No surprise here, unfortunately.

Six lobbyists for every member of Congress as healthcare industry heaps cash on politicians to water down legislation

America’s healthcare industry has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to block the introduction of public medical insurance and stall other reforms promised by Barack Obama. The campaign against the president has been waged in part through substantial donations to key politicians.

Supporters of radical reform of healthcare say legislation emerging from the US Senate reflects the financial power of vested interests ‑ principally insurance companies, pharmaceutical firms and hospitals ‑ that have worked to stop far-reaching changes threatening their profits.

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“It’s a total victory for the health insurance industry,” said Dr Steffie Woolhander, a GP, professor of medicine at Harvard University and co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Programme (PNHP).

“What the bill has done is use the coercive power of the state to force people to hand their money over to a private entity which is the private insurance industry. That is not what people were promised.”

PNHP blames a political process it says is corrupted by millions of dollars poured into the election campaigns of members of Congress and influencing the discourse about health reform by funding advertising campaigns, supposedly independent studies and patients rights organisations that press the industry’s interests.

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Baucus took $1.5m from the health sector for his political fund in the past year. Other members of the committee have received hundreds of thousands of dollars. They include Senator Pat Roberts, who last week tried to stall the bill by arguing that lobbyists needed three days to read it.

Baucus holds dinners for health industry executives at which they pay thousands of dollars each to be at the table, and an annual fly-fishing and golfing weekend in his home state of Montana that lobbyists pay handsomely to attend. They have included John Jonas, who represents healthcare firms for Patton Boggs, widely regarded as the top lobbying firm in Washington. Jonas, who formerly worked on the congressional staff, acknowledges that political contributions are intended to buy influence and says it works.

Read The Full Report from the Guardian U.K.

A new report by the Center for Responsive Politics has found that 237 members of Congress are millionaires.

That’s 44 percent of the body.

California Republican Darrell Issa is the richest lawmaker with a net worth estimated at just over $250 million.

At least seven lawmakers have net worths greater than $100 million.

Read the original story from Democracy Now!

On McNamara Leaving
By Joseph L. Galloway
McClatchy Newspapers
July 7th, 2009

“I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.” - Clarence Darrow (1857-1938)

Well, the aptly named Robert Strange McNamara has finally shuffled off to join LBJ and Dick Nixon in the 7th level of Hell.

McNamara was the original bean-counter ó a man who knew the cost of everything but the worth of nothing.

Back in 1990 I had a series of strange phone conversations with McMamara while doing research for my book We Were Soldiers Once And Young. McNamara prefaced every conversation with this: “I do not want to comment on the record for fear that I might distort history in the process.” Then he would proceed to talk for an hour, doing precisely that with answers that were disingenuous in the extreme ó when they were not bald-faced lies.

Upon hanging up I would call Neil Sheehan and David Halberstam and run McNamara’s comments past them for deconstruction and the addition of the truth.

The only disagreement i ever had with Dave Halberstam was over the question of which of us hated him the most. In retrospect, it was Halberstam.

When McNamara published his first book ó filled with those distortions of history ó Halberstam, at his own expense, set out on a journey following McNamara on his book tour around America as a one-man truth squad.

McNamara abandoned the tour.

The most bizarre incident involving McNamara occurred when he was president of the World Bank and, off on his summer holiday, he caught the Martha’s Vineyard ferry. It was a night crossing in bad weather. McNamara was in the salon, drink in hand, schmoozing with fellow passengers. On the deck outside a vineyard local, a hippie artist, glanced through the window and did a double-take. The artist was outraged to see McNamara, whom he viewed as a war criminal, so enjoying himself.

He immediately opened the door and told McNamara there was a radiophone call for him on the bridge. McNamara set down his drink and stepped outside. The artist immediately grabbed him, wrestled him to the railing and pushed him over the side. McNamara managed to get his fingers through the holes in the metal plate that ran from the top of the railing to the scuppers.

McNamara was screaming bloody murder; the artist was prying his fingers loose one at a time. Someone heard the racket and raced out and pulled the artist off.

By the time the ferry docked in the vineyard McNamara had decided against filing charges against the artist, and he was freed and walked away.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

A hard hitting, lucid critique of the trajectory of corporate-controlled politics in this country.

America has always been a country with its full and fair share of flaws, but for quite some time during the middle part of the twentieth century, we got one thing reasonably right. There was a bargain then, between elites and the government and the public. According to the terms of the deal, the aristocracy would still be fantastically rich, but there would be limitations on their wealth, because some of that wealth, some substantial amount, needed to be shared with the working people and the middle class, and it was the role of government to make sure that that happened. Many among the well-to-do even shared that consensus.

Since Ronald Reagan rode into town, however, that deal is off the table, replaced by what is essentially a new New Deal — or, more accurately, simply the Bad Old Deal. Under the terms of this new/old arrangement, the unregulated wealthy grab absolutely everything they can get their hands on, the middle class scrambles for whatever bare existence it can maintain, and the rest of America, the working class and the poor, fall deeper and deeper into third world-style poverty. Under the terms of this new system, the role of the government is no longer to provide for the welfare of the people, nor to ensure that there are limitations on what the plutocracy can liberate from them. Under the terms of this new arrangement, the function of the government is simply to serve as a tool, assisting that plutocracy in depriving America’s own people of everything that can be taken from them.

That means that in the last thirty years we’ve entirely restructured the economy so that the super-wealthy have become obscenely-super-wealthy, and the middle class are lucky to have stood still, and haven’t really even managed that. If one examines the destination of the considerable GDP growth that America has sustained over the last three decades, it’s gone entirely to the richest of Americans. The middle class has actually lost ground. That’s an astonishing fact, but think about it: Despite robust economic growth, workers today actually make less than they did back in the 1970s.

Even more amazing, it wasn’t that hard to pull off. All you had to do was to fool the people and divert their attention to other circuses to go along with the remaining crumbs of bread. Meanwhile, unions were decimated by changes in government policy. Jobs were exported — first to the south, then to Mexico, then to China, now to Thailand or Vietnam, and probably soon to Africa — in a never-ending search for the cheapest possible way to wring value out of the working people of the world, leaving Americans without any sort of remaining industry or economic base. Tax policy was also deployed, channeling money from current working Americans, and especially from their children, and diverted it to the already wealthy. The upshot of all these policy changes was that the richest Americans became absolutely, astonishingly, fabulously rich, and the rest of us are barely holding on, if that.

If the Russians had come here and done this — if they had come and stolen our resources, if they come and enslaved our children into inescapable soul-numbing jobs, if they had left us with environmental degradation and a wrecked economy and destroyed education system and a crumbling infrastructure and a sieve-like healthcare regime — if the Russians had come and done any or all of this, we would’ve risen up in anger and hostility and patriotism and nationalism, and we’d have loaded up our weapons and killed every last one of them.

But it wasn’t the Russians that did it, it was our own overclass. And worse still, it was our own government acting as though they were protecting us from the evil bogeyman du jour, while in fact they were assisting the wealthy in bleeding us dry, until our anemia left us fit only for our profit-seeking hospitals.

This piece is pretty critical of Obama and his administration’s policies, but it can be hard to argue with the premise of those criticisms.

The upshot is that today American voters have two choices. They can have the party that represents the maximal plundering of America, at the maximal speed. Or they can have the party that represents nearly the same crime at almost the same velocity.

Either way, the United States has ceased in any meaningful way to be owned by citizens. Its voters vote, but their representatives in Congress and in the administration are beholden to economic elites, and act entirely accordingly. The country’s institutions, infrastructure, and social relations are all being dismantled piece by piece and either relocated elsewhere or sold off in order to wring yet another drop of wealth out of the hides of working Americans, so that those who are already wealthy beyond belief can be even further enriched.

Read The Complete Article

A couple of talented film students from the Wright State University film program attended the Fox “News”-promoted self-proclaimed “Tea Party” event in Washington D.C. Here is some of their documentation of it. A superb, funny, even sad short piece.

As an accompanying video, author and radio commentator Thom Hartmann gives some needed perspective on just What Was The Tea Party All About?

UnCommon Sense TV - “Framing The Public Debate” A look at what the term ‘framing’ means in political discourse, and how it is used to influence people’s perceptions and perspectives on the issues of the day. Why citizens believe what they do about specific issues is often directly related to how that issue is presented to them in the first place. Featured on the program is exclusive USTV coverage of a presentation by professor George Lakoff, director of the Rockridge Institute, and author of numerous books on the topic, including “Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate” and “Metaphors We Live By” (taped at the Free Press National Conference on Media Reform). The program also discusses some of the specific techniques on how framing actually works and of the influence that private, corporately-funded think tanks have in helping to shape our nation’s populace’s perception of the issues of the day.

UnCommon Sense TV - “State of the Union” A somewhat irreverent yet critical analysis of President Bush’s 2005 State of the Union address.

Interesting idea. I hope Jones and company are able to help drive this into being (though can we please drop the whole ‘czar’ thing for once and for all? Monarchical terminology with autocratic overtones is just simply un-American).

A call for President-elect Barack Obama to give the arts and humanities a Cabinet-level post — perhaps even create a secretary of culture — is gaining momentum.

By yesterday, 76,000 people had signed an online petition, started by two New York musicians who were inspired by producer Quincy Jones . In a radio interview in November, Jones said the country needed a minister of culture, like France, Germany or Finland has.

Read the complete report in The Washington Post

Something from Michael Moore which resonates rather personally.

Windows of opportunity are being opened, if just for a moment. Time to move through them and onward.

We may, just possibly, also see a time of refreshing openness, enlightenment and creativity. The arts and the artists will not be seen as the enemy. Perhaps art will be explored in order to discover the greater truths. When FDR was ushered in with his landslide in 1932, what followed was Frank Capra and Preston Sturgis, Woody Guthrie and John Steinbeck, Dorothea Lange and Orson Welles. All week long I have been inundated with media asking me, “gee, Mike, what will you do now that Bush is gone?” Are they kidding? What will it be like to work and create in an environment that nurtures and supports film and the arts, science and invention, and the freedom to be whatever you want to be? Watch a thousand flowers bloom! We’ve entered a new era, and if I could sum up our collective first thought of this new era, it is this: Anything Is Possible.

Here’s to things being possible, and moving from a realm of defensive reaction to one of creative response.

Read The Full Essay Here

I am very glad to see the pathetic criminal Bush marginalized so badly by this own kind that he would be so unwelcome at ANY political rally.

Some predictions:

(1) The Teamsters Union will organize WalMart Distribution Centers within six months of the inaugural.

(2) The Fox “views” Channel will find a few “liberals” to take some air space on their satellite network along with the radio stations that carry “conservative” messages. The “fairness” doctine will be feared by the AM worms worse than AIDS.

(3) Obama will have his “nerve tried” by Pakistan. Pakistan will soon learn that Obama can be a killer but one who practices proportional response; something Bush and his neo-con pimps never understood.

(4) Iraq will “seek a new status of forces agreement” whereby the U.S. leaves. The Shia and Sunni will settle the score themselves.

(5) Iran will agree to a diplomatic solution to the nuclear issue.

(6) Israel will not have carte blanc in the middle east as they used to. Obama you can believe will be more pragmatic.

(7) Deep economic recession with a rebound at the end of 2010.

(8) The Democrats if successful in curing the economic troubles we face will see a twenty year control of the House and Senate.

(9) Look for Evita (Hilliary Clinton) to be nominated to the Supreme Court.

(10) A serious assassination attempt will probably occur within the next three years.

(11) The electrical grid will be the first priority of infrastructure jobs to be created by Obama.

- Posted by Scott Velniak