The costs of the war have been rendered invisible. There’s no draft. Instead, we take the most vulnerable elements of our population, and give them a choice between unemployment and missile fodder. Government deficits conceal the need to pay in cash for the war.

We put the cost of both guns and butter on our Chinese credit card. In fact, we don’t even put these wars on budget; they are still passed using ‘emergency supplemental’. A nine-year ‘emergency’.

Let’s show Congress the cost of these wars is too much for us.

Tell Congress that you support ‘The War Is Making You Poor Act’.

Go to http://www.TheWarIsMakingYouPoor.com

The right-wing has been opposing Jefferson since the election of 1800. They may finally have their say with Texas history books, writing him out of the picture entirely. This whole affair is quite disturbing, though one can hardly find it surprising. Americans have, on a whole, never been overly interested in history (particularly their own that did not reiterate certain popular national mythos). And now, in our hyper-ideological, fact-free political landscape, we’re descending to this.

The most ballyhooed effort is under way in Texas, where conservatives have pushed the state school board to rewrite guidelines, downplaying Thomas Jefferson in one high school course, playing up such conservatives as Phyllis Schlafly and the Heritage Foundation and challenging the idea that the Founding Fathers wanted to separate church and state.

The effort reaches far beyond one state, however.

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The Jamestown settlers? Socialists. Founding Father Alexander Hamilton? Ill-informed professors made up all that bunk about him advocating a strong central government.

Theodore Roosevelt? Another socialist. Franklin D. Roosevelt? Not only did he not end the Great Depression, he also created it.

Joe McCarthy? Liberals lied about him. He was a hero.

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While even some conservative intellectuals say that some of the revisionist history is simply wrong, at the core, the effort reflects the ever-changing view of history, which is always subject to revision thanks to new information or new ways of looking at things, and often is viewed through a political lens.

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Reaching for an example of how bad socialism can be, former House of Representatives Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, said recently that the people who settled Jamestown, Va., in 1607 were socialists and that their ideology doomed them.

“Jamestown colony, when it was first founded as a socialist venture, dang near failed with everybody dead and dying in the snow,” he said in a speech March 15 at the National Press Club.

It was a good, strong story, helping Armey, a former economics professor, illustrate the dangers of socialism, the same ideology that he and other conservatives say is at the core of Obama’s agenda.

It was not, however, true.

The Jamestown settlement was a capitalist venture financed by the Virginia Company of London — a joint stock corporation — to make a profit. The colony nearly foundered owing to a harsh winter, brackish water and lack of food, but reinforcements enabled it to survive. It was never socialistic. In fact, in 1619, Jamestown planters imported the first African slaves to the 13 colonies that later formed the United States.

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A member of the audience asked Armey how the Federalist Papers could be such a tea party manifesto when they were written largely by Alexander Hamilton, who the questioner said “was widely regarded then and now as an advocate of a strong central government.”

Armey ridiculed the very suggestion.

“Widely regarded by whom?” he asked. “Today’s modern, ill-informed political science professors? . . . I just doubt that was the case, in fact, about Hamilton.”

Hamilton, however, was an unapologetic advocate of a strong central government, one that plays an active role in the economy and is led by a president named for life and thus beyond the emotions of the people. Hamilton also pushed for excise taxes and customs duties to pay down federal debt.

In fact, Ian Finseth said in a history written for the University of Virginia, others at the constitutional convention “thought his proposals went too far in strengthening the central government.”

Many more interesting points of reference made within this article. Read it in full Here

This is sad. Did you know Obama is going to ban fishing in the United States? The Tea Partiers are rightly concerned about the criminal class taking this country for a ride, but I’ve got to ask where have they been the last eight years before the Obama administration? The pervasive influence of Faux News at work again. One should never underestimate the power of propaganda in a modern, technological society.

Wow. Henry Giroux keeps getting to the point in ways that elude most analysis one sees these days. This is a bit of a tour de force in and of itself, and is highly recommended reading for all, though with people’s attention spans these days, its hard to conceive of folks getting past the first paragraph of anything anymore.

In a robust aspiring democratic society, language along with critical thought have a liberating function. At best, they work together to shatter illusions, strengthen the power of reason and critical judgment and provide the codes and framing mechanisms for human beings to exercise a degree of self-determination, while holding the throne of raw governmental, military and economic power accountable.

Language in such a society is robust, engaged, critical, dialectical, historical and creates the conditions for dialogue, thoughtfulness and informed action. Such a language refuses to be co-opted in the service of marketing goods, personalities and sleazy corporations. Needless to say, it is a language that is troubling and almost always threatening to the guardians of the status quo. As Toni Morrison said in another context, this is a language, a way of reading and writing the world, that “can disturb the social oppression that functions like a coma on the population, a coma despots call peace … [that makes visible] the blood flow of war that hawks and profiteers thrill to.”

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If successful, the language of oppression and cruelty becomes normalized, removed from the sphere of criticism and the culture of questioning. Such a language does more than normalize ignorance, illiteracy and irrationality; it also produces a kind of psychic hardening and deep-rooted pathology in a society increasingly willing to eliminate the policies that enable social bonds and protections necessary for a substantive democracy….

This language of cruelty, a zombie-inspired discourse of sorts, has been given a new life within the last few decades as it has become the lingua franca of powerful American politicians, corporations, and many in the dominant media. And it is mobilized to both dismantle the liberating function of critical reason and to stifle criticisms of a society that appears to be adrift. Such a discourse turns hate-talk into a commodity and human suffering into a spectacle.

Read The Full Essay

There certainly is a lot of hoopla swirling about regarding the recently passed health care reform legislation. Sorry to rain on the parade, but I’m afraid this bill isn’t nearly what many think it is, or is going to do what many hope. The bill is a short term balm for a few of the more egregious symptoms afflicting our highly dysfunctional health care system at the expense of actually treating the disease. I could go into detail, but Chris Hedges sums up the core problems pretty well here…

The claims made by the proponents of the bill are the usual deceptive corporate advertising. The bill will not expand coverage to 30 million uninsured, especially since government subsidies will not take effect until 2014. Families who cannot pay the high premiums, deductibles and co-payments, estimated to be between 15 and 18 percent of most family incomes, will have to default, increasing the number of uninsured. Insurance companies can unilaterally raise prices without ceilings or caps and monopolize local markets to shut out competitors. The $1.055 trillion spent over the next decade will add new layers of bureaucratic red tape to what is an unmanageable and ultimately unsustainable system.

The mendacity of the Democratic leadership in the face of this reality is staggering. Howard Dean, who is a doctor, said recently: “This is a vote about one thing: Are you for the insurance companies or are you for the American people?” Here is a man who once championed the public option and now has sold his soul. What is the point in supporting him or any of the other Democrats? How much more craven can they get? 

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The U.S. spends twice as much as other industrialized nations on health care-$7,129 per capita-although 45.7 million Americans remain without health coverage and millions more are inadequately covered, meaning that if they get seriously ill they are not covered. Fourteen thousand Americans a day are now losing their health coverage. A report in the journal Health Affairs estimates that, if the system is left unchanged, one of every five dollars spent by Americans in 2017 will go to health coverage. Private insurance bureaucracy and paperwork consume 31 cents of every health care dollar. Streamlining payment through a single nonprofit payer would save more than $400 billion per year, enough, Physicians for a National Health Plan points out, to provide comprehensive, high-quality coverage for all Americans. Check out www.healthcare-now.org. It has some of the best analysis.

This bill is not about fiscal responsibility or the common good. The bill is about increasing corporate profit at taxpayer expense. It is the health care industry’s version of the Wall Street bailout. It lavishes hundreds of billions in government subsidies on insurance and drug companies. The some 3,000 health care lobbyists in Washington, whose dirty little hands are all over the bill, have once more betrayed the American people for money. The bill is another example of why change will never come from within the Democratic Party. The party is owned and managed by corporations. The five largest private health insurers and their trade group, America’s Health Insurance Plans, spent more than $6 million on lobbying in the first quarter of 2009. Pfizer, the world’s biggest drug maker, spent more than $9 million during the last quarter of 2008 and the first three months of 2009. The Washington Post reported that up to 30 members of Congress from both parties who hold key committee memberships have major investments in health care companies totaling between $11 million and $27 million. President Barack Obama’s director of health care policy, who will not discuss single payer as an option, has served on the boards of several health care corporations. And as salaries for most Americans have stagnated or declined during the past decade, health insurance profits have risen by 480 percent.

Some people are saying that “yes, we know it isn’t nearly all it needs to be, but it’s a step.” A step, but in which direction? You don’t solve a problem by solidifying the very institutional structure that is the cause of that same problem in the first place. It is similar to how this adminstration has been addressing the economic problems we face, by pursuing policies which financially reward the very actors who have been the instrumental cause of them of them in the first place. He now pushes “health care reform” (when what we really need is health insurance reform), by making sure that the institutions at the systemic center of the problem are amply rewarded and that their business models are preserved.

Enjoy your legally-mandated subsidization of private insurance corporations everyone!

Read The Complete Article

Noam Chomsky provides some lucid analysis about why remedying the problems with health care system seem to be such an unsolvable issue in American politics. This is of particular relevance considering the ongoing debate currently raging over the issue in America today.

How many more times does this have to be explained?

The real central message in the film [”Capitalism: A Love Story”], and the one we should all be sharing around on Facebook, is that democracy and capitalism are NOT the same thing. We have suffered for the past eight years under a president led by a spin-master who purposely tried to define American Democracy as run-amok corporate capitalism. “Liberty” to Bush meant chasing down Saddam Hussein in a spider hole. “Freedom” meant allowing a private corporate contractor, Halliburton, to rape and plunder and make off with Saddam’s gold.

It may seem like a cheap trick, but when Moore goes to the US Capitol and searches the original copy of the Constitution for any mention of words associated with capitalism, and can’t find them, that is an essential message that ought to be taught in our elementary schools.

Here’s where Moore falls short, and where I hope to remedy our dialogue in a documentary of my own in the not too distant future. American democracy was conceived in a revolution designed to fight monarchy and what writers such as Thomas Paine then called “mercantalism,” the monopolies of the British tea companies and such.

In other words , the original dream for America was an egalitarian society with a strong middle class, not so much ruling elites and peasants. That’s what most of the people came to these shores from Europe to escape. But that is back where we find ourselves after eight years of Bush, who ran the country like a king in charge of a multi-national company led by a pope.

Public enemy number one in some ways might very well be the government, when Republicans are in charge at least, but the real public enemy number one in this land of the not so free anymore are the mega-corporations. That’s what people need to begin to realize.

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After the movie, I met a restaurateur right down the street who was raised in Trussville, and would tend to be a political conservative because of it, but he gave me some hope about the folks around here when he said he would go see the movie, mainly because he is concerned about what happened to the bailout money. He also feels screwed as a small businessman by certain corporate interests, including insurance companies and Alabama Power, which has a monopoly on the electricity business in these parts - and a government-guaranteed profit margin.

“I’m paying a $3,500 a month power bill,” he said, a rate based not on his power usage, but by the previous tenant in the building. When he asked them to actually read his meter and charge him each month for power he actually uses, they basically laughed at him, he said, and gave him the run-around.

Sometimes, in other words, corporate bureaucracy is worse than government bureaucracy. Sometimes, as in the case of Southern Company, which is supposed to be a quasi-government entity anyway, what you have is both. They basically run it like a corporation, but it runs the government. In the case of domestic spying and AT&T, at least according to some courts, the phone company is considered part of the government .

Read The Full Article

For additional perspective on this, here Steve Fraser writes on The Crisis of Capitalism

This was controversial when it was first published in the summer of 2009. Unfortunately, further actions (or inactions) by the Obama administration continue to reiterate a number of the points made in it.

The American empire has not altered under Barack Obama. It kills as brutally and indiscriminately in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan as it did under George W. Bush. It steals from the U.S. treasury to enrich the corporate elite as rapaciously. It will not give us universal health care, abolish the Bush secrecy laws, end torture or “extraordinary rendition,” restore habeas corpus or halt the warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of citizens. It will not push through significant environmental reform, regulate Wall Street or end our relationship with private contractors that provide mercenary armies to fight our imperial wars and produce useless and costly weapons systems.

The sad reality is that all the well-meaning groups and individuals who challenge our permanent war economy and the doctrine of pre-emptive war, who care about sustainable energy, fight for civil liberties and want corporate malfeasance to end, were once again suckered by the Democratic Party. They were had. It is not a new story. The Democrats have been doing this to us since Bill Clinton. It is the same old merry-go-round, only with Obama branding. And if we have not learned by now that the system is broken, that as citizens we do not matter to our political elite, that we live in a corporate state where our welfare and our interests are irrelevant, we are in serious trouble. Our last hope is to step outside of the two-party system and build movements that defy the Democrats and the Republicans. If we fail to do this, we will continue to undergo a corporate coup d’etat in slow motion that will end in feudalism.

Read The Full Article

ThinkProgress spoke with Wendell Potter, a former VP of communications at health insurance giant CIGNA, about exactly how insurance companies derail reform and preserve the status quo. Working in public relations for CIGNA, Potter had a direct role in multiple campaigns in the past to minimize public outrage at insurance company abuses, defeat legislation aimed at regulating insurers, and the massive effort to discredit Michael Moore and his movie SiCKO. In addition to enormous amounts of money spent in direct lobbying and campaign contributions, Potter spelled out precisely how insurance companies have prepared to defeat meaningful reform.

More on this strategic campaign and how it works (and who is working it) is outlined Here at ThinkProgress.org