,000 -- last -- Urban Institute (2007).

As this guy says, "Not surprisingly, the United States ranks last in preventable deaths compared to 14 Western European nations." Larry Weiss, public health researcher (retired).

Christopher Murray, M.D., Ph.D., Director of WHO's Global Programme on Evidence for Health Policy, offers a more global analysis. "The position of the United States is one of the major surprises of the new rating system," Murray says. "Basically, you die earlier and spend more time disabled if you're an American rather than a member of most other advanced countries."

It's only a surprise if you don't live here, Dr. Murray. If you do, it's just another facet of routine, systemic corporate abuse the US peasantry has apparently been willing to live with for well over a century, even as the noose tightens and the predatory practices become so obvious even our tens of millions of dysfunctional TEE VEE-trained bliss ninnies occasionally catch on.

Happily, some are making out like the successful criminals they are. Warms the heart, doesn't it?

What the hell's so great about being a "leader?"

2009-06-27T06:01:00.000-07:00

AllentownJake has been a Democratic Underground member for about 15 months now and has already managed to crank out 12,503 posts. (By comparison, I've been with DU since 2001 and I'm barely closing in on 3,750 posts.)

Must be that Bush Economic Miracle(tm) keeping everybody fully and gainfully employed. Anyhow, Jake says America v2.0 -- particularly now during the first few months of the post-Bushean era -- needs a little respect and love from the rest of the world again. And our new president, charismatic adoration magnet Barack Obama, is just the guy to bring some home with him.

As Jake puts it:

"If all we get out of this Presidency is our restored standing as a leader and good in the eyes of the rest of the world. That will be a miracle in (and) of itself.

I'll be happy. Everything after that is gravy."

Ummmmmm..... Graaaaaaaaaavyyyyyyy... Quick! Somebody draw a Homer Simpson icon with plenty of saliva drooling from the corners of his mouth. But on the real side...

How about trying to follow the civilized countries of the world for a change -- the western European social democracies come to mind, along with the former Brit colonies Canada and Australia.

New Zealand's doing well, at least until some snooping petro-geologist discovers OUR OIL in a sub-oceanic puddle 20 miles off the North Island's western coast. Then they're fucked, along with the "rag heads" and "sand Ni**ers" of the middle east.

Africa's next, with Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya about to join Nigeria in wearing that giant Standard-Mobil-Shell-BP-Conoco-Exxon-Unocal bullseye the rest of the world has come to know and loathe. Leadership...

Who the hell needs this country's leadership? Who ever has besides those land speculating bastards and mass-scale property thieves who invented the "white man's burden" and "Manifest Destiny?"

Why not discuss the white man's idea of leadership with the ghosts of the 15 million original Americans who were wiped out by "guns, germs and steel," in the words of the great, great cultural geographer and anthropologist Jared Diamond.

Read Howard Zinn's "Peoples' History..." and learn what attempted leadership gets you. It ought to be a capital crime; here, it's woven into the fabric of our wretchedly phony creation myth. We have to be the world's leader because everybody else is just too... a) lazy; b) incompetent; c) anti-capitalist; or d) all of the above.

A little well-earned humility would go a long way these days, it seems to me.

But, as always, your mileage may differ. In fact, it may require wiping out all New Zealand fisheries just to keep that ol' tank topped off.

The GOP: Victimized by Human Partial Brain Syndrome

2009-06-27T05:53:00.000-07:00

Shireen of Democratic Underground asks on 6/26/09: WTF is wrong with Republicans? Where is their humanity? How could they be so devoid of empathy and compassion, and their duty to do what's right for the health of this country.

I'm sick to my stomach. Each of those rats needs to be kicked out during the next election. The most important qualification for holding public office is that they should be HUMAN BEINGS.

A very fair criterion, you'd think. But it's tough to be human when they're only given a sigmoid colon and a few other adjacent parts at birth, told to assemble them like pieces from some viscous erector set, then go out into the world and make the best of things.

Thing is, though, they started to self-identify as assholes around the Robber Baron days of the 1880s and the world's been a much lousier place because of it ever since.

For more than a century, the GOP has been proud to be the planet's largest hatchery for world-class assholes. And they've got plenty of company. They're very appealing to the tens of millions of natural born assholes who infest this country like nowhere else I've ever been.

You know that jerkoff down the road with the mullet and the truck and the Confederate battle flags? He's an asshole and he loves it when the GOPiggies screw the dems again and again. But only before he's had his daily 12-pack of Bud lite; he's a little too out of it to appreciate political infighting after a gallon or two of that undrinkable swill.

That prissy little fundie twerp who likes to fire up the leaf blower around 7:30 every Saturday morning? He's an asshole, too, and it makes him feel all chesty and tough and maaaaaaaanly when the GOP fucks the idiot dems over for the three millionth time this month. Same with the leaf blower; if he had the courage of the Cowardly Lion, he'd flip those hippies off now and then. But he's another in a long line of chicken hawks, so his best shot is pulling that starter rope and letting that two-stroke speak for him.

The bake sale queen who's half church lady and half mid-afternoon gin-swilling souse? She's an asshole of the first magnitude and she gets goosebumps whenever her GOP heroes nail those goddamn liberals and commie rat bastards and their free sex and abortions and they don't support our troops and damn that lefty bitch Pelosi and her liberal gay San Fran agenda that's going to ruin everything George W has done for this country.

So there's a few of them out there. Most aren't so obvious, but that's the genius of the true asshole. A smile, a welcoming hand, a couple of rounds at the lizard lounge, a generous and fun-loving all around great guy or gal. Right up til somebody mentions how the US medical system screwed them over and how single-payer is the way to go, and...

Oooops! That's all it took so send him screaming back to the AEI playbook.

How to minimize the influence these assholes have on our lives? We can't, unless we also eliminate the bribocracy that's been created to smooth and accelerate the process of turning this country from a democratic republic into a gigantic feudal manor. Just have a look at opensecrets.org for the awful, depressing truth.

And how to get things turned around? Public financing of campaigns. It all begins there.

Until we forcibly jerk their fat, bloated piggy snouts from the corporate trough and put them on a severe fiscal diet, they'll continue to represent their real employers in the corporate-run bribocracy and only pretend to represent you and me for a few months every election cycle. So there's a little work to be done. Fortunately, there are also identifiable milestones that turned this country into the shithole travesty it's become. Attacking them through those specific milestones is the way to go, imo.

First, get the 1886 Scotus ruling overturned -- the one that gave corporations "personhood," meaning all the rights and none of the responsibilities that accrue to actual human American citizens. Here's a nice synopsis:

An 1886 Supreme Court clerk's headnotes misreading (Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad) applied the 14th Amendment to corporations, extending to them all the rights, but none of the responsibilities, of human persons. The result has been the steady erosion of our democracy since then, and the consequent rise of the corporate state, which is primarily responsible for the military-corporate-media-academic complex, the expansion of the often brutal U.S. global empire (including the IMF, WTO, and World Bank) with its protecting militarism, and the destruction of our only planet's environment, all in the service of corporate capital's endless lust for power and profits. Corporate personhood is at the core of all of our problems. Ending it is the start of the way back to humane civilization.

- ED CIACCIO (RETIRED TEACHER/CURRENT ACTIVIST), Douglaston, NY

90 years later, the Burger court couldn't resist stepping up the pace at which the rich are destroying this country. So in 1976, ruling on a case called Buckley v. Valeo, they declared (in a split decision that included a famous dissent by Burger himself) that money equals free speech.

The court essentially said that, because these corporate persons don't have mouths or vocal chords and, therefore, lack the ability to talk in the standard sense, they needed a way to express their political opinions. Gawd only knows why, but that's what the court said.

And since corporations only speak the language of money, contributing to political candidates is their version of a soapbox and megaphone in the public square.

Here's a fairly good look at the case, the times that produced it, the court composition and, most importantly, the results over time. That ruling has to go, too.

Then, there's the so-called corporate death penalty, which involves revoking their corporate charters and essentially forcing them out of business. That's a huge subject and far too long for this already essay-like post, but there's lots of data on it and links to more info in this old post.

Meanwhile, you've got corporate mass media yammering at you 24/7 about the intrinsic wonderfulness of the greatest country ever in the history of the universe. This would be the same country in which well over 100 million people have to self-medicate each day just to handle all that rich American wonderfulness.

But they're members of the more perceptive group. The Pox Nous/CNN crowd -- the dummies and imbeciles who are spoon-fed an hour of utter corporate garbage each day and then dutifully swear they know everything of significance that occurred over the past 24 hours -- should be self-medicating rather than buying into this inane American creation myth belief system that tells them:

Taxes on the rich are killing our competitiveness. They hate us for our freedoms. This is the land of equal opportunity for all. Free trade is an economic godsend. Guns don't kill people. The US is a Christian country, founded on biblical principles.

The criminal justice system protects the powerless from the powerful. Elections aren't stolen in America. TV news tells the truth. America always acts internationally out of benign motives. The surge is working. Gay marriage is destroying the family. The war on terror is making us safer. The bible is the literal word of god. 9/11 was an OBL/Al Qaeda production and happened exactly as the official conspiracy theory says it did. Saddam helped finance OBL and 9/11.

The policeman is our friend. The liberal media is poisoning this country with secular humanist lies. Brown people are disposable. Global climate change is a leftist fantasy. Evolution is just another creation myth. Socialized medicine is evil. Capitalism lifts all boats. The rich are rich because they're morally and intellectually superior.

Just so...

No nukes ain't necessarily good nukes

2008-02-24T08:30:00.000-08:00

Remember those stray nukes that flew from Minot to Barksdale in firing position last August? The story broke in the Military Times when three whistle-blowing Air Force officers became aware of a back-channel scheme to acquire a few nuclear weapons by person or persons unknown and, recognizing an unprecedented breach of security protocols when they saw one, smelled a rat the size of a Great Dane and went public with their suspicions.

Here's the long version of the story, complete with comment from military people who should know what they're talking about, and a long list of procedures that were allegedly either forgotten or intentionally violated -- simultaneously -- by more than a dozen people whose jobs depend on following these very protocols to the letter every single day of their working lives.

Now sit back, grab a beer and I'll tell you a story...

If your memory's in good shape and you follow the machinations of what's laughingly known as our government, you might recall a very weird and disturbing incident from late last summer when six nuclear-tipped cruise missiles, mounted in combat-ready position on the wings of a B-52 were flown from Minot AFB in North Dakota to Barksdale AFB in Louisiana.

Aside from the inconvenient fact that the wing-mounted method of transport is a gross violation of regulations governing shipment of nuclear warheads that have been in place since 1968, the story didn't seem all that newsworthy. Both bases are major B-52 facilities and handle nukes routinely. Barksdale is the primary staging base for B-52s heading for the Middle East. And Caporegime Cheney has made no secret of his growing lust for nuking Iran's uranium enrichment facilities.

The main problem (outside of Cheney's obviously worsening apocalyptic madness and his willingness to take us all with him in a nuclear fireball): according to the latest National Intelligence Estimate – a document that combines data from 16 US intelligence agencies and uses it to assess the severity of threats to the US from nation-states and non-governmental entities around the world – Iran has no ongoing uranium enrichment program and hasn't been in the nuclear weapons business since 2003. Just a minor problem, though, for the world's most reviled man.

Cheney's dementia notwithstanding, what IS interesting, not to mention worrisome, about this particular transfer is that it took place in secret, the product of a complex, off-the-books clandestine operation that ignored or violated virtually every single procedure in place to prevent exactly this kind of major security breach.

The story broke in a September 5, 2007 Military Times piece, based on tips from three unidentified Air Force officers who apparently couldn't stand by and watch as six nuclear warheads were essentially stolen right out from under their noses.

Realizing that this operation was so obviously illegal that it must involve senior officers at Minot, and probably went much higher, they chose to leak the story to the press rather than take it up with base command.

The story got a lot of initial attention on blogs, discussion forums, Internet-based news outlets and was picked up by a few international news outlets. But the usual daily crop of ever-more-outrageous actions and threats by the Bush administration competed for attention and eventually shoved the missing nukes story into digital oblivion.

Meanwhile, US mass media did its best to bury the whole thing and, when Internet exposure made containment impossible, circled the wagons, spiked all but the "mistakes were made" angle, ran a couple of perfunctory, content-free stories and waited patiently for the official Air Force investigation to issue its report. The Washington Post was the lone exception to the self-imposed mass media blackout.

On September 28, the Post ran a major story on the incident -- three weeks before the Air Force issued its official report on October 18. In the time-honored tradition of holding the peasants and mid-level functionaries accountable for the misdeeds of those at the top of the food chain, the Post blamed everything on an improbable convergence of career-ending mistakes by airmen and B-52 crew members who somehow ignored the same standard procedures that had governed their working lives since their first assignments to bases that handle nuclear weapons. And in a classic case of life imitating art, the official report said pretty much the same thing.

The report blamed the incident on "multiple, simultaneous mistakes" made by at least a dozen otherwise 100 percent reliable airmen who just happened to lose their minds one August afternoon in North Dakota.

In announcing the results, U.S. Air Force Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations, Plans and Requirements, Major-General Richard Y. Newton III, said the incident involved an “unprecedented” series of procedural errors, which revealed “an erosion of adherence to weapons-handling standards.”

The report implied that nuclear security had become a little lax over the years and that the Air Force was taking steps to tighten things up. Henceforth, rigid adherence to nuclear weapons handling protocols would be absolutely mandatory at all times and violators would be severely punished.

Punishment had already been exacted on Minot and Barksdale officers and airmen alike; some 70 heads rolled in retribution. The Air Force fired four colonels who oversaw aircraft and weapons operations at Minot and Barksdale, and other more junior personnel were also disciplined, Newton said.

And it's not over yet. The case was forwarded to a three-star general, who will review the findings and determine whether any Air Force personnel should face court-martial proceedings.

So, is this all true? Is this an accurate account of what took place last August 30? Is it all just a series of unlikely mistakes? Are these airmen given to ignoring or forgetting nuclear weapons handling procedures?

Or is the official report just another federal government whitewash, thrown out there with the expectation that the majority of Americans are gullible enough to believe just about anything and the dissenting minority doesn't count anyway.

Surely we've been lied to hundreds of time before about incidents the military swears "pose no danger to the public" – except for that inexplicable cancer cluster that develops 20 years after the allegedly harmless incident took place.

And there's a few of the more notorious tales of medical and psychological experimentation on unwitting test subjects. The infamous story of the Tuskegee Airmen comes to mind. Or the one about the hundreds of GIs intentionally exposed to radiation from open-air nuclear weapons tests because military researchers wanted to determine how much of the stuff humans could absorb without suffering serious health consequences or sustaining chromosomal damage that could cause cancers or birth defects in their children.

In fact, there's such a lengthy pattern of official lying specifically intended to deceive the American public -- from the Battleship Maine to the Gulf of Tonkin to the recent "harassment" of US Navy ships by Iranian speedboats -- that judging the validity of any official report's conclusions is quite difficult.

If the official story is true, Minot AFB must have experienced an outbreak of mass amnesia that caused veteran nuclear weapons handling personnel to completely forget their years of training and on-the-job experience. It's either that or a quiet rebellion against the tyranny of rules and regulations they're forced to live by.

In all seriousness, the official multiple simultaneous mistakes explanation means that at least a dozen – and perhaps double that number – of the most intelligent, rigorously trained and highly motivated enlisted personnel in the entire Air Force, airmen who are constantly evaluated for the mental toughness and physical strength required to perform their duties flawlessly -- committed an inexplicable series of major violations of nuclear custody, security and handling protocols... at the same facility, at the same time, during the same operation and not one of them saw anything amiss.

As a civilian with no military background, I think this stinks, but I have only my instincts to rely on. The following comments, however, come from people who've been there, done that and know these procedures inside and out. And when even they think the official story is hogwash, I've got to respect their experience and judgment.

Here's what a few of them had to say immediately after the Military Times story broke:

Re: B-52 mistakenly flies with nukes aboard
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UNBELIEVABLE. I’m not sure where to begin. I’m outraged and embarrassed! Back in 1979 we had to sign for nuclear weapons verifying serial numbers, the security folks posted two man guards at the aircraft, the cops enforced two man maintenance crews access to aircraft, the 781s are annotated, maintenance job control was informed, the wing command post was informed, weapons were moved in armed convoy, etc. How were the weapons removed from storage? Who was guarding the weapons military troopers or contractors? How were they transported to the aircraft? How were the aircraft forms updated? How was the chain of custody broken? Did the flight crew and munitions maintenance OICs verify weapons status? What the hell happened here? This is dereliction of duty, Wing CC, DCM, OMS/CC Munitions Sq/CC, Security Sq Commander and a lot of other folks should be going to jail, today !!!!!!!!!!!! Maybe we have too many fighter pilots as generals. Maybe we need to split Air Combat Command back to the cold war days of SAC and TAC.

Retired B-52 Crew Chief

Re: B-52 mistakenly flies with nukes aboard
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Being a former cruise missile troop, I do not see how this could have happened. If the "missile shop" failed to download the heads before taking them to the flightline, the crew loading them on the plane has a checklist asking them to "verify no warheads installed", as do the pilots.... hmmmmm, maybe they thought they were dummy heads. That's the only way I can see that possibly happening. Wonder what happened to the guy signing off that inventory?

Re: B-52 mistakenly flies with nukes aboard
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I was a PACAF IG inspector in the 1970-1975 time frame. When we performed CIs, it was a very tough inspection covering all aspects of nuclear munitions. It didn't take much to take the keys, lock up the facility, and bring in the training guys to recertify the MMS handling of nukes. Is that still the procedure during this day and age? - I realize that AF manning has dropped significantly over the years and our people need to do more with less. As an example of how tough it was, I remember one time when a maintenance man changed a time phased part (rubber grommet) with a non T.O. part - as we discussed the incident around the table, the boss let them off the hook. He noticed my dissatisfaction and I told him I did not approve of his decision - that weapon had a specific mission and follow up missions would be compromised if that weapon did not explode. Luckily, the next day, they violated the two-man concept and we failure the unit. The Boss told me that he did not sleep the night because of our conversation - we had stringent rules, this is a serious incident and almost impossible to believe that it could have happened. This is bad news for the best Air Force in the world and a blot on many people's records. The only good that comes out of this situation is that it reminds Mr. Ahmadinejad to the fact that we are a very powerful country and will not take his actions lightly. He is now aware that one B-52, B-2, or whatever carries a lot of throwweight and "Mister, don't mess with us".

Re: B-52 mistakenly flies with nukes aboard
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I was a navigator/radar nav of B-52s at Minot for 5 years, and there is only one person responsible for this incident, the radar navigator on the crew that flew the missiles down there. If he did his preflight correctly he would have known what he had on board, and that there was a problem. I suspect he blew it off because they were told they didn't have warheads in the missiles, and even before I left the jet in 2000 the units had become so focused on conventional warfare that the nuke mission was being neglected. Just goes to show that you NEVER take what the paperwork says or what anybody else tells you as being the truth. You ALWAYS preflight your weapons, even when you have weapons troops or some Colonel standing there tell you that you don't need to do it, because it is your job and your responsibility alone. The radar nav should have known that, and did his job. He didn't, and now they have a big mess on their hands. I suspect the radar nav will find himself up in front of an FEB explaining his mistake, and he should lose his wings. Had I been in his position I would have raised hell when I saw what I had, if for no other reason than to be a pain in the ass to the leadership for letting the weapons get to the plane in that state in the first place. That is the best part of being a radar nav on the B-52, you have a license to bitch!

Re: B-52 mistakenly flies with nukes aboard
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I agree, the radar nav was the last line of defense when it came to making sure that the nukes stayed on the ground and the one in the best position to question what was going on. Shameful

But lets take a look at the other parties at fault

1) The munition Sq control room for not ensuring that the warheads were removed per schedule. Shameful
2) The missile/bomb shop for not removing the warheads per the schedule. Shameful
3) The munitions transport/handling shop for not questioning why they were driving a SAFED Nuke out the front gate of the storage area without security. Shameful
4) The security police for not being able to identify a Nuke as it goes out their front gate and not questioning it. Shameful
5) The load crew for not questioning why they were loading SAFED Weapons onboard an aircraft without security. Shameful.
6) and last the radar nav for not questioning his payload.

I also agree with another writer. This would not have happened on a SAC base.

Sometimes the same things that make a military unit effective have the opposite effect. The ability to follow orders without question and to rely on your follow team members also makes us weak.

Re: B-52 mistakenly flies with nukes aboard
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This little fairy tale doesn't hold up to the slightest scrutiny. In order to believe it you have to be willing to slander a whole parade of people who, by definition, are the very best at what they do. I'm not willing to do that. I've never flown with a crew of morons. Ordnance people, ground crews, and the maintenance chief with the aircraft log book are not a bunch of shambling zombies. The entire chain of custody for those special weapons did not include people prone to making the biggest screw up in the history of the Air Force. Many posters here have pointed out that the people in this story are all top-flight professionals. What if that is true? What if every single one of them did exactly what they are trained, and required, to do? What if everything went exactly according to plan, until somebody smelled a rat and called the press?

As Sherlock Holmes would say, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” The undeniable fact is that 6 special weapons were moved from Minot to Barksdale, or, 6 special weapons were moved from secure storage to a staging area for the ME. Let us not ignore the obvious- the administration is openly ramping up a conflict with Iran. They have been reported as having floated the idea of using nukes on deeply buried targets. They have already performed acts that caused an enormous, global, public outcry. I suspect that the officers who leaked this story feared that they were witness to the start of the greatest war crime in history, feared that their own chain of command was complicit in it, and did the only thing they could think of to do to stop it. That would make this story exactly what it sounds like -- a cover-up based on the first panicked lie the administration could think of.

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The following is a current list of the procedures and protocols that govern handling, transporting and securing nuclear weapons. Nearly all these rules -- the "bible" for servicemen and women whose jobs involve dealing with the US nuclear arsenal – would have to have been forgotten, willfully ignored or countermanded for this "mistake" to occur. Please skim; if you actually read every word, you'll be as crazy as Cheney in less than an hour.

"Nuclear Surety Tamper Control and Detection Programs Supplement"

This Interim Change (IC) 2006-2 provides new/additional guidance regarding the definition and intent of the Air Force Tamper Detection Program, further clarifies the intent for MAJCOMs to develop and distribute sealing procedures and updates general information. A bar ( | ) indicates a revision from the previous edition.

1. Requirements and Procedures.

1.1. Tamper Control Program. The Two-Person Concept is central to nuclear surety tamper control measures in the Air Force. It is designed to make sure that a lone individual cannot perform an incorrect act or unauthorized procedure on a nuclear weapon, nuclear weapon system, or certified critical component.

1.2. Concept Enforcement. Each organization with a mission or function involving nuclear weapons, nuclear weapon systems, or certified critical components:

1.2.1. Identifies no-lone zones (where at least two authorized persons must be present during any operation or task).

1.2.1. (AFSPC) Apply Two-Person Concept procedures during training with non-war reserve assets to the extent necessary to maintain proficiency.

1.2.2. Enforces the Two-Person Concept

1.2.2. (AFSPC) Before entering a no-lone zone, brief personnel that the Two-Person Concept applies. Supervisors must ensure that individuals are aware of the location of all no-lone zone boundaries, location of certified critical components within the no-lone zone, emergency procedures, and methods for reporting violations and hazards. Do not use signs or devices externally that identify a building as a no-lone zone.

1.2.3. Develops procedures to limit entry to authorized persons who meet the requirements of paragraph 1.3.

1.2.3. (AFSPC) After entry into a no-lone zone, the supervisor/team chief of each authorized team controls individual team members within the no-lone zone.

1.2.4. (Added-AFSPC) After initial entry of an authorized Two-Person Concept team into a no-lone zone, a single, authorized individual may enter providing:

1.2.4.1. (Added-AFSPC) The Sole Vouching Authority (SVA) identifies individuals wishing to gain entry to a no-lone zone, verifies authorization, and validates need for entry into the no-lone zone. Note: SVA is the representative identified as having responsibility for deciding who will enter the no-lone zone. Normally, this is the senior member of the first team entering the area. SVA may transfer between individuals provided the two individuals jointly identify

1.2.5. (Added-AFSPC) An area designated as a no-lone zone may be defined as the interior of a cabinet, a work bay or equipment bay; an entire structure or building, a junction box, a drawer, an area encompassed by an actual boundary established by painted markings, rope, or a fence; and in some instances, the interior of vehicles. Local commanders are authorized to enlarge a no-lone zone. This authority should be used sparingly and only when absolutely required. When used for unattended storage of nuclear weapons or certified critical components the no-lone zone must meet the requirements of AFI 31-101, The Air Force Installation Security Program, and AFI

1.2.5.7. (Added-AFSPC) Any room, computer facility, vault, or similar area where certified critical components are repaired (operationally certified or decertified), manufactured, stored, or processed, is a no-lone zone. For an area in which maintenance is infrequently performed on certified critical components, establish a temporary no-lone zone with signs placed around the work area while components are present.

1.3. Team Requirements. (Refer to paragraph 1.1.6.1 for criteria on foreign nationals.) A Two-Person Concept team consists of at least two individuals who:

1.3.1. Are certified under the Personnel Reliability Program (PRP), as specified in AFI 36-2104, Nuclear Weapons Personnel Reliability Program(formerly AFR 35-99 and AFR 40-925).

1.3.1. (AFSPC) Inspectors or evaluators who meet the requirements of paragraph 1.3. may form a Two-Person Concept team in the performance of their duties.

1.3.2. Know the nuclear surety requirements of the task they perform.

1.3.3. Can promptly detect an incorrect act or unauthorized procedure.

1.3.4. Have successfully completed nuclear surety training according to AFI 91-101.

1.3.5. Are designated to perform the required task.

1.4. (AFSPC) Violations to Report. Report violations of the Two-Person Concept, including emergency response, through the command post to the commander. The commander will ensure violations are investigated promptly. A Two-Person Concept team must ascertain if unauthorized acts were performed, inspect involved certified critical components, verify their status, and reestablish the integrity of the system. Accomplish applicable visual and functional checks for components that have such procedures established.

1.6.4. PRP Interim-Certified Personnel Restrictions. Two interim-certified individuals may not form a Two-Person Concept team. Also, do not allow an interim-certified member to pilot a single-seat aircraft loaded with nuclear weapons.

TAMPER DETECTION PROGRAM

2. Tamper Detection Program. Seals help to verify that no one has tampered with or accidentally activated a certified critical component.

2.1. Sealing Requirements. Certain items must be sealed because either:

2.1.1. Air Force nuclear weapon system safety rules require it, or,

2.1.2. In the case of some certified critical components, seals protect their certification status while in storage or during transportation, as specified in AFI 91-105, Critical Components (formerly AFR 122-17).

2.2. Sealing Methods. Authorized sealing methods include:

2.2.1. Safety Wiring and Lead Seals. In this method, you place a lead seal on a safety wire connected to certain switches, covers, handles, or levers and impress the lead seal with a distinctive mark using a crimping device and controlled die. An unauthorized act breaks or alters the wire connection so that you can detect activation. Use this method only in no-lone zones.

2.2.2. Tamper Detection Indicators (TDI). In this method you place an approved TDI so that it will indicate when someone has activated or had access to the interior of a certified critical component. Once the TDI is installed, evidence of tampering is visible to the naked eye or can be detected through the use of special equipment.

3.3.1. (AFSPC) Where AFSPC directives do not cover a particular local situation, wings will develop local standard publications or checklists to ensure adequate control of certified critical components or nuclear weapons and application of the Tamper Control and Detection Programs.

3.3.2. Develop and distribute procedures for sealing, where appropriate. As a minimum, these procedural directives:

3.3.2.1. State when and by whom seals can be applied and removed.

3.3.2.1. (AFSPC) Units will designate personnel authorized to apply and remove tamper

detection indicators (TDI). TDIs will be applied and removed by a Two-Person Concept team when required by technical orders or directives.

3.3.2.2. Establish controls for the handling, receipt, storage, issue, inventory, and disposal of TDIs (including all residue), controlled dies and self-locking, non-reversible seals. (example: roto-seals)

3.3.2.2. (AFSPC) Develop local controls for handling, receipt, storage, issue, inventory, and disposal of TDIs not covered in technical orders, directives or this supplement.

3.3.2.2.1. (Added-AFSPC) The Aquila Cobra Seal TDI-1 (ACSTDI-1) is used to maintain certification of the Missile Guidance Set (MGS) during shipment. Task-qualified personnel must install, remove, and verify the ACSTDI-1.

3.3.2.2.2. (Added-AFSPC) The ACSTD-1 system kit requires special handling. The kit

which includes special tools, camera, printer, video disks, ACSTDI-1 bodies, and fiber

optic cables does not require special handling. Maintain the video disk used during the

ACSTDI-1 installation process under proper Two-Person Concept control until all information recorded on the disk has been properly verified by the unit receiving the MGS. Maintain the master pictures taken during the installation process under Two-Person Concept

control until TDIs on MGS shipping containers are verified by the receiving unit.

3.3.2.2.3. (Added-AFSPC) Prior to shipping a certified MGS to another unit, ensure the

receiving unit has a copy of the master pictures taken during the seal installation process.

Transmit the master pictures by facsimile machine or overnight mail. Immediately upon

receipt of the master pictures the receiving unit will contact the sending unit via telephone to confirm that the pictures have been received and are under Two-Person Concept control. The sending unit will verify the caller,s identity by immediate call back. Accomplish this verification procedure prior to shipping the MGS.

3.3.2.2.4. (Added-AFSPC) The sending unit must inspect installed ACSTDI-1s immediately prior to loading the MGS shipping container for shipment. The same inspection is performed upon receipt of the MGS.

3.3.2.2.5. (Added-AFSPC) Dispose of the ACSTDI-1 by destroying the body and discarding it along with the cables.

Cognitive dissonance: It's not just for breakfast anymore.

2008-01-27T10:02:00.000-08:00

This is a reply to a post on Democratic Underground that asked: "Do you realize that you are living in a Fascist Country?"

I responded:

New, improved: It's fascism with a smirk

BushCo and various compliant congresses, with both R and D majorities, have signed off on an ever-expanding list of repressive legislation, executive orders and presidential directives; massive federal invasions of privacy regarding medical and financial records; monitoring US citizens' electronic communications; re-targeting spy satellites for domestic surveillance; the TSA cavity search specialists (for attractive young women only; the rest are presumed to pose no threat to the state); no-fly and terrorist watch lists; Halliburton/KBR's detention camps; RFIDs in all new passports and the new national ID cards scheduled to be issued later this year; new TSA "behavior detection officers" to spot those who don't "look quite right;" all this wonderful new stuff from the DHS; private armies featuring mercenaries from companies like Blackwater and SAIC springing up like mushrooms after a light rain... All that and the Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act, extraordinary rendition (whatever the hell that means) and torture, too. (Note: the torture link is graphic and disgusting, as it should be.)

But most people would call you insane if you tried to connect these dots in a way that pointed toward governmental malevolence. Can't happen here, they say.

And because another poster in the same thread vehemently denied any hint of fascism in the current version of America, I couldn't keep my mouth (or keyboard) shut:

Cognitive dissonance: It's not just for breakfast anymore

Odd that you'd cite media obsession with the upcoming elections as evidence that we're just rolling in personal freedom. I'd argue that watching the media's evolving role in campaign and election coverage, and transcending neutrality by actually influencing the outcome, provides ample evidence of just the opposite. In maybe 50 years, they've completed the transition from reporters of objective fact to gatekeepers and promoters of official orthodoxy.

But even that wasn't enough to justify the huge sums of money corporate America has spent since 1996 to buy its own alternative universe. So in 2000 and 2004, they assumed a new activist role in determining the eventual "winner" by proclaiming a Bush victory out front; containing, suppressing or ridiculing all contrary information; then forcing the Gore camp to make its case with its credibility already undermined by the "infallibility" the public ascribes to the mighty media Wurlitzer. Goebbels and Bernays couldn't have done it any better.

The role of the "free press" as a check on the excesses of the rich and powerful -- which is what the founders had in mind when they ratified the First Amendment -- no longer exists except in small, local, independent papers, radio stations and community access TV.

Now, in its new role as champion of the status quo, PR firm for the aristocracy and official ministry of propaganda for the unholy marriage of right wing politicians and their corporate love-children, the "free press" is there at the outset of all major election campaigns to weed out any hint of progressive ideology, keep progressives muzzled and off camera and actively promote only the most vanilla, corporate-approved, useless degenerates of the bunch.

As you note, "In fascism, there is no debate about who the next leader will be." In sharp contrast, I suppose, to our free and open system in which all candidates enjoy public funding and equal media access and where mass media respects and accurately reports on every candidate's views on the issues.

One way to pick leaders in a fascist society is to physically, psychologically and spiritually intimidate people into accepting anyone who's shoved down their throats. Another is to limit their options to the finalists who represent the two factions of the Business Party. Just as in the other method, this keeps the status quo safe for another four years, this time by making sure there's only a superficial difference between the choices mass media has shoved down their throats. The outcome is the same; the second method is just slicker, less obviously totalitarian and doesn't tend to make people crazy, unproductive and useless as drones and debt slaves.

And if you actually believe that there's a lick of difference between Ms. Clinton and Mr. McCain or Mr. Romney when it comes to their unwavering commitment to corporate values and steadfast opposition to anything that might benefit actual humans at the expense of corporate profits, then I've got to assume that history and cognition aren't your strong suits. You might care to have a look at opensecrets.org and follow the dollars for a while. Better yet, have a look at Hillary's idea of health care reform.

Like it or not, we no longer live in a democratic republic based on Constitutional law, the will of the people and 220 years of legal precedent. There is no due process; there is no habeas; there is no right to counsel; there is no right to privacy; there is no right to speak your mind; there is no prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment; there is no right to a speedy trial by jury.

This is the reality of America v2.0. Just because the enforcers aren't wearing black uniforms decorated with swastikas and lightening bolts and goose-stepping down the Unter den Linden; just because Leni Reifenstahl's granddaughter isn't filming the sequel to "Triumph of the Will" and the boxcars are still carrying freight; just because oppression is still partly concealed under a peeling veneer of liberty while most people flatly refuse to pay any fucking attention at all... Just because the jackboot has yet to kick in my door, I'm not naive enough to believe that it can't happen here.

I look at the massive power the executive branch has accumulated since 2001 -- with the complete complicity of congress and an uncritical mass media -- and I can only draw one conclusion: all the pieces are in place to lock down this country like a time vault. They're just not fully operational yet.

Maybe they never will be, although the overlords have gone through a hell of a lot of trouble to build a legal and physical infrastructure that can really serve only one purpose. The Cheneys of the world don't strike me as the type to do stuff like this just for fun.

Time to reinstate the corporate death penalty

2008-01-27T09:21:00.000-08:00

This is a reply to a post on Democratic Underground about how do deal with renegade corporations, particularly those conglomerates like GE, Disney, Time-Warner and Murdoch's News Corp. who own media empires that control more than 90 percent of everything you see, hear and read in the US. My post follows:

I'm really starting to like the idea of corporate charter revocation. Basically, if they consistently act like felons and their business practices routinely include befouling local ecosystems, clear-cutting, releasing toxic chemicals into the water, air or ground, screwing the community out of legitimate taxes, laying off half the workforce and replacing them with H-1b visa holders, moving some or all of their operations overseas and so on... If they're going to claim the privileges of "personhood," then they should damn well be subject to the same legal sanctions and criminal penalties any other person would incur for such behavior.

Or, more to the point here, corporate death for giant holding companies buying up all the country's information outlets, replacing news with infotainment and propaganda and claiming First Amendment protections apply to broadcasting this nonstop drivel.

Just think for a second about which media outlets have pissed you off in the past week. I'll start with NBC for the Kucinich lockout, then CNN, Fux, CBS, ABC, the History Channel, the NYT, the WaPo, my local rag, AM radio motor mouths (for the three seconds it took to hit the mute button) and even ESPN. All of them peddled lies, distortions, disinformation, government-approved spin, told breathless tales of D-class celebrity idiots and engaged in actions harmful to the continued survival of the republic -- i.e., promoting and perpetuating the brain-dead culture of Dumbfuckistan. And that's just a normal week. The big six media conglomerates are also in probable violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, but that's another subject.

Media companies are particularly sensitive to charges of malfeasance, since they have a special obligation to be of service to the public in return for being allowed to use our priceless airwaves on the cheap or for free. To the extent that they ignore that mandate, they're vulnerable to charter review at the very least, and revocation if warranted. The FCC actually used to care about such things until St. Raygun deregulated everything he could find, a practice continued by all his successors, no exceptions, and reaching epic proportions with the Codpiece in Chief.

Obviously, it would take a new and fairly progressive administration to take on the GEs and Viacoms of the world -- one whose figurehead hasn't accepted massive bribes from those very same companies in return for favorable legislation and minimal regulatory oversight, and which the corrupt liars characterize as merely "buying access." Of the possible finalists, only Edwards seems to have any desire to take on these cancerous monsters. The GOP will remain worse than useless, Clinton and Obama are too heavily invested in corporate values and stuffed with corporate money to fight for the peasants against the oligarchs and Kucinich has been judged "unelectable" by people so much smarter than us that we really should just accept their word for it.

So as usual, it's up to us, and we can decide pool our talents and combine skill sets and work to revoke their corporate charters. The rewards are huge. If successful, the corporation ceases to exist as a legal entity. You can then seize their liquid assets and divide them among the corporation's creditors -- which, in the case of a relatively solvent company, means the workers and contractors -- and auction off anything not nailed down, with proceeds again going to the workers and small creditors. The shareholders just lose their investments, the execs may or may not be subject to civil or criminal liability and when a new business moves in to occupy the old facilities, they're compelled to hire the former occupant's workers first.

I think it's long past time for people to begin harassing these unaccountable fiefdoms and either dissolve them entirely or cripple their ability to operate in secret and outside the laws and ethical constraints the rest of us are subject to.

Here's some background material. Unfortunately, successful revocation hasn't happened for decades, so there are no contemporary "how-to" case studies. But several of these links outline circumstances that could result charter revocation, along with citing precedents and legal arguments. Others contain the processes and templates needed to create the proper paperwork and get it into the hands of the right (i.e., more sympathetic) government officials. Fortunately, it's not as boring as it sounds.

http://multinationalmonitor.org/mm2002/02oct-nov/oct-no...

http://www.duhc.org/rethinking_revoking.html

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Controlling_Corporati...

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=1810

http://www.commondreams.org/scriptfiles/news2003/1230-0...

http://reclaimdemocracy.org/corporate_accountability/de...

http://www.corporatecrimereporter.com/corporatedeath103...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sheldon-drobny/the-best-u...

http://www.corporations.org/afd-paradigm-shift.html

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/cases/clcc.html?c...

That's probably enough for starters. For more, search Google for any combination of "corporate charter revoke procedure case study"... and so on.

Happy hunting.

The Internet must die

2008-01-27T08:20:00.000-08:00

"I hear there's rumors on the Internets that we're going to have a draft." — Dry-no-more-drunk George W. Bush, contemplating his next tall, cold Lone Star, October 8, 2004, St. Louis, Mo

You know that you've reached desperate times when you find yourself fondly remembering Tass and Pravda as beacons of journalistic integrity.

But when considering US corporate media's seven-year love affair with the Bush administration and its willingness to deliver blatant propaganda and outright lies to manufacture Bush-approved political orthodoxy, those former USSR institutions compare favorably with the shameless house organs now masquerading as an American free press.

The Internet's corporate competition: co-opted beyond redemption

Thanks to a 30-year frenzy of mergers and acquisitions, wink-and-nod FCC "oversight" and congressional unwillingness to invoke existing anti-trust laws, the American marketplace of ideas is now ruled by six massive conglomerates that control the content of more than 80 percent of what most of us see, hear and read.

So what? Well, for one thing, a significant majority of news, entertainment and information US audiences see is vetted for its support of status quo corporate values and purged of "dangerous" unconventional narratives -- perhaps regarding the threat to independent thought posed by media consolidation.

And when discussing media consolidation, someone might tumble to the fact that NBC is owned by General Electric, one of the world's largest armaments manufacturers in 2006 and among the six largest media conglomerates. GE makes and maintains engines for the F-16 Fighter jet, Abrams tank, Apache helicopter, U2 bomber, Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle (UCAV), A-10 aircraft and numerous other military equipment, including planes, helicopters, tanks and more.

Is it reasonable to expect NBC to report critically on the status and duration of the Iraq occupation? Or is it predictable that NBC's occupation coverage will tell us that the "surge" is working, that US troop deaths are down, that the Iraqi puppet regime is gaining traction and, if we can hang on for another decade, things should turn out hunky-dory.

Well, it's certain that extending the US presence in Iraq by a decade will have a very positive impact on GE's profit and loss statements. It's probably going to be somewhat less beneficial for the people who actually have to fight this insane proxy war on behalf of GE's bottom line.

But that's okay, since war is the optimum business condition for many industries -- banks, weapons makers, raw materials suppliers, machine tool makers and so on -- GE looks to sell many billions of dollars more of its killing machinery, all the while telling Americans via NBC how peace is just 10 or so years down the road.

And GE is just one of the main offenders. We'll leave for another day a discussion on how thoroughly Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. has polluted the national discourse. Or how the acquisitive tentacles of Viacom, CBS, TimeWarner and Disney have managed to take a relatively engaged population and, in 30 short years, turn it into a nation of compliant, ill-informed, politically illiterate chowder heads content to consume their quota of goods, services and ideologies with an equally uncritical eye.

American mass media lost the thread of the story decades ago and are now only qualified to dish pop culture infotainment masquerading as news; report breathlessly on the latest D-class celebrity screw-up; and act as stenographers and cheerleaders for the latest batch of official Bush administration lies.

Among other insults, this explains why John Stossel is a network star while Bill Moyers is on PBS.

The parallel universe

The only serious competition threatening corporate media's monopoly on official "truths" -- those pieties designed to narrow acceptable choices and increase social control -- comes from the Internet.

"The news," as it's laughingly known, can tap into a seemingly endless supply of drunken or felonious fools like Jessica and Paris and OJ and Twitany to sedate its viewers. Then there's the occasional gruesome murder to balance the chirpy happy talk on miraculous medical procedures (which most of us will never live to experience because our for-profit insurers won't cover them), an always erroneous look at local weather, followed by 15 uplifting minutes on sports and a recap of the top celebrity screw-ups. The viewer yawns, feels a bit awed by all this technical wizardry and slick showmanship, and heads for bed thinking he's up to date on the stuff that really matters.

Corporate media has a bottomless pool of "on-air talent" -- perfectly coiffed, well-modulated, tastefully made up, arrayed in $5K worth of suits, ties and little flag lapel pins, strident and irritating as a hundred Ross Perots.

We have broadband, YouTube, blogs, forums, actual reporters, search engines, discussion groups, political organizing, access to newspapers published in actual free countries -- all taking place in plain sight.

Over the past decade Internet and Web technology have matured and surpassed nearly anything mass media can offer. It's instant news, usually with audio or video, often reported by eyewitnesses rather than filtered by some blow-dried idiot. It's preserving what's left of our national heritage by archiving "purged" documents. It's subjecting every significant political, social and economic development to the scrutiny and analysis of the world's collective brainpower. It's the unifying element linking diverse cultures into an evolving planetary society not subordinated to states or lines on a map. And it's the universe's greatest source of jokes, one-liners and satire.

Governments' worst nightmare: an informed and activist citizenry

I don't see how the power elites can afford to allow this nonsense to continue for much longer. People with unconventional (read: humanitarian or peaceful) ideas are the implacable enemy of those sustaining their wealth and power by aligning themselves with the status quo, and these dissenting Internet pipsqueaks cannot be tolerated forever.

To our corporate masters, libraries, independent publishers and bookstores are bad enough. But fortunately for "them," libraries are underfunded and ill-attended, it's getting harder to publish unorthodox material in the US and many independent book stores are getting killed by the Barnes & Nobles and Amazons of the world.

Not so the Internet. It's become the alternate universe for hundreds of millions of people worldwide who know and understand that the official story is always and inevitably suspect. That altruism has never been a function of governments. That governments are always at war with "the people" they pretend to watch out for. That, as The Commander Guy pointed out in a rare moment of clarity, dictatorships ARE easier to run than representative democracies. That power exists solely to perpetuate itself and, when threatened, will defend its position with anything and everything in the arsenal.

Now that's a hell of an alternate narrative. And the Internet is the "plumbing" that carries these contrarian messages -- and the seditious thoughts and attitudes and movements they inspire -- around the world in less time than it takes Murdoch to count his latest billion.

Death by harassment

In July of last year, Bush signed an executive order, entitled "Blocking Property of Certain Persons Who Threaten Stabilization Efforts in Iraq. This expanded the administration's flexible definition of a terrorist to include anyone disagreeing with its " . . . efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq or to provide humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi people." This apparently isn't intended as a joke, although I'm not sure what's going on over there qualifies as "economic reconstruction" or "humanitarian assistance."

Which brings us to "Endgame," as the Department of Homeland Security calls HR 1955/S 1959, known officially as The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007, and which contains -- among dozens of disgusting provisions -- these gems [italics mine]:

(2) The promotion of violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism and ideologically based violence exists in the United States and poses a threat to homeland security.

(3) The Internet has aided in facilitating violent radicalization, ideologically based violence, and the homegrown terrorism process in the United States by providing access to broad and constant streams of terrorist-related propaganda to United States citizens.

Striking at the heart of the international terrorist conspiracy, this bill targets the dangerous arch-fiends/grandmothers who participate on the hundreds of thousands of political forums, blogs or news and information sites that aren't exclusively devoted to singing the praises of Bush/Cheney and their merry band of imperialist oil pirates.

Note that this piece of repressive legislation -- rumored to be the brainchild of the Rand Corporation and introduced by Democrat Jane Harman -- passed the House last October by a 404-6 margin. Note that, introduced last August in the upper house as S 1959 and co-sponsored by GOP armchair warrior and domestic repression enthusiast Norm Coleman, it's coming up for a vote in the Senate early this year. If it passes, which seems likely, a Bush signature is a given -- probably with a signing statement that says he'll ignore the act's few feeble provisions to combat totalitarianism, like this one:

(a) In General - The Department of Homeland Security's efforts to prevent ideologically based violence and homegrown terrorism as described herein shall not violate the constitutional rights, civil rights, or civil liberties of United States citizens or lawful permanent residents.

Readers may want to take appropriate preemptive action before, say, downloading this article becomes a felony.

Another motive for digital murder

There's an interesting new site called "Wikileaks" that has garnered some recent attention from corporate mass media, notably Time Magazine, which notes that Wikileaks " . . . could become as important a journalistic tool as the Freedom of Information Act." The site is intended as a secure repository where whistleblowers can, at minimal personal risk, post confidential, potentially embarrassing government and corporate documents for the entire online world to see, study and analyze.

Here's part of Wikileaks' mission statement:

We propose that authoritarian governments, oppressive institutions and corrupt corporations should be subject to the pressure, not merely of international diplomacy, freedom of information laws or even periodic elections, but of something far stronger — the consciences of the people within them.

We believe that transparency in government activities leads to reduced corruption, better government and stronger democracies . . . We believe this scrutiny requires information. Historically that information has been costly - in terms of human life and human rights. But with technological advances to the Internet and cryptography, the risks of conveying important information can be lowered.

Wikileaks opens leaked documents up to stronger scrutiny than any media organization or intelligence agency can provide. Wikileaks provides a forum for the entire global community to relentlessly examine any document for its credibility, plausibility, veracity and validity. Communities can interpret leaked documents and explain their relevance to the public. If a document comes from the Chinese government, the entire Chinese dissident community and diaspora can freely scrutinize and discuss it; if a document arrives from Iran, the entire Farsi community can analyze it and put it in context.

In an important sense, Wikileaks is the first intelligence agency of the people . . . its only interest is the revelation of the truth. Unlike the covert activities of state intelligence agencies, Wikileaks relies upon the power of overt fact to enable and empower citizens to bring feared and corrupt governments and corporations to justice.

Wikileaks is still months from going fully operational, but they've already put up quite a few leaked documents from all over the world. Here's one entitled "Fallujah, the information war and U.S. propaganda."

I suppose the whole thing could be a slick disinfo psy-op designed to leak phony documents to "non-embedded" reporters, then embarrass them publicly for printing anti-US propaganda attributed to some obscure left-radical loon or "terrorist."

But only a pure pessimist would think the Bush administration capable of such chicanery. On the contrary, they've amassed an impressive record of unstinting support for the organizing principles of this country . . . at least for those with the right pedigree who kick in a million bucks or so to the Republican National Committee each election cycle.

# # #

This article first appeared in Online Journal on January 14, 2008

9/11 and the incompetence excuse: Could a bunch of sociopathic screw-ups really pull off the crime of the century?

2008-01-27T08:12:00.000-08:00

Many who deny government complicity in 9/11/01 maintain that some of the best evidence against official involvement in the crime of the century lies in the Bush administration's unbroken record of sheer incompetence, an argument bolstered by the perception that key members of the administration, notably The Commander Guy, spent that entire day running around like headless chickens.

On the contrary, they did no such thing. Rather, the administration was highly competent and enormously successful that day -- they just had different criteria for success than would sane people. And they've been highly competent ever since. You just have to adjust your standards for evaluating success, then view the past six years through the PNAC/neocon lens. Let's review some of their primary accomplishments -- on 9/11 and in the six eternal years since:

They got the entire world to believe that a ragtag organization called Al Qaeda, fronted by a seriously ill guy in a cave armed with only a laptop and a phone, managed to orchestrate an unbelievably complex plan that had involved years of planning and training, much money, split-second timing and ridiculously good luck.
They got the entire world to believe that four hijackers who couldn't fly single-engine Cessnas well enough to graduate from flight school suddenly became the Blue Angels when at the controls of large, twin-engine Boeing jetliners, and this during the most stressful moments of their short lives.
They got the entire world to believe that the crime of the century was pulled off by 19 guys with box-cutters whose names (or any other Arabic names) don't appear on any passenger manifests and at least four of whom have been seen alive and well in the Middle East since 9/11/01, (this one even interviewed by the BBC).
Better yet, they got the entire world to believe their evidence linking these 19 guys to the hijackings, using for proof a few cell phone calls that couldn't have happened with 2001 technology. Then there's the famous carry-on bag supposedly left behind by alleged ringleader Mohammed Atta containing, among other things, a copy of the Koran, a Boeing flight manual and his will (and that's surely something you'd take with you on a flight you knew was going to be vaporized). And then the kicker, a passport allegedly belonging to Atta that miraculously survived a massive explosion and temperatures we're told were high enough to soften steel and fluttered unsullied to the ground, where it was eventually found among the debris a couple of blocks away from what used to be the World Trade Center.
They got the entire world to believe that the seriously ill guy in the cave had such vast control over US armed forces that he ordered four exercise scenarios -- Vigilant Warrior, Vigilant Guardian, Northern Guardian and Northern Vigilance -- which diverted to northern Canada or Alaska many of the NORAD fighter jets that would have been scrambled per standard operating procedure in the event of a suspected hijacking in the northeast corridor.
They got the entire world to believe that this same guy in the cave was able to insert at least 11 and as many as 21 false radar blips (according to FAA administrator Jane Garvey) onto air traffic controller screens throughout the northeast corridor. As a result, controllers had no idea which blips represented planes that had been hijacked, which ones represented non-hijacked flights still in the air and which blips were phantoms. They were thus incapable of following the actual moves of the four hijacked jets and/or coordinating with the FAA to relay warnings to NORAD interceptors (most of which, again, were screwing around over the arctic wastes).
They got the entire world to believe that the remaining NORAD forces -- which had been a perfect 67 for 67 in 2001 prior to 9/11 -- managed to fail completely in their missions four separate times that morning.
They got the entire world to believe that it was only a coincidence that a fifth exercise was taking place at the same time, this one designed to test emergency response capabilities at the National Reconnaissance Office in the event that an off-course plane from nearby Dulles airport crashed into one of the NRO's four office towers.
They got the entire world to believe that two planes took down three skyscrapers, WTC buildings 1, 2 and 7, and that for the first and only time in history, fire brought down reinforced steel and concrete structures and caused them to collapse vertically rather than keel over sideways and take out a few blocks of the New York City financial district.
They got the entire world to absolve them of any complicity in "the events of 9/11," even though the above list of "coincidences" is inexplicable without the knowledge, involvement, approval and direction of people high up in the federal food chain.

And that was only the beginning . . .

Literally overnight, they and their mass media cheerleaders turned a quasi-literate simpleton who was already tanking in the polls into an heroic "war president" who enjoyed the approval of more than 90 percent of the American public and the support of just about the entire world community.
Suggesting the presence of a script, the administration immediately used this new-found popularity to get the public to buy insane increases in Pentagon spending; invented a war on terror to further justify enriching cronies at banks, arms merchants and fossil fuels companies; and attacked Afghanistan, murdering tens of thousands of civilians but failing to find that omnipotent guy in the cave.
They got the entire world to believe Condi Rice when she perjured herself at the 9/11 Commission hearings by saying, "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon; that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile."
They got the entire world to forget that at least 11 countries had issued warnings of an imminent attack against the US: Afghanistan, Argentina, Egypt, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Morocco, Russia and the UK.
They got the entire world to forget that Bush slept on a US Navy ship in Genoa Harbor during the July 2001 G8 meeting because Italian intelligence services had intercepted communications indicating terrorists might try to use a hijacked plane to assassinate him by ramming it into his hotel.
They got the whole world to forget about Operation Bojinka, a plot to hijack and blow up 11 flights from Asia to North America, which the CIA had rolled up back in the mid-'90s and which should have provided some hints of future activities.

And ever since, it's been the express train to hell for the US and the rest of the world. Anything's fair in the phony war on terror that 9/11 launched and sanctified.

It justifies preemptive civilian slaughter branded as "shock and awe;" blatantly looting the national historical treasures of a sovereign nation; commandeering its oil reserves for the exclusive profit of US and UK petrochemical companies; building forward bases from which to rule the Middle East militarily; privatizing everything that isn't nailed down; threatening or ridiculing any national leader who dares to differ with US hegemony; threatening Iran with nuclear weapons; the use of illegal torture to compel confessions (which are, of course, useless since they're obtained under duress) . . . all this and more cementing the US's richly deserved place as the world's most feared and despised rogue state. And that's just the foreign policy side.

Meanwhile, back at home . . .

Domestically, the official 9/11 story has justified an ever-expanding list of repressive legislation, executive orders and presidential directives; massive federal invasions of privacy regarding medical and financial records; obsessive monitoring of US citizens' electronic communications; re-targeting spy satellites for domestic surveillance; the TSA cavity search specialists (for attractive young women only; the rest are presumed to pose no threat to the state); no-fly and terrorist watch lists; Halliburton/KBR's detention camps; RFIDs in all new passports and the new national ID cards scheduled to be issued later this year; new TSA "behavior detection officers" to spot those who don't "look quite right;" all this wonderful new stuff from the DHS; private armies featuring mercenaries from companies like Blackwater and SAIC springing up like mushrooms after a light rain... All that and the Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act, extraordinary rendition (whatever that actually means) and torture, too. (Note: the torture link is graphic and disgusting.)

Thanks to "the events of 9/11," we no longer live in a democratic republic based on constitutional law and 220 years of legal precedent. There is no due process; there is no habeas corpus; there is no right to counsel; there is no right to privacy; there is no right to speak one's mind; there is no prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment; there is no right to a speedy trial by jury.

This is the reality of America v2.0 post-9/11. Just because they're not wearing black uniforms decorated with swastikas and lightening bolts and goose-stepping down the Unter den Linden; just because Leni Reifenstahl isn't filming the sequel to "Triumph of the Will" and the boxcars are still carrying freight; just because oppression is still partly concealed under an eroding veneer of liberty while most people flatly refuse to pay any attention . . . Just because the jackboot has yet to kick in the door, we're not naive enough to believe that it can't happen here.

We look at stuff like this and can only draw one conclusion: All the pieces are in place to lock down this country like a time vault. They simply haven't gone fully operational yet.

There are dozens -- probably hundreds -- of additional outrages that have been justified by "the events of 9/11." The official 9/11 story is the lynchpin, the keystone, the catalyst for every single act of international aggression and domestic repression this administration has been able to get away with. Absent 9/11, or at least the official Bush administration version, they don't have a leg to stand on. Demolish the official coincidence theory and their entire rationale crumbles.

A united front

That's why attacking, discrediting and ultimately disproving the 9/11 myth is so critical to the continued survival of the republic. Even Ms. Nancy might find grounds to allow impeachment back on that infamous table once the 9/11 armor rusts away.

Ironically, instead of presenting a unified front to expose this preposterous lie and condemn the complicit US mass media echo chamber that has hard-wired it into the American psyche, the left/liberal end of the political spectrum is predictably fragmented on this issue and includes some of the more steadfast and adamant defenders of the official coincidence theory.

So when we see otherwise intelligent and perceptive people doing the administration's PR work for them, defending the official story with the tenacity of the religious zealot, we have to wonder at the level of internal conflict these people must experience in accepting this ridiculous official story at face value.

But fear is a powerful thing and shilling for the official 9/11 cover story -- while staunchly ignoring the most basic unanswered questions and obvious inconsistencies -- provides insulation against the cognitive dissonance and bottomless cynicism that would result from admitting that this administration is so utterly malevolent that it would plan and execute mass murder against its own citizens for purely political reasons.

There's always Operation Northwoods to provide a bit of historical perspective on governmental malevolence. Even US mass media managed to pick up on that one. Read it before it gets scrubbed.

# # #

This article first appeared in Online Journal on January 9, 2008

So . . . what's this here single-payer health care thing all about anyway?

2008-01-27T07:55:00.001-08:00

"I�m going to tell you something -- we have fabulous health care in America, just so you know. I think it�s very important -- before people start griping about the health care system here -- and of course there�s always grounds for complaint -- just to compare it with other systems around the world." --George W. Bush, December 17, 2007, eruditely discussing his own single-payer coverage, courtesy of the US taxpayer.

Note: please pardon all the weird characters -- like question marks where there should be quotation marks. I'm a writer; not a coder. However, if you know how to fix this crap, please shoot me an email and tell me how. ALso looking to truncate posts to show the first 500 words, then show a link to the rest at the bottom of the opening section. Again, if you know how to make that work, please tell me how. And now, on with the show...

But first, a moment of silence

A teenaged girl died some time ago because Cigna HealthCare, a for-profit medical insurance provider, did exactly what it's compelled to do by law: it chose to maximize its profits by refusing to pay for a liver transplant for 17-year-old Nataline Sarkisyan, whose doctors warned that she would certainly die without the organ replacement.

And they were correct. She did in fact die, just hours after Cigna relented and agreed to cover the costs of the procedure after all. This, too, was a move intended to maximize profits, since the terrible PR that news of its denial of coverage generated could have affected Cigna's bottom line as well, as could damages awarded as the result of a wrongful death suit. So it wasn't a rekindling of the human spirit on Cigna's part that caused the company to reverse its position; that was the result of a serious internal disaster management campaign, run by corporate lawyers and high-level spinmeisters, designed to reduce the impact on Cigna's image and minimize the company's financial exposure.

By law, the only obligation of a publicly owned, for-profit US corporation is maximizing return for its shareholders. That's it. Nothing about good corporate citizenship, the public good, saving lives or anything else that isn't related to jacking up the price per share and maintaining a reasonable price-earnings (P/E) ratio.

If Cigna had been operating outside the rules, perhaps we could simply discipline that one company, levy stiff fines, jail a couple of high-ranking execs and serve notice to the rest of the industry that such behavior won't be tolerated. But that's not the case. Cigna was following the rules. The problem is that the rules are insane. That's why this profit-driven disaster of a medical system must be replaced.

We need to dump this murderous system entirely. It's too far gone to tinker around the edges. We simply have to get rid of the profit motive as the driving factor in determining who lives and who dies. We need to decouple the idea of health care from the idea of health insurance, since the two have absolutely nothing in common. For example, listen to Cigna president David Cordani defending the decision in an internal memo that was also made available to mass media.

Nataline Sarkisyan's request was evaluated on an expedited basis using "evidence-based guidelines published by independent physician and medical organizations, as well as expert scientific journals," Cordani said. Translation: We made a life or death decision based on a quick scan of "Liver Transplantation for Dummies" and we backed that up with a little reading on WebMD. Oh, and JAMA, too, and Lancet maybe . . . And don't forget Dr. Rudinski's best-seller, "The Home Guide to Major Abdominal Surgery."

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming . . .

The pinko commie plot to ruin the American way of debt and dying

Now that "Sicko" is available on DVD, millions of people will see it for the first time. If the film's run in theaters is any indicator, most of them will be infuriated as Michael Moore exposes a greedy US medical insurance system run amok, drunk on profits, willing to abandon any last traces of human decency to fatten the bottom line and adept at filtering out patients with acute illnesses that might cost the insurers real money.

The solution Moore advocates is a national health care program, funded by a modest and progressive tax, and generically called "single-payer," meaning that the insurance industry's multiple payers are replaced by a single entity, usually a state or the federal government.

This system would provide universal access to health care for all Americans without the need for private, for-profit medical insurance and the huge financial burden that currently imposes in insurance premiums, deductibles, co-pays, pharmaceuticals, non-covered procedures and "negotiated rates" which somehow never seem to cover the entire bill.

And those people are the lucky ones; they have medical insurance of some sort and, therefore, aren't usually sentenced to die (Nataline Sarkisyan excepted) or be forced to use the local ER as their primary care facility. That happy fate falls to an estimated 47 million of their fellow Americans, who have no medical insurance at all and must therefore game the system to survive.

And we're not talking solely about the chronically unemployed (although why employment is a condition for receiving medical care remains unexplained and undiscussed). We're talking about Wal-Mart greeters and checkers, burger flippers, cab drivers, the self-employed, retail clerks, waiters, bartenders, most non-union workers in most trades and an endless list of service economy employees.

These people all have jobs; many have two or three. But they work for employers who can't afford today's obscene medical insurance premiums. Or they work for world-class cheapskates like Wal-Mart, which rakes in many billions each year, whose billionaire Walton family owners occupy a special pedestal among Forbes magazine's list of richest Americans, but who just can't seem to spare a few bucks to help keep their workers healthy and free from medical debt.

The very words "single-payer" give many of our more delicate citizens the vapors and drive many more into an apoplectic rage. These magic words also cause the last of the cold warriors to dissolve into a frothy lather of anti-pinko invective about subverting the invisible hand of the free market.

Considering the massive propaganda campaign waged non-stop by for-profit medicine and seconded by stern warnings of the "evils of socialized medicine" intoned by well-insured right-wing politicians and TV pundit hucksters, those kinds of adverse reactions aren't all that surprising. The buzzwords and visual cues and code phrases are hard-wired by the time kids hit the sixth grade. Go here for a scholarly treatment of the single-payer/for-profit debate.

In the case of the US medical system, we've been taught by our leading opinion-shaping institutions -- public relations, marketing and advertising -- that health care is a privilege to be auctioned off to the highest bidder and not a universal right to be shared by and for the general welfare of society.

Single-payer butts heads with the American archetype

We're so steeped in the rugged individualist, go-it-alone archetype that the idea of making common cause with "those other people" -- working toward a shared objective of improving quality of life for all members of society, not just those who can afford it -- is anathema and, increasingly, un-American. I fully expect some gasbag GOP presidential candidate, before primary season mercifully ends, to come up with something like, "If we go to a non-profit health care model, the terrorists win." Any bets?

class="MsoNormal">In fact, our apathy or antipathy toward those who don't share our looks, background, ideals, language, income, education or culture is driving the US toward an endgame that bears an uncanny resemblance to the Friedman/GOP-style unregulated free market model, with peace for none and antagonism toward all.

We're becoming a society of 300 million disconnected, semi-autonomous city-states, constantly at war with one another for the same dwindling supply of goods and jobs, and services and money, and square feet of pavement. A society too distracted and exhausted by the process of battling each other to notice the class war being waged -- and won -- against us all by the very people who designed and sanctified this system in the first place.

They've divided and conquered very well. No surprise, given the massive resources of the entire insurance industry, along with an approving pat-on-the-back from our "representatives" in Washington; it would be odd if they hadn't done a good job of keeping us at each others' throats and away from theirs.

The insurer as friend and savior

Distraction also helps produce the suspension of critical thinking required to believe in the most illogical premise of all: that America has the best medical care system in the world and has achieved that lofty position because the most voracious, profit-hungry, inhuman corporate institutions routinely ignore their very reason for existence, as well as a file cabinet full of SEC regulations and case law precedents that demand a publicly held corporation pursue profitability with single-minded, sociopathic disregard for basic human values. This is nothing less than a case study in the impossible, but it's the core tenet of the great American health care fairy tale nonetheless.

So are these corporations portrayed in media and pop culture as the enemy, as one would expect? Of course not; they're the solution. The US, unique in the world in its child-like belief good citizenship from corporations, expects these rapacious profit machines to completely abandon their chartered mandates requiring them to churn out ever more money for their stake-holders and, instead, act in the best interests of their customers.

Never mind that those two objectives are locked in inexorable conflict. Never mind that medical insurance is a zero-sum game and, when the insurer pays a claim, that's money grudgingly subtracted from the bottom line. Never mind that the insurance industry employs an army of obstructionists -- known ridiculously as claims adjusters -- whose main job it is to find some quasi-legal way to avoid paying out any money at all. Never mind the inevitable outcome of those conflicts: that the US isn't even in the top 30 according to the landmark 2000 World Health Organization study. Nope, never mind all that. The industry is our friend and savior, and where would we be without it? Other than healthier and happier, with more disposable income, that is.

As one California psychologist who serves on several managed care rate negotiating teams in the Santa Cruz area told me a while ago, �They have become adept at providing the illusion of health care, while avoiding the messy and expensive reality of having to actually deliver it -- to the extent legally possible. And you�d be amazed at what�s legally possible. Most of the time you can�t even sue them so, at some point, the consumer literally has no recourse but to beg for his or her life. Increasingly, those pleas fall on deaf ears as the race to maximize profits obliterates what�s left of basic human kindness.�

So much for the bad news. We now need to examine the nature of single-payer, universal-access health care: what it is, what it isn't, how it compares and contrasts with the US for-profit model.

So what exactly is single-payer and why is it better than what we have now?

Well, surprise, surprise, it's not socialized medicine. The federal government won't set up shop in every doctor's office and medical facility. Unlike the current system, in which privatized pests occupy a permanent position overlooking every doc's shoulder, governmental bureaucrats won't be making harassing calls to doctors offices every five minutes to second-guess whether a patient actually needs that procedure, or that test, or that prescription.

Let's say your doc has his own small family practice, which he runs as an LLC. He probably accepts payment from a couple dozen different insurance carriers. Does that mean he works for, say, Blue Cross or Cigna or Aetna? Of course not.

Under single-payer, he would no more work for the government than he now works for an insurance company. He gets paid by the feds, but runs his own business exactly as he has for many years.

So docs and hospitals continue to operate as they always have, although for-profit facilities must convert to non-profits. The truly revolutionary change is that now the feds foot the bill via a progressive tax that hits the rich hardest and the poor not at all.

In fact, if a patient just looks at the outward signs, things are very much as they've always been. You see the same doctors and support staff. You have blood drawn at the same labs. If you're seriously injured or suddenly become ill, you end up at the same ER. You see the same specialists. If surgery is required, the same group of medical professionals handles the entire process -- from pre-op to rehab. You find that service is about as fast, or as slow, as ever. And if you want a tummy tuck or nose job, you're still going to have to pay for it out of your own pocket.

The payer changes -- from any of hundreds of private insurance companies to a single entity -- but the process of providing and receiving medical care remains the same. Actually, it improves because single-payer eliminates the armies of bureaucrats the insurance industry employs in an effort to squeeze the last mil out of every penny by denying coverage or illegally reducing benefits.

Single-payer: the basics

The following is the nature of any single-payer health care system. Simple, direct, universal, free. And having tried the alternative and found it wanting in that it's currently killing around 18,000 people a year because making gobs of money is incompatible with covering subscribers' medical costs, it seems about time to admit our errors, dismantle the current tragicomedy and move all the way into the 21st Century.

Single-payer means:

One nation, one payer
Everybody in, nobody out
No exclusions for pre-existing conditions
No doctor bills
No hospital bills
No deductibles
No co-pays
No in network
No out of network
No corporate profits
No more medical bankruptcies

How to get there from here

The relationship of health care to health insurance is manufactured out of thin air by the US obsession with applying market-based, privatized solutions to nationalized, systemic problems. Therefore, it seems that to get to single-payer, we first need to abandon the propaganda and separate the idea of health care from the idea of health insurance.

Health care is what happens when patients and health care professionals interact to successfully diagnose and treat a medical condition or injury.

Health insurance is the protection money you have to pay the middleman to enable this transaction and keep you out of bankruptcy court.

Why would anyone want to give a single penny to some parasite intermediary that skims billions while doing absolutely nothing to provide health care?

Unfortunately, it takes a lot more than pennies to keep the beast fed. While Medicare, our unofficial single-payer system, runs at an annual overhead of about 3 percent, for-profit insurers typically squander between 25 and 40 percent of an estimated $2.2 TRILLION annual market. And that 25 to 40 percent -- which translates into between $550 billion and $880 billion each year -- does absolutely nothing to enable these companies to perform their alleged jobs, which is supposed to be covering medical expenses for their ratepayers.

The unbearable lightness of Democratic politicians

Equally unfortunate is the unwillingness of our elected representatives to even consider single-payer among the options for US health care reform. Among the Democratic presidential candidates, only Dennis Kucinich has advocated single-payer from the start. The rest are all talking about something called "expanded coverage," which is just code for "let's invite the single most destructive element in the old system to play a key role in the new one."

That's a bit like expecting a shark to develop qualms of conscience, renounce killing and turn vegan, despite millions of years of evolution that dictate its natural role as a rapacious, heartless, omnivorous predator. Kind of like an average American for-profit corporation.

Any new system that subordinates health care to the for-profit model carries the seeds of its own destruction. If insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different outcomes, then allowing these soulless gatekeepers to continue preying on the people of this country is truly insane. Such a system is virtually guaranteed to evolve into a new version of the same old deadly scam once the insurers stop glad-handing and get down to the serious business of making money. They may play nice at first, promising to mend their rapacious ways and act like humanitarians, but once they're inside the tent, they'll revert to form as certainly as that shark will continue to eat seals.

But that hasn't kept our alleged representatives in Congress and on the campaign trail -- Kucinich the lone exception -- from avoiding any mention whatsoever of the single-payer option. In 2003, Rep. John Conyers of Michigan introduced H. R. 676, dubbed the United States National Health Insurance Act, in an effort to remove private insurers from the US health care maze and install a national single-payer system in their place. The new system is essentially a well-funded version of Medicare, minus the age restriction.

It languished in committee for two years; Conyers then re-introduced H. R. 676 in 2005 and, according to information gleaned from Thomas.loc.gov, it has resumed its slow fall to the bottom of the House agenda. Like impeachment, single-payer remains "off the table," despite the poll numbers that say more than 70 percent of Americans want an end to for-profit medicine and want to replace it with single-payer.

And why is it off the table? For one outstanding example, let's take a look at Hillary Clinton's campaign contributors. The probable Democratic nominee and odds-on favorite to become the next president is an insurance industry money magnet. According to campaign finance figures submitted to the Federal Elections Commission and reported by Opensecrets.org, through the first nine months of 2007 she leads all presidential candidates, Democrats and Republicans, in money accepted from the insurance industry ($2.675M). She also leads the pack in money accepted from hospitals and nursing homes ($375K); from HMOs ($247K); from pharmaceutical companies ($274K); and from medical industry lobbyists ($570K).

As Bob Dole said way back in 1983, before he became the Senate's leading recipient of special interest money, "When these political action committees give money, they expect something in return other than good government." So that just about takes care of any possibility of true health care reform in a Clinton presidency, and virtually guarantees that any Clinton-sponsored health care "reform" plan will bend over backwards to accommodate the needs of the for-profit medical insurance industry.

What about quality of care?

Corporate mass media is ever busy safeguarding the interests of their masters and advertisers, so it's hardly surprising that there's serious opposition to single-payer spewing forth from the television sets and radios of America. People who watch network and cable TV, and actually believe they're well informed, internalize and then repeat industry claims that a single-payer system would lower quality of care, create shortages of medical staff and facilities and result in long waiting lists for even the most mundane procedures. Worst of all, it would be run by demon spawn employed by the federal government.

But, as usual, corporate mass media is lying through its bleached teeth. If that vision of health care hell were true, all other Western democracies would exhibit shorter average life spans, higher rates of cancer and heart disease, higher infant mortality rates, lower birth weights, fewer average healthy years, failing mental health programs and far more serious epidemiological incidents than does the US. Since the opposite is true in all cases, it seems fair to conclude that single-payer, universal-access works, this cobbled together disaster we call a health care system is not getting the job done and that we're being ill served by US media yet again. (Go here for 2004 data on how US per capita medical spending and health care outcomes rank against three of the major single-payer countries.)

The big con: we've already got national health care but the peasants don't get to use it

Perhaps the most galling stat of all: A Harvard Medical School study showed that, back in 1999, the US taxpayer shouldered the burden for just under 60 percent of all medical costs nationwide by being forced to fund health care for federal, state and local government employees. That included programs such as the federal employees health plan and those for state and local employees as well (through state, local and property taxes); the Cadillac coverage our fine representatives and Senators enjoy (which they say we can't have); the costs of covering ER expenses for those without insurance; the costs of running the Medicare program; and the state and local costs of various Medicaid programs.

That 60 percent represented $2,604 per capita at the time, which means government spending per-person on health care in the US was higher than total per capita health care expenditures in any other country in the world -- including those with single-payer, universal-access national health care systems. So we're paying for national health care; we're just not getting it.

This must end; single-payer is the answer, a well-funded Medicare system is the model, greed is the obstacle. Eliminate profits as a factor in life and death decisions, run the entire system based on serving human needs rather than those of shareholders and CEOs, and the profiteers will go elsewhere for their money.

# # #

This article first appeared in Online Journal on January 4, 2008

Endgame

2007-12-24T14:05:00.001-08:00

Life without parole at Abu Ghraib under the watchful eyes of our taxpayer funded official torturers. If you listen closely, you can hear him and Cheney and the rest squealing like the little piggies they are.

Back and to the left...

2007-11-03T00:38:00.000-07:00

False Flags over Portland?

2007-10-06T14:06:00.001-07:00

Impeachment Souffle: Still off the table?

2007-09-16T12:05:00.000-07:00

Although key to a balanced diet, House keeps impeachment off the menu

"…impeachment was something that we could not be successful with, and that would take up the time we needed to do some positive things to establish a record of our priorities and [Republican] short-comings. The president isn't worth it. He's not worth impeaching. We've got important work to do." Asked whether the Constitution is worth it, she replied, "Well, yeah, the Constitution is worth it if you can succeed."

-- Nancy Pelosi, from a 7/5/07 article by David Lindorff

The usual excuses
So much for that silly oath of office, eh Nancy? Last anyone heard, Ms. Nancy and Uncle Harry were so busy saving America through the really important legislative work they've been doing – indiscernible though it may be to the naked eye – that impeachment has had to remain on the sideboard and off the table, slowly congealing under one of those clear plastic cake covers.

As they tell us, there's no time for impeachment because it would detract from their laser-like focus on doing the people's business. Which, translated into our native tongue, is a frank admission that Congress can't walk and chew gum at the same time.

Then there's the "we don't have the votes" excuse. Keep in mind that this administration has never been called out on TV (which remains the sole or primary source of "news" for 92 percent of Americans) for its corruption, criminality, cronyism, unconstitutional power grabs, and commission of everything from the customary outrage du jour to high treason.

I have a feeling that if the American people were actually allowed to hear even a partial list of the outrages perpetrated in their names and with their tax dollars, the votes to convict would miraculously show up in the form of ass-chewed Senators whose constituents have told them to vote for conviction or look for another job next election.

My personal favorite is pleading with the more furious among us to give the investigations time to work. Never mind that subpoenas are routinely ignored, testimony is laughably incoherent, administration insiders routinely lie even on the rare occasions when they're placed under oath – and there are no consequences for any of this.

But rather than admitting they're not up to the job, we're told that these spineless incompetents in the House and Senate Judiciary committees – who managed to bungle a prima facie case for treason against at least three of these vampires, then have the nerve to wring their hands in anguished futility over those shockingly uncooperative BushCo meanies – are just keeping their powder dry for the coming showdown.

Which I suppose means High Noon on Pennsylvania Avenue is on the way, in which leading Democrats will, as is their custom, bring Neolithic tools to counter BushCo's M-4s and mobile rocket launchers.

Unacceptable but unaccountable
Meanwhile, the outrages keep on coming: impeachable offenses keep piling up; the latest figures report that our liberating presence in Iraq has murdered more than a million civilians and created between two and four million refugees; Iran is the next jewel in the PNAC's crown; Syria is in line for an oratorical upgrade in BushCo's demonization campaign; domestic repression is edging its way toward the golden age of Stalinism; and Cheney may have just become the world's newest nuclear power (Minot AFB; six cruise missiles; background here: missing nukes).

So don't buy the lies. Impeachment is the only effective way to curb this insane rush to bring about The Rapture. And despite the bleatings from the Democratic leadership, there are at least five really good reasons to impeach Bush and Cheney right now, along with the rest of this hideous administration:

1 Simple justice says they must be held accountable for their crimes, and punished to the full extent of the law.

2 Their totalitarian agenda must be exposed so that the American people understand the magnitude of their unprecedented criminality.

3 Somebody has to put a stop to their murderous agenda before they can nuke Iran or shed any more blood in Iraq or Afghanistan.

4 They must serve as an example of what will happen to the next right wing cabal if it tries to replace representative democracy with fascism.

5 Then there’s impeachment as the last means of self-defense. It’s getting a bit urgent, and all the pieces are in place to install a pure fascist dictatorship.

The Commander Guy: lord of all he surveys
Below are links to three presidential directives that the usually vigilant corporate media managed to miss, excerpts from particularly odious provisions within each of them, and articles or blog postings explaining their significance.

This is the most recent, signed July 17, 07, and sanctions property and liquid asset seizure for pretty much anyone BushCo deems a pain in the ass. Here's the text of the directive:

How to legally steal your stuff

Here's three particularly awful parts:

(c) "…the term "United States person" means any United States citizen, permanent resident alien, entity organized under the laws of the United States or any jurisdiction within the United States (including foreign branches), or any person in the United States."

(B) "…undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq or to provide humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi people."

Sec. 5. "I (therefore) determine that for these measures to be effective in addressing the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13303 and expanded in Executive Order 13315, there need be no prior notice of a listing or determination made pursuant to section 1(a) of this order."

And here’s comment on what this actually means in real life:

Outlawing the anti-war movement

The following is a link to two earlier directives, signed May 9, 07, both of which provide the framework and excuses for implementing martial law (which is what declaring a national state of emergency means to these swine). Note that Bush is to be the sole guarantor of the continuance of Constitutional law under these conditions, and that he’s the only one who gets to define what constitutes grounds for declaring a state of emergency.

Lock up the usual suspects

A couple of looks behind the curtain:

(b) "Catastrophic Emergency" means any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions;“ (NOTE: which means Katrina II, a California quake, a flood in the Midwest, a massive power outage, etc.)

(18) "The Secretary of Defense, in coordination with the Secretary of Homeland Security, shall provide secure, integrated, Continuity of Government communications to the President, the Vice President, and, at a minimum, Category I executive departments and agencies.” (NOTE: The shadow government stays in the loop.)

(6) "The President shall lead the activities of the Federal Government for ensuring constitutional government.” (NOTE: This is in recognition of Bush's well-documented veneration for Constitutional law.)

Comment on this blueprint for totalitarianism includes this article detailing the rise of fascism under Bush:

Imperialism and fascism are on the rise in the USA

This one is specific to the DHS and National Security directives:

Bush anoints himself ensurer of Constitutional government in emergency

This one deals with fabricated "false flag" attacks ascribed to "terrorists" (more on that below) as a pretext for nuking Iran:

Bush directive for a "catastrophic emergency" in America: Building a justification for waging war on Iran?

So we’ve already seen that the events that would trigger these security state actions are pretty arbitrary, and are defined by Little Lord Hissyfit himself. Meanwhile, there has been a great deal of “buzz” about upcoming terrorist activities against “the homeland.” Predictably, our free press is all over this one, since it gives them yet another opportunity to wave their pompoms and cheer on the Bush Death Machine.

DHS head Michael Chertoff spoke of his “gut” feelings about an impending attack recently (although most attributed his stomach pangs to a pastrami and Swiss sandwich of questionable vintage). Here’s Keith Olbermann’s take on Chertoff’s intestines:

Al Qaeda in Michael Chertoff's Stomach: The Terror of a "Gut Feeling"

However, unlike Chertoff, whose resume includes his utter uselessness during the Katrina aftermath, this guy might be worth paying attention to. A former Reagan administration insider credited, so to speak, with the invention of “Reaganomics,” author and national syndicated columnist Paul Craig Roberts is no flaming lefty propagandist. And if he’s concerned, we should be as well.

My wake-up call: Watch for another 9/11-WMD experience

About those false flag ops
A “false flag” operation is an extreme act of governmental propaganda that can consist of mass violence like 9/11, or a manufactured incident – such as the Gulf of Tonkin "attack" – perpetrated by elements in the US security apparatus and blamed on the contemporary US whipping boy and his shadowy band of swarthy evil doers.

So on 9/11 Osama was immediately identified as the chief perp -- although the entire 9/11 myth is seen in more enlightened and informed parts of the world as simply a crude ploy and convenient fairy tale to enable BushCo's resource and power grabs. And that Gulf of Tonkin incident blamed on the North Vietnamese leadership? History now tells us it never happened.

The intent of false flag operations is to manufacture consent for the next governmental outrage -- like bombing Afghan or Vietnamese civilians -- further demonize the designated bad guys, scare the hell out of the public, encourage rabid unquestioning patriotism and provide popular support for actions alleged necessary to prevent similar atrocities in the future -- which generally means a military attack on the usual disposable brown people, public acceptance of things like torture and "extraordinary renditions," along with suppression of political dissidents at home. Roberts says this about the possibility of BushCo pulling off another one of these false flag black ops:

“Alternatively, false flag “terrorist” strikes could be orchestrated in the US. The Bush administration has already infiltrated some dissident groups and encouraged them to participate in terrorist talk, for which they were arrested. It is possible that the administration could provoke some groups to actual acts of violence.”

In the case of the 9/11 “attacks,” reprisals included invading Afghanistan and Iraq, occupying both, causing massive civilian casualties and incidentally providing the muscle for the US to deploy a huge, permanent military presence in the heart of oil country.

And US citizens got their own reprisals: Patriot Acts I and II, the Military Commissions Act, dozens of "signing statements" Bush uses to ignore any parts of legislation he doesn't feel like complying with, the recent executive orders detailed above, NSA spying, FBI spying, the TIPS program which seeks to deputize at least five million domestic snitches to do the NSA's dirty work for them… All kinds of stuff that so enthralls and delights the Third Reich leadership that they're doing the wave in their particularly warm corner of hell.

So… still think impeachment isn’t appropriate? Martial law, asset seizures, unending proxy wars for the benefit the petroleum industry, oceans of civilian blood flooding the Middle East, ever-increasing war budgets designed to enrich arms manufacturers while stealing money to fund what remains of the New Deal, the end of the great democratic republic experiment, terror terror all the time...

“It Can’t Happen Here,” as Sinclair Lewis titled his novel that demonstrates the exact opposite, and chronicles a rapid US devolution from representative democracy to fascist dictatorship.

Dancing to the PNAC tune
Oh, sure it can. In fact, the whole thing is spelled out in the right wing think tank Project for a New American Century's (PNAC) 2000 manifesto called "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century." You can download it as a PDF file by clicking here. Scroll down to the bottom and you'll find the link to the report.

Before you read it, it might be interesting to look at the signatories at the end of the document. You'll recognize quite a few names, such as Stephen Cambone, Robert, Fred and Donald Kagan, the ubiquitous William Kristol, "Scooter" Libby and Paul Wolfowitz.

PNCA members past and present who didn't sign that study but who pop up elsewhere in various propaganda pieces include: Elliott Abrams, Madeleine Albright, Richard Armitage, John Bolton, Gary Bauer, Bill (morality czar) Bennett, William F. Buckley, Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Steve Forbes, Frank Gaffney, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Charles Krauthammer, Barry McCaffrey, Richard Perle, Norman Podhoretz, Dan Quayle (for comic relief?), Zalmay Khalilzad (former ambassador to Iraq and now to the UN), Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Weyrich, James Woolsey and Dov Zacheim (credited with losing about $1.3 trillion while comptroller at the Pentagon).

The deep thinkers on these lists, judged solely by the massive death and destruction their actions have visited on the planet over the decades, are indictable as war criminals by the International Court at The Hague.

Taken together, they seem to comprise the advance force for malevolent invaders from some distant planet, coming soon to eliminate all disposable brown and black people (ongoing), demolish all interdependent ecosystems (with gusto), plunder poor countries for raw materials (check), create history's most overdrawn debtor nation (check), harness invisible rays to destroy the critical thinking capacities of Americans (see talk radio), use TeeVee to keep Americans focused on celebrity worship and sex scandals (check) and enslave the latest endangered species, the middle class, through debt and job insecurity (check).

In other words, sow the seeds for an Orwellian world based on constant war, official lies that must be believed, flexible revisionist history, the requirement for strict doctrinal and ideological conformity, banning of books, sexual repression, public displays of universal hatred for a designated demon, domestic spying as a given, super-patriotism as social control mechanism -- and the ever-present threat of a trip to Room 101, where the harshest punishments imaginable are reserved for dissenters or those engaging in "anti-social" behavior.

Does any of this sound familiar?

Just give these maniacs time to put a few more minor pieces in place and we'll suddenly find our thoughts enclosed by virtual razor wire, our savings donated to the GOP, our houses sold to pay for the voracious war machine, our jobs exported, our families broken up -- and Orwell's vision finally realized: As O'Brien says to Winston Smith, "If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever."

Then imagine your face under some BushCo fascist thug's boot. Think maybe it's time to fight back?

# # #

Setting the record straight: observations on universal health care from actual Canadians

2007-08-30T07:39:00.000-07:00

“There are only two ways to allocate any good or service: through prices, as is done in a market economy, or lines dictated by government, as in Canada's system. The socialist claim is that a single-payer system is more equal than one based on prices, but … Canadian health care is equal only in its shared scarcity.” – Wall Street Journal editorial, June 13, 2005.

Thus spoke the leading apologist for US-style vampire capitalism. And that’s a microcosm of what most Americans hear about the Canadian health care system. It’s inefficient, slow, technologically backward, understaffed and, of course, socialist – proving that the ideological demons that provided the rationale for the Cold War can be re-purposed to inspire fear and distrust of virtually anything the American plutocracy deems threatening to its continued economic dominance and massive revenue stream.

The latest smear campaign, engendered by "Sicko," Michael Moore's box office hit documentary/expose on the US health care system, has been hilarious for many Canadians, although some express frustration at watching their successful single-payer, universal-access health care system get trashed in US mass media by dozens of well-paid propagandists or the idiots who believe them, and whose claims of Canadian inadequacy go largely unchallenged.

Lucky Americans: CMcL's saga
About a month ago, I got the following email from CMcL, who lives in Florida, detailing experiences in getting a simple series of blood tests – and getting the insurance company to pay for them.

“I am in the middle of dealing with three medical problems. In order to get some simple blood tests performed this week, I had to do the following:

1. Phone call to primary insurer to ensure coverage
2. Phone call to secondary out-of-state contractor to find approved lab
3. Phone call to doc's office to get procedure code – not known
4. Phone call to first (erroneously chosen) lab to get procedure codes
5. Phone call to secondary insurer to give procedure codes. Lab is not approved even though the hospital it is attached to is approved
6. Phone call to approved labs to find out whether I need new form – no answer at either facility
7. Series of six runaround voice mail messages at lab 1 – after reaching correct person, I get cut off
8. Series of four runaround voice messages at lab 2 – asked to be called back and never was
9. Direct call to lab 2 to confirm procedure code – must have new form from doc
10. Phone call to doc to get new forms – two voice mail messages
11. Phone call to lab 1 – no new form required

“All of this required two hours of my time. For one blood test. In all I was transferred or left a voice message or had to listen to menu options a total of 22 times. For one blood test.”

All this abuse is expensive; to keep CMcL and spouse insured, it costs them more than $11,000 annually in premiums, deductibles, co-pays and the usual arbitrary "gotchas" the industry loves to spring on us. That sum doesn't include one-time costs such as the $3000 out of pocket expenses incurred earlier this year for "routine tests." And then there are pharmaceuticals; if your doc prescribes non-generics, you're probably going to be spending $40 to $150 for a month's supply. Sometimes a lot more.

Well thank the deities CMcL isn't in Canada, where we're told the experience at the hands of the soulless state-run health care system would make the US for-profit model look like nirvana. Or possibly not…

Here’s a weird idea: let’s ask some Canadians
Given all the horror stories we in the US hear about waiting times, lines, inefficiency, understaffing and such, I decided to ask Canadians how similar blood work would be handled there, what it would cost, what the waits would be like, and so on. So I asked Canadian participants on a couple of popular political/social-issues bulletin boards to react to CMcL’s story.

Just regular people from nearly every province – no government officials, no spin, no propaganda, no weird agendas. As it turned out, their sole common denominator was the desire to set the record straight and, in the process, inform their southern neighbors that we’re being lied to every single day by paid apologists and cheer leaders for the status quo.

I got 24 separate responses. Unfortunately, all of them won’t fit here, so I included only the 12 replies that focused narrowly on blood tests in particular, rather than using other medical procedures as evidence to refute the argument for the US market-based model.

(And there were quite a few of the latter; one from Angiej, a Canadian temporarily sentenced to living in Houston who maintains that her father in Quebec would have died under the US system because he would have been denied coverage and couldn't have afforded the procedure out-of-pocket. It's a constant source of worldwide amazement that lack of medical insurance in the richest country in human history can be a capital crime.)

I don’t pretend these stories are representative of the experiences of all Canadians in similar circumstances. Nor do I pretend this is a random sample large enough to draw statistically valid conclusions. It pays no attention to demographics, so responses can't be weighted accordingly. I didn’t ask a series of scripted questions. In short, the whole thing is just anecdotal. (For serious statistical analysis, go here to pore over the numbers compiled by the World Health Organization comparing the overall effectiveness of 191 countries' health care systems. More on that study below.)

All respondents preferred confidentiality, so screen names are the only identifiers used here. Each respondent is also identified by gender and province. Date and time stamps from emails are included. All statements are verbatim, except where edited for length or clarity (in italics). So, anecdotal or not, I think you’ll see a common theme emerge fairly quickly…

In their own words
We don't often hear the unvarnished truth in a country that has perfected the art of spin. But when a dozen people who don't know each other all say pretty much the same thing on the same subject, the circumstantial evidence mounts up quickly. I suppose they could all be in on some vast socialist conspiracy to subvert capitalism by ruining the best health care system in the world – as the US mess is routinely rated by our chest-thumping mass media shills. But probably not… Read on and decide for yourself.

daleo – male, Alberta
Thu Jul-12-07 01:34 PM

I haven't had a blood test for a long time, but my experience has been:

Go to doctor.
Doctor gives you form.
Go to clinic, get blood test.
No bills.

Spazito – female, Alberta
Wed Jul-11-07 10:53 AM

At my doctor's office, after an examination, etc., my doctor would fill in a form detailing the tests to be done and give me a copy to give the lab technician. In the small city I lived in, prior to moving to a larger center last year, I would have to go from my doctor's office up to the hospital where the lab is located, give the form to the clerk manning the desk at the lab and, either wait while the lab technician finished up prior work or go right in and have the blood work done.

After that is complete, I go home and await a call from my doctor's office, usually within the week, telling me the results.

There are no phone calls needed to okay the tests or anything else. There are no payments asked for or made.

SidDithers – male, Ontario
Wed Jul-11-07 11:01 AM

If your family doc wants to test your blood, they will write out a testing requisition form, indicating the type of testing to be done. The patient then takes that requisition form to either their local hospital, or one of a number of private labs to have the sample taken.

We're fortunate in that there is a lab that operates out of the waiting room at our doctor's office. My daughter needed a blood test not too long ago, and it was very easy. At the appointment with the family doc, we were given the blood test requisition, and then we walked across the waiting room to the lab office, waited about 10 minutes for her turn, and then had vials of blood drawn from her arm. No phone calls to insurers, no hassles and no cost to us.

Lautremont – male, Manitoba
Thu Jul-12-07 10:36 AM

I … decided to get a check-up finally after several years and much prodding from my wife. So I had to get a gamut of blood tests, and did so this past Monday. I walked down a couple of blocks to a doctor, having made no appointment. I showed them my provincial health card. They copied down the number, took my blood, and away I went.

I'd brought along a book to read, because after all, wait times in Canada are horrendous, right? I mean, that's what the right wing would have us believe. I didn't have time to read more than a paragraph before I was called in, and I was in and out of the place within 15 minutes. Free and easy like it ought to be. Yes, I know I pay for it with my taxes, but nothing will make you happier about paying taxes (and not nearly such onerous ones as you might think) than medical care that doesn't bust your bank account.

ducati588 – male, Ontario
Sun Jul-22-07 12:43 AM

In Canada the doctor completes a card (5X8) for all of the required blood tests. You take this card to a blood/X-ray clinic, which is usually in the same facility, and the clinic staff draw blood as required. The results are sent to the doctor within a few days or quicker if necessary.

Virtually no wait in the clinic, and the tests are covered under the government plan. The tests are free.

Glarius – female, Ontario
Thu Jul-12-07 10:46 AM

This is very timely... I just went in this morning for blood tests....

The procedure here is this: My doctor, (who we choose ourselves and not the government, despite what right-wingers in the U.S.A. claim) on my visit yesterday gave me a requisition for blood tests which I took into the local lab this morning. The tests were performed promptly (I waited about 20 minutes) there were a few people ahead of me. That was it. No appointment necessary for the lab and NO COST. This is about the 8th time I've had these tests and it's always the same. The case you describe here (CMcL's experience) is absolutely ridiculous. No patient should have to go through that kind of (nonsense).

Somehow or other it seems to me that the right wing conservatives in your country have convinced your citizens that Universal Health Care is akin to that devil...communism… I keep hearing them say that our government runs health care.... choosing our doctors and deciding on treatment, etc. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Our doctors and hospitals make ALL the decisions and send the bills to the government. The government PAYS and that's it.

GET UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE AMERICA! YOU GOOD PEOPLE DESERVE WHAT THE REST OF THE CIVILIZED WORLD HAS!!!!!!!

Hand – male, Nova Scotia
Thu Jul-12-07 11:00 AM

I get blood work twice a year. Here's how it goes.

1. My doctor fills out a form specifying the tests she wants done.

2. I take the form to the hospital where blood work is done.

3. I take a number deli-style, wait until it's called, hand in the form and show them my provincial health card.

4. I sit back down and wait until my name is called.

5. I go in and get my blood samples drawn.

6. I leave. I don't stop at the cashier because there's no cashier.

7. The lab faxes the results to my doctor. I make an appointment to review them.

The whole process takes maybe an hour, maybe less, maybe more. Depends on how busy they are. Everyone does it this way. Nobody jumps the line, and as far as I know, nobody is denied service. If your health card is expired, they tell you to get a new one (free), but you still get the tests.

End of story. It's based on the assumption that my doctor knows what tests I need and that no one is silly enough to ask for unnecessary blood work. What a concept.

There are no fees for these tests – the service is paid for via tax revenues.

gula – female, Quebec
Wed Jul-18-07 08:56 PM

Pretty much the same (as Hand) here in Québec, except that I go to a local community clinic (CLSC) for the blood samples as it is much faster than the hospital. They, the CLSC then send the samples to the hospital which then sends the results to my doctor and so on. And of course, there is no cost involved.

ironflange – male, Alberta
Tue Jul-17-07 10:58 PM

I get mine done four times a year. Other than that trifling difference, my experiences are identical to yours (referring to Hand, above). The only variation is (4); I've learned the best times to go and don't even have to sit down the odd time. I also have one particular test that has a standing order on it, I can go in anytime and get it with no form or anything. Oh yeah, I've forgotten my card at home a couple of times, so it's a waste of twenty minutes when I have to retrieve it.

Bragi – male, Ontario
Fri Jul-13-07 07:43 AM

I just had my annual check up and my doctor ordered the usual tests (actually, about a dozen or so specific tests were checked off on the list.) The process went exactly as others here have described. It took about 45 minutes in total at a walk-in, first-come-first-served lab.

One thing I did have to pay for, though, is the (quite unreliable) blood test for prostate cancer, which for some bizarre reason is not covered by the Ontario health plan. I think paid $25 for that test.

MrPrax – male, British Columbia
Fri Jul-13-07 08:25 AM

My mom had a blood test last week – she went to her GP for her check-up and he sent her for the usual blood test at a lab she likes to go to. No phoning involved, other than maybe phoning the doctor's office for the test results.

I think the only time anyone has to call their provincial Medicare office is to inform them of a change of address or to get their premiums (in BC) adjusted because their income changed drastically and have to apply for a subsidized rate.

GirlinContempt – female, Manitoba
Tue Jul-31-07 06:51 AM

A couple of weeks ago, I called my doctor. I got in to see her within a few days. We talked about my concerns. She wrote me a little slip for blood work. I went down three floors in the clinic, sat down, and 15 minutes later had my blood taken. One week later, my doctor had the results. No money changed hands.

Stats back up the stories
That's a dozen stories from the socialist hellhole to the north, where blood work doesn't seem to exact quite the mental and financial toll it does in the lower 48. But these tales don't exist in a vacuum; they're supported by mountains of demographic and epidemiological evidence that sits in a gigantic World Health Organization database. When the WHO did its groundbreaking 2000 study, the US ranked 37th overall in a compilation of key indices that include average life span, average disease-free life span, average birth weight, infant mortality rate, access to necessary health care services, cost of those services and so forth. Thirty-seventh.

Which puts us among such famous mainstays of medical superiority as Slovenia (#38), a small part of the former Yugoslavia, and Domenica (#35), a Caribbean island nation of about 70,000 people comprising 289.5 square miles. And I think it's safe to speculate that the US has fallen further in those rankings since 2000 because of growing inequity of access and steeply rising per capita costs.

Canada was ranked 30th at the time, but there are interim studies based on WHO methodology that suggest it’s climbing into the top 10. And who was number one? Think “freedom fries” and “freedom toast.”

A word on the democratization of health care
Here's a picture you'll never see in America: a member of Congress waiting in line with the commoners for his turn at the doctor's office. Here it's generally understood that the rich, the powerful and the well-connected have access to better quality health care than what's available to the serfs, and that's accepted by many as just another perk to which America's modern feudal lords are entitled.

Canadians see things a little differently. Let's let Hand of Nova Scotia describe his experiences under a single-tier, equal-access health care system:

"One time I needed a chest x-ray, which is done by the same procedures that I and others have described – get the form, go to the hospital, hand it in, show your card and so forth.

"Since this is a public first-come-first-serve service, there's often a bit of a lineup, which there was this day (took maybe half an hour from the time I walked in the door). Anyway, while I was waiting in line, I noticed my federal MP (member of the House of Commons, equivalent to a US congressman) also waiting in line in his suit next to the usual lineup of people in jeans and t-shirts or whatever. He didn't jump the line, didn't think of pulling rank on anyone and was content to hang out until his name was called like everyone else.

"I talked to him on the way out since I had voted for him and liked what he said in Commons – he was just there to have an old basketball injury checked on. That's pretty much the way it works in a near single-tier system – to the greatest extent possible, everybody's equal and gets the same level of service.

"That's perhaps the greatest benefit, in my opinion, of a single-payer universal health care system – it's as near to fully democratic as it can be (given that folks with money and/or education generally tend to be able to take better care of themselves). In that way, it helps bind together all strata of society in very real and very important ways. I think people are aware of this and do not begrudge the taxes they pay for the health system, even though the benefits may go more to others than themselves."

Amen.

# # #

A version of this article first appeared in Online Journal August 13, 2007. Go here and here to read my other articles on US health care in the Journal, or just scroll down a bit and read them here.

A blast from the past

2007-08-20T08:25:00.000-07:00

A little background...

With the Iraq disaster bankrupting the country, both morally and financially, and Iran next in line for a little tough love, it might be a good idea to revisit how in hell this country got started on this path to unapologetic imperialism, naked resource grabs, the PNAC ideal of "full-spectrum dominance," the fear and loathing of much of the planet and the gradual devolution of George W. Bush from useless blithering idiot to soul-shriveled, blood-drenched sociopath.

Below is an article I wrote in the week after 9/11/01, in which I attempted to point out the similarities between selling a product and selling a war. As I watched the lies and phony rationales unravel during the run-up to the Iraq invasion, and cringe as the very same set of unsubstantiated accusations are now hurled at Iran, it seemed a good time to revisit the influences of salesmanship and marketing on a population already pre-conditioned to accept the outrageous claims of advertising and, rather than apply critical thinking skills to the issue, respond by simply buying the product.

And because consumerism is its own reward, the cycle repeats for every single "hot" new product for which advertisers can create buzz, resulting in the itch to buy and then scratching that itch with a trip to Walmart. Return home, fondle the new gizmo for awhile, turn on the TV, watch more embarrassingly childish advertising, develop a new itch and so forth. Rinse and repeat ad infinitum.

So, without further babbling, here's a little trip down memory lane.

September 17, 2001

War on Sale: Buy Now while Supplies Last

By Warren Pease

The public is galvanized as if Hitler and Tojo had returned from hell to finish the job of pulverizing America and installing a fascist state fronted by the Japanese emperor. Polls show nearly universal sentiment to kick ass and take names – and the names don’t really matter. We’ll lash out at any wog in a pinch, even the guy we bought fresh fruit from two weeks ago at the corner market. There’s blood lust in the land and it must be satisfied.

Which is hardly surprising. We live in a country in which our primary duty is stoking the engines of commerce by consuming the fad du jour as defined by pop culture and branded by TV advertising. So when the major cable and broadcast networks run 24/7 advertising for a single product – in this case, a US war against Islamic radicals – it shouldn’t be too shocking that more than 90 percent of American consumers respond with wild approval.

In the hours and days immediately following the atrocities of September 11, Americans were subjected to what amounts to an endless branding campaign, featuring some of the most powerful images ever seen on television. Relentless, sustained, moving and graphic, television pounded home the message that America had been horribly violated and that it must exact revenge. Within hours, a suspect was named and a strategy articulated.

Using a strategy from Marketing 101, the networks first defined the problem and then sold the solution. The problem was international terrorism, personified by Osama bin Laden and his shadowy band of Islamic fundamentalists, and the only solution proposed – at least the only one not immediately dismissed as quixotic or unworkable – was massive military response.

By defining the solution along such a narrow continuum, network advertising virtually assured that Americans would buy the Bush administration’s product. Throw in the testosterone quotient – manly American men doing manly things to unmanly swarthy cowards in far away places we can't identify on a map – and the administration had a real hit on its hands.

War or widgets: creating the buzz

But simply substitute "widgets" for "war" and see what happens. Beginning at 9:00 A.M. EDT on September 11, manufacturing giant Glutco Inc., the company that manufacturers and distributes the world’s most sought-after widgets, launched a non-stop advertising campaign on all major television networks. Within hours, imbued with THE MESSAGE, Americans roared their approval, left their jobs and homes and drove directly to the nearest widget outlet. They didn’t need proof that Glutco’s widgets were superior; most of them didn’t even want or need widgets. But the clarion call of mass marketing won’t be ignored.

Shelves emptied in minutes; trucks lined up at the loading docks to deliver more widgets; those also sold out. Even though the campaign had been planned for months, mighty Glutco’s distribution system was unable to keep pace with demand. Americans simply couldn’t get enough widgets. Special edition widgets showed up on eBay at preposterous prices, then were bid up several times over. Widget collectors found themselves in demand as instant celebrities, being asked weighty questions on national television by a fawning media.

Daily newspapers and weekly magazines kept the public salivating. Publishers happily saw their pages eaten up by lucrative, image-intensive Glutco advertising. Entertainment trade rags reported a series of made-for-TV movies in the works; marginal actors and off-key singers kept themselves in the public eye for another few weeks by shilling for Glutco widgets; even Glutco’s chief competitors expressed reluctant admiration for their adversary, since the heightened popularity of widgets had expanded the market for their products as well.

True, the campaign was the most expensive marketing exercise in history, but it really wasn’t much of a gamble. After all, if American adults will fight over the last Cabbage Patch doll, even though the Cabbage Patch brand was sold primarily to kids through Saturday morning cartoons, it was reasonably predictable that they’d respond with unprecedented fervor to a non-stop harangue by analysts and experts, blow-dried anchors and "on the ground" reporters. Even with the sound off, the images were just too compelling to ignore.

And the numbers proved the hypothesis. Consumers bought $40 billion worth of widgets in the first week alone. Many ran their credit cards up to the limit and many more said they’d make any sacrifice to buy more widgets in the coming months. They took second mortgages on their houses; they spent their kid’s college funds; they looted their retirement accounts; those with disposable income bought bigger SUVs to carry more widgets. And Glutco’s major shareholders smiled the satisfied smirk of the seriously rich.

And so it goes in pop culture America, where the invisible hand of the market occasionally pops into public view -- whether shilling for widgets or war -- where allegiance is bought and sold like a used car, and where operators are always standing by.

A version of this article appeared at bushandcheneysuck.com in mid-September, 2001.

Health care wars and the lies the for-profit racketeers tell us

2007-07-28T12:25:00.001-07:00

Health care is either a right or a privilege: Ultimately, that’s going to be the central question regarding any efforts at health care reform

As Michael Moore’s “Sicko” continues to draw huge crowds and spawn spontaneous health care reform advocacy groups all across the country, the health care industry is planning to hit back hard.

They’ll attack Moore’s credibility, discredit the movie’s core thesis, hammer on the horrors of government control, provide a list of uplifting bullet points detailing for-profit medicine’s contributions to the good of society, conduct endless push polls, create case studies detailing the horrors of other countries’ health care systems, and build a phony but cogent case for continuing the American way of medicine, along with its disgracefully inequitable delivery system.

For-profit medicine – insurance, medical facilities, specialized equipment manufacturers and the like – was a $1.3 TRILLION business as far back as 2000, and it’s safe to say that figure has only increased in the seven intervening years. The companies who have a stake in maintaining that massive revenue stream will do whatever it takes to convince Americans that they would be crazy to modify or dismantle “the best health care system in the world.” As always, PR and advertising will be the preferred weapons of mass disinformation.

Back in the early ‘90s, the “we’re number one” myth’s public faces were a folksy old couple named Harry and Louise, who polluted TV advertising every evening for months reciting industry propaganda and spreading fear of “radical” change that could place our very lives in jeopardy. All this as the ill-fated Clinton health care plan gradually sank beneath the combined weight of its own complexity and the groundswell of public opinion, taught to them by Harry and Louise, against reforming such a perfect system.

This time though, things are a bit different. Anger is everywhere and sharply focused on the source of the problem. Nearly everyone’s had their own personal HMO moment by now, and it’s likely going to take more than the estimated $100 million Harry and Louise campaign to sway public opinion industry’s way. But never underestimate the vast amounts of money the health care racket is willing to spend to keep its front-row seat on the gravy train. They would have spent 10, 20, 30 times the $100 million Harry and Louise cost and still considered it a bargain, given that they retained their ability to bilk consumers out of trillions for another decade and a half. And that kind of money buys some very clever, skillful media strategists and professional opinion manipulators.

Observers of the fine art of manufacturing consent are eagerly waiting to see how the health care industry slithers its way out of this latest assault on its revenue stream. One thing is certain, as the mass media sages like to say: If things get serious enough that Congress actually moves Dennis Kucinich’s HR 676 single-payer, universal-access plan out of committee and onto the floor for a vote, all of us will be the targets and/or victims of the most egregious assault on critical thinking and common sense since the Supreme Court ordered the Florida recount stopped because the results might be prejudicial to Bush’s contention that he had won the state’s electoral votes. And that’s a tough one to beat.

Here are some of the industry's most treasured talking points to scare us into compliance and empty our pockets in service to the god of market-based medicine.

The “S” word
Might as well get it out in the open, because as soon as somebody raises the topic of a taxpayer-funded universal-access health care system for the U.S., the chorus starts bleating “socialized medicine; socialized medicine” like a combination of Chicken Little and the last Cold Warrior, until everybody starts looking under the bed for Commies and subversives.

Fact is, we’ve already got socialized medicine. It’s called Medicare, and it’s absolutely astounding how the subversive evils of socialized medicine for people aged 64 years, 364 days, 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds are magically transformed into an untouchable entitlement program when the clock ticks one more time.

It’s both comic and tragic to watch our elected representatives fall all over themselves in an effort to defend Medicare while denying its very nature. Comic because only a clown would try so hard to avoid the taint of socialized anything while advocating tirelessly for that very thing. And tragic because the rest of the world doesn’t have to do the free market orthodoxy dance, and gets better and far more affordable health care as a result. We can only look beyond our borders with appreciation and envy as other populations get healthier and ours gets more sickly and desperate by the year.

And here's the crowning insult: The US taxpayer already foots the bill for the bulk of all health care expenditures in this country. A seminal Harvard Medical School study shows that, in 1999, the US taxpayer shouldered the burden for just under 60 percent of all health care costs nationwide. That percentage represented $2,604 per capita at the time, which means government spending on health care in the US was higher than total per capita health care expenditures in any other country -- including those with single-payer, universal-access national health care systems. So we're paying for national health care; we're just not getting it.

More of the usual scare tactics
In late 1993, during the alleged U.S. health care debate, a conservative academic and columnist named Thomas V. DiBacco wrote an article that was picked up by a number of daily newspapers and whose headline read, “Health Reform Could Kill Individualism.” This is in sharp contrast, one supposes, to the current system, which only kills actual people while leaving prevailing free market ideological mythology in place.

But this is the kind of inane argument advanced by privatized health care apologists, as if anyone in his or her right mind gives a tinkers damn about the merits of individualism, American-style, while they’re busy dying on a feces-stained, urine-soaked mattress because they exceeded their lifetime benefits cap and couldn’t afford a hospital bed where they might get treatment, or even a hospice where they might at least die with dignity.

Other phantom phobias and industry favorites include:

• Single-payer will force us to ration health care. Nonsense. Health care is already rationed in this country. Or more accurately, it’s auctioned off to the highest bidder. To the shock of no one, study after study shows that the rich tend to recover from illness far faster and far more completely than the middle class, who in turn are doing way better than the poor. A single-payer plan erases those class distinctions, which may well offend the 4 or 5 percent of the population able to pay out-of-pocket for premium medical care, but will put the rest of us on an equal footing.

Poverty as health risk is borne out by a late-‘90s Tufts University study, which concludes that poverty is the single most dangerous risk factor in America – ahead of genetic predisposition, bad habits, dangerous jobs, extreme sports and poor diet combined.

Which leads us to the inevitable: According to a study released in May 2002 by the Minnesota-based research firm Institute of Medicine, approximately 18,000 Americans die each year because they lack the basic medical coverage necessary to get proper health care. Only in America is lack of private health insurance a capital crime.

• Single-payer will cost too much and raise taxes. Nonsense. The current debacle costs each American more than anyone else, anywhere else in the industrialized world. And payment doesn’t end at the pocketbook; there are some things you simply can’t put a price tag on, like recovering from an illness because you had the right care from the right people at the right time. Managed care, by making sure that none of the above happens without throwing a huge bureaucratic hissy fit, is simply a cruel hoax. After all, if they were so effective at controlling costs, health insurance premiums wouldn’t be rising by double-digit percentages each year.

• Single-payer will kill choice of physicians. Nonsense. Managed care killed your freedom to choose a long time ago. If your doc is in the plan, great. If not, you’re paying a fair percentage of your own medical bills along with your bloated premiums. Single-payer, on the other hand, doesn’t place any restrictions on who you see, despite industry propaganda to the contrary. And logically, if all docs are operating under the same rules and are paid by the same entity, why should there be any questions about freedom of choice? The argument makes no sense.

• Single-payer will create an army of government bureaucrats who will have control over our health care needs. Nonsense. There’s already an army of bureaucrats in charge of our health care. The difference is, private health care industry bureaucrats advance up the corporate food chain largely on the basis of how well they control costs – which is code for how often they’re able to deny coverage without incurring lawsuits. Public bureaucrats, such as Medicare administrators, are also graded on how well they measure up to their job descriptions, although those descriptions rarely include how effective they are at killing off their clientele.

• Single-payer will turn over our health care to the people who run the post office. Nonsense. For all their well-documented inefficiency, the fact is the Feds do many things pretty well – one of which is the Medicare system, which only takes about two or three cents on the dollar to administer, as opposed to the 25 to 40 percent overhead we pay the industry parasites so they can deny us coverage.

Moreover, many things are just too important to be subjected to the bottom-line mentality. Police and fire departments are perfect examples. Both are single-payer, universal-access services provided to the public through a modest tax on all so that individuals don't have to pay for private security or face bankruptcy because of a giant bill for privatized fire-fighting services if their house goes up in smoke.

And really, why would anyone want the air traffic control system privatized? There you are suspended seven miles in the air when the captain comes on the intercom and tells you that Glutco Air Traffic Solutions, Inc. has just laid off 40 percent of its workforce, including most of the people who staffed the control tower at the airport you're heading to.

Industry happy talk and the leaked BC/BS memo
To balance the fear mongering, there will also be continual recitation of happy talk platitudes about how the health care industry is constantly striving to improve service, expand covered procedures, control costs and otherwise incrementally improve the Best Health Care System In The World.

Here are a few “positive spin” talking points excerpted from a leaked Blue Cross/Blue Shield memo written by a communications VP named Barclay Fitzpatrick regarding the anticipated “Sicko” backlash.

• The Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association (BCBSA) and the 39 Blue Cross and Blue Shield companies are committed to improving the U.S. healthcare system for our nearly 100 million members through continuous innovation that reflects the ever-changing healthcare landscape and the needs of the consumer.

• The Blues recognize the need for improvement of both the coverage and delivery of healthcare. But the divisive tone set forth by Michael Moore and his movie "Sicko" is not helpful. Positive change to our healthcare system can be best achieved through shared responsibility, not recrimination. To ensure Americans have access to the best healthcare that is both timely, efficient, and of high quality, requires the collective contribution of all stakeholders -- consumers, providers, employers and the government.

• The Blues participation in the Health Coverage Coalition for the Uninsured is a primary example of how the broader healthcare community is working together to reduce the number of uninsured in the United States.

• The Blues are working on myriad initiatives that ensure Americans have access to quality and affordable healthcare. Each day, Blue Plans across the country are bringing healthcare value to their members in a number of ways such as new advances in health information technology and greater access to cost and quality information.

The Blues, indeed. You can read the entire memo here, which includes the priceless, oft-quoted line “You would have to be dead to be unaffected by Moore’s movie,” and links to a letter from Moore in which he challenges Fitzgerald to a public debate – which will happen about the time my mortgage is paid off.

Beyond the PR wars
After the character assassinations and scare tactics and ads extolling the overarching wonderfulness of the for-profit system, we’ll eventually be presented with a clear choice: Continue to squander huge sums of money on a scam that is systemically incapable of providing decent health care for all. Or follow the lead of every single other industrialized country – and quite a few who aren’t even close to industrialization – and create a fair, universal-access, single-payer system that doesn’t limit its services to those with the fattest wallets.

Most of the rest of the world has decided in favor of the latter. Thus far, the US has taken the former position. It’s up to us, the tens of millions of individuals most affected by this hideous, malevolent, soulless system, to force our representatives to obey their constituents because, other than a few gutsy people like Dennis Kucinich, Congress certainly isn’t going to do this on its own. After all, when has altruism ever been a property of governments, particularly when so many of our alleged representatives are so well paid by the health care racketeers to look the other way.

The for-profit medical system, along with its accomplices and employees in Congress and the executive branch, has managed to con Americans into believing and even parroting the industry's talking points that tout the inherent wonderfulness of privatized health care. This is a sad tribute to the death of critical thinking and the ascendancy of PR and advertising to take its place.

But despite the best efforts of our bought-and-paid-for political "leaders," who are delivering exactly the kind of government you'd expect in an insanely corrupt bribocracy, they can only keep the peasants down for so long. "Sicko" has unleashed decades of pent-up rage at the sheer inhumanity of the American health care model. It's hard to find anyone who isn't furious at the profits-over-patients ethos that drives that model and -- happy, happy, glorious day -- they're finally starting to organize. There will be hell to pay if politicians continue to ignore this issue, or offer half-baked faux solutions that seem on the surface to be improvements but, according to the fine print, only serve to protect and perpetuate the status quo.

Health care is either a right or a privilege. Ultimately, that’s going to be the central question regarding any effort at health care reform in this country. And when the dust finally settles, after another 18,000 or maybe 36,000 Americans die from lack of health care, it's increasingly likely that the industry parasites, the rabid free-marketeers, the privatization zealots and the paid apologists for this deadly system will be the ones left behind.

A version of this article first appeared in Online Journal July 6, 2007. Go here to read my follow-up on the Journal, or just scroll down an inch or so and read it here.

Universal health care, Islamic extremists and the gleaming scalpels of doom

2007-07-28T10:16:00.000-07:00

“We must remove their appendixes over there so we don’t have to do it here.”

OK, I made up the quote above. Even President Malaprop hasn’t tried that one yet, although it’s likely being tested for credibility and traction on some focus group as we speak. But to the point…

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an article for Online Journal called “Health care wars and the lies the for-profit racketeers tell us.” I wrote it to offer my best educated guesses on how the health insurance industry will attack Michael Moore’s “Sicko” and, even more critical to them, blunt the groundswell of public anger and outrage this movie has generated all across the country.

News reports and blog postings from Florida to Alaska suggest Moore is responsible for creating widespread public revulsion regarding our ongoing public health catastrophe. Apparently, it crosses standard demographic barriers, race and class distinctions. And it points an accusing finger directly at the tragicomic fiction that the for-profit health care industry’s sole concern is the welfare of its subscribers.

A little background
My column was written from the perspective of someone whose day job for the past 15 or so years has been consulting spinmeister to corporate America. Prior to that, I was a “senior media relations manager” with a division of a very large software company whose initials are not MS. In short, I’ve got a ton of experience at devising PR strategies and campaigns, some of which have included damage control or “crisis management” as their prime objective, and all of which are designed to deceive, manipulate opinion or destroy the counterweight of critical thinking – or all of the above. It’s soul-shriveling work, but it pays well.

I often atone for my professional sins by using my experience to help people understand how, for example, effective corporate spin-doctoring shifts the focus of cynicism and outrage away from the machinations of big business and attempts to direct it toward whoever or whatever is challenging their public image and benevolent-corporate-citizenship mythology.

Creating and focusing mass opinion
This process of shifting public focus from the crimes of the perps to sins of their accuser takes many forms, occasionally by attempting to rebut the challenger’s views, but more often simply by assassinating the challenger’s character. This has become standard practice in business and politics. You have only to look back to 2004 and the “swift-boating” of John Kerry to see it elevated to an art form. And now Moore is having his own swift-boating experience, trashed by the usual reactionaries as an anti-American, anti-free market, anti-capitalism fanatic who wants to destroy one of the US’ most dominant corporate institutions.

Having destroyed the challenger’s credibility, the tactics now shift to engaging the enemy in “reasoned” debate. In any PR campaign, sets of official talking points evolve to provide “balance, context and support” for the official story. In this case, about a half-dozen standard objections to single-payer specifically, and to universal access in general, pop up every time these issues are widely discussed – the last time being Clinton’s bloated, indecipherable “near universal coverage” plan, which still scared the industry into a $100 million ad campaign to convince Americans that they’d be nuts to tamper with the status quo.

So for last week’s article, I put together a set of talking points that I expect we’ll hear from the usual corporate shills in Congress and mass media. I also provided arguments and counter-spin points that easily debunk the conventional nonsense about the dark secrets and socialistic evils of universal health care.

And I thought I did a pretty good job overall. However, last Thursday, even as my article sat in Online Journal editor Bev Conover’s computer, scheduled for placement in Friday’s edition, the health care industry came up with something so ridiculous, yet so ingeniously creative, that I really should have seen it coming.

Fox News: The wingnut full-employment act
With Fox News’ customary humility and understatement, we learn that “Today on Fox News’s Your World With Neil Cavuto, National Review Online columnist Jerry Bowyer attacked Michael Moore’s movie SiCKO and its positive portrayal of the health care in countries such as Britain and France.”

OK, so what? Been there, done that. However, Bowyer unveiled a brand new industry weapon in the health care wars. Official wingnut doctrine says Americans must fear Muslim extremists. They must also fear universal health care. It’s pure genius to combine these two phobias and come up with this caliber of hogwash. From the Bowyer transcript (and people say he hadn’t been drinking):

“A state run health care enterprise is bureaucratic, and I think the terrorists have shown over and over again, whether it’s dealing with INS or whether it’s dealing with airport security, they’re very good at gaming the system with bureaucracies. They’re very good at getting around bureaucracies…

“And if one of your guys is a jihadist, if one of your doctors is spending all the time online reading Osama bin Laden fatwas, someone’s going to notice that (in the US). But the National Health Service is more like the post office, you know there’s a lot of anonymity, it’s easy to hide in the bureaucracy.”

As evidence, Bowyer cites the recent bombing attempts in the UK, which were allegedly perpetrated by seven National Health Service doctors, along with the wife of one of the docs who also works in the medical field. All eight are immigrants from either India or the Middle East, all eight came to the UK because the NHS suffers from a chronic shortage of qualified docs and nurses (thanks mainly to Maggie and Major underfunding it for 17 years in a Tory effort to get Brits to support US-style privatization) and all eight are Muslims.

So apparently Bowyer’s thesis is: Single-payer, universal access means millions of Americans who had previously lacked the insurance or the money to visit a doctor would suddenly flood waiting rooms, hospitals and clinics all across the country. The current supply of trained medical professionals in the US won’t be able to handle an additional 80 million patients (consensus rough estimate of the combined number of uninsured and underinsured in this country).

Docs and nurses would have to be imported from other countries, some of them inevitably Islamic, to cope with the onslaught of new patients. Some of those countries breed, harbor or covertly encourage Islamic jihad against the US. Therefore, medical professionals from those countries could also be fanatical anti-US Islamic terrorists using newly enacted single-payer legislation as leverage for fast-track immigration clearance. Once admitted to the country, they would simply disappear into the anonymity of a giant new health care bureaucracy, treating patients by day and blowing up the American infrastructure by night.

You can check Jerry out further at his web site. He’s actually a fairly interesting guy for a wingnut and, from reading through some of his articles, I get the feeling he’s not enough of an ideological purist to be the point man for this kind of garbage. Still, there he was on Fox…

The right wing echo chamber circles the wagons
You’d think that any self-respecting pundit would run away from such complete idiocy as if his pants were on fire. But that would be underestimating the lockstep cohesiveness that characterizes the right wing in America these days as it clings desperately to any argument, no matter how absurd, that advances its intellectually and morally bankrupt agenda.

So, in support of Bowyer’s fantasy -- which looks very much like a trial balloon floated by the industry’s PR machine to see how many imbeciles buy into it -- syndicated columnist, author, luxury cruiser with other National Review luminaries and more raving wingnuts than there are asteroids, star of the TV/radio interview circuit and tireless self-promoting right wing shill Mark Steyn weighs in with a July 8 piece on the horrors of imported docs, intensifying the endless 9/11 hangover that’s warped the thinking of millions of gullible Americans and feeds the free-floating fear, suspicion, angst and xenophobia that typifies it.

“Does government health care inevitably lead to homicidal doctors who can't wait to leap into a flaming SUV and drive it through the check-in counter? No. But government health care does lead to a dependence on medical staff imported from other countries.”

See… he’s a reasonable guy. He recognizes that not all Middle Eastern guys with swarthy complexions and medical degrees are fanatical anti-western bomb throwers. But that possibility remains, and if we institute single-payer here, we open ourselves up to the same kinds of terrorist threats now present in the UK. After all…

“Mohammed Asha, Mohammed Haneef and their comrades didn't even require a work permit to come and practice as doctors in state hospitals. You don't have to be the smartest jihadist in the cave to see that as an opportunity…”

Steyn’s position, translated into our native tongue
So, to extrapolate, Mark actually prefers having about 45 million uninsured and another 35 million or so underinsured so they can’t over-stress the current supply of docs and medical facilities and force Mark to wait a little longer to see his proctologist.

If those 80 million suddenly have access to quality medical care – which is to say, if they can finally get that weird lump looked at by a specialist, or have that painful scratched cornea treated, or get that CAT scan or blood test or MRI or tox screen or any of the other standard medical procedures that well-insured elitists like Mark take for granted while 80 million Americans go without – if that happens, they’ll quickly overwhelm existing medical resources and the US will have to look abroad to fill staffing requirements.

And because in Jerry’s and Mark’s delusional world a certain percentage of these overseas docs will prove to be Islamic terrorists, buildings will come tumbling down, bridges will collapse, pets will be poisoned (wait; somebody already did that), Jeeps will be set aflame and launched at airport ticket counters… They might even disrupt communications such that vast areas of the country would be prevented from seeing reruns of “American Idol.” Now that’s terrorism.

In his own words
Just so you understand where Mark’s coming from, here are a few jewels from his own web site.

On Iraq: In the summer of 2002, Amr Moussa, Secretary-General of the Arab League, warned BBC listeners that a US invasion would “threaten the whole stability of the Middle East”. I wrote: “He’s missing the point: that’s the reason it’s such a great idea.” Invading Iraq made sense because it offered the best way to prick the puffed-up pustule of regional stability.

On nationalism and xenophobia: … America is the western world’s odd man out, and has been increasingly since September 11th. Personally, I couldn’t be happier about it. I’m delighted the United States is “out of step” with, say, Belgium. Not because I’m Belgophobic. If the Belgians want to support the International Criminal Court, keep Saddam in office until his nuke arsenal is ready to fly, and continue subsidizing Yasser Arafat’s pay-offs to the relicts of suicide bombers, that’s fine, go ahead, you’re an independent nation.

On the liberal media: Six imams returning from a big conference of imams were removed from a plane at Minneapolis Airport after other passengers grew concerned about loud cries of “Allah akbar,” the imams reseating themselves in the same configuration as the 9/11 hijackers and demanding seat-belt extenders, even though none was of sufficient girth to need them. Aside from Fox, America’s national media showed little interest in the story. Nor, oddly, did the local media. …This is one of those stories that runs for a couple of days because he (a daily newspaper editor) chose to run it only for a couple of days. Had it been something more consequential – like, say, fictitious stories about guards at Gitmo desecrating the Koran – he would have run it into the ground.

And of course, Holy Joe likes Mark’s new book: “The thing I quote most from it is the power of demographics... But the other part is a kind of confirmation of what I know ... that Islamist extremism has an ideology, and it’s expansionist, it’s an aggressive ideology. And the title (“America Alone”) I took to mean that we Americans will have ultimate responsibility for stopping this expansionism.” Senator Joe Lieberman (Democrat [sic] of Connecticut)

So Mark’s a predictable purveyor of right wing doctrine, a counter balance to Agnew’s “nattering nabobs of negativism,” a staunch supporter of the US as antidote to the European world view, and a prominent member of the “fear, fear, terror, terror, all the time” paranoia-perpetuating chorus.

Personally, I wouldn’t trust such a warped personality to make correct change at McDonalds. Unfortunately, in today’s poisoned media ecosystem, he’s one of its more ubiquitous partisan hacks and influential fear-mongers.

Compared with the usual low standards of wingnut punditocracy, which lives by its ability to annihilate reason and logic, this one is unusually slick. Linking two of the right wing’s most terrifying phantoms into a single talking point is sheer PR genius, and I really should have seen it coming. That it’s inane, insane and incredible is beside the point. Just connecting these two harbingers of doom is sufficient.

I may need to take a few refresher classes, attend a thought manipulation seminar, read Chomsky’s “Manufacturing Consent” again. I’ve got to upgrade my skills lest I become another of those unemployable ghosts who spend their time on the Web sniveling about the good old days and trolling LinkedIn in case somebody’s actually looking for them.

An earlier version of this article appeared in Online Journal on July 13, 2007

The marketplace of ideas: empty shelves and dusty aisles

2007-07-23T11:25:00.000-07:00

...and why obliterating Rush and the thousands of wingnut motormouths he spawned -- by means such as death by sponsor abandonment -- is vital if there is ever going to be a functional marketplace of ideas in this country. Next step after that would be to assert the public's right to the airwaves -- a legal right, I'm told -- and reclaim them from the corporate oligarchs who determine the range of permitted thought in America. But first...

The marketplace of ideas assumes two non-optional components: The marketplace is free and open to all ideas, no matter from whom and no matter how weird. And the "consumers" are informed, intelligent and capable of discerning one idea from the others based on the validity of the idea itself -- no PR, no advertising, no positioning, no pandering, no spin.

The internet seems to meet the first requirement, although it's limited in that participants either own or have access to a computer, know how to use it well enough to connect to the Internet, live in a place with the appropriate telecom infrastructure, and have the means to pay for that access. Still, those barriers are falling all over the world and, as a result, there is a relatively unfiltered forum for the marketplace of ideas to peddle the full range of its wares.

However, a true marketplace of ideas capable of reaching everyone who wished to tap in would by definition have to include TV, print media and radio. Since those media are virtually all under the control of large corporations whose vested interest in the status quo makes presentation of the conservative world view inevitable, and unbiased presentation of a full range of opinion impossible, I would argue that the marketplace of ideas doesn't really exist in any useful sense, at least in this country.

As to the second requirement, polls consistently show that TV news is the sole or primary source of information for about 92 percent of Americans. So passive consumers of ideas are lulled to sleep by the continuous repetition of narrow points of view that almost universally support the status quo. Active consumers can turn to the Internet as an alternative to TV news, but the above-mentioned polls suggest that at most 8 percent do so as their primary source of information.

Add to that the hideous state of public education in this country, the diminishing time people have to do anything but work, pay bills and "put food on their family," the complete absence of "un-spun" reporting in conventional media, the horrible morphing of the press into a cheer leading corps of status quo stenographers and, to seal the deal, the absolute dominance of the AM and FM bands by Clearchannel and a couple of other media giants, none of whom are shy about hosting right wing hate speech -- consider all these factors and I suggest the average American idea consumer lacks both adequate information and the basic critical thinking skills necessary to separate spun hogwash from fact.

For example, it's a "fact" that more than 3,600 American military have died in the Iraqi invasion and occupation. Spun hogwash takes that fact, coats it with equal doses of phony patriotism and official White House fear-mongering, and if those death tolls are ever even reported on TV news, they're linked to the latest line about Iranians slipping over the border and killing US troops in Iraq. This kind of subservient, uncritical "reporting" is designed to drum up public support for BushCo's insane assertions that the US needs to exact revenge on Iran for allowing these alleged hit squads to organize and train in that country. Just fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them here, as they like to tell us undiscerning morons.

Un-spun ideas can compete successfully in a fair fight, and I'd be surprised if progressive positions didn't swamp wingnut ranting if given an equal hearing. The problem is that anyone who uses M$M as their sole source of information can go weeks, months or, on Fox or CNN, years without hearing a progressive viewpoint, unless it's voiced by that candy ass Colmes who exists solely to portray liberals as eunuchs that the mighty Hannity can whip with one frontal lobe tied behind his back.

The problem is access, and we ain't got it. We have the Internet, where progressive and regressive web sites exist by the tens of thousands. But we're non-existent as far as Ward, June, Wally and the Beav are concerned. Not wrong; not misguided -- just not heard at all, except when a wingnut talker abstracts some out-of-context half-quote attributed to a liberal and spends the rest of the hour laughing at it. And only callers who agree get to be on the radio, so there's no possibility of refuting the wingnut position.

It seems like the forces arrayed to prevent progressive/left ideas from hitting the mainstream are pretty overwhelming. In addition to nut-case radio, the Internet is getting unwelcome scrutiny from the privatization crowd. The FCC is looking to charge tolls for fast web site access (and keep the ones that won’t or can’t afford it in second gear). Some (including me) speculate that this is just a first step toward putting non-corporate web sites out of business – and in the process effectively silencing the last remaining medium available in which progressive/left ideas thrive.

TV news is, as always these days, pathetic (and I imagine that Murrow’s ghost is much disturbed). Even newspapers, long admired (somewhat more than they’ve deserved) as sources of unbiased, unvarnished information, have decided, with a few notable exceptions, that their advertisers want zero controversy and prefer a status quo-boosting venue to peddle their wares.

When GE buys Air America, expands it into hundreds of new markets, promotes the hell out of it and puts actual lefties back behind the mic, then we'll have the faintest beginnings of the sound machine the right wing has enjoyed for decades.

When people ignore TV news in sufficient number, and boycott the sponsors who pay for this garbage, then programming heads will roll and changes may emerge that include encouraging reporters to hurl actual questions at Bush and his spokespersons/apologists rather than the softball, no-follow-up scripted bit of infotainment that passes these days for a press conference.

When the US “papers of record” – the NY Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal (reporters, not editors) – learn that progressives can afford their ad rates, too…

Nah, that would be to go against their very nature as tools for manufacturing consent and coalescing public support around the policies of those running official Washington.

After all, these media conglomerates often have business before various federal regulatory agencies and they don’t want to be seen as enemies of the state.

wp

Here's what I think...

2007-07-23T09:57:00.000-07:00

Just to start things off, I'll give you an overview of what I see as a few current critical issues, with links and comment throughout.

Things are lively but inconclusive and frustrating on the impeachment front. And as usual, Nancy Pelosi is spouting more apologist nonsense, this time with a whole new talking point about how the party could become fragmented over impeachment and, as a result, fail to win super-majorities in 2008.

That's nice, Nancy, but please don't expect me to buy into yet another clichéd argument on the heels of such brilliant ones as: He's going to be gone anyway so why bother (even though a couple of recent presidential directives [not subject to congressional vote or review] set the stage for martial law and cancellation of the '08 elections, along with the seizure of assets of anyone disagreeing with BushCo's Iraq policies, assuming any exist).

Or how impeachment wouldn't leave enough time to do the peoples' business (even though impeachment is the ONLY valid way to serve the people right now, unless bombing and possibly nuking Iran, continuing the Iraq genocide, and escalating domestic repression and voiding the Constitution are now regarded as great ideas by our slack-jawed, Fox-poisoned idiot citizenry).

Or how we should give the investigations time to work, even though BushCo simply laughs at the subpoenas and orders his subordinates not to honor them -- for which he should be indicted for obstruction of justice, yet another impeachable offense that carries serious criminal penalties unless you're a republican named Scooter Libby -- or any other republican, for that matter.

There are at least four really good reasons to impeach Bush and Cheney right now, along with the rest of this hideous administration:

1 Simple justice says they must be held accountable for their crimes, and punished to the full extent of the law.

2 Their totalitarian agenda must be exposed so that the American people understand the magnitude of their unprecedented criminality.

3 Somebody has to put a stop to their murderous agenda before they can nuke Iran or shed any more blood in Iraq or Afghanistan.

4 They must serve as an example of what will happen to the next right wing cabal if it tries to replace representative democracy with fascism.

And then there’s impeachment as the last means of self-defense. It’s getting a bit urgent, and all the pieces are in place to install a pure fascist dictatorship. Below are links to the presidential directives mentioned above, an excerpt from a particularly odious provision within each of them, and articles or blog postings explaining their significance.

This is the most recent, and sanctions property and liquid asset seizure for pretty much anyone BushCo deems a pain in the ass. Here's the text of the directive:

How to legally steal your stuff

Here's a particularly awful part:

"(c) the term "United States person" means any United States citizen, permanent resident alien, entity organized under the laws of the United States or any jurisdiction within the United States (including foreign branches), or any person in the United States. (NOTE: Corporations aren’t exempt, unless they’ve recently donated large sums to GOP campaigns,)

(B) undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq or to provide humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi people; (NOTE: this means anyone at all who's pissing them off, including anti-war protesters and those who donate to leftist political organizations)

Sec. 5. For those persons whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order who might have a constitutional presence in the United States, I find that, because of the ability to transfer funds or other assets instantaneously, prior notice to such persons of measures to be taken pursuant to this order would render these measures ineffectual. I therefore determine that for these measures to be effective in addressing the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13303 and expanded in Executive Order 13315, there need be no prior notice of a listing or determination made pursuant to section 1(a) of this order." (NOTE: which means they snatch your stuff and you don't know about it until, say, you stick your card in the ATM and find you have zero balance)

And here’s comment on what this actually means in real life:

Outlawing the anti-war movement

The following is a link to two earlier directives, signed May 9, 07, both of which provide the framework and excuses for implementing martial law (which is what declaring a national state of emergency means to these swine). Note that Bush is to be the sole guarantor of the continuance of Constitutional law under these conditions, and that he’s the only one who gets to define what constitutes grounds for declaring a state of emergency.

Lock up the usual suspects

A couple of looks behind the curtain:

“(b) "Catastrophic Emergency" means any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions;“ (NOTE: which means Katrina, a Calif. quake, a flood in the Midwest, a massive power outage, etc. could all trigger the marvelous plans that comprise most of the rest of the directive.)

“(18) The Secretary of Defense, in coordination with the Secretary of Homeland Security, shall provide secure, integrated, Continuity of Government communications to the President, the Vice President, and, at a minimum, Category I executive departments and agencies.” (NOTE: This would be making sure the usual shadow government entities have uninterrupted access to Il Duce and his puppet masters in the secure white house.)

“(6) The President shall lead the activities of the Federal Government for ensuring constitutional government.” (NOTE: You may have noticed BushCo’s ongoing respect for Constitutional law, and may assume that such respect will continue after the dictatorship is in place.)

Comment on this blueprint for totalitarianism includes this article detailing the rise of fascism under Bush:

Imperialism and fascism are on the rise in the USA

This one is specific to the DHS and National Security directives:

Bush anoints himself ensurer of Constitutional government in emergency

And this one is the best of the bunch and deals with fabricated “terrorist” attacks (more on that below) as pretext for nuking Iran:

Bush directive for a "catastrophic emergency" in America: Building a justification for waging war on Iran?

So we’ve already seen that the events that would trigger these security state actions are pretty arbitrary, and are defined by Little Lord Hissyfit himself. Meanwhile, there has been a great deal of “buzz” about upcoming terrorist activities against “the homeland.” Predictably, our free press is all over this one, since it gives them yet another opportunity to wave their pompoms and cheer on the Bush Death Machine.

DHS head Michael Chertoff spoke of his “gut” feelings about an impending attack last week (although most attributed it to a pastrami and swiss sandwich of questionable vintage). Here’s Keith Olbermann’s take on Chertoff’s intestines:

Al Qaeda in Michael Chertoff's Stomach: The Terror of a "Gut Feeling"

However, unlike Chertoff, whose resume includes his utter uselessness during the Katrina aftermath, this guy might be worth paying attention to. A former Reagan administration insider credited (?) with the invention of “Reaganomics,” author and national syndicated columnist Paul Craig Roberts is no flaming lefty propagandist. And if he’s concerned, then so am I.

My wake-up call: Watch for another 9/11-WMD experience

A “false flag” operation is an extreme act of governmental propaganda that can consist of mass violence like 9/11, or a manufactured incident – such as the Gulf of Tonkin "attack" – perpetrated by elements in the US security apparatus and blamed on the contemporary US whipping boy and his shadowy band of swarthy evil doers. So Osama was immediately identified as the chief 9/11 perp -- although the entire 9/11 myth is seen by most of the world as a convenient fairy tale to enable BushCo's resource and power grabs, while the North Vietnamese leadership was blamed for the Gulf of Tonkin incident -- which history now tells us never happened.

The intent is to create consent for the next governmental outrage du jour -- like bombing Afghan or Vietnamese civilians -- further demonize the designated bad guys, scare the hell out of the public, encourage rabid unquestioning patriotism, and provide popular support for actions alleged necessary to prevent similar atrocities in the future -- which generally means a military attack on the usual disposable brown people, along with suppression of dissidents at home. Roberts says this about the possibility of BushCo pulling off another one of these false flag black ops:

“Alternatively, false flag “terrorist” strikes could be orchestrated in the US. The Bush administration has already infiltrated some dissident groups and encouraged them to participate in terrorist talk, for which they were arrested. It is possible that the administration could provoke some groups to actual acts of violence.”

In the case of the 9/11 “attacks,” reprisals included invading Afghanistan and Iraq, occupying both, causing massive civilian casualties and incidentally providing the muscle for the US to deploy a huge, permanent military presence in the heart of oil country.

So… still think impeachment isn’t appropriate? Martial law, end of the great democratic republic experiment, asset seizures, terror terror all the time everywhere...

“It Can’t Happen Here,” as Sinclair Lewis titled his novel that demonstrates the opposite, and chronicles the rapid US devolution from representative democracy to fascist dictatorship.

Oh sure it can. In fact, the whole thing is spelled out in the right wing think tank Project for a New American Century's (PNAC) 2000 manifesto called "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century." You can download it as a pdf file by clicking on that link. Before you read it, it might be interesting to look at the signatories at the back of the document. You'll recognize quite a few names.

So just give these maniacs time to put a few more minor pieces in place and we'll suddenly find our thoughts enclosed by virtual razor wire, our savings donated to the GOP, our houses sold to pay for the voracious war machine, our jobs exported, our families broken up -- and Orwell's vision will finally be realized: As O'Brien says to Winston Smith near the end of 1984, "If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever."

Then imagine your face and some BushCo fascist thug's boot. Think maybe it's time to fight back?

wp