A Strategy Note for Single Payer Activists: Now is the Time to Take Control of the Language!

The momentum in favor of the “public option” has probably already achieved a critical mass—recent polls have 80% of physicians in favor, 65-70% of the general public. And these numbers have been on a steady upward trend, so we should expect to see them climb higher in the weeks and months ahead. Despite the blatant attempts of the Democrat party leadership and the corporate news media, the ranks of the single payer activists have continued to swell. Everyday, all over the country, we are reaching a lot of people and converting them over to our side. It is like we are a civic version of the white blood cell, multiplying in the body politic to drive out the virus of the corporate privateers. Every day, tens of thousands more Americans are realizing that a profit-driven health care delivery system ultimately endangers the health and financial well being of the entire society, for the benefit of a very small economic elite.

Although they embarrassingly trail behind public opinion, even the elected Democrats in Washington seem to realize that they will have to pass health care reform with at least the words “public option” written into the bill. A battle has been won and our side has seized a better tactical position from which to fight on.

Now begins the battle over just what, exactly, the bill will say. And this is a terrain where our enemies are well prepared to fight. The health insurance industry has 2700 full-time lobbyists in Washington D.C., and their dirty finger prints are smudged all over every single bit of health care legislation that has appeared to date.

For an example of what I am talking about I will turn to America’s Affordable Health Choices Act Implementation Timeline—a summary of H.R. 3200, the Democrat sponsored House Bill that stalled out on the floor in early August and which will likely reappear in some altered form for vote at some time in the near future. This was a document prepared by the Committees on Ways and Means, Energy and Commerce, and Education and Labor and was released on July 14, 2009. It is what the National Democrat Party leadership would have given our nation in the way of health care reform, had they gotten their way last summer session. One needs to look no further than the first sentence of this document to find a loophole big enough for an insurance-industry owned Mack truck. The very first claim the document makes is that America’s Affordable Health Choices Act: “Ends Health Insurance Rescissions: Prohibits abusive practices by health insurance companies rescinding existing health insurance policies as a way of avoiding covering the costs of enrollees’ health needs.”

Here is a rule of thumb when looking at any document prepared by lawyers: Be very wary of all modifying words and clauses. In other words, if you see an adjective or adverb, ask yourself:  “Why?”

In the sentence quoted above, why include the word “abusive?”

Why include the very clumsy phrase “as a way of avoiding covering the costs of enrollees’ health needs?”

Why not simply write “Prohibits health insurance companies from rescinding existing health insurance policies” and leave it at that?

You do not need to have graduated first in your class at Harvard Law to be able to look at a sentence like “Prohibits abusive practices by health insurance companies rescinding health insurance policies as a way of avoiding covering the costs of enrollees’ health needs” and realize that this will give the health insurance corporations all the legal wiggle room they need to continue rescinding policies, justifying that they have not done it in an “abusive” manner, or for the purpose of “avoiding covering the costs of enrollees’ health needs.”

Instead of a 1000 page long bill full of poorly written sentences and legal loopholes designed to protect health insurance industry profits, we need to be pushing hard on our representatives to write a straight forward piece of legislation which will establish a Medicare buy-in system as the public option. And it must be open to any United States citizen who wishes to participate.

Right now the Democrats are brandishing about the words “public option,” with no clear statement of what they really mean by it. Now is the time for us as activists to make sure they understand exactly what we, the members of the public, expect from a public option. We must seize the term and use it as our own weapon to drive the greed from our health care system.

What the Public Option Must Look Like

Strategy Note for Single Payer Activists: Make Sure “the Public Option” does not become the Insurance Industry’s Flanking Maneuver!

 

It has now become clear to a strong majority of American voters that meaningful healthcare reform will not happen unless the greed-driven health insurance corporations are forced to compete against a not-for-profit, publically administered plan. A New York Times poll released on September 25^th had 65% favoring a “public option” vrs. 26% against. Another recent poll puts support for public option at 77% (SurveyUSA, June 2009). Health care reform activists are achieving these results influencing voter opinion in spite of the way the mainstream media spent the summer inflating the phony populist right-wing backlash of the town-hall know-nothings. The reason we are achieving these results is simple: The health care crisis is too big to ignore or gloss over. Millions of Americans live with the results every day and they know that the profit hungry jackals in the insurance industry are to blame.

The Democratic Party, too, is learning that they face an uprising among the party rank and file. Support for a single payer plan continues to grow. In the meantime, the house Democrats realize they will not be able to face their constituents if they fail in delivering a “strong public plan.”

We have won some valuable ground in this battle, but victory still hangs in the balance. As activists we have to keep engaged on the ground. There are 2,700 health insurance lobbyists working full time in Washington D.C., and if they can’t outright defeat a “public option,” you can be certain that they will work day and night trying to make sure that legislation gets written that will protect their bloody-money profits.

A strong, viable public option must do several things. It must be open to ANYBODY who wants to buy into it. There is a significant danger that health-insurance owned legislators will write a bill that forces workers to accept whatever private plan is offered at their work, regardless of how bad it is. It is crucial that the public option be open for enrollment to ANYBODY so that the plan will have a big enough risk pool to be sustainable. If the public option is created merely to serve a relatively small, less healthy population than it will never have a financially viable risk pool.  It will face constant financial unsustainable, making it an easy target for an eventual right-wing backlash.

This leads to a second crucial point. The “public option” legislation must be written in a way that strengthens Medicare. For decades, Medicare has provided efficient, timely medical care to our highest risk pool, all the while suffering under the out-of-control inflation caused by the profit-driven American healthcare model. The best way to create a public option and strengthen Medicare at the same time is to demand a public option that is a Medicare buy-in. They must let everybody buy into Medicare. This will provide the Medicare risk pool with an infusion of younger, statistically healthier patients, strengthening the system for the long term future. Howard Dean used the term “Medicare buy in” immediately after Obama’s speech this month.

A “Medicare buy in” public option would of course be a death sentence for the health insurance industry. When they argue that they “can’t compete” against a strong government run plan, they are 100% right. If given the choice, what consumer would not opt for the plan that costs less, that has no out-of-pocket expenses, that has no profit-motivated desire to refuse care?

As single payer activists, we should keep pushing for single payer. We should demand our representatives vote for H.R. 676, “Medicare for All” when it comes up on the floor. We should demand that they support the Kucinich amendment to H.R. 3220, which will allow individual states to start single payer systems. But right now, we also need to be working tirelessly to make sure we don’t let the health insurance lobbyists use “the public option” to flank us. If we take over the debate and make “the public option” our own, we can instead use it at the lance point straight into the heart of the insurance industry.

Report from Michael Arcuri Town Hall Meeting

Report from Mike Arcuri Town Hall Meeting in Varna, 9.11.09

The entire Varna Community Center building on the side of route 366 was packed, with overflow parking graciously provided by the service station next door. Arcuri had to address the crowd by standing in a doorway between two rooms. A lot of credit should go to Martha Robinson and whoever else helped her put together the event. There were probably between two and three hundred in attendance.

There was strong pro-single payer sentiment expressed throughout the comments and questions, with even larger numbers momentarily bursting into applause for the invocation of single payer and single payer ideas. If the rather large crowd was not overwhelmingly single-payer, it was at least overwhelmingly in favor of the sort of public health system that can really only be delivered by a single payer system.

Arcuri gave his standard dismissal of single-payer: “It can’t get the votes to pass. It’s not practical.” But I suspect others who saw him in his office in D.C. on July 30^th, and a week or so later in Cortland, will agree with me that he was much less forceful in dismissing single payer yesterday. Within a sentence of saying it was not practical, he segued to discussing how the opposition to single-payer was very similar to the opposition to Medicare and now Medicare is extremely popular and politically untouchable now. He brought up single-payer himself, prior to anybody else asking about it or advocating for it, acknowledging it as popular with some people in the way Obama did in his speech. It is easy to be cynical and view that as them just patting us on the head after they sold us out at the bargaining table, but from a practical organizing standpoint, the more people hear the phrase “single payer” used, the more receptive those people will be to the very fiscally conservative, common sense logic of adopting a single payer system.

The first question Arcuri actually took on health care policy was about health saving accounts. Health savings accounts are very popular, and for obvious reasons. It a profit-driven, inhumane health care system, the health care savings accounts have made a big different for a lot of people with crappy, high deductible policies. Arcuri stated that he was generally against health care savings accounts because they inhibit the risk pool, but admitted that they were quite popular and may “fit in somehow” with an eventual health care bill.

He also invoked all the people who “like their plans and don’t want to see them changed.” But he also spent a lot of time throughout the meeting explaining that a lot of people who think they like their plans have never really had to rely on them under a true medical emergency, when the insurance corporations use all their various loopholes to deny care and save money. This was a very positive development since I last saw him in late July and early August. In those meetings, he would just insist “a lot of people really like their plan now” and we would have to point out that a high percentage of those people don’t really understand how their plans even work. Then he would say “it doesn’t matter why they think it, it’s what they think.” It was encouraging to see him now seeming to come around to the point of view that he should be willing educate his constituents if necessary. At several points throughout the meeting he was quite explicit about blaming the for profit health insurance corporations for creating misery, suffering and an economic burden for the society.

The question about health saving accounts was followed by a gentleman who made an eloquent denunciation of the private insurance industry. He stated that he preferred a single payer system and asked for at least a strong public option, legitimately open and big enough to succeed. He also asked Arcuri to at least cast a symbolic vote for H.R. 676, “Medicare for All,” when it comes up for up or down vote in the fall.

Some guy claimed Medicare is going to be broke in six years and asked Michael Arcuri, “for the sake of my two children”, to vote against any spending, ever again.

It should be noted here that the popular right-wing claim that “Medicare is broke” is absurd. Medicare pays for medical care for one of the most expensive demographics there is to treat, and in a medical system with out of control yearly increases in costs. So Medicare continually needs more money—just like the private insurers. The private insurers get more money from hiking rates—9 to 10% a year, 119% over the last decade. The whole thing should be turned around: “Why can’t the private insurers operate without doubling their rates every ten years? That’s supposed to be a practical business model?” If they weren’t selling something we need to survive—access to medical care—with no competition, they would have gone broke a long time ago.

Arcuri responded to the question from the “fiscal conservative” by invoking his own towering status as a fiscal conservative. He said he will not support any bill that adds to the deficit. He raised one of his favorite issues, the fact that the bill needs to make sure Medicare and Medicaid payment schedules will continue to rise sufficiently to allow the small rural hospitals like he has in his district to continue operating. This is a legitimate concern for rural areas throughout the country. I actually think that, although people associate single payer with urban liberals, it is much more likely to catch on in rural, traditionally conservative parts of the country first.

It was somewhere around this point in the meeting where Arcuri made his first reference to his recent televised encounter with somebody named “Chris Matthews.” This Matthews guy has apparently decided that the Democrats are going to lose some number of house seats if they can’t manage to pass a “health care bill.” Apparently according to this Matthews guy, it doesn’t matter how many people will actually end up covered under the bill or whether or not it will add to the deficit or how much citizen money the bill will end up funneling into the coffers of the health insurance corporations, the only really important thing is that the Democrats pass a bill, so that people with television shows like this Chris Matthewson will be extremely impressed by their organization skills. Arcuri apparently told him in no uncertain terms that it did matter whether or not the bill was a good bill. Obviously it is great that he thinks this way. He mentioned the show at least two other times, so it is clearly something he is proud of and anybody calling his office might consider mentioning that you “caught Mike on the Chris Mackelsen Show and thought he really let Chris have it!”—provided you really did see the show, of course.

A woman from the Teacher’s Association spoke very intelligently about how even people who seem to have great insurance find themselves out in the cold when they really need to get help. She said under the Teacher’s Association plan her mother was denied critical end-of-life care on the basis that “dying is not a medical emergency.” She gave other example of co-workers who have had their doctor-order chemo-therapy treatment denied (it is a sad fact that if you spend a month doing single payer activism, you will end up meeting more people than you would ever have thought possible who have had their insurance companies deny or cut off their chemo), examples of people denied payment for highly effective laser technologies to more safely remove cancer tumors because the treatment was “experimental.” She summed up her testimony very nicely by talking about the difference between having insurance and actually having access to care: “We think we have insurance. But we don’t, maybe.”

Arcuri responded to her by saying “Most people are happy with their insurance. Most people don’t actually need their insurance.” I have to say, I am a much bigger fan of Michael Arcuri when he is telling the truth about insurance corporations.

Some woman made a strong general statement of her disapproval of Michael Arcuri for his alliance with the Blue Dogs and his alliance with his business friends. She said he needed to stop listening to his business friends and listen to people like her, “experts on social and public policy.” She finished her comments by announcing that she had to leave immediately for a very important meeting she was attending in Cortland at the Center for Ethics, Peace and Social Justice—presumably some confederation of  other experts in public and social policy. She urged him to “check us out.” And then she was gone into the afternoon.

Arcuri was happy to take the opportunity to defend his association with the Blue Dogs, once more returning to the issue of Medicare payment schedules for small rural hospitals. He said he was proud to stand with the Blue Dogs when trying to make sure the bill will protect small rural health care networks.

The next speaker said he loved the free market, and also liberty. He identified himself as a Republican and said he was very proud of Arcuri for voting against the cap and trade bill. He called Arcuri a man of integrity no fewer than four times during the course of perhaps two minutes of talking. He urged Arcuri to be “fiscally conservative on health care.”

Arcuri again emphasized that he wanted to see a fiscally conservative bill. In the next breath he stated that it was very important to write a bill that would take out “the prejudice against pre-existing conditions.”

A woman from 212-HELP and the Tompkins Health Alliance gave a very strong front line report documenting the shocking rise in unmet health care needs in our own community over just the past six months. I plan to get a copy of the Health Alliance’s research and send them out in a future Water Cooler Wars Bullet pack.

Arcuri used this to segue into the argument that fixing the health care system is not only an ethical imperative, it is also an economic imperative. He said it is “not just the morally right thing to do, it is the economically necessary thing.” He also said “We need to make sure people who think they have good insurance understand they probably don’t.”  He was really making these sorts of arguments with a lot of enthusiasm. His fiscally conservative side is getting drawn into the debate. I think we can flip him to support single payer at some point.

Another guy complained about Medicare being broke, the government being inefficient because he had to wait in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles (apparently there are retail stores and private business office I have not been to, where the miracles of the Free Market have eliminated all waiting). He also invoked the commonly known rightwing opinion that the post office is no good. He spoke about how frustrating it is for him to not be able to buy health insurance policies from any state he wants; the phrasing of his question did not indicate that he had any awareness of the Sherman Anti-trust laws, and of the fact that the insurance corporations have a specially written exemption to them. He seemed to think that if only some non-existent government regulation were removed from place, the health insurance market would suddenly be transformed “by competition” that policies would suddenly appear that were both affordable and actually useful for when you get sick or injured. He finished by asking for “loser pays” torte reform—a brilliant idea for effectively denying the Constitutional right to due-process to any poor or working class person.

Arcuri managed to politely explain what a stupid idea “loser pays” torte reform would be. He then tackled the issue of “competition.” He explained how, by design, almost all the markets in the country are divided up between the various corporations and only two or three operate in most areas. He said that a strong public option was necessary in order to provide real competition. The guy who had just asked for “loser-pays” countered “But it’s not fair, because the private health insurance corporations have to make a profit.” Arcuri pointed out that private schools manage to flourish alongside the public school system, UPS and FedEx make money despite the completion from the Post Office, and that the Post Office keeps the private shippers’ fees down.

Really, we should pray that the right-wingers keep making this “But it’s not fair because the private insurers can’t compete” argument. That argument is check-mate for them. By raising it, they are admitting that the profit in the health care industry comes at the direct expense of the patients in the health care system—it is not something traded in exchange for added value, but is in fact something siphoned off in an exploitive manner. They are admitting that you can’t have huge corporate profits and still provide people the care they want and need. You can tell that they think they are making a “good point” when they bring this up, but the argument they are making is: “Hey, if the government starts letting people create a large public risk pool, where all of the money is only used to provide medical treatment, then nobody is going to want to go enter the privately managed risk pool, where so much of the money has to be filtered out of the pool to pay off investors and to pay CEO’s over a hundred thousand dollars an hour, at the continued expense of actual sick people who are denied treatment.”

A Doctor followed by saying that anybody who thinks the private insurance system is the best way to go has a “rich fantasy life.” He said that when he started practicing in 1970, he old needed one and half employees to manage billing and paperwork. Now he needs 10. He said that private insurance costs are making the entire system unsustainable. He also mentioned a patient who had his payments denied after he was shot in the face in a hunting accident because he “went outside the system.”

Another Doctor and Cornell professor stated that he had lived in Britain, Canada and the U.S. and that the U.S. health care system is far inferior. He stated that the only good solution was a single payer system. He said he also wanted a ban on drug advertising on television. Arcuri made a lame argument that he had “first amendment problems” with banning Drug Company advertising. I think we should at least be pushing him to help take away the tax write off that drug companies get for their advertising. According to Eric Massa at his town hall meeting last month, drug companies are able to deduct their advertising from their taxes—not their pre-tax burden, but their actual tax bill. That means that the tax payers are really paying for it.

A woman from Ulysses spoke about the difficulty of losing coverage while pregnant. She said her sister had a great job with insurance, and still had to fight her insurance company for treatment, right up to the day she died of cancer.

A woman from Ithaca challenged fiscal conservatives to justify opposing single payer when it is the only really fiscally conservative solution to the health care problem. She wanted to know why fiscal conservative are opposing reforms that will save money. Arcuri responded with a defense of fiscal conservatism and said that he and other fiscally conservative Blue Dogs were supporting the public option, because it would save money.

A Doctor from Trumansburg said that in 30 years he has seen the insurance companies become increasingly hostile to patients. He said he favored a single payer system. “You should really think about that,” he told Arcuri. “A lot of rural doctors support single payer.”

Arcuri at this point said a very interesting thing—he said he was going to support the amendment to force Congress to take the public option as their plan. This is something Massa mentioned at his town hall meeting in Erin. Let’s encourage him to keep this position.

A man invoked the moral imperative of providing health care and kept saying that he didn’t mind paying more in taxes to give more people coverage. He asked Arcuri what exactly Arcuri would or would not vote for. Arcuri said he would vote for anything that will “legitimately improve the situation.” He came back again to saying that the prejudice against pre-existing conditions had to be eliminated. He also spoke about closing the donut hole in Medicaid D—which means making the drug companies negotiate with Medicare for drug prices (like the rest of the world does). It is interesting he brought this up, because it is thought that Obama already bargained it away. I think this is one of those details we should force the issue on—Obama doesn’t have a right to bargain that away, for the sake of “support” from the drug companies for his bill. Any meaningful healthcare reform has to force drug companies to negotiate their prices.

In general, I think that the meeting showed Arcuri is in a good place on this issue—or as good of a place as we could hope to find him. He is making a lot of the arguments you would want to hear him making, and in his case, I think that means he is hearing those arguments from larger and larger numbers of his constituents. The idea that radical reform is necessary is gaining a lot of traction—so many people, from all walks of life and all backgrounds, find themselves dealing with the same cruel, unjust problems within the American healthcare system. Single payer is forcing its way into the conversation, and we can hope that it will reach a critical mass as more and more people come around to the undeniable fiscal and moral reality of our situation.

Really? This is the Best America Can Do?

Back in 2002 the Institute of Medicine released a study which estimated that 18,000 Americans had died during 2000, as a result of not having health care. More recently, the Urban Institute employed the IOM’s methodology, accounting for the rise in the ranks of the uninsured, and adjusted the number upwards: 22,000 in 2006 (urban.org). Let’s say we just split the difference and call it 20k, for the sake of convenience. Any way you count it, it works out to over a hundred thousand dead Americans since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. For over half a decade now, our federal government has been spending in excess of a billion dollars a week of tax payer money, much of it going to private corporations such as Halliburton and Black Water, all in the name of “protecting” our “national interests.” Meanwhile, enough people to fill a city the size of Allentown, Pennsylvania or Midlands, Texas bit the dust. In no other industrialized nation in the world would this happen.

By the way: During roughly that same time period, health insurance industry profits have risen 1000%  and premiums for workers’ policies have jumped five times the rate of wages (AFL-CIO). The strain of paying health insurance premiums is threatening to bust the budgets of nearly every city, county and state government across the nation; it went a very long way towards destroying the American auto industry. Somehow, the United States of America has managed to cobble together a healthcare delivery system which is simultaneously bankrupting industry and government, while killing off large numbers of the population.

Of course, a very small number of United States citizens make tens of millions of dollars a year working within this deadly health care delivery system. And for this reason alone, some people will actually maintain that our “uniquely American” health care system is a smashing success. Some people really and truly do believe that any enterprise which increases personal wealth is noble and just, no matter how many other people suffer or die as a matter of due course.

There is a kind of folk belief in the United States that “nobody goes without medical care if they really need it.” But that just isn’t true. If you are one of the 50 million Americans without health insurance coverage then you cannot simply make an appointment and go see a Doctor just because your stomach has hurt and your digestion has been haphazard for months. You can’t just waltz into the convenient care at the first sign of flu symptoms. You won’t get the routine physical and blood work that might detect a sudden, troubling rise in your blood sugar or a glitch in your organ functions.

Oh, sure, as things go on and your condition continues to degenerate, you can eventually look forward to receiving whatever medical attention will be needed to stabilize your condition at an emergency room, once you have contracted a full-blown case of influenza, or slipped into a diabetic coma, or progressed significantly far along with a case of stomach cancer to be shitting blood when you cough.

At that point, your condition will be extremely expensive to treat, and your options for procuring treatment severely limited by your uninsured status. Unless you have been sick sufficiently long enough to have slipped into the lowest levels of the economic underclass, you will not qualify for Medicaid or any other sort of government subsidized health plan. For an uninsured person with a serious medical condition, procuring any kind of medical care at all can become a full-time job by itself; simply keeping track of and servicing the ever rising debt, another.

And there just isn’t a lot about the situation to inspire even the smallest flicker of hope. Let’s suppose that, for instance, in spite of dealing with a serious medical condition, you manage to land a better job, one that offers health insurance. But you still won’t be able to get the medical care you need, because the insurance corporation that your new employers buy their policy from will deny you coverage the very first time you go sign up for those tests or treatments you’ve been waiting months, or even years, to get done.

Denying coverage for “pre-existing” conditions is the industry standard. It has to be. Insurance corporations are legally obligated to pursue maximum profits. They present themselves to the public as if their business was somehow providing health care services, but almost the exact opposite is in fact the case. They are instead a parasitic bureaucratic syndicate that has somehow managed to insert itself as a gatekeeper between sick Americans and their Doctors. Their only goal is to take more money from people in premiums than they pay out to medical care providers on those people’s behalf. If you are already sick, the “health care industry” is never going to let you through the door.

So as an uninsured person with a serious, chronic medical problem, your fate is now largely sealed. Under the United States’ for-profit model of health care delivery, a “pre-existing condition” equals lifetime banishment from full access and care. Your only hope is to somehow manage to make enough money to pay for tens of thousands of dollars worth of medical care up front. Or else wait until your condition deteriorates enough so that you are no longer productive and able to support yourself, at which time you will be able to get onto Medicaid. Or, if you are old enough you might cross your fingers and hope you can ride out a few tough years and hang in there long enough to qualify for Medicare. In the meantime, if things get desperate, maybe somebody will throw a fundraiser for you at an Eagle’s Hall or the VFW, and put up some collection cans for spare change at the checkouts of the local package stores.

But mostly you are just shut out of the system. And, frankly, there is a good chance it will kill you in the end. And I will repeat: In no other industrialized nation in the world would this happen to you. Only here in America, where we love freedom so goddamned much more than everybody else.

And where, apparently, no freedom is more sacredly entrenched than the freedom of health insurance CEOs to rig our health care delivery system, so that they can wring 50 million dollar a year salaries from figuring out ways to deny medical treatment to people who are not profitable to insure.

Why on earth is it like this? Why do we here in the home of the Brave opt for a private insurance system, instead of joining the other Democratic nations of the world in guaranteeing access to health care for all of our citizens? For some reason, we just accept as fact that the “free market” model of health care is more efficient than a publically managed program that covers everybody. We, apparently, believe it is some how more “efficient” to have a system that shuts out 50 million of our fellow citizens. Some of us, at least, seem to clearly believe that it is “efficient” to let tens of thousands of our citizens die each year, so long as a few other citizens get to make tens of millions of dollars in salary and profit, as a direct result.

I mean, that has to be what the insurance industry lobbyists and defenders mean when they rant and rave about how much more “efficient” the free-market, for-profit health care system is. They must mean that it “efficiently” allows a small number of well connected CEO’s to make billions in profit by directly exploiting our society’s sickest, hardest-suffering individuals.  That has to be what they mean by “efficient,” for in no other sense could the United States health care system be regarded as so.

Still I get the distinct impression that some of my fellow Americans naively believe “more efficient” might mean something else—like that it saves our nation money. In fact, the United States spends roughly twice as much per capita on health care as other industrialized nations spend through their various single-payer, non-profit systems. A study released two weeks ago by the state of New York found that the state would save 20 billion dollars a year under a single payer system. I honestly do not understand how fiscal conservatives can countenance it: our nation pays roughly twice as much as other nations, only to achieve verifiably inferior results.

Others perhaps imagine that the private insurance company model is more efficient because it somehow eliminates layers of complicated, inhumane bureaucracy that exists in a government managed, single payer system. Again, essentially the opposite is the case. Medicare, and the various single-payer models that are employed by other democracies average about 3% in administrative overhead costs. American, for-profit insurance corporations average about 30%. I recently heard an RN and office manager for a primary care physician quote a study that found the average doctor spends roughly 70 thousand dollars a year in staffing costs, simply to deal with the insurance companies.

Of course, health insurance corporations have overhead expenses that just do not accrue under the not-for profit, single-payer system. In the first place, they must pay much, much higher salaries, in order to attract that particularly successful brand of individual who is not morally troubled by generating wealth directly through the misery of others.

Secondly, the health insurance corporations must spend millions of dollars a year lobbying our elected representatives in Washington, in order to make sure their own, narrowly defined, selfish interests are given a dominant stake in any discussion of potential reform.

And perhaps most important of all, the health insurance industry must maintain an entire army of workers whose only job is to go over policies with a fine tooth comb, looking for reasons to disqualify a person from coverage, once they have become sick enough to actually need access to health coverage, often after they have spent years paying ever rising premiums.

Because in our free-market, for-profit health care system, you can spend years feeling confident and well covered, only to discover that was never really the case. Once you get sick and start costing the health insurance corporation money, there is an excellent chance they will figure out some “efficient” way to deny you care. Not only is it their legal right to do so, it is their responsibility. Very efficient, that.

On the front page of the August 5^th New York Times, insurance industry sophist (a sophist was a kind of professional liar in ancient Greece) Karen Ignagni whined that “not one single person is going to get coverage as a result of attacking our community.” As you would expect of a comment made by an insurance industry spokesperson, this one is completely untrue. To increase health care coverage to all Americans will not only require attacking Ignagni’s “community”—it will require putting them completely out of business. Remember, Ignagni’s “community” is the group of health insurance CEO’s who make billions of dollars in profits each years through collecting health insurance premiums and then denying care for any possible reason they can come up with. That “community” has no place in civil society. They prevent us from properly taking care of our citizens.

But naturally they are not going to quietly go away. The health insurance corporations are currently spending 1.4 million dollars every single day in congressional lobbying and media manipulation, in order to keep their death grip on our health care system. And they have pulled the necessary strings to fire up their “astro turf” organizations, those angry mobs of lunatic right wingers who have recently launched a strategy of shouting down and disrupting town hall meeting about health care reform.

These unfortunate individuals are allowing themselves to be turned into some of the greatest dupes in human history. In the great generational battle to win back liberty from the corporate-state leviathan, these passionately ignorant patriots are standing tall and true for the corporate elites fundamental right to exploit and privateer off from the rest of society. And somehow, in their minds it has gotten all twisted up into a kind of holy crusade, a battle to protect the American way of life against the menacing specter of socialism. That’s right, the Godless commies are coming to infringe upon our sacred right to pays hundreds of dollars a month in health insurance premiums to insure our families, just so we can run the strong risk of having them cut us off once we really need care.

It is, of course, ludicrous. The other countries which have single-payer health care systems are anything but “socialist.” In most cases, they have more robust economies than we do, when measured in terms of quality of life for the average citizen. Unencumbered by the idiosyncratic American habit of marrying health insurance to employment, the businesses in Canada and the European nation are free to focus their resources on production. Under a single payer system, entrepreneurship is more strongly encouraged, because bright and creative people are not obligated to stay in a job just to maintain their insurance.

A system for providing adequate and timely health care to all members of society is as important a part of the infrastructure as maintaining a system for responding to house fires or criminal attacks. Which is to say, decrying a single-payer health care system as “socialism” makes as little sense as ranting about the “socialist” fire and police departments. Carrying on about “socialism” and “government takeovers” is emotional dummy talk. The cold reality is that corporate interests took over our health care system long ago. It is time to use our government—the one that is of, for and by the people—to take it back.

This September, the Congress will take up for debate and vote H.R. 676, the “Medicare for All” bill by John Conyers of Michigan. This bill would reign in the out of control inflation of  medical costs while at long last providing coverage to all Americans. The bill can be read in summary or in its entirety at healthcare-now.org. Contact your congressional representative and ask them to sign on as a co-sponsor for H.R. 676. We can have a more cost effective and humane health care system in the United States, and we can even have it sooner rather than later. But we aren’t going to get it without demanding it.

Or maybe you just figure that 20 thousand dead Americans each year is good enough, or simply the best that can do.

Some More Reviews of my Summer Reading

Forecast: The Consequences of Climate Change, from the Amazon to the Arctic, from Darfur to Napa Valley by Stephan Faris, 2009

Unlike much of the writing on the topic of climate change, this book by Stephan Faris altogether avoids an alarmist tone. It is chilling nonetheless. That Faris is able to so thoroughly, accurately and unflinchingly detail the current and most likely effects of climate change without sounding like Henny Penny is a testament to his tremendous rhetorical skill as a journalist.  I will not even try to emulate him. If society does not adjust to the physical reality of our ecosystem, and quickly, we will all be fucked. Even in the best case scenario, we will be leaving a vastly different world to our children and grandchildren, with some very difficult problems to be solved.

Faris offers a brief but thorough catalogue of places around the world where climate change has already begun to place significant pressure upon human society. He begins in Darfur, where climate change has been responsible for one of the most catastrophic human conflicts in recent decades. For generations, the farmers and nomadic herdsmen of the Sudan existed together in some semblance of civil accord, managing to accommodate each other on the humble land they shared. The desert-expanding droughts that North Africa suffered under in the last decades of the 20^th century shattered this mutual tolerance; one side eventually adopted a policy of genocide against the other, to ensure their own continued access to the region’s dwindling natural resources.

Faris’ reporting dramatizes a cruel and bitter irony of climate change—although it has been driven by the frantic industrial growth and consumption of the world’s richest nations, it is mostly the poorer ones which are suffering the first, harshest brunt. Nowhere, perhaps, is this truer than in Bangladesh. Faris describes Bangladesh as a place where “a population half the size of…the United States crams into an area a little smaller than Louisiana…With floodplains stretching across roughly 70 percent of its territory…uniquely vulnerable to flooding, rising seas and storm surges. Most of the country lies within six yards of sea level.”

Rising seas have already begun to turn the ground water salty in parts of the country. Even under the most optimistic models for near-term climate change, significant portions of Bangladesh will become uninhabitable, potentially causing a refugee problem of a magnitude never seen in the history of humanity. Bangladesh, of course, was formally East Pakistan—meaning that the country is a focal point in the Indian/Pakistani rivalry, perhaps the world’s most volatile nuclear stand-off.

Rising water levels and hotter temperatures will turn large sections of the planet into ideal environments for all manner of diseases and viruses, such as malaria, staph infection, dysentery, Ebola, dengue and Lime disease. Flooded coastal regions and vanishing ground water in drought areas will push more hungry, desperate, and oftentimes, physically ill people into increasingly crowded land areas, to share finite resources.

The U.S., too, will almost certainly loose shoreline, even in the best case scenarios, with major disruptions to the economy as a result. Insurance corporations seem to harbor no doubts at all about the real, immediate threat of climate change, and in recent years they have bumped the premiums on wind and storm policies for hurricane plagued regions of the country by four to five hundred percent, where they will still even write them at all. Faris refers to an article published in Science magazine by U.S. Department of Energy scientist Evan Mills, just prior to Hurricane Katrina: “He predicted that property and business-interruption losses would continue to force rates up, while extreme temperatures, worsening water quality, and vector-borne diseases would add new costs to health and life insurance. Meanwhile, major insurers would begin to see lawsuits against their clients as victims of global warming turn their attention to the emitters of greenhouse gases. There would be more and more years when the industry isn’t profitable.”

At the same time, the vanishing ice of the Arctic region is already spurring a land boom, as shipping routes, oil fields, mineral and precious metal mines previously inaccessible beneath sheets of ice are now opening up. The result is a suddenly more contentious, confrontational assertion of national sovereignty from nations like Russia, Canada, the United States and the Scandinavian countries, in parts of the globe where less then a decade ago such matters were shrugged at for being irrelevant.

In his epilogue, Faris writes that he considers his book “an exercise in optimism.” He notes that the most ambitious proposals likely to be adopted by society aim at curbing warming “at about three and a half degrees Fahrenheit, enough to bring about most of the changes laid out in this book. In other words, the scenarios described in the preceding chapters could turn out to be the best we can expect under even the most rosy assumptions.”

He also warns that an increase of more than three and a half degrees “is the point beyond which global warming risks slipping out of our control. After that, the Earth starts to undergo changes that perpetuate the thermometer’s climb. Warm soils decompose faster, releasing carbon dioxide and methane. Hotter oceans absorb less. Melting permafrost unleashes millennia’s worth of methane trapped in frozen bogs. At the North Pole, white ice is already giving way to black water; the feedbacks pile up, the warming accelerates, and there’s little we can do to slow it down.”

It is important to note in a review of this book that the recent House Bill designed to implement a “Cap and Trade” policy will not do nearly enough to lower the rate of carbon dioxide being discharged into our atmosphere. It was primarily designed in order to provide Goldman Sachs, Obama’s largest contributor (look it up, Democrat partisans), with another trading bubble to manipulate. Still, it is scary to see how the mainstream corporate media is only allowing this bill to be criticized from the perspective of how “bad it will be for industry.” It is a simple matter of reality that adequately responding to man-made climate change is going to require a level of accommodation from human society.  And industry, after driving our planet to the brink of environmental collapse, will at long last need to be reigned in. The pursuit of “economic prosperity” at any environmental cost has produced a legacy of ecological crisis; our entire view on what constitutes “prosperity” has been erected on shifting sands, and it cannot withstand the angry waves waiting to crash over us in the days ahead.

Some Reviews of my Summer Reading, Part 2: The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why it Matters by Rose George, 2008

I spent this past Fourth of July Weekend at the Blue Heron Music festival, in far Western New York, where my wife was singing. As part of a band entourage, I had a backstage pass to the Hospitality Tent, where impressive meals were served three times a day, and free draft beer was dispensed in the evening. But for me, a 38 years old man with a typical 38 year old man’s digestive issues, spending three days camped out and drinking more cans of cheap beer than are healthy, the true attractions of the hospitality tent were the twin portapotties, far more gently used than the facilities available to the thousands of festival ticket buyers (although, even in the general public facilities, which I of course did need to use in a pinch, the Blue Heron festival does a fantastic job of providing timely sanitation.) So it was with a special appreciation that I returned home on Monday and began reading George’s journalistic investigation of sanitation practices around the world.

During my life I have spent time both as a low-ranking enlisted infantryman on lengthy deployment and as an off-the-grid homesteader, so I have had personal experience with the gritty realities of waste disposal. Nevertheless, most of my life has been spent in first world comfort, where such matters are easily dismissed from the mind with the casual whoosh of the modern flush.

Indeed, as George demonstrates, casual indifference is pretty much the default attitude most people adopt towards sanitation and waste disposal, which is portrayed in the book as a kind of Rodney Dangerfield in the area of third world development. But her first rate reporting clearly establishes that this issue is among the most critical facing humanity on this ever-more crowded earth.

George’s journalistic tour takes the reader from the sewers of such ultramodern cities as London and New York,  to the Indian subcontinent, where open defecation continues to be a standard practice in some of the world’s most crowded slums, and where women of the Dalit caste continue to have the wretched role of “public scavenging” forced upon them—a euphemism for cleaning human feces from shallow pits by hand and then hauling it away in leaky baskets balanced upon their heads, a task which pays them pennies a day, when they are lucky, and leaves them perpetually suffering from dysentery (a disease I myself caught after performing an improvised water crossing down stream from a sewage treatment plant one summer while stationed in Germany—the sickest I have ever been in my life, by far).

A recurring complaint George reports throughout her book is the inattention governments, aid agencies and the media around the world pay to this crucial matter: “Talk to anyone who is trying to improve the world’s sanitation, and this idea becomes a refrain. We need a champion. A Bono or Geldoff. A Nelson Mandela or Angelina Jolie. A film star or politician who has the courage to talk about toilets, when most people only want to talk about faucets.”

She contrasts this to the situation with drinking water, a popular (and worthy) issue with no shortage of champions. Matt Damon has launched his own NGO to “bring clean water to Africa.” Jay Z produced a three-part series on the issue for MTV.  But in a world where 2.6 billion people have no access to any kind of toilet facilities at all, talking about providing clean drinking water to the poor while ignoring the reality of how they dispose of their bodily waste really doesn’t help them in any meaningful way at all. Lack of adequate sanitation in a crowded area leads as a matter of course to contaminated drinking water and the miserable package of associated diseases. George quotes a 2006 Human Development Report from the United Nations: “The 1.8 million child deaths each year related to clean water and sanitation dwarf the casualties associated with violent conflict. No act of terrorism generates economic devastation on the scale of the crisis in water and sanitation. Yet the issue barely registers on the international agenda.”

George also does an excellent job of showing how this is not exclusively a third world problem. She refers to semi-regular reports issued by The American Society of Civil Engineers, grading the nation’s infrastructure: “In 2000, wastewater infrastructure got a D. By 2005, it was a D minus. In 2000, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimated that a quarter of the nation’s sewer pipes were in poor or very poor condition. By 2020, the proportion of crumbling, dangerous sewer pipes will be 50 percent.” Our first-world privilege of flushing and forgetting might very well prove to be a luxury that vanishes in our lifetime.

Indeed, for many of our fellow citizens, those days have long passed. George devotes a substantial part of her chapter on “biosolids” (another euphemism, for sewer sludge) to the plight of nurse and activist Nancy Holt, and her rural North Carolina neighbors, whose community has been plagued by a staggering, statistically improbable, level of assorted cancers, auto-immune diseases and other assorted health crisis since the farmland in their area became the regular spreading sight for something like 9.75 million gallons of sewer sludge a year (a best guess estimate by Holt and her husband, since no records are available). This atrocity is a brought about by the EPA giving yet one more pass to corporate industry, allowing them to classify sewage as “fertilizer” before it has been properly treated. The result is a chilling array of heavy metals, PCBs and infectious diseases being spread over prime agricultural land across the nation.

I think most people realize, metaphorically, that the world is going to shit, and if humans are going to have any hope of changing that, they are going to have to get their shit together. And in the second to second world of daily reality, an important part of fixing a shattered world economy and restoring a level of dignity and equality to humans everywhere is going to require dealing with the problem of shit.

Some Reviews of My Summer Reading, Part 1: The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule

by Thomas Frank, 2008

Frank has been among my favorite writers since the late 90’s, when I was finishing up my dysfunctional graduate student years and embarking upon my tumultuous career as a radical adjunct writing professor. His journal The Baffler and his first book The Conquest of Cool played a decisive part in helping me to find a viable alternative to the college English department, dominated as it was in those days by the a-historical, anti-intellectual aestheticism of the academic creative writing world on the one hand and to the philosophically vapid, self-congratulatorially hip, cultural studies obsessed, self-described “Marxists” on the other. I most often see Frank described as a “cultural critic,” which he is, to an extent, though his real strength is as a philosopher of recent history. His work examines the way popular intellectual and aesthetic movements in post-World War II America have been manipulated and implemented for the systematic purpose of increasing wealth and power to the corporate class. In The Wrecking Crew he describes how this trend has reached its grand culmination in recent years, shattering our Democratic Republic’s ability to fulfill its obligation of protecting the common good, and in the process creating a disparity in wealth and power not seen since the Robber Barons.

Frank wrote this book during the last years of the Bush/Cheney regime, a period of American history that will forever after be known for jaw-dropping corruption and shameless cronyism: Hundreds of billions of dollars worth of no-bid contracts doled out to a corporation which the vice president was a former direct of, and in which he currently held (undisclosed amounts of) stock; party loyalty forced upon government employees in a manner not seen since the Soviet Union; a major American city left floundering in the wake of a devastating hurricane because the directorship of the Federal Emergency Management Agency had been turned over to an Arabian horse expert with absolutely no qualifications aside from his insider political connections; the lobbying scandals centering around Jack Abramoff and Tom Delay.

Abramoff, in fact, provides a kind of lynchpin character for Frank’s story of how the Republicans managed to go from being the party of “fiscal responsibility and good government” to the party of massive deficits and obscene corruption. He starts his narrative during the early Reagan years, when the young Abramoff took charge of the national chairmanship of the  College Republicans and transformed the group from what had primarily been an organization of goodtime  frat boys, marking years before returning home to Daddy’s firm and the country club, into a radical campus presence agitating on behalf of such causes as the Contra’s terror campaign in Nicaragua and the South African apartheid regime. By taking the playbook from campus radicals of the 1960’s and inverting it, they helped to establish the central myth of the contemporary right-wing worldview, that conservative activists are always rebellious outsiders struggling against the oppressive Federal Government leviathan and/or the international socialist conspiracy.

This myth has remained emotionally potent for going on three decades now, even as conservatives have most often controlled the Federal Government during that time. It is frankly pathological, a persecution complex that defies all rationality. But the most important thing to understand about the right-wing persecution complex is that the right wing political operatives employ it strategically. They use it to justify all the jaw dropping corruption and criminality they engage in. When Ollie North was taking it upon himself, as a Lt. Colonel, to subvert the Constitution of the United States to covertly fund an armed insurrection against a Democratically elected government in Nicaragua (in express violation of United States law)—well, old Ollie was being opposed by a vast Communist conspiracy of democratically elected United States Senators! To diehard rightwing Republicans, that totally justified it. Hell, to them, it justifies the fact that he was probably involved in putting crack onto the streets of South Central Las Angeles. And it justifies the lobbying scandals of politicians like Tom Delay—they are bravely standing up for the underdog cause of protecting the rights of the extremely wealthy, while pretending to give a shit about abortion and gay marriage in order to placate the poor white Christians who must be lured to the polls every two years. By any means necessary, my brother.

This underdog myth is foundational to the contemporary, far-rightwing Republican Party. It is what they are selling for hours every day on the a.m. radio. Belief in it seems to be shrinking, but the smaller it gets, the nastier it squeals. Nobody explains this phenomenon, and chronicles it more meticulously, than Thomas Frank.

From the College Republicans, The Wrecking Crew follows Abramoff and his pals as they discovered the unbelievably lucrative field of “political entrepreneurship”—i.e., establishing “think tanks” and lobbying firms dedicated to relentlessly pushing a pro-corporate, pro-industry agenda, even at the expense of truth and the common good, in exchange for millions of dollars in direct funding from international corporations and industry groups, even from rogue nations like Apartheid era South Africa.

The millions of dollars are a good investment for the economic elite. It allows them to set up shop in Washington D.C. in the most stylish of digs, where they can get down to the business of holding shady fundraisers for your Congressperson and mine, while they wine and dine the important people and write the very legislation that it supposed to protect the rest of us from their unrelenting greed and predatory excess. A chapter in The Wrecking Crew is devoted to detailing how the explosion of lobbying since 1980 has led to the Washington D.C. area transforming from a middle class city of civil servants into the wealthiest area in the nation, at a time when major cities across the countries were seeing their own economies, infrastructure and populations collapsing. They have gotten rich from stripping out our economy and government, rich beyond any poor man’s wildest dreams.

Conventional wisdom, as established in the corporate owned mainstream media, generally treats the important political divides in this country as social matters—those who favor abortion rights and gay marriage versus Christian fundamentalists; those who believe in “God, guns and guts” versus those who spend every spare moment sipping lattes and plotting out their next yoga retreat; those who attend the opera versus those who follow NASCAR. Something like this cultural rift does exist in the country, and it has been skillfully manipulated by political campaigners—it was, in fact, the topic of Frank’s last book What’s the Matter with Kansas? But in The Wrecking Crew, he makes a very convincing argument that the only truly meaningful political divide in contemporary America is between the economic elite and everybody else.

Viewed from this perspective, the rampant corruption and incompetence of the recent Bush administration was no accident. It was the grand culmination of a political strategy, designed to weaken and discredit, and ultimately destroy the ability of the Federal Government to function, leaving a power vacuum for the corporate elite to fill through more privatization, more transfers of wealth and control to the banks and the corporations. The staggering deficits have been an intentional plan to leave the government unable to fund its most basic responsibilities, even as we face the most challenging economic climate in over 70 years; the corruption scandals have had the simultaneous effect of both immediately enriching industry and of fomenting cynicism and apathy among the disgusted electorate, making the possibility of engaged, citizen led governance that much more unlikely.

This is Rome

About two weeks ago my wife and I walked into an all-night diner in Ithaca’s Collegetown, to get something to eat after her weekly gig singing with a funk band. This particular joint features 3 large televisions running continually, usually the endless overnight loop of Sports Center. But on this night they were tuned to CNN. “Breaking News” said a big banner running across the screen over footage of a crowd cheering wildly. I stopped short, anxious to see what had happened. Had the Iranian people managed to get their contested election overturned? Had the citizens of Honduras managed to stand down the military coup? Had a sudden popular uprising broken out in some other corner of our profoundly troubled world?

Within seconds I realized how absurd my excitement was: The cheering crowd was merely stock footage, B-roll of Michael Jackson at an awards show some years back. The “breaking news” turned out to be some newly released detail concerning the singer’s recent death. I really should have known better. I am a cynic of long standing, but still I somehow manage to be continually shocked and surprised at the vapid, sensationalized trivia that the corporate mainstream media presents as “news.”

This was some number of days after the enigmatic pop star had died.  And nearly two weeks later, Michael Jackson remains a lead story on my Yahoo front page; his picture is ubiquitous at the grocery checkout, along with alleged lists of the pills he was taking, sordid details about the paternity of his surviving children. Even on National Public Radio, an organization that continually congratulates itself on covering high-minded topics and “serious news,” the late, great King of Pop has become an ongoing story. The death of Michael Jackson has become the official trivial distraction of the summer of 2009.

Well, they had to find something. Without all Jacko, all the time, they might have been forced to spend these first two unsettlingly cold weeks of July talking about, well, who knows what? The fact that June saw the unemployment rate climb to nearly 10% nationwide? The fact that the Congress passed a climate bill which will do very little to slow down catastrophic climate change, but will provide Goldman Sachs with yet another trading bubble to manipulate? The fact that the “healthcare reform” the Congress looks set to offer up is a tax-raising, employment-stifling, insurance industry give-away that will be even more complicated than Bush’s Medicare D boondoggle? The fact that the much heralded and anticipated “June pull out” of Iraq is turning out to have been not so much of a “pull out” after all? The fact that our Federal Government’s computer networks were revealed to be disturbingly vulnerable to attack, (and, it appears, from a nation ranked in the bottom 10 world wide in computer savvy)? The fact that our most populous state (and the sixth largest economy in the entire world, and the state that is generally viewed as the trend-setter for the nation) is so broke that they have been forced to issue I.O.U’s, like some hard luck loser a Tony Soprano card game?

Whatever unsavory behavior the controversial singer might have been guilty of in life, Michael Jackson’s death has been a god-send for those who benefit from having American public discourse dominated by lurid gossip. And who, exactly is it, that benefits from this? The economic elite—the corporate tycoons, who day and night are busy at work in the Capital, making deals with our elected officials from both parties, making sure they manage to steal as much as possible, before Rome finally burns.

And make no mistake: This is Rome we are living in, and the glory years are now in the past, in the review mirror and getting smaller with each passing day. Some future Gibbons looking at the American Empire will view these years we have been living through as the period when we commenced in earnest with the process of decline and fall. Early this century we launched our war of aggression, a naked, desperate grab to secure the oil needed to keep our imperial citizens cozy and complacent back home, to maintain that lifestyle that Obama famously refused to apologize for. We have been rewarded with bankruptcy, with a million new “barbarians” anxious to tear us down. We are Rome, and Michael Jackson is merely the latest elaborate circus staged inside of the electronic Coliseum, to placate the angry, hungry plebes.

So perhaps the time has come for all good men and women to turn away from this vain, futile task of putting the failed empire back on track, of returning it to the Founder’s inspired vision of a Democratic Republic of, for and by the people. That was the dream and the accomplishment of our ancestors; bravely defended in the 1940’s by the generation of our grandparents, then carelessly given away by, first our parents, and then by ourselves. For the sake of our children and our grandchildren, and the generations to come, it is time to start building something new, and fast.

The corporations own our Federal Government, they write laws to facilitate their ability to steal from and abuse the citizens, and when their corrupt “capitalist” economic system begins to falter, their bought off politicians indebt the rest of us for generations, in order to preserve the grotesquely lavish lifestyles of that very small chosen few. The rest of us get mounting economic uncertainties, sometimes genuine hunger, desperation and want. We get a rapidly collapsing environment, and an increasingly destabilized global-political world.

But no empire is sustainable—sooner or later, they all over-reach, contract and then crash. That is the process we are seeing now, in our lifetime. For the brave, this will be an intensely exciting time to be alive. But the crash is coming; indeed, it has already begun. The first responsibility of all ethical grownups is to get themselves, their families and their communities as safely clear of it as possible. And that must mean, first and foremost, resisting all the mesmerizing spectacles that the Empire’s elite would use to distract us from the fall.

A Special Lobbyist, Just in Time for Summer

And so we move on into summer, when even these, our national discontents of historical significance, appear to mercifully ebb, at least for some of us, at least for the space of an afternoon gardening or while walking with the dog along the creek at sunset. Meanwhile, in the capital city, our president of historical significance continues his battle to soothe our historic discontents. One hopes that, for the good of our collective humanity, he too is enjoying a few stolen moments of peace as our Earth once more awakens and bursts forth with sensual abundance. I like to imagine, perhaps, that when he sneaks off for one of those illicit Kools, it is late afternoon, the shadows growing long, and that he finds himself somewhere in that lovely organic garden instituted by his maternally resplendent and wise wife. I like to hope that as he slowly exhales that toxic menthol cloud of nicotine from his lungs he is idly contemplating some magnificent expression of fecundity bursting forth from the ground in front of him.

In my day dream I suppose what I am really hoping is that the garden can somehow serve as a type of special lobbyist to Obama. These are profoundly troubling times; civilization stands balanced upon the environmental tipping point with one foot, the economic tipping point with the other. As we teeter there, collective knees trembling, collective core muscles engaged to the point of burning strain, we slowly realize that remaining balanced on this precipice will likely require, beyond our simple will power, some degree of cosmic grace. The carbon count in our atmosphere is now 387 parts per million and shows no sign of slowing down. Scientists who study these matters generally agree that a concentration higher than 350 is incompatible with the long term sustainability of life as we know it. As a species, we may very well have already caused catastrophic environmental damage to the ecosystem; we are beginning to see signs of it happening in our own time. 

There have been some signs that Obama recognizes the severity of this problem. His appointees have been serious scientists who favor the kind of enlightened and responsible policies that are going to be required from our generation in order to make sure that there can be any future at all for the generations to come. But he is away in that Imperial City of Washington, where he presides as an Imperial President. Short-sighted greed whispers in his ear at every turn. For decades, the industry lobbyists have remained encamped inside our capital, conniving at every turn to thwart any and all attempts to regulate pollution or shift our crumbling infrastructure to more sustainable energy sources. Already they have managed to water down the climate bill so as to render it meaningless. The industries that have gotten rich off from destroying the planet remain as hungry as ever for profits. It will take the effort of millions of concerned citizens to stop them at this crucial moment.

Meanwhile, it seems like only yesterday, though it was months ago now, when we all still believed that the glorious American economy really could truck along, a champion forever more. But the truth is, Wall Street gutted it out and shipped it over seas a generation ago. The only thing that has kept the chimera of prosperity glimmering these last few years is credit. Our national economy has been mainlining debt Sid and Nancy style for so long now that, like all junkies, we have come to view addiction as normal. And as we wretch and heave from withdrawal, our national leaders seem intent only on locating new sources of the drug.

Even if you have no debt yourself, as an American, you have been financially dependent upon it. The 401(k) and the rising property values you were tickled about so recently? Their value got pumped up by a bunch of bad debt. All those housing developments and shopping malls that kept our economy looking active and strong? Built on debt. The houses? Paid for with debt? The stores in the malls? Operated on debt. The cars that get the people from the houses to the stores? Financed with debt. The plastic crap made in China sold in the stores? Charged with debt. And all that debt, good and bad, was chopped up and repackaged and sold and chopped up and repackaged and sold again and again and again. The great brains who engineer our economic system truly seemed to believe that they could generate endless economic growth simply by trading back and forth increasingly complex packages of IOU’s.

An honest analysis of the economy indicates that things are only going to get worse. For years the steady stream of debt has allowed us to believe that we have a fundamentally strong economy, in total defiance of common sense. This debt has been provided by foreign investors, primarily the Communist Chinese, who have bought our treasury bills. The dollar has held a privileged place as the international reserve currency, and this has kept it artificially strong, which has motivated investors to continue purchasing our debt.

But the days of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency are coming to a close, just as rapidly as the days of unlimited cheap oil. Earlier this month Russia, China, and the other members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization held talks to discuss plans for replacing the dollar as the reserve currency. This meeting has been called “the most important meeting of the 21st Century” by some economists. The United States asked to send a representative; we were told to stay home.  Once the dollar ceases to be the international reserve currency, its value will drop sharply. Inflation will be staggering. I have seen commentators throwing around the words “Weimer Republic” and “Zimbabwe.” Perhaps they are being hyperbolic, but the comparisons are unsettling nonetheless.

It is important to note that the economic crisis and the environmental crisis are intimately linked, stemming from the very same root: the single-minded and myopic acceptance of the Capitalist Religion. It is important to regard Capitalism as a religion when analyzing the destructive role it has played in society; it really makes no sense otherwise. Beneath its dry, circa the 18th century, rationalist rhetoric, the ultimate acceptance of the capitalistic worldview rests upon one critical supernatural belief: the notion that defrayed costs do not exist.

Traditional religions assert that certain things exist in reality, despite the lack of physical proof. The Capitalist religion is a more dangerous inversion: It denies the existence of certain things in reality, despite overwhelming proof.

It is almost as if a kind of demonic witchcraft has been practiced over the entire society, so that we have somehow come to accept it as normal that, in order to keep making profits for the very rich, we must accept a world in which rivers become so polluted that they can peal the paint off from the buildings they flow by; that entire mountains should be leveled with dynamite, and the drinking water of surrounding communities destroyed by coal sludge; that the groundwater across the Midwestern section of our country should be so polluted by chemical fertilizers that when the run off ends up down river in the Gulf of Mexico it creates huge dead zones of algae, choking out all competing organisms and literally killing the ocean that supports all life on this planet.

Unpleasant, potentially catastrophic side effects such as these are somehow irrelevant to the Capitalist true believer. If they even acknowledge that they exist at all, it is only to dismiss them as unimportant compared to all the benefits that the Capitalist system provides across the wide spectrum of society. They will testify to you with great fervor about all the wonderful televisions that the individual members of our free market worshipping society have been able to acquire: “Why, in America even the poor have great big televisions!” Over the years I have heard this sentence and ones like it offered again and again as proof that our economic system was unimpeachable. When actually examined objectively, the much ballyhooed “standard of living” that Americans are taught to crow to themselves about really boils down to little more than an expanded opportunity to waste tremendous amounts of natural resources in various empty, consumer-oriented “leisure activities.”

It is not quite five full months into his term, much too soon to renounce Obama entirely as yet another Corporate Emperor, content to fiddle away the Empire’s last years while the well connected steal whatever they can for themselves in advance of the inevitable fall. But it is not too early to say that for the most part, so far, Obama’s responses to these two crisis situations have been less than inspiring. He appears committed to a dangerously complacent course of action, willing to do what he can to help the Wall Street charlatans inflate another debt bubble, as if by promoting the return of illusionary prosperity, he can make all once more right in the world.

This lack of vision could very well prove to be the last great tragedy of the American Experiment. Mealy-mouthed attempts to stimulate the economy by pumping up the debt bubble can only be of very short term success; at most, such economic conditions would allow the very well connected one more shot to consolidate even more wealth into even fewer hands, and the next inevitable crash will be far worse than the one that shook us this past fall.

That Obama persists in this direction shows how enthralled he continues to be to the Capitalist worldview, to its supernatural belief that, so long as abstract numbers in an accounting ledger can be made to rise, the actual state of reality is irrelevant. It is the same delusion we have shared as a culture. For the past few hundred years, our species has been seduced by the Capitalist worldview, convinced against all commonsense that our finite ecosystem can be continually stretched, strained and forced to accommodate whatever petty and fickle demands our consumerist hearts desire, so long as somebody, somewhere is getting rich off from the process.

What is needed now is a new world view—one that eschews reckless, hedonistic pursuit of short-term profits in favor of creating an economy that meets real human needs in a pragmatic relationship to the physical realities and demands of the ecosystem we inhabit.

And we desperately need leaders who can share this vision of a viable future; Obama can become such a leader, if only he has the courage and the heart. But knowing what I do of Washington, I have my doubts. Which is why I find myself now, at the start of what could be a pivotal summer in the history of our species, thinking about the garden outside our President’s mansion. I hope that it, at least, might inspire him in the right direction, fearing, as I do, that little else will.

Of Pandemics and the Common Good: Another Argument against Corporate Privateering 

            In all these last months of corporate media hype about the Swine Flu virus that may or may not threaten the foundation of global society, one particularly relevant and chilling question has been somehow kept far from the official discussion. That question is this: exactly how much more difficult will it be for federal health authorities to slow and contain a pandemic among a U.S. population in which 50 million people do not have health care? I can testify from my own personal experience that people without healthcare do not bother to visit the doctor for flu symptoms. We are told that early detection and quarantine are crucial for preventing the spread of such diseases, so it should worry people that fully 1/6 of our population is unlikely to contact medical professionals until the virus has had days to incubate and spread through person to person exposure.

            And really, the 50 million number is probably quite low. 50 million is only the estimated number of Americans who have no healthcare at all. Millions of more American workers have private insurance policies which feature prohibitively high deductibles and do not cover such luxuries as timely visits to the doctor’s office. Now common sense would dictate that given the scary uncertainty of the current flu virus, even people who will have to pay out of pocket will quickly get themselves to a doctor if they feel themselves becoming sick. But financial desperation such as the kind tens of millions of Americans are now experiencing has a way of fostering a sense of angry fatalism. When they are already drowning under a sea of debt, struggling to put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads, a lot of people are going to go ahead and gamble that the nausea will pass, rather than take on another fifty or hundred dollar bill that they won’t be able to pay. And that is a gamble our entire society is now anteed up for.

            But this is what happens when a government abdicates its responsibility to protect the common good and instead grants corporate privateers free reign to reap massive profits from the misery and hardship of the general population. In all other modern industrial nations, healthcare is correctly viewed as among the most central and crucial of common goods, one of the necessary building blocks that must be in place for a civil and democratic society to flourish. Universal access to adequate and timely medical care was among the basic human rights agreed upon by the United Nations in the somber aftermath of World War Two. Among first world economies, only in the United States have the citizens tolerated anything less. Canadians and Europeans shake their heads in bafflement over this, unable to understand why we tolerate it.

We Americans explain this to ourselves by falling back on our old romantic notions of the “free market” and “competition.” But to argue that a common good such as healthcare is best left to the “free market” is to demonstrate a rather incomplete understanding of supply and demand economics. The free market works great for retailing goods. If companies A, B and C are all competing to sell widgets on the free market, they will create innovations in production and distribution that will lead to lower prices for the consumer. But healthcare and the relative need for it does not in any way conform to supply and demand principles. Just because competition has led to a cheaper method of performing heart surgery does not mean more consumers will suddenly opt for the procedure. And just because the procedure is kept artificially high does not mean fewer consumers will need it. The only way that private insurance corporations can make profits is by denying people medical care; usually very desperate, sick people.    

And it is not like the United States actually even saves money by turning our healthcare system over to the privateers of the free market—quite the opposite, in fact. When adding together both individual and government expenditures on healthcare, one finds that our country actually spends close to TWICE AS MUCH per capita on healthcare than the average among countries with some form of a single payer system. We pay twice as much, and receive far less—the idea that our healthcare system is the “envy of the world” is among the dumbest examples of provincial chauvinism ever uttered. We have a healthcare system in which 1/6 of the population is completely shut out. We have a healthcare system in which the private insurance companies make most of their money by denying care to people exactly when they need it. We have a healthcare system in which to suffer from a pre-existing condition is to be virtually guaranteed financial ruin. We have a healthcare system which has crippled our automotive and other manufacturing industries by saddling them with a burden which is viewed in the rest of the modern nations as the proper responsibility of the government. And again, we pay twice as much for it. And why do we pay twice as much for it? So that millionaire insurance company executives (i.e. privateers) can make billions of dollars more on the backs of our citizens each year.

            Fortunately even the least well informed citizens of this country are beginning to realize that something is terribly wrong. Too many people have friends or family members who have lost their homes because of medical bills, or died because they were refused treatments, or both. Too many employers are finding it impossible to offer their employees adequate healthcare policies. Too many doctors and nurses have been grown disgusted with a system in which they must work around greedy insurance companies in order to treat their most desperate patients. Politicians from both parties now realize that our healthcare crisis must be addressed.

            But it is nowhere near time to celebrate. The privateers in the insurance industry have invested wisely and they effectively own both houses of the Congress, and both parties. Democrat Senator Max Baucus, chairman of the finance committee, paid back the millions of dollars he has received over the years from insurance corporations by completely shutting out any single-payer advocates from the recent Senate hearings of “stakeholders.” President Obama, who supported single-payer before he didn’t support it, recently staged a high profile photo-op with insurance industry executives, in which he crowed proudly about the “concessions” he had gotten from them on future costs. Hopefully Americans learned during the recent debacle surrounding the bailout of the financial industry that “voluntary concessions” from corporate privateers are worth less than a new roll of two-ply toilet paper.

            So given the lapdog status of our elected officials, making real, meaningful progress on healthcare reform is going to require an active and engaged electorate. The insurance corporations own our elected officials—bought and paid for. We are going to have to steal them back. That means calling them, writing them, and even visiting them in person to let them know what we demand as a people. And frankly, reforming our healthcare system is going to take a new level of engagement from the citizens on an additional level. The Center for Disease Control estimates that of the 2 trillion dollars spent each year on healthcare costs in this country, 1.5 goes to treatment for preventable lifestyle diseases. Just as a working, efficient healthcare system will require the government take responsibility for the common good, it will also require that individual citizens take responsibility for themselves and their own health. It is going to require that tens of millions of Americans adopt a more active lifestyle. That is a very good thing. And what better way to start getting our population active than by having everybody come together to kick our elected officials asses back into line?