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.

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)

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

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:

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

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.

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.

Destroying forests to save carbon emissions

"Clear-Cutting the Truth About Trees", Bernd Heinrich, New York Times op-ed, Dec. 20, 2009:

Part of the problem is the public misunderstanding of how forests and carbon relate. Trees are often called a “carbon sink” — implying that they will sop up carbon from the atmosphere for all eternity. This is not true: the carbon they take up when they are alive is released after they die, whether from natural causes or by the hand of man. The only true solution to achieving global “carbon balance” is to leave the fossil carbon where it is — underground.

Beyond that, planting more trees is decidedly not the same thing as saving our forests. Instead, planting trees invariably means using them as a sustainable crop, which leads not only to a continuous cycle of carbon releases, but also to the increased destruction of our natural environment. ...

In fact, most of the problems with the system can be traced back to the Kyoto Protocol, which was adopted in 1997. After much political wrangling, the Kyoto delegates decided that there would be no carbon-reduction credits for saving existing forests. Since planting new trees does get one credits, Kyoto actually created a rationale for clear-cutting old growth.

This is horrifying. The world’s forests are a key to our survival, and that of millions of other species. Not only are they critical to providing us with building material, paper, food, recreation and oxygen, they also ground us spiritually and connect us to our primal past. Never before in earth’s history have our forests been under such attack. And the global-warming folks at Copenhagen seem oblivious, buying into the corporate view of forests as an exploitable resource.

A forest is an ecosystem. It is not something planted. A forest grows on its own. There are many kinds of forests that will grow practically anywhere, each under its own special local conditions. When a tree falls, the race is on immediately to replace it. In the forests I study, there so many seeds and seedlings that if a square foot of ground space opens up, more than a hundred trees of many different species compete to grow there.

So if you want to plant a specific species of tree for lumber or for offsets, you’ll have to apply an (petroleum-based) herbicide repeatedly over its lifespan. If you hope to make a profit, you will plant a tree genetically engineered to grow quickly and resist disease. This is the path to domestication of a plant that needs to be ever coddled with fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides and fungicides. And not coincidentally, there will then be a market for its seeds, and all the chemicals needed to coddle the crop.

In the end, what was originally intended as a mechanism for slowing global warming has created huge economic pressure for ecocide. And there will be no objections from easily duped bleeding- heart “environmentalists,” who absolutely love tree planting because it sounds so “green.”

To preserve something it first has to be valued, and the most effective means of valuing it is to have a practical use for it. If the discussions in Copenhagen were any indication, mankind sees little value in forests, but much in tree plantations. ...

environment, environmentalism, animal rights, ecoanarchism