Paul Harvey passed away on Saturday, February 28th. He was 90 years old.
We found ourselves at odds with his comments on many occasions, but always admired his radio talent. His morning and noon broadcasts were usually interesting and always schmaltzy.
His pm show, The Rest of the Story, was our favorite. As it was written by Paul Harvey Jr., maybe it will continue.
18,000 people die every year in the United Statesbecause they are refused treatment in a hospital.Why?They have no health care insurance.47 million Americans do not have health insurance - - 6 million more than when the Supreme Court chose George Bush as their president.Millions more are about to loose their insurance as they loose their jobs.With real unemployment now hovering around 17 percent, millions more people are without insurance. Millions of us just one illness away from poverty and destitution while the health-insurance company owners are awash in profit, pounds of flesh ripped from the bodies of “unhealthy mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters and, most of all, children”.Our current health care system, ranked 39th in the world, is, as Nick Metel wrote last month, “an old, failed relic, broken beyond repair.”
There are alternatives, alternatives that don’t rely on a profit motive.Single payer is such a system.Single payer as in Medicare available to all seniors in the U.S.“The government, which is the ‘single payer’ covers all citizens and pays the bills when they visit private (or public) doctors, hospitals and other facilities for medical care, wrote Mike Dennison in the Billings Gazette. “All would have basic coverage, regardless of whether they have a job, or where they work.Nobody gets billed for basic care.Nobody goes broke because of medical bills.
Who supports single payer?According to the latest polls, 68 percent of the American people do.51 percent of American physicians do.The nursing unions do.American business leaders do.
Who opposes single payer?It seems the only hold-outs for the current system are President Obama, big pharma, the health insurance companies, including AARP and their congressional lackeys who claim single payer is off the table.Funny how small their tables are when it comes time to enacting policies that benefit the majority of people in the country.
The time has come to scrap the for profit health care system.Representative John Conyers of Michigan and 93 co-sponsors have introduced HR676 that would establish national health insurance and a single payer system.500 labor unions have endorsed the bill.Led in part by the California Nurses Association, the national coalition supporting single payer has 85,000 institutional members.
The time has come “for our leaders to ensure that no citizen is ever again added to the lost of those who have died due to a lack of health coverage, a list that adds 18,000 names each year according to the Institute of Medicine.”18,000?That’s five 9/11s.But congress and Obama are not going to do it unless we apply political pressure.Call or write members of congress and the president and demand that they institute real change we can believe in.
Sean Penn upset Mickey Rourke for the Best Actor Oscar at the 81st Academy Awards.
Rourke has been sweeping awards in most of the B award shows and was the favorite to win the Oscar for a deserving performance in The Wrestler as well as the sentiment accompanying a long awaited comeback.
After seeing Rourke take the other awards it was nice to see a great actor like Sean Penn get this for his performance as Harvey Milk in Milk.
His opening line in his acceptance speech was, "You commie, homo-loving sons of guns!"
“When the economy recovers,” I heard several talking heads agree during the weekend interview programs, everything will be ok.
Will the economy recover? I’m not so sure it will and even if it does make what we could call some semblance of recovery, we will be living in a country that is significantly different. Recoveries in previous recessions or depressions, and they have come with sickening regularity throughout the history of the country, have had either a “V” shape or a “U” shape. This time, one economist has predicted, what we are likely to see is an “L” shape. That’s right, a precipitous drop that will level out and remain the same for decades much like the Japanese economy has looked for the last two decades.
Other writers and economists are not even that optimistic. “The daily bleeding of thousands of jobs will soon turn our economic crisis into a political crisis,” writes former New York Times foreign correspondent, Chris Hedges. “The street protests, strikes and riots that have rattled France, Turkey, Greece, Ukraine, Russia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria and Iceland will descent on us. It is only a matter of time. And not much time,” Hedges wrote on February 2nd. Frankly, I’m surprised that we have not already seen protests in our streets. The official unemployment rate is reported by the government at 7% but the real figure is probably closer to 12% or 13% if not higher.
“Our way of life is over,” Hedges wrote. “Our profligate consumption is finished . . . and poverty and despair will sweep across the landscape like a plague.”
Our economy is, after all, constructed on debt. Mountains of debt. Bank debt. Housing debt. Car debt. Student loan debt. Payday debt. Credit card debt. A Mount Everest of debt. We are no longer citizens of the United States we are consumers. As consumers, we account for 72% of the gross national product. We don’t make anything anymore, we consume and let China and other make products for our consumption. And let’s not forget, war debt. The economist Joseph Stiglitz has calculated the eventual total Iraq war debt under Bush at 3 trillion. Now President Obama is prepared to commit the United States to a continuing imperial debt in Iraq for the foreseeable future of 10 to 12 billion per month and the same or more in Afghanistan.
This system is not sustainable: it is not going to be OK. We must begin, now, to see our country and our economic system is a vastly different way. We need to “measure economic performance by the indicators of what we really want,” writes David Korten, the health and well-being of our children, families, communities, and the natural environment.” Like the British at the end of World War II, we have to give up empire. One would have thought that George Bush would have given empire a bad name by now but that doesn’t seem to be the case. We must confront this “obstacle to national recovery - - the nation’s obsession with militarism and foreign wars,” writes Dave Lindorff. “The honest truth is that the US is technically bankrupt and in a state of chronic decline, and yet the nation persists in spending a trillion dollars a year on war and preparations for war. . . .” The truth is, Lindorff says, “that we are not threatened by Communism, by drug lords, or by Muslim Jihadists in any serious way. Rather, we have become our own worst enemy.”
We have to become, as Lenin said, as radical as reality itself.
On "This Week with George Stephanopoulos", conservative SC Sen. Lindsey Graham (R) announced he supports, or at least thinks it may be necessary, to nationalize the banks. In the same segment, liberal NY Sen. Chuck Schumer (D) declared his opposition to that plan.
Congress Boehner was in the majority for 6 years of the Bush Administration while spending like drunken sailors and running up a 10 Trillion Dollar Debt!
I had an epiphany of sorts over the weekend.As some of you may know, for the last several weeks there has been an ongoing exchange in the letter’s to the editor of the Aberdeen, Daily World over a letter I wrote back in December 2008.In that letter I criticized, among other things, the grooming of our children for militarism in the public schools.In one response, a letter writer suggested that I had a defective conscience or worse, probably no conscience at all.Ouch!Another writer, a man who stalked me several years ago when I first moved here, used classic Red Baiting techniques by calling me a Communist, a Socialist and a Bolshevik.That was not exactly correct:
1.the Communists kicked me out of their party after a very short time - - they said I was too radical;
2.I was never a Bolshevik although Alexander Cockburn has, on occasion, called me a Bolshi Scum; and
3.I’m no Bush neo-Socialist!I’m a classic, paleo-Marxist Socialist. W has certainly given classic Socialists a bad name what with his bailout of the capitalist system.But that’s another commentary.
Now, those acute criticisms of my letters have had a profound effect on my thinking so I’d like to change my mind.The change occurred when I read that several of our legislators, including our own Lynn Kessler, have decided to protect our children in the schools from grooming.Not from the grooming that would turn them into killers or cannon fodder that I criticized, but save them from adult sex with the wrong, other adult people.Let them enter into a contract, let them vote, let them kill for God and country but by Jehovah or Allah or whatever, don’t let them engage in consensual, adult sex.
What a fool I was.
I have decided to support American militarism and empire. In that spirit I offer a program that might heal the rift between me and my critics.
I now realize that we are waiting far too long to indoctrinate our children.Let’s rename our area from Grays Harbor to Sparta.Like Sparta we must take the children, boys and girls, away from their indulgent parents at an early age, say five or six, and begin their rigorous military training.This would have many advantages, not the least of which would be to alleviate the need for all those teachers of music and reading and writing and English and social studies and others who don’t teach the manly virtues.We could have military bases in every community instead of those useless schools - - that would ensure lots of Congressional earmarks from Norm Dicks.We would no longer have over a hundred homeless teenagers to worry about every week.No more worries about the 25% of girls who are physically, emotionally or sexually abused by their parents before they reach the age of eighteen.Naturally we would re-institute the draft and conscript all teenagers at age eighteen - - oops, I mean thirteen.No more worry about teachers and students having sex as long as we make sure that no military trainers are also Catholic priests.At any rate, it would all be a military secret so out of sight out of mind.
We might also be able to save the social security system with my plan because having conscripted every teen in the country, many of whom would die in the process, never to reach sixty-five, we could invade a much wider range of countries of little brown people who don’t adhere to our religion or refuse to give us our oil.
I can see now how wrong I used to be.I’m totally over my Communist, Socialist, Bolshevik phase and I hope my critics can now see that I’m really trying to come to grips with my defective conscience or the probably that I have no conscience at all.
Some of the wounded lay where they fell, waiting for what they knew would come.For others, a comradely shot to the head was thought humane.Rudyard Kipling captured the essence of the terrible decision:
When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains,
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.
That was January 1842.A British army of 5,000 troops and 12,000 civilians left Kabul, Afghanistan in a mad retreat to Jalalabad.As the Afghanis cut them to pieces, chaos prevailed among the British soldiers who, it is reported, knocked down their officers with the butts of their muskets. On the 13th of January, just seven days after the retreat commenced, one man, bloody and torn, mounted on a miserable pony, and pursued by horsemen, was seen riding furiously across the plains.The other 17,000 lay dead on the snowy ground.
Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires.Alexander the Great, Moghuls, the British, and the Soviet Union were all driven from Afghanistan.
The United States now has 30,000 soldiers in Afghanistan.It’s Bush’s war.“We are on the verge of significantly expanding the war in Afghanistan,” Ray Bonner wrote in the New York Times Book Review, “which will inevitably affect Pakistan as well.Unfortunately, there has been little or no debate about President-elect Barack Obama’s plan to send in more troops,” Bonner concluded.When he does that, when Obama escalates the war by sending in 20,000 more troops, on that day it will be Obama’s war.
Why is the United States in Afghanistan?Contrary to the propaganda of the Bush and now Obama administrations, as Bonner points out, “the threat presented by Al Qaeda has been exaggerated.”Al Qaeda’s “importance in the general scheme of things is greatly overstated by the West,” Tariq Ali writes in his new book, The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power.Bruce Riedel, a former C.I.A. analyst and adviser to three presidents, “acknowledges that enlarging the war in Afghanistan is exactly what Al Qaeda wants, just as it wants the conflict in Iraq to continue.‘In its view,’ Riedal says, the bleeding wars offer the best opportunity to defeat the United States’.”
Have we learned nothing from history?Does no one remember that Osama bin Laden is a creation of the United States?Does no one remember that some of the weapons he now uses on U. S. soldiers were supplied to him through the largess of Congressmen Norm Dicks and Charlie Wilson?
After seven years of war and occupation, Afghanistan is a failed, narco-state.It has a puppet president whose authority does not extend beyond Kabul.He depends for his survival on NATO and U. S. mercenaries.It has, according to Ali, “a corrupt and abusive police force, a nonfunctioning judiciary, a burgeoning criminal layer and a deepening social and economic crisis.”
Sounds to me a lot like Vietnam under U.S. tutelage in the 1950s and 1960s.I hope Obama does not go down this road, to compound the tragedy we have already induced..
