A recent newspaper article from the New York Times Corporation reports on CIA domestic wiretapping, assassination plots, mind-control and spying on Americans. It quotes CIA director Michael Hayden saying that yesterday’s release of highly censored government documents was part of the agency’s “social contract” with the American public.

That’s so silly. There is only one social contract — the one which sovereign people, alleged to be the source of all governing authority — make among ourselves to determine how we go about governing ourselves.

Of course, THAT social contract has been half-assed in practice from In the Beginning, given that a minority of people denied the majority their fundamental rights. But think, for a moment, that maybe it’s the idea that counts.

The CIA — and all creations of law, of government (including business and propaganda corporations) — are nothing but subordinate entities. They have no legitimacy except in being subordinate to the sovereign people.

Neither the CIA nor the Microsoft Corporation has authority — legal, moral, cosmic — to make “social contracts” with its superiors. Their legitimacy comes only from being obedient, from following orders, from licking We the People’s shoes metaphorical and literal, (not to mention our bare toes).

Which makes all this secrecy stuff not only absurd but contrary to fundamentals of self-governance. How can We the People, We the Sovereign People, even dream about governing ourselves when most of what our temporary public servants have been and are doing is kept from our eyes and ears?

There are empirical data galore demonstrating when law and our acquiescence enable mere creations of law — from corporations to government bureaus — to operate in secret, the result is governance by the few.

And destructive, stupid, rights-denying, authoritarian governance at that.

(These data, to be sure, precede today’s ephemeral Bush & Chaney and Pelosi and Reid.)

Of course, they — like their predecessors — make sure it’s all “legal,” and made necessary by some terrifying “other” out there — like for instance a fiendish enemy bent on destroying this country’s values and violets. For millennia, very important people have been obsessed with rendering their destructions and rights denials and oppressions as “legal.”

For them, “legal” has been a fetish.

And, our persistent authoritarians also make sure to instruct us over and over again that their secrecy, repression, fascism and legalities are for our own good.

See, for example, the popes who authorized European pillage of North and South America, Asia, and Africa, the kings and queens who paid for these pillages, their viceroys and generals and captains and men of religion, President McKinley who sent American soldiers to crush the Philippine War of Independence…and the endless violence and rights denials waged by governments from Germany to South Africa around the world. Read their documents and speeches, and see “legal” “legal” “legal” “legal” “legal” (accompanied, of course, by “God’s Will” “God’s Will” “God’s Will”….)

But it’s not about them. Rather, isn’t this all about us? About us as individuals, and us as We the People — and who among us truly aspires to BE the sovereign people, and what does it mean to ACT in concert like sovereign people?

All to say: the headline on the NYTimes Comany’s first page story this morning is “Files on Illegal Spying Show CIA Skeletons from Cold War.” If we the sovereign people really want to know, so we can act commensurately, don’t we need the files on all the LEGAL spying?

When people tore down the Berlin Wall and the East German government evaporated, thousands of people stormed into the STASI (secret police) headquarters and started pouring through the files.

Will We the American people one day storm into the CIA, NSA, FBI, Homeland Security, White House, Congress, Supreme Court, the Library of Congress and other of the people’s buildings so we can begin to learn what we need to know to start governing ourselves?

If we aspire to democratic self-governance, then don’t we gotta demand, and act upon, NO MORE SECRETS?

For starters?

- Richard Grossman, CELDF

Dean Baker is usually good for insightful and spot on analysis in regards to our corporate economy. He delivers again with this essay on Michael Moore’s film “SiCKO” and the dismal state (and causes) of America’s health care system, and the fraudulent and hypocritical claims towards ‘market choice’ that private insurance companies hide their bloated and inefficient (though personally lucrative) processes behind.

The pundits are working overtime trying to defuse the message from “SiCKO,” Michael Moore’s new film. They are trying to convince the public that the United States could not possibly do what every other rich country (and even some not so rich countries) have managed to do: guarantee their people decent health care.

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This experience is important. We cannot afford universal health care if we don’t bring the costs of the US system more in line with the rest of the world. We currently pay more than twice as much per person, with no obvious benefit in terms of outcome. The key to creating a more efficient system is to have a government-run system comparable to the traditional Medicare system.

But, we don’t have to pontificate about American values and the role of government - leave the silly pseudo-philosophical debates out of it. This is a straight dollars-and-cents question that can be determined by the market. Give people a choice and let them decide whether they want to be insured through the government-run system or want to stick with private health care providers.

The pundits have managed to flip reality on its head. It is the health insurance industry and their partners-in-crime, the pharmaceutical industry, that are scared of the market and competition.

Read The Full Essay

Update: Paul Krugman nails it again with this piece on the criminal state of America’s health care system and the immoral lengths the specially benefitting minority will go to maintain it with his essay Health Care Terror

This might be one of the more craven and cowardly things I’ve seen a local government do in awhile. Corporate welfare on full display (and somewhat reminiscent of how governments will cut 10 cents off gas taxes to try to offset cartel increases of 30 cents, so we subsidize US and Arab oil billionaires and have crummy roads). Rather than get something to stay in the community and make a big deal of the need for real competition, this Township is now subsidizing Comcast. At least poor little Comcast won’t go to bed hungry tonight.

An Open Letter To Kevin DeWine and Steve Austria

Kevin/Steve,

As my State Rep and State Senator, I would be very interested in your perspectives on the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicle’s practice of including DISCOVER and CHASE promotional materials in annual vehicle registration notifications. From my perspective, I don’t think taxpayers should be footing the bill for private corporation direct mail marketing campaigns, and frankly, I’m disappointed that you haven’t done a better job of overseeing the Ohio BMV.

Article 8, Section 4 of the Ohio Constitution reads, “The credit of the state shall not in any manner, be given or loaned to, or in aid of, any individual, association or corporation whatever, nor shall the state ever hereafter become a joint owner, or stockholder, in a company or association in this state, or elsewhere, formed for any purpose whatever.”

Do you agree or disagree that it is inappropriate for state government to use taxpayer dollars to aid private corporations in this manner? If you agree, what do you plan to do about it?

Otherwise would you be so kind as to explain how this practice fits into state government’s roles and responsibilities as outlined in the Ohio Constitution?

- John Mitchel, Beavercreek, OH
www.patriotpressohio.com

Fragile principle or oxymoron?

Michel Rocard, a former Prime Minister of France, takes the issue on with some insight and lucidity (by American standards, at least, considering these are not the types of questions usually discussed on the evening cable talk shows. Hmmm, wonder why?)

Henry Ford, builder of the American automobile (1863-1947), was not only the world’s biggest industrialist for fifteen years. He was also one of the saviors of the capitalism that had been severely struck by the 1929 crisis: He invented the policy of high salaries that assured consumption’s comeback. That indicates the importance of his intuitions.

On various occasions, he asserted that capitalism could not live and develop without respecting a rigorous ethic. In his opinion, it was bad - morally - for the head of a company to pay himself more than 40 times his employees’ average salary. He followed this rule himself. The key to this conclusion maintains that capitalism is assuredly the form of social organization that guarantees the greatest margin of freedom to all actors in the system. That observation obviously does not hold in the absence of a high degree of self-limitation and self-control.

Now it is clear, as this twenty-first century begins, that something has cracked somewhere in the system.

It sure has. And all of it is ‘perfectly legal.’

Read The Complete Essay

A good example of what it means to have a society operating by ‘market forces.’

The site is Turkish but the video is British.

Watch The Video

Paul Krugman, ever the foghorn that he is cutting through the smoke and mirrors, further dissects the scam that is private corporate health insurance racket.

Is the health insurance business a racket? Yes, literally - or so say two New York hospitals, which have filed a racketeering lawsuit against UnitedHealth Group and several of its affiliates.

I don’t know how the case will turn out. But whatever happens in court, the lawsuit illustrates perfectly the dysfunctional nature of our health insurance system, a system in which resources that could have been used to pay for medical care are instead wasted in a zero-sum struggle over who ends up with the bill.

Read The Full Article

Paul Krugman nails it regarding the idiocy of ‘market incentives’ solving the health insurance crisis afflicting the nation.

Going without health insurance isn’t like deciding to rent an apartment instead of buying a house. It’s a terrifying experience, which most people endure only if they have no alternative. The uninsured don’t need an “incentive” to buy insurance; they need something that makes getting insurance possible.

Read the complete article Here

Bob Herbert has a follow up piece on the desperate debt cycle many are taking on in their efforts to meet ever-increasing medical bills and insurance premiums.

A disturbing new report shows that with health care costs continuing their sharp rise, low- and middle-income patients are reaching for their credit cards with alarming frequency to cover treatment that they otherwise would be unable to afford.

This medical debt, to be paid off in many cases at sky-high interest rates, is being loaded onto consumer debt that is already at dangerously high levels. Many families have been crushed by the load, driven from their homes, forced into bankruptcy, and worse.

Read “Your MasterCard or Your Life” by Bob Herbert.

Pretty good essay from a poster on The Daily Kos on the true logic and justice behind progressive taxation policies.

One of the most illegitimate and yet seductive arguments the Republicans have is, “Why should people who have or make more money have to pay more taxes?” This is the argument that underlies the call for a flat tax, for an elimination of estate taxes, and even for reductions in capital gains taxes.

It took me quite a few years to understand why a progressive tax system is fair and reasonable and why the Republican tax arguments are nonsense.  My goal here is to share the knowledge I’ve gained by discussing a bit of history, a bit of political theory, and quite a bit of miscellany.  

Read The Full Post

Bill Moyers describes the shameful state of education in America. He delivered these remarks in October of 2006 to the Council of Great City Schools, an organization of the nation’s largest urban public school systems.

“Education should be the centerpiece of a great and diverse America made stronger by equality and shared prosperity. It has instead become the epitome of public neglect, perpetuated by a class divide so permeated by race that it mocks the bedrock principles of the American Promise.”

Moyers’ analysis is excellent for many reasons. Not the least of which is the fact that it goes beyond the discussion of education unto itself and analyzes some of the underlying core issues involved in the continuing degradation of America’s public education system, most notably the class war being driven by the economic elites of this nation against the very idea of the commons and a shared public good for all our citizenry.

Highly recommended for anyone interested in and/or involved in America’s educational system, or for that matter anyone interested in the future state of our national health and well-being.

Read Bill Moyers’ piece in full here on TomPaine.com