tertulia

Is America Hooked on War?

2009-09-20T06:09:09Z

by: Tom Engelhardt | TomDispatch.com

"War is peace" was one of the memorable slogans on the facade of the Ministry of Truth,Minitrue in "Newspeak," the language invented by George Orwell in 1948 for his dystopian novel 1984. Some 60 years later, a quarter-century after Orwell's imagined future bit the dust, the phrase is, in a number of ways, eerily applicable to the United States.

Keep reading this unsettling article. It rings true and it spells the end of our democracy.

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Where has this country gone?

2009-09-15T03:17:48Z

When I first came to this country, many years ago, I was amazed at the hospitality, honesty, liberal thinking and humanity of its people. It was Iowa, a place of which soon I became very fond and where I experienced first hand the bright side of the American soul. I soon moved to California which, if not Iowa itself, it was still a place of beauty, great dynamism, openness, and the quintessential place to achieve the American Dream. It was still, the bright side of the American soul.

Over the years, however I learned that there was a dark side to the American soul. It was ugly, fundamentalist, anti-black, anti-jewish, anti-immigrant, profoundly anti-intellectual, and above all selfishly individualistic. It was, and is, represented by the Ku Klax Klan, many members of the Southern Baptist Church and many other churches born since, the NRA, and some people whom Obama described as "...bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations".

It is the ugly side of the American soul that is screaming against health care reform. It is the same side that opposes immigration reform if it involves amnesty for the undocumented residents. And, it is the same side that will fight Obama, regardless of his decisions. They hate him and they will not cease in their opposition.

E.J. Dionne gives us a good picture of the bright side of the American soul here.

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Bill Moyers: Uncivil discourse

2009-09-07T15:51:18Z

The Conscience of American Journalism, as Bill Maher calls him, Bill Moyers offers us a lucid, reasoned, extremely angry at times, view of the dark forces at work in our country today.

The right wing of the Republican party; ignorant, hateful, stupid people, the same people Obama described as "...bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations", are being manipulated, unbeknown to them, by the lobbyists, insurance companies, big pharma and Wall Street, those who will profit the most by the continuation of the status quo. Meanwhile, the poor, ignorant protesters, who will pay the most from the consequences of this status quo, are working to get us a "health care reform that measures human beings only in corporate terms of a cost-benefits analysis. I mean this is topsy-turvy - we should be treating health as a condition, not a commodity." Read Bill's article here

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The New York Times editorial has it right. Just do it, Mr. President.

2009-09-06T15:11:22Z

"The Bush administration and a Republican-controlled Congress enacted a Medicare prescription drug benefit that will cost the government almost $1 trillion over the next decade without raising or saving a penny to pay for it.

They also passed tax cuts for wealthy Americans that will cost more than $1.7 trillion over 10 years, again without making provisions to offset the costs. Now they are complaining that $1 trillion for health care reform — fully paid for over the next 10 years — is too much to spend on a problem that has been festering for decades.

Rather than yield to Republican intransigence, the Democrats ought to resort to a parliamentary maneuver known as “budget reconciliation,” which would allow them to push through most reforms by majority vote". Read the editorial here

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Here is the thruth about "public option"

2009-09-05T13:41:55Z

"Currently, there is nothing more controversial in President Barack Obama's health care reform proposal than the "public option." Much of the controversy, of course, has been generated by private insurance companies, determined to safeguard their hefty profits, and by Republican politicians, eager to destroy anything that might redound to the benefit of the Democrats. Even so, a little clear thinking on the subject of public programs might illuminate their advantages and disadvantages. In fact, there are numerous "public options" in American life, with many of them rooted deep in the nation's history. In the area of education, there are public schools; in recreation, public parks; in travel, public roads; in fire-fighting, public fire departments; in law enforcement, public police forces; in culture, public libraries; in transportation, public bus and train lines; in mail delivery, the post office; in sanitation, public water supply plumbing, and sewers; in energy, public power; in old-age security, Social Security; in nutrition, public school lunch programs. Where did the notion ever come from that public programs were somehow "un-American"?

Even in the disputed area of health care, there exist public hospitals, Medicare, Medicaid, the Veterans Administration and the National Institutes of Health".

Keep reading this excellent article by Professor Lawrence Wittner of the University of New York at Albany

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Socialized Medicine? Not Quite: 5 Myths About Health Care Around the World

2009-08-25T03:50:59Z

Now, this is what we should be talking about and not "death panels", "socialized medicine", "we have the best health care system in the world" and other such inane myths product of a great ignorance.

The key difference is that foreign health insurance plans exist only to pay people's medical bills, not to make a profit. The United States is the only developed country that lets insurance companies profit from basic health coverage.

Read this excellent myth-busting article by T.R. Reid in the Washington Post.

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A walled world

2009-08-23T18:48:20Z

Walled_worldb

In what obviously is a perversion writ large of the Gated Community syndrome, the world is clearly divided into two areas: the haves and the have nots. Ironically, Old Europe is the only area where the wall seems to be expanding outwards in the so-called Schengen Border. Elsewhere the walls are getting higher and more foreboding, especially in Palestine. Quite ominous is also the Mexican border. Meanwhile, the numbers are staggering: 86% of the world population have to share only 27% of the world's income while the other 14% of the population share 73%! of that income. And most of Asia, Latin America and Africa are lingering in a state of poverty and despair by the masses, kept under the boots of dictatorships and rampart corruption. Perhaps as the emerging economies of China, India and Brazil try to be the next to crash the poverty walls, others will follow. But we in the richer world need to be mindful of these inhumane conditions and help to level the playing field.

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A monster in our midst: Scalia's logic

2009-08-21T02:17:47Z

Scalia

To Antonin Scalia, an innocent man can be executed knowingly once he was convicted in a "full and fair and trial"

Or as Alan Dershowitz puts it:

"Let us be clear precisely what this means. If a defendant were convicted, after a constitutionally unflawed trial, of murdering his wife, and then came to the Supreme Court with his very much alive wife at his side, and sought a new trial based on newly discovered evidence (namely that his wife was alive), these two justices would tell him, in effect: "Look, your wife may be alive as a matter of fact, but as a matter of constitutional law, she's dead, and as for you, Mr. Innocent Defendant, you're dead, too, since there is no constitutional right not to be executed merely because you're innocent."
“This court,” Scalia pointed out, “has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a court that he is ‘actually’ innocent.”

This monstrosity, with the full concurrence of the other monster in the court, Clarence Thomas, is typical of judges of this type because to them, it demonstrates that the law is a nonpolitical and intellectually rigorous practice, rather than a touchy-feely exercise in doing the "right thing". It does not show "empathy" the horrible feeling they accused Sonia Sotomayor of being guilty of.

I hope Sonia, a wise latina, shows how her decisions are far better than those of these two stupid white basterds (one is an Uncle Tom)

Read two excellent articles by by Pail Campos and Alan Deshowitz on this latest aberration here

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We MUST have a public option

2009-08-18T03:39:42Z

Professor Reich is right. This is our test. The Obama presidency is on the block. If we lose this one, even when the Democrats have the House and the Senate, Americans will not forget Obama and his presidency will go down in flames beginning with the 2010 mid term elections.

It's now or never!

The Public Option's Last Stand, and the Public's
by Robert B. Reich, Professor of Public Policy at UC Berkeley :

I would have preferred a single payer system like Medicare, but became convinced earlier this year that a public, Medicare-like optional plan was just about as much as was politically possible. Now the White House is stepping back even from the public option, with the President saying it's "not the entirety of health care reform," the White House spokesman saying the President could be "satisfied" without it, and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius saying that a public insurance plan is "not the essential element."

Without a public, Medicare-like option, health care reform is a bandaid for a system in critical condition. There's no way to push private insurers to become more efficient and provide better value to Americans without being forced to compete with a public option. And there's no way to get overall health-care costs down without a public option that has the authority and scale to negotiate lower costs with pharmaceutical companies, doctors, hospitals, and other providers -- thereby opening the way for private insurers to do the same.

It's been clear from the start that the private insurers and other parts of the medical-industrial complex have hated the idea of the public option, for precisely these reasons. A public option would cut deeply into their current profits. That's why they've been willing to spend a fortune on lobbyists, threaten and intimidate legislators and ordinary Americans, and even rattle Obama's cage to the point where the Administration is about to give up on it.

The White House wonders why there hasn't been more support for universal health care coming from progressives, grass-roots Democrats, and Independents. I'll tell you why. It's because the White House has never made an explicit commitment to a public option.

Senator Kent Conrad's ersatz public option -- his regional "cooperatives" -- won't have the scale or authority to do what a public option would do. That's why some Republicans say they could buy it. What's Conrad's response? "The fact of the matter is there are not the votes in the United States Senate for a public option. There never have been," he tells "FOX News Sunday." Conrad is wrong. If Obama tells Senate Democrats he will not sign a healthcare reform bill without a public option, there will be enough votes in the United States Senate for a public option.

I urge you to make it absolutely clear to everyone you know, everyone who cares about universal health care and what it will mean to our country, that the bill must contain a real public option. Tell that to your representatives in Congress. Tell that to the White House. If you are receiving piles of emails from the Obama email system asking you to click in favor of health care, do not do so unless or until you know it has a clear public option. Do not send money unless or until the White House makes clear its support for a public option.

This isn't just Obama's test. It's our test.

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ECONOMICS IS NOT NATURAL SCIENCE

2009-08-15T04:42:23Z

We must stop perpetuating the fiction that existence itself is dictated by the immutable laws of economics. These so-called laws are, in actuality, the economic mechanisms of 13th Century monarchs. Some of us analyzing digital culture and its impact on business must reveal economics as the artificial construction it really is. Although it may be subjected to the scientific method and mathematical scrutiny, it is not a natural science; it is game theory, with a set of underlying assumptions that have little to do with anything resembling genetics, neurology, evolution, or natural systems. [more]

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