David Michael Green writes at Counterpunch:
There’s only one political party in the entire world that is so inept, cowardly and bungling that it could manage to simultaneously lick the boots of Wall Street bankers and then get blamed by the voters for being flaming revolutionary socialists.
It’s the same party that has allowed the opposition to go on a thirty year scorched earth campaign, stealing everything in sight from middle and working class voters, and yet successfully claim to be protecting ‘real Americans’ from out-of-touch elites.
It’s the same party that could run a decorated combat hero against a war evader in 1972, only to be successfully labeled as national security wimps.
Just to be sure, it then did the exact same thing again in 2004.
It’s the same party that stood by silently while two presidential elections in a row were stolen away from them.
How ’bout dem Dems, eh?
One year ago today, there was real question as to what could possibly be the future of the Republican Party in America. That’s changed a bit now.
And, speaking of ‘change’, the one kind that Barack Obama did actually deliver this year was not that which most voters had in mind after listening to him use the word incessantly, all throughout 2008. Obama and his colleagues have now managed to bring the future of the Democratic Party into question, just a year after it won two smashing victories in a row. ...
[click here to read entire essay]
January 23, 2010
January 15, 2010
Democrats Going Down in Flames
Russell Mokhiber, editor of Single Payer Action, writes in Counterpunch:
Martha Coakley is going down in flames.
So is the Democratic Party.
Why?
We found the answer earlier this week at – of all places – The Cato Institute in Washington, D.C.
Timothy Carney was giving a powerpoint presentation about his new book: Obamanomics: How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting You and Enriching His Wall Street Friends, Corporate Lobbyists, and Union Bosses.
Here’s the book in a nutshell:
“Both parties are the parties of big business,” Carney said. “They both promote corporate socialism.”
I sat there in the front row at Cato, in wonder.
Listening to the talk – as Carney outlined how Obama had cut deals with Billy Tauzin and the pharmaceutical industry.
Thinking to myself – is this why Martha Coakley is having such a hard time in Massachusetts?
She’s just another corporate Dem — just like Obama?
Then, lo and behold, as if I was channeling Carney, he calls up a slide on his powerpoint.
On the big screen at Cato is an invitation to a corporate fundraiser – that night at the Sonoma Restaurant on Capitol Hill – for Coakley.
And I say to myself – wait a second.
Coakley is in the middle of a tight race and she’s flying to DC one week before the election to be with a group of corporate lobbyists?
Yes.
She is.
And then Carney went down the list of 22 members of the host committees – meaning they each raised $10,000 or more for Coakley.
“Seventeen are federally registered lobbyists, 15 of whom have health-care clients,” Carney said.
“You see the names – Gerald Cassidy, David Castagnetti,, Tommy Boggs – those are all lobbyists I’ve highlighted there who have clients who are drug companies, health insurers, hospitals or all three,” Carney said. “AHIP, Phrma, Pfizer, Blue Cross – everybody is covered there. Aetna somehow isn’t. I don’t know how they got left out.”
“These are the special interests,” Carney said. “These are the people trying to elect Martha Coakley to be vote number 60 for health insurance.”
Carney then puts up a slide showing how the Phrma cash went from supporting Republican candidates for President in the past – to supporting Barack Obama in 2008.
“Barack Obama raised $2.1 million from drug companies in 2008,” Carney said. “That’s about equal to what John McCain raised plus what George Bush raised in both of his elections. It’s the most by far any candidate has raised from the drug industry.”
The people of Massachusetts already have tried a corporate reform that forces them to buy junk insurance.
They don’t like it.
They’re waiting for a candidate that will deliver a message they’ve been waiting to hear.
Single payer.
Everybody in.
Nobody out.
Put the private insurance companies out of business.
Drive down the cost of drugs to the levels of say Canada or the UK.
But Obama, Coakley and the Democrats are awash in corporate cash.
They have made their choice.
And they deserve to lose.
Onward to single payer.
Martha Coakley is going down in flames.
So is the Democratic Party.
Why?
We found the answer earlier this week at – of all places – The Cato Institute in Washington, D.C.
Timothy Carney was giving a powerpoint presentation about his new book: Obamanomics: How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting You and Enriching His Wall Street Friends, Corporate Lobbyists, and Union Bosses.
Here’s the book in a nutshell:
“Both parties are the parties of big business,” Carney said. “They both promote corporate socialism.”
I sat there in the front row at Cato, in wonder.
Listening to the talk – as Carney outlined how Obama had cut deals with Billy Tauzin and the pharmaceutical industry.
Thinking to myself – is this why Martha Coakley is having such a hard time in Massachusetts?
She’s just another corporate Dem — just like Obama?
Then, lo and behold, as if I was channeling Carney, he calls up a slide on his powerpoint.
On the big screen at Cato is an invitation to a corporate fundraiser – that night at the Sonoma Restaurant on Capitol Hill – for Coakley.
And I say to myself – wait a second.
Coakley is in the middle of a tight race and she’s flying to DC one week before the election to be with a group of corporate lobbyists?
Yes.
She is.
And then Carney went down the list of 22 members of the host committees – meaning they each raised $10,000 or more for Coakley.
“Seventeen are federally registered lobbyists, 15 of whom have health-care clients,” Carney said.
“You see the names – Gerald Cassidy, David Castagnetti,, Tommy Boggs – those are all lobbyists I’ve highlighted there who have clients who are drug companies, health insurers, hospitals or all three,” Carney said. “AHIP, Phrma, Pfizer, Blue Cross – everybody is covered there. Aetna somehow isn’t. I don’t know how they got left out.”
“These are the special interests,” Carney said. “These are the people trying to elect Martha Coakley to be vote number 60 for health insurance.”
Carney then puts up a slide showing how the Phrma cash went from supporting Republican candidates for President in the past – to supporting Barack Obama in 2008.
“Barack Obama raised $2.1 million from drug companies in 2008,” Carney said. “That’s about equal to what John McCain raised plus what George Bush raised in both of his elections. It’s the most by far any candidate has raised from the drug industry.”
The people of Massachusetts already have tried a corporate reform that forces them to buy junk insurance.
They don’t like it.
They’re waiting for a candidate that will deliver a message they’ve been waiting to hear.
Single payer.
Everybody in.
Nobody out.
Put the private insurance companies out of business.
Drive down the cost of drugs to the levels of say Canada or the UK.
But Obama, Coakley and the Democrats are awash in corporate cash.
They have made their choice.
And they deserve to lose.
Onward to single payer.
January 3, 2010
Best health care in the world
MAYNARDVILLE, Tenn. – The two-hour drive is done, but Hannah and Jack Hurst leave the Honda's engine running.
Hannah's prayers have brought them here. Now there's little to do but turn up the car's heat, try to get some sleep and wait for morning — and a set of glass and metal doors to open.
Still, Hannah doesn't complain. The 26-year-old mother of three has waited "pretty much as long as I can remember" to escape the pain throbbing through her jaws. Jack lost his road construction job a year ago and health insurance is out of the question. If the answer to Hannah's misery can be found behind those doors, then what's 10 hours more?
Out in the dark, the Hursts have plenty of company. Even before 10 p.m. on Friday in late fall, nearly 50 cars ring the ball field parking lot. By 6 a.m. Saturday, more than 400 men and women — some wrapped in blankets, others leaning on walkers — stand tightlipped and bleary-eyed under the Big Dipper.
They clutch numbered tickets, ready to claim the prize for perseverance: By day's end, as long as they can keep appetites and tempers in check and the sleep from their eyes, they will win the privilege of care from a dentist or a doctor.
In a country convulsed over health care, the scene would be alarming if it wasn't so predictable.
In fact, it's always the same, Stan Brock says. For 17 years, Brock has piloted a nonprofit called Remote Area Medical around the country, commandeering high school gyms and county fairgrounds to offer free health care to the uninsured, the underinsured and the desperate.
Brock has seen so many crowds like the one massed outside Union County High School this dawn he chides himself for losing track of whether this is RAM's 578th expedition or its 587th (it's the latter). And yet in every one of those seemingly identical crowds there are hundreds of Hannah Hursts, each a unique testament to the nation's ragged pursuit of health care answers.
Over the next two days, RAM's volunteers will examine, test, anesthetize, extract and prescribe hundreds of solutions for individual aches and afflictions. They will, in the few moments left, try to convince patients they'll probably never see again of the virtues of healthier living and continuous care. They will do their best to answer Hannah Hurst's prayers. ...
--Adam Geller, AP National Writer – Sat Jan 2, 2010
(click title of this post for complete article; click the photo for more pictures)
December 30, 2009
There Is Plenty of Renewable Energy -- Just Take It
This comment was sent to us, responding to a vapid article by Jurriaan Kamp at Huffington Post:
"Renewable" energy -- as opposed to fossil or fissile fuels -- are those that the earth is already using. When humans take it, whether it's water, wind, or sunlight, we are taking it from other living things. In that sense, though "alternative", renewable energy is not green.
It is also, except for hydro, not efficient, requiring massive machines over huge areas to collect the diffuse resource. And without traditional thermal backup, it requires equal buildup of means of storage, which not only adds to the adverse environmental impact but also drastically reduces efficiency yet more.
Meaningful carbon and pollution taxes would not bring in renewables any more than current subsidies do. But they might inspire more conservation and efficiency, a result that would truly help the planet, not just "transform" our means of exploitation.
wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism, human rights, animal rights, anarchism, ecoanarchism, anarchosyndicalism
"Renewable" energy -- as opposed to fossil or fissile fuels -- are those that the earth is already using. When humans take it, whether it's water, wind, or sunlight, we are taking it from other living things. In that sense, though "alternative", renewable energy is not green.
It is also, except for hydro, not efficient, requiring massive machines over huge areas to collect the diffuse resource. And without traditional thermal backup, it requires equal buildup of means of storage, which not only adds to the adverse environmental impact but also drastically reduces efficiency yet more.
Meaningful carbon and pollution taxes would not bring in renewables any more than current subsidies do. But they might inspire more conservation and efficiency, a result that would truly help the planet, not just "transform" our means of exploitation.
wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism, human rights, animal rights, anarchism, ecoanarchism, anarchosyndicalism
December 29, 2009
Wind Turbines and Health Disputes
In an editorial at renewablesbiz.com, Bill Opalka describes Nina Pierpont's recently published case series describing wind turbine syndrome and the consequent pushback by the American and Canadian Wind Energy Associations. Unfortunately, a few members of their "expert panel" have written in clear support of Pierpont's findings. Opalka also notes their statement that "for 30 years, people have been living near the more than 50,000 wind turbines operating in Europe and the more than 30,000 in North America, with few people experiencing ill effects." A correspondent sent us her comment:
wind power, wind energy, wind turbines, wind farms, environment, environmentalism, human rights, animal rights, anarchism, ecoanarchism, anarchosyndicalism
Case studies vs. review
If Pierpont's work is new, then the industry's (self-published) review of earlier published work, much of it not specific to wind turbines, is not a convincing refutation. The point is that it is indeed a newly described phenomenon.
As for the statement that people have lived near wind turbines for decades with few complaints, it should also be noted that: 1) most of those turbines are much smaller and much farther from residences than those now being built in North America and the U.K. (and even so, Dutch and Swedish studies have found remarkable levels of annoyance and sleep disturbance, both of which they describe as an adverse health effect); 2) lease and neighbor easement contracts, signed in the innocence of industry reasurances, generally include gag orders against making problems public; and 3) many properties near wind turbine facilities are bought by the company because of health complaints, as, e.g., last year in Dufferin County, Ontario, with the imposition of new gag orders.
wind power, wind energy, wind turbines, wind farms, environment, environmentalism, human rights, animal rights, anarchism, ecoanarchism, anarchosyndicalism
December 25, 2009
Are there no prisons?
Paul Krugman wants us to know ("Tidings of Comfort", New York Times, Dec. 24) that the health insurance bailout bill just passed by the Senate is a great progressive act. He notes that if Tiny Tim can keep from getting sick until 2014, some yet-to-be-defined subsidies will help his family pay for some of his insurance, which they very likely will still not be able to afford (the company will be required to cover his preexisting condition by being allowed to charge more for it), for which crime they will be fined in true Scrooge-like fashion -- "to make America a much better country".
Krugman, who has written about the feasibility of both single-payer insurance (Medicare) and socialized medicine (Veterans Administration), now scolds "progressives" -- i.e., 70% of the American people in poll after poll who want a government-run single-payer system -- that "politics is the art of the possible". Krugman is an economist and knows that every other country in the world that has established universal health care has done so first by making it not for profit. The senate bill allows insurance companies to apply 20% (but no more!) of what they take in to "administrative" costs, mainly profits, bonuses, and dividends. In most universal-care countries, they are limited to 5%, and it is often less. Yet it is not possible that Americans should at least be able to choose an efficient public plan.
He thus gives up the fight (admonishing anybody who doesn't), happy to accept the Senate bill as law, to ignore or criticize what actually is possible. As Krugman points out: "There is a narrow [Congressional] majority in favor of a plan with a moderately strong public option. The House has passed such a plan." And there are likely 50 votes for it in the Senate. And, as already mentioned, there is a strong majority of the public in favor. Instead of crying about the rules of the Senate and fetishizing the need for 60 votes, and blaming the American people for not being impressed with the massive sell-out so far, Krugman should admonish both Harry Reid and Barack Obama for letting the assholes run the game.
The "possible" in Krugman's eyes is limited to what the lobbyists deem to be so. But Obama, at least, was elected in the hope that he would listen to the people first. Our bad! Shut up and be joyful! Paul Krugman brings you glad tidings that your betters have protected themselves royally so that someday they can help you a little bit maybe. More crumbs, please, sir.
Krugman, who has written about the feasibility of both single-payer insurance (Medicare) and socialized medicine (Veterans Administration), now scolds "progressives" -- i.e., 70% of the American people in poll after poll who want a government-run single-payer system -- that "politics is the art of the possible". Krugman is an economist and knows that every other country in the world that has established universal health care has done so first by making it not for profit. The senate bill allows insurance companies to apply 20% (but no more!) of what they take in to "administrative" costs, mainly profits, bonuses, and dividends. In most universal-care countries, they are limited to 5%, and it is often less. Yet it is not possible that Americans should at least be able to choose an efficient public plan.
He thus gives up the fight (admonishing anybody who doesn't), happy to accept the Senate bill as law, to ignore or criticize what actually is possible. As Krugman points out: "There is a narrow [Congressional] majority in favor of a plan with a moderately strong public option. The House has passed such a plan." And there are likely 50 votes for it in the Senate. And, as already mentioned, there is a strong majority of the public in favor. Instead of crying about the rules of the Senate and fetishizing the need for 60 votes, and blaming the American people for not being impressed with the massive sell-out so far, Krugman should admonish both Harry Reid and Barack Obama for letting the assholes run the game.
The "possible" in Krugman's eyes is limited to what the lobbyists deem to be so. But Obama, at least, was elected in the hope that he would listen to the people first. Our bad! Shut up and be joyful! Paul Krugman brings you glad tidings that your betters have protected themselves royally so that someday they can help you a little bit maybe. More crumbs, please, sir.
December 22, 2009
Moving steel production from U.K. to India saves the planet
Before Rajendra Pachauri became head of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he was director and then director-general of the Tata Energy Research Institute, later called "The" Energy Research Institute, or TERI, which is essentially a division of the Indian industrial conglomerate the Tata Group. And he still is. TERI now has branches worldwide. In North America, its corporate sponsors include Amoco, two leading U.S. defense contractors, Monsanto, and two world leaders in the international carbon market, according to Christopher Booker and Richard North in the Independent (click the title of this post).
Under the "Clean Development Mechanism" of the Kyoto accord, which will be replaced by an even more lucrative scheme by the Copenhagen agreement, the Tata Group is transfering steel production from a Corus (which it owns) plant in the U.K. to a new one in India, putting 1,700 British workers on the dole and earning itself a potential £1.2 billion in carbon credits. Pachauri has apparently managed to convince people that emitting your carbon in a "developing" country is better than doing it in a "rich" country. And that his countless industry connections are not a conflict of interest but rather a sign of his fervent commitment to fighting climate change. Of course, rich countries have always transfered as much of their dirty business as possible to poorer countries. But they never pretended that it was saving the planet.
Under the "Clean Development Mechanism" of the Kyoto accord, which will be replaced by an even more lucrative scheme by the Copenhagen agreement, the Tata Group is transfering steel production from a Corus (which it owns) plant in the U.K. to a new one in India, putting 1,700 British workers on the dole and earning itself a potential £1.2 billion in carbon credits. Pachauri has apparently managed to convince people that emitting your carbon in a "developing" country is better than doing it in a "rich" country. And that his countless industry connections are not a conflict of interest but rather a sign of his fervent commitment to fighting climate change. Of course, rich countries have always transfered as much of their dirty business as possible to poorer countries. But they never pretended that it was saving the planet.
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