“PUBLIC OPTION”–IS IT REALLY AN OPTION? WHAT WE NEED IS A POLITICAL THIRD OPTION

August 19th, 2009

By Alexander Leon

Why is the so-called “public option” not an option? Think about it. If you were a health insurance industry tycoon, what would you do if you had to “compete” with a government run insurance plan and could not deny care or drop patients requiring costly medical procedures and maintenance?

First off, to compete “bribe” health providers so to speak by paying slightly more than the government program in exchange for giving priority to the patients privately insured by your company. That will push the government insured to the end of the line, increasing their wait times and, best of all, produce the most desirable effect: make patients perceive the government option as inferior, as one that does not provide the “best” care, one that does not quite work, is bad or not as good. That will motivate those who can afford it to move to private insurance–hopefully yours.

As for dealing with the “expensive” patients after reform, that you can not then just throw overboard or deny treatment through your company “claims-denial-death-panel,” hike their premiums to the point that they voluntarily jump ship and preferably move to the government plan—similar to what insurance companies do to poor drivers. That might even bankrupt the government plan. Justify the high premiums by claiming those patients cost more because they have not taken care of their health and thus must be made to pay more, like poor drivers.

Combined, that one-two-punch might lead eventually to sinking the “public option” altogether.  Then you could roll back the remaining reforms through your bought and paid-for politicians until you’re pretty much back to business as usual—very similar to how Friedmanian neoliberals have systematically and effectively rolled back the New Deal and worker, social, consumer and civil rights gains up until the sixties, all of which has stranded us in the current economic, financial, wage and jobs doldrums that most must bear, as the captains have been readily bailed out.

The shenanigans of corporations, whether tobacco, insurance, pharma or the media, are unending. They lie, hide and distort the truth. They misinform and scare to manipulate the people to their aims. Killing “single-payer” has been their aim all along–like the distorted generalization that government is the problem to “drown it in a bath tub.”  The “public option” has been more of a distraction that will not truly bring about change in healthcare we can believe in.

According to Democratic Senator Kent Conrad, “The fact of the matter is there are not the votes in the United States Senate for a public option. There never have been.” There aren’t nor have there ever been enough votes in the Senate to pass healthcare reform, in any form apparently, even with pretty much sixty so called Democratic senators? And Obama seems scared of his own shadow these days.

What all this means is that what we really need then is a real third political option, made out of politicians truly willing and committed to bring about credible reforms for the benefit of the people, children, workers, women, men, the country and the world. Republicans will never do that, and Democrats, as currently being evidenced, won’t either, regardless of how they sing and dance around the issues.

Bottom line is that the for-profit insurance provided healthcare system needs to be obsoleted–very much the way monarchy practically has. In like fashion, it serves only a few obscenely well but is a heavy tax and burden on everyone else. We need single-payer, period, and the politicians that will truly deliver it.

As for the gun-totting nuts out there, they’re blind pawns and minions of the savage status-quo who might one day realize their brazen folly.

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Healthcare | No Comments »

Concrete Lesson From the UAW

June 21st, 2009
A. Leon – 6/21/09
Watch this video from The Real News: 
Retired auto workers have their say Pt.3


More at The Real News

One of the retirees rigthly points out that UAW fretted away the solidarity between generations by now having the benefits of GM retirees contingent on the price of GM stock going up.  That means cuts in wages and benefits, plant closings and outsourcing of jobs–all against young workers–is to the benefit of the old.  Labor has been effectively divided in a new way, and in so defeated once more.  How can this be?
 
Union tribalism, not having sought solidarity amongst all unions and all workers and even consumers and people everywhere, now finds members concesioned out and the purpose of unions subverted–workers facing lower wages, cut benefits and no pension beyond self funded 401Ks, which they’ll be lucky to fund at the meager new wages, and retirees too are now at risk of further loosing medical benefits and more.  By looking out for numero uno and tribe in the past, workers, people and societies now face greater fragmentation as they have been put in greater conflict against themselves and each other.  New workers are in conflict with the stockholder union, for they don’t want the profits of what they make to be scooped up as dividends; they want better pay and benefits for themselves, which lowers the stock price.  What a conflict of interest!  But Machiavellian ways to divide will continue to be conjured up for they have proven dandy as means to conquer. 
 
This is what happens every time we allow unevolved leaders hijack positions of power and leadership, whether in government, finance, unions, media, education and all forms of organized human endeavor.  The wrong leaders run things only for their benefit, at best paying lip service to the needs of all, while in reality taking all they can and conceding only what they are forced to in order to keep their empires and games going.  Funny thing is they eventually destroy their own empires.  This is how Milton Friedman’s brand of unfettered free-market capitalism suddenly found itself in the throes of death, needing vampire-like lavish bailout transfusions because it killed its own market: to maximize profits, jobs, pay and benefits were cut until people no longer could pay their mortgages and were forced to cut spending across the board.  That’s the elephant in the room few are talking about.  The Friedmanist trickle-down Frankenstein is a myth and a monster–it does not work except for a time and for a few.  The extreme measures to resucitate the monster are accumulating an uprecedented debt which fortells disaster ahead.
 
In what has happened to the UAW resides a concrete lesson of how tribo-individualism–the source of conflict, crime, poverty, ecowrecking and wars–can only provide temporary, elusive and disappointing solutions to some, eventually leaving all, even our children, gasping.  This is why it is imperative that we all evolve beyond rabid individualism and tribalism–especially since in doing so we learn to identify those who, if empowered, will truly manage all aspects of human activity for the benefit of all, including preservation of the ecosystem, and not just for the benefit of a few.  Hopefully we’ll do so before we destroy the planet and ourselves.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Economy, Evolvement | 5 Comments »

Confusion: Curare for the Masses

May 28th, 2009

When I recently read a piece authored by insightful Robert Scheer on the banksters bailouts and cutting of social services in California, as usual, the comments were laden with the red herring stories that also come in emails from supporters of Bush 43, bailouts, torture etc., or against single payer.  In the piece Scheer basically questions why the banksters get bailed out while education and healthcare for poor children get cut.

Clearly not only do we have to contend with the disinformation spread by the corporatist media, but also the misleading comments posted even at progressive sites throughout the internet.  And there are so many of these that we should not be surprised many come from people being paid to ‘spike the trees’ of democracy by spewing disinformation in this manner -paid by right-wing richly funded think-tanks, lobbyists, PACS, or industries like oil, healthcare and insurance.  Sure many already drunk on the disinformation are unpaid minions.  But the point is that by ‘lifting dust’ and ‘muddying the waters’ people’s vision is clouded, keeping them from seeing clearly, causing confusion and ultimately political paralysis.  Curare is a poison that in small doses causes paralysis.  Thus, I call disinformation and bad information “curare for the masses” since in not understanding or knowing what to do it leads precisely to paralysis, namely political paralysis.

A particular colorful ‘curare’ (misleading reader comment) to Scheer’s article called my attention.  In it, The Little Red Hen in the story named after it was used to represent ‘red states’ (i.e., Republican states), which purportedly are the ones that work hard and of course don’t need bailouts, while the liberal donkey, pig and dog states like California don’t work but are willing to eat the bread that in the story the ‘red hen states’ bake after doing all the work of planting, harvesting, threshing, milling and baking.  The poster then said that “Farmer Barack came out to the hen house and explained that everybody does better when the wealth is spread around. He took most of the loaf of bread the Little Red State Hen had made and gave it to the Donkey, the Pig and the Dog” [-bluelori comment].  Poster then goes on to depict Farmer Barack as a socialist utopian.  Predictably the story ends with the “Little Red Hen State” refusing to work too, and with that, nobody doing the work, the socialist world goes to pot.

Funny thing is that people in social democracies are faring much better than most in the utopia-promising dystopia of free-market capitalism –which is never free and its price is misery for most, even with two jobs, to support obscene unearned wealth for those at the pinnacle of the pyramid scheme.  Furthermore, in reality the little bread that the donkey, pig and dog worked hard for, was taken from them and given to the bankster red hen, who claimed to plant, harvest, thresh, mill and bake, though in reality it would have had an army of exploited donkey, pig and dog underpaid workers, with little or no benefits, doing all the work.  If California is failing, it is because of the global Miltonian neoliberal right wing policies of deregulation, tax cutting for corporations and the rich, while outsourcing and cutting jobs and benefits for workers, though productivity and profit margins have substantially increased.  And Red states are not exempt from suffering the same fate.

“The sky’s falling” under anything but capitalism stories have been around long enough that people begin to understand their purpose: prop a system that is morally and now economically bankrupt on the backs of workers.  Just look at who really benefits from the status quo said stories aim to protect and who’s skies it darkens and brings down.  The antidote to such ‘curare‘ is finding the honest information that unmasks the lies and myths, exposes the cooked-books, unearths crimes and shines the light of truth.  Truth not only makes us free, but also cures the political paralysis insidiously caused by poisonous disinformation, spinning and deception.

 

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Economy, Media, Politics | 3 Comments »

Sonia Sotomayor: ‘Judicial Activism‘ According to Republicans

May 27th, 2009

Judges must interpret the law.  “Activist judges” however, are truly those who promote self-serving agendas, whether personal or of a group they happen to identify with (like Dubya’s “my base”), rather than further the interests of the people and democracy -whether setting new precedent or reversing it, and irrespective of party affiliation.  A clear example of activist judges are those who ‘elected’ George W. Bush. 

Judicial activism also comes from inaction, whether the Court declines to review a case or rests its decision on “following the [status quo] law” when clearly something should be done in the name of justice.  The 1857 USSC Dread Scott decision is an example of this injustice-preserving judicial activism.  In sum, according to that decision people could be property in the U.S. (African-American people) and Congress had no authority to prohibit slavery.  It took the Thirteenth Amendment and the Civil War to change that.  Shameful decision but surely hailed by slaveholders as “just,” though it was obviously not applying the law “evenhandedly” (borrowing from Mitch McConnell language when fretting over Sonia Sotomayor).  Under McConnell’s criteria of even-handedness, setting new precedent in Scott was not just plausible but imperative.  The case is a clear example of judicial activism used to preserve a status-quo of injustice. 

But Republican’s Orwellian talk reserves the expression ‘judicial activism‘ for judges who don’t rule in their favor, irrespective of what the law says, whether setting new precedent or reversing, and even when doing this in the most EVENHANDED way possible.  Only judges promoting the GOP agendas set by their lobbyists or PACS are to them fair and qualified -i.e., not “activist judges.”  Go figure.  They would love Roe reversed, but decisions and laws they love they want untouched even if as ill as Dread Scott.  The GOP rightly senses that Sotomayor is probably not in their camp and with her Federal judicial experience beyond any judge appointed to the Court in the last 100 years she could easily become a force to contend with in the third branch.  Thus all the talk by the GOP and right-wing media about Sotomayor is posturing and preparation to oppose her confirmation since they fear she could rock their apple cart.  For obvious reasons this is not something they would ever admit. 

Just as Republicans typically cry “unfair” though they primarily are the ones cheating and changing of the game rules, making it all up as they go, to them it is also not about reason, integrity, reality, truth, facts, science, justice, common sense or even ’evenhanded’ application of the law (regardless of their demogougery).  For most Republicans, sadly, it’s about imposing their self-serving world order over the rest, right or wrong, and for which they never appologize.  They are an endangered species but their ideology is rather infectious under conditions of fear, caos, promoting individualism and collective regression and fixation to earlier developmental stages.  Thus, if they manage a pandemic re-infection to hyper-individualism and regain control of the three branches of government, we’ll again all be an endangered species.  But forget this and let’s see how they handle her confirmation.  Predictably they will oppose Sotomayor as rabidly as they supported Thomas, who is probably the most inept yet activist member of the Court -but that goes without mention since he rules in their favor.

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Politics | 7 Comments »

Think Tanks and Creatures to Kill Thought

May 1st, 2009

Conservative right-wing think tanks like the American Heritage Institute, along with the creatures they spawn such as Glenn Beck and Michael Savage, routinely resort to fear and xenophobia to stop us from thinking clearly –so we only react viscerally.  Blaming Mexicans for the H1N1 flu virus is the new scare in fashion, right behind the McCarthyist red-baiting of calling Obama a socialist despot.  The usual suspects of billionaire families and toxic corporations fund these factories of propaganda and designer fear to get us to willingly dismantle the principles this nation was founded upon and to endorse fascist agendas the conservative rich elite perceive convenient and though disastrous in any other way –agendas that destroy economic opportunity (and thus even capitalism itself), the environment, and even hijack environmentalism with a  the pretense of ‘greening’ capitalism, which is not about saving the planet but about profiting while pretending to save it.  Just try and get them to stop production of something they can still milk profits from, regardless of how damaging.  But it is worse, now even our own tax dollars are being used to fund these consent manufacturing centers, thanks to a complicit military.

You can’t green blight; you can’t make a respectable murderer or rapist by making it kinder, gentler or greener.  By the same token, the empty promises of prosperity for everyone from capitalism will remain that –utopian promises.  It will continue to betray us, keeping us in a child-like state, requiring massive amounts of taxpayers money periodically, and police and military action to prop it up, as it operates in constant self-destruct mode by killing its own market. 

God forbid giving purchasing power back to the people because that means giving them jobs, better pay, benefits like universal health care and real education, and that my friends, it’s a plain NO, N-O, NO since it eats away ‘profits’ (basically what’s stolen by the pyramid peak parasite dwellers).

Milton Friedman’s “shock doctrine” –as rightly reframed by Naomi Klein—is the refined approach to ‘remake’ us into compliance, and further their agendas undemocratically.  It will continue to be until a greater portion of the American public awakens –understands the attempts and methods used to enslave us under the Orwellian labeled economic constructs of ‘free market’ and ‘neo-liberalism.’.  This slowly seems to be the hopeful trend in spite of the choking grip conservatives have on the press and media.  Help others understand this so that they may stop acting and voting against their own interests… yours, ours.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

Embezzlement ‘Bonuses’

March 18th, 2009

Bonuses are supposed to be awards for jobs well done.  To call thieves’ booty shares ’bonuses’ is an euphemistic stretch of euphemisms.  Much of what the bankers, brokers and AIG did is not much different from the scheme that Bernard Madoff pulled.   They probably believed too that unending growth to the sky would cover up their misdeeds: the reckless racket that resulted in banks leveraged 30:1 and global economic implosion.  These ‘bankers’ (seems another euphemism for ‘thieves’ these days) did not earn money the ‘old fashioned way’ –creating real products and jobs, investing to provide affordable housing, or to develop new industry or infrastructure, or to try to improve existing industries in order to protect good paying endangered jobs for American workers, improving their competitiveness and thus preserving their ability to obtain credible mortgages and pay them off.

Instead of outright stealing it, the Wall St. sharks speculated and gambled with other people’s money, and like any bookie, made sure they won big regardless of who lost.  The ruse that “too many people were getting loans they should have never have gotten,” while true, is a distortion that leaves out the most important aspects of the whole picture.  Those ‘people’ were not the culprits as they are being blamed –they simply were victims of the economy and at worst caught up, enticed, exuberant participants in the scams of the brokers and bankers, believing they too could have a piece of the pie or fulfill their American dream of owning a home or at least make a killing in equity as the bubble kept inflating to a dream of infinity.  All has now turned into a nightmare, except oddly for the key perpetrators of the crime.

What the main culprits did has also been euphemistically called ‘wealth extraction.’ It was a more insidious racket than that.  Skimming schemes in government are called graft, in the private sector, embezzlement and fraud –technically different than what Kenneth ‘Kenny Boy’ Lay and Jeffrey Skilling engaged in, but still stealing, Bunco, scamming, swindling little old ladies money and retirees savings.  This was not just ‘bad judgment’ as their apologists and abettors in the media call it in their efforts to help with the cover up –hell the pundits helped sell the scams as they helped sell us WMDs and war, and as Jon Stewart has exposed, it was perniciously misleading financial advice from the Jim Cramers of MSNBC.

How did the scheme work?  Let’s back up a second.  The imbalance of wealth distribution orgy that began in earnest during the Reagan years gained steam during his poor but far more noxious imitation, Dubious Dubya.  There were people and hedge funds with boatfuls of money floating about without places to invest in, and they started demanding more of the now infamous mortgage investment vehicles known as derivatives, credit default swaps, CDOs, etc.  To generate more of these presumed high yield vehicles, high risk was of course the order of the day, whereby they unleashed the subprime mortgage market at a fevered pace.  The more loans and transactions they generated and executed the more skimming in the form of fees, commissions and bonuses –reason for bankers and brokers to be paid flat salaries or hourly wages just like everyone else (imagine paying tellers a commission for each bank transaction).  So in tacit agreement, knowing full well that what they had was bunk and stunk, they kept the subprime mortgage sausage factory going with nobody looking at how it was being made. 

The bonuses subject of debate today are embezzlement cherries on the pies of dung they created.  They insist ‘contractually’ they are entitled to continue picking cherries off their investment scams, while they leave their dung and the bill to clean it up to the rest of us –taxpayers expected to slave away for what we earn.  Since when is a ‘contract’ or agreement amongst thieves something that a presumed nation of laws is supposed to honor and abide by?  These people should certainly NOT get any further embezzlement bonuses.  Furthermore, they need to be fired, made to return all their ill-gotten gains and then be severely prosecuted.  Had they been allowed to go out of business, as capitalism by, for and of the rich dictates for every human outside their aloof elite click, they would at minimum be on the street and certainly not entitled to further embezzlement fig-leafed as bonuses.  Many of those should be ran behind bars, and the banks nationalized and ran for the benefit of us who fund them with our savings and bail them with our taxes. 

BTW, who is this Geithner guy?  One of the original architects of what’s got us in this mess.  So why is he in Obama’s cabinet?  Obama too needs to shake all the old school good ol’ boys and girls with which he’s fenced and compromised himself in with off his cabinet.  We need real change, not just moves designed for public relations and politicking.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Economy | 15 Comments »

MBAs or MSAs?

March 6th, 2009

Do we need Masters in Business Administration which only seek to maximize profits? They are in great part responsible for the current destruction of the economy and the environment. The mainstream media would have us believe that the economic implosion is just the result of a housing market and mortgage meltdown. They deliberately avoid root-cause analysis since that would require admitting the built-in contradictions of the YOYO (you’re on your own) free-market economy, which carries the seed pods of its own destruction that periodically erupt, giving off their poisonous fruit such as the current economic disaster, requiring once again massive transfusions of cash to try and salvage the Draculian patient.

In a world in which rabid individualism rules, MBAs have sought to maximize profits—through increased productivity, outsourcing jobs, cutting workers pay and benefits, adopting the use of contractors (instead of permanent workers) and laying them all off in the blink of an eye—never questioning whether their practices are sustainable. It took some time for the current implosion to build up while workers fought to stay afloat by first switching to the two-income household, and later by living on credit and using their home equity as an ATM. Sure there was fraud, but it was relatively minimal and induced by the created conditions in which, while productivity and profits continued to rise, workers’ compensation stopped rising in parallel since the seventies. The result is an economy that lies in shambles—the goose that laid the golden eggs lies dead—since about 70% of the market is consumer spending. High ticket and expensive boutique items employ but a handful of people. Workers are the bulk of consumers (the demand-side), and they are not only the real drivers of the market economy, but are also the true creators of wealth. But there’s more; one thing that supply-siders can’t admit even under torture.

Supply-side economy adepts claim that capital is what creates wealth and invariably credit themselves with creating it.  How else could they justify walking off with the bulk of it? They would otherwise be admitting to theft. But let’s take a look. Pile all the capital in the universe (as defined by supply-siders) at the banks of a river and see if you can watch it make a single bridge or even a simple crossing of stepping stones. It won’t -not without human labor. On the other hand, people, alone and especially working together, can do just about anything. This is what supply-siders can never admit: what truly creates wealth (and in that sense is the real ‘capital’) is labor. The rest are myths and rationalizations. Without labor, capital, regardless of how defined, does not exist. In a monetary system, the only thing that gives value to notes or doubloons is that workers or someone will accept it as representative of labor or in exchange for labor, and things grown, obtained and created through labor. It could be said that capital is ‘accumulated labor’ (such as grain in a silo), but in a more liquid and readily exchangeable form.

What we need are Masters in Systems Administration (MSAs), who will manage our complex adaptive systems and capital to create and distribute wealth in ways that are equitable and sustainable, so that it will be preserved or regenerated, benefiting especially those most responsible for creating it, while also preserving the environment. The catastrophic results of the supply-side orgy of the last three decades prove again that those who claim to be the creators of wealth (a-la Ayn Rand) aren’t; they are its looters and destroyers. Sorry Reagan and faithful devotees.

Tip for MBAs: it would significantly increase profits if you laid yourselves off.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Economy | 11 Comments »