Mobile Bay native Brinkley Hutchings flew over the water and saw the crude oil heading for her home.

Oil oozes through reeds in Mississippi Delta, 2010-05-20 – John Moore, AFP / Getty Images

Tony Hayward, CEO of BP, at interview, 2010-05-13 – The Guardian

Oil slick from satellite, 2010-05-18 – NASA

Flyover by hccreekkeeper, 2010-05-07

Further Info

‘Latest Gulf Oil Spill FAQ: How Much Oil Has Spilled, Why Hasn’t It Been Plugged, and More…’ by Marian Wang, ProPublica – May 19, 2010

‘Timeline Of The Spill’ – NPR

Sources

¹ Tony Hayward interview – The Guardian, 2010-05-13

² ‘Tar balls wash ashore on Dauphin Island’ – by Renee Dials, Ryan Coleman; Photojournalist: Jason Caldwell; WALA, 2010-05-08

³ ‘Nightmare Scene of Oil Unfolding in Wetlands’ – AFP, 2010-05-20

⁴ ‘A Local’s Account of the Deepwater Disaster’ by Brinkley Hutchings, 2010-05-10

⁵ ‘Gulf oil spill: NOAA expands no-fishing zone to nearly a fifth of the gulf’ by Bettina Boxall, LA Times, 2010-05-18

⁶ ‘Fishery Closure Boundary – map’ – NOAA, 2010-05-18, pdf

By Quinn Hungeski – Posted at TheParagraph.com

Rep. Roskam (R-IL) shakes his Etch-A-Sketch as Pres. Obama looks on. from C-SPAN

1. Good, Constant Coverage: I want a plan with good, reasonable coverage that is always in effect — even when I’m in between jobs.

2. Insurance Standards: I want coverage without insurance company tricks and loopholes: no caps, no denial for preexisting conditions, no cancellation when needing an pricey treatment.

3. Quick Treatment: I want to be able see my doctor, or go to a walk-in clinic and get treatment, without waiting days for an appointment.

4. No Paperwork: I want to be able to show my health care card and get treatment — no interview, no forms.

5. Doctor’s Best Judgment: I want my doctor to act from one’s own best judgment, and not from the need to ring the cash register.

6. No Premiums: I want to pay for this out of our taxes. But if I have to pay a premium, it should be affordable, and I should be able to pay it into a public, non-profit plan.

7. Everyone In: I want these things for everyone in America. A healthier nation is a stronger and freer nation.

Which of these features do you want in a health care bill? Please check ALL the ones you want, then click “Vote”:

While Congress’s bills would address some of these features in some measure, I think that the best and least costly way to get them would be to improve and extend Medicare to all.³⁶ While Congress has not moved on that, several states are now moving towards a single-payer system.³⁷

Sources

³⁰ ‘Health care summit: Transcripts from every speaker’ – Washington Post, 2010-02-25

³¹ ‘Sen. Mitch McConnell suggests the President starts over on reform at White House health summit’ – CQ Transcriptions, 2010-02-25

³² ‘Rep. Peter Roskam makes remarks at White House health summit’ – CQ Transcriptions, 2010-02-25

³³ ‘White House Health Care Summit, Part 2’ C-SPAN, 2010-02-25 – video Etch-A-Sketch routine at 134:40

³⁴ ‘Vice President Joe Biden makes remarks on cost at White House health summit’ – CQ Transcriptions, 2010-02-25

³⁵ ‘Poll: Americans Want Dem Health Care Reforms, Not Dem Bills’ by Evan McMorris-Santoro, Talking Points Memo, February 24, 2010

³⁶ ‘Comparing the House and the Senate Health Care Proposals’ New York Times, 2010-02-23

³⁷ ‘Single-Payer Healthcare Coming to Minnesota and Maryland’ by David Swanson, 2010-03-03

California keeps passing bills for state single-payer healthcare, but Ahhhnold won’t sign em, and Jerry Brown who wants to be governor doesn’t seem to want it badly enough to make a commitment on healthcare. Meanwhile, Pennsylvania is encouraged that their current governor has said he probably will sign a single-payer healthcare bill, and the legislature just might pass one. But Minnesota has an angle neither of these other states can claim: a serious candidate for governor who is the state’s leading advocate for single-payer.

By Quinn Hungeski – Posted at TheParagraph.com

K2 from air, West Face (Guilhem Vellut)

… I walked behind the village, and I saw 84 children sitting in the dirt during their school lessons. There were five girls, 79 boys. What really struck me, though, was that there was no teacher there. And I said, where’s your teacher? And they said, Master Hussein is in the next village because we can’t afford his daily one dollar salary. So that day in ’93 I made a promise to try and get a school built there.

After working at it for three years, Mortenson fulfilled his promise. Since then, his Central Asia Institute (CAI) has built 131 schools in rural Pakistan and Afghanistan.

CAI’s Pigish High School in the Wakhan Corridor, Afghanistan (Teru Kuwayama)

Community Buy-In is Key to Success

The school-building process starts when persons of a village ask Mortenson to meet with them.²³+²⁴ Community members then take part in every stage of planning and building. The CAI provides the teacher training, materials and skilled labor, and the community provides the land, resources, and 2000 to 5000 days of manual labor. So with this community buy-in, in these countries where the Taliban has bombed or otherwise shut down hundreds of girls’ schools, only one CAI school has been attacked. Mortenson tells the story of how that school was closed and soon reopened:²⁶

About 14 Taliban came in at night. They beat up the night watchman and the next day they said if anybody comes to school, we’ll kill you. The headmaster got on his bicycle. He pedaled about 23 miles. He went to the local commander. Now, he’s somewhat of a shady guy, but he also has two daughters in school, and so he rounded up about 120 men. He came in with his militia. He killed two Taliban and then, for lack of better words, he extracted information from the other Taliban.

And he found out they had gotten $3,000 to shut the school down from the local mullah. So today, some of those men are in prison and two days later, the school was reopened. He appointed 12 Askari, which are – Askari is like militia men – to guard the school. And they have orders that if anybody tries to hurt or harm the school or the students, that they should just shoot them.

School under construction in Daltir, Thaile Valley, Baltistan, Pakistan (Teru Kuwayama)

Educating Girls is Powerful

Gultori Girls’ School near
Skardu, Baltistan, Pakistan (Teru Kuwayama)

Well, it’s obvious the boys need education also. But as a child in Africa, I learned a proverb. And it says, “If we educate a boy, we educate an individual. But if we can educate a girl, we educate a community.” And what that means is when girls grow up, become a mother, they are the ones who promote the value of education in the community. The education of girls has very powerful impacts in a society. Number one, the infant mortality’s reduced. Number two, the population is reduced. The third thing is the quality of health improves. … And another compelling reason is when women are educated, they’re not as likely to condone or encourage their son to get into violence or into terrorism. In fact, culturally when someone goes on jihad, they should get permission from their mother first. And if they don’t, it’s very shameful or disgraceful. So when women are educated, as I mentioned, they are less likely to encourage their son to get into violence. And I’ve seen that happen … over the last decade in rural areas of Afghanistan, Pakistan. I mean, I could go on all day about this, but educating girls is very powerful.

A Girls’ School in Taliban Country

Mortenson tells the story of how the CAI came to be building a girls’ high school in the heart of Taliban country:²⁴

[O]ne of our goals … was to put a girls’ high school in Urozgan province in Afghanistan, which is in the south. It’s the home of Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban — it’s probably one of the last bastions who are completely opposed to girls going to school. And so last year we kind of set a rough goal that would take us … 20 years to set up a girls’ school there. So this spring, a year later, we got contacted by … the elders of Urozgan province. They wanted to visit one of our schools. And we said sure. And so this summer they came to Char Asiab, where we have a girls’ school. And these are about 14 men. When they got to the school, these are, you know, some of them are, you know, kind of shady guys, black turbans. They’re armed to the teeth, have, you know, big, long beards. And when they got there, they saw the giant playground. So they threw down their weapons. For the next hour and a half, they went on the swings and slides and had a glorious time playing. And I finally kind of had to stop them and say, “You know, let’s get serious. We need to — this is the headmaster. We need to talk to the principal.” And he said, “No, no. We’re totally satisfied. We want a girls’ high school in Urozgan Province. But it has to have a playground. And you have to come and have tea with us.” So I got up the nerve in September to visit Urozgan. And this is an area, there’s no U.S. troops there. I mean, there’s no nothing there. There’s a lot of Taliban. We had a giant jirga. And I was pretty, you know, pale faced and kind of fearful. But it was a beautiful meeting. When they got done, they said, “We want to start this school. Of course we want the playground built first.” And so in October 2009 we started breaking ground on the school, and this year, in 2010, the school will be finished this summer.

Greg Mortenson, second from right, with tribal leaders in Tarin Khot, Urozgan Province, Afghanistan (Teru Kuwayama)

Advice for U.S. Officials

From his many years of working with the people of Afghanistan, Mortenson gives two strong points of advice to officials of the United States, which has 100,000 of its soldiers in that country, along with 130,000 persons under contract.²⁵ One point is to talk with the elders:²⁴

Every province has three to five dozen shura. And these are elders. They’re poets. They’re warriors. They’re businessmen, a few women. And they’re not elected, but they’ve kind of risen up through the ranks. And these to me are the real people with integrity and power in Afghanistan. … And it’s not that difficult. You can do it at a district level, or local level, or at a national level. It’s, you know, I think half of diplomacy is just showing up. You know, we’ve got to actually just show up and start to talk and then maybe we could get somewhere.

And the other point is to not bomb people:²⁴

[O]f all things that the elders say is, please, do not bomb and kill civilians. That is the number one way to antagonize people.

Further Information

Video: Bill Moyers interviews Greg Mortenson — video and transcript

Book: Three Cubs of Tea – One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time By Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, 2007

Book: Stones into Schools: Promoting Peace with Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan By Greg Mortenson and Mike Bryan, 2009

Sources

²⁰ ‘Greg Mortenson – bio’ – gregmortenson.com – pdf

²¹ ‘Three Cups of Tea’ (excerpt) by Greg Mortenson & David O. Relin, 2006, Viking Press

²² ‘K2: The Story of the Savage Mountain’ by Jim Curran (1995). Hodder & Stoughton. p. 25. ISBN 978-0340660072

²³ ‘Teach a Girl, Change the World’ By Judith Stone, Good Housekeeping, May 2009

²⁴ Greg Mortenson interview, video and transcript, Bill Moyers Journal, 2010-01-15

²⁵ ‘DOD: Obama’s Afghan Surge Will Rely Heavily On Private Contractors’ by Justin Elliott, TPM Muckraker, December 15, 2009

²⁶ ‘Greg Mortenson: ‘Ordinary Oprah’ – NPR, March 12, 2009’

By Quinn Hungeski – Posted at TheParagraph.com

Haplocanthosaurus, where it belongs. Cleveland Museum of Natural History

Here is an example from Wisconsin in 1905 of a law banning corporate influence on public policy:¹⁰

No corporation doing business in this state shall pay or contribute, or offer consent or agree to pay or contribute, directly or indirectly, any money, property, free service of its officers or employees or thing of value to any political party, organization, committee or individual for any political purpose whatsoever, or for the purpose of influencing legislation of any kind, or to promote or defeat the candidacy of any person for nomination, appointment or election to any political office.

Penalty: Any officer, employe, agent or attorney or other representative of any corporation, acting for and in behalf of such corporation, who shall violate [this act] shall be punished upon conviction by a fine of not less than one hundred nor more than five thousand dollars, or by imprisonment in the state prison for a period of not less than one nor more than five years, or by both … and if the corporation shall be subject to a penalty then by forfeiture in double the amount of any fine so imposed … and if a domestic corporation, it may be dissolved, … and if a foreign or nonresident corporation, its right to do business in this state may be declared forfeited.

Similar Ohio Law, 1908

Section 1, That no corporation doing business in this state shall directly or indirectly pay, use or offer, consent or agree to pay or use, any of its money or property for, or in aid, of any political party, committee or organization, or for, or in aid of, any candidate for political office or for nomination for any such office, or in any manner use any of its money or property for any political purpose whatever, or for the reimbursement or indemnification of any person or persons for moneys or property so used.

Section 3. Every corporation which violates section 1 of this act shall be punished by a fine of not more than five thousand nor less than five hundred dollars… Any officer, stockholder, attorney, or agent of any corporations which violates section 1 of this act who participates in, aids, or advises any such violation, and any person who solicits or knowingly receives any money or property in violation of this act shall be punished by imprisonment for not more than one year or a fine of not more than one thousand dollars, or both at the discretion of the court.¹¹

Other Wisconsin Laws

From research by Jane Anne Morris:¹

• corporations were required to have a clear purpose, to be fulfilled but not exceeded.
• corporations’ licenses to do business were revocable by the state legislature if they exceeded or did not fulfill their chartered purpose(s).
• the state legislature could revoke a corporation’s charter for a particular reason, or for no reason at all.
• the act of incorporation did not relieve corporate management or stockholders/owners of responsibility or liability for corporate acts.
• as a matter of course, corporation officers, directors, or agents could be held criminally liable for violating the law.
• state (not federal) courts heard cases where corporations or their agents were accused of breaking the law or harming the public.
• directors of the corporation were required to come from among stockholders.
• corporations had to have their headquarters and meetings in the state where their principal place of business was located.
• corporation charters were granted for a specific period of time, like 20 or 30 years (instead of being granted “in perpetuity,” as is now the practice.)
• corporations were prohibited from owning stock in other corporations in order to prevent them from extending their power inappropriately.
• corporations’ real estate holdings were limited to what was necessary to carry out their specific purpose(s).
• corporations were prohibited from making any political contributions, direct or indirect.
• corporations were prohibited from making charitable or civic donations outside of their specific purposes.
• state legislatures set the rates that corporations could charge for their products or services.
• all corporation records and documents were open to the legislature or the state attorney general.

All of these provisions were once law in the state of Wisconsin. And similar ones were on the books in most other states.

Sources

¹ ‘Fixing Corporations: The Legacy of the Founding Parents’ by Jane Anne Morris, Madison, Wisc.

² ‘Some Like It Hot’ By Chris Mooney, Mother Jones May/June 2005 Issue

In 1989, the petroleum and automotive industries and the National Association of Manufacturers forged the Global Climate Coalition to oppose mandatory actions to address global warming. …

…

[W]ith the release of the IPCC’s third assessment in 2001, a strong consensus had emerged: Notwithstanding some role for natural variability, human-created greenhouse gas emissions could, if left unchecked, ramp up global average temperatures by as much as 5.8 degrees Celsius (or 10.4 degrees Fahrenheit) by the year 2100. “Consensus as strong as the one that has developed around this topic is rare in science,” wrote Science Editor-in-Chief Donald Kennedy in a 2001 editorial.

Even some leading corporations that had previously supported “skepticism” were converted. Major oil companies like Shell, Texaco, and British Petroleum, as well as automobile manufacturers like Ford, General Motors, and DaimlerChrysler, abandoned the Global Climate Coalition, which itself became inactive after 2002.

Yet some forces of denial—most notably ExxonMobil and the American Petroleum Institute, of which ExxonMobil is a leading member—remained recalcitrant. In 1998, the New York Times exposed an API memo outlining a strategy to invest millions to “maximize the impact of scientific views consistent with ours with Congress, the media and other key audiences.” The document stated: “Victory will be achieved when…recognition of uncertainty becomes part of the ‘conventional wisdom.’” …

Though ExxonMobil’s Lauren Kerr says she doesn’t know the “status of this reported plan” and an API spokesman says he could “find no evidence” that it was ever implemented, many of the players involved have continued to dispute mainstream climate science with funding from ExxonMobil. …

³ ‘Put a Tiger In Your Think Tank’ Mother Jones May/June 2005 Issue

ExxonMobil has pumped more than $8 million [from 2000 to 2003] into more than 40 think tanks; media outlets; and consumer, religious, and even civil rights groups that preach skepticism about the oncoming climate catastrophe.

⁴ ‘Medicare for All: The Only Sound Solution to Our Healthcare Crisis’ By Guy T. Saperstein, AlterNet, January 16, 2007.

The United States has the most expensive healthcare system on the planet. Even including the 47 million uninsured, the U.S. healthcare system costs almost double per capita what single-payer systems in Europe, Japan and Canada cost; in the United States, healthcare costs were $5,635 per person in 2005.

⁵ Bill Moyers Journal, July 10, 2009

The House Energy and Commerce Committee found that the major private health insurers had rescinded the policies of approximately 20,000 people in a five year period, to avoid paying out approximately $300 million in benefit claims.

⁶ ‘Familiar Players in Health Bill Lobbying Firms Are Enlisting Ex-Lawmakers, Aides’ by Dan Eggen and Kimberly Kindy, July 7, 2009, The Washington Post

The nation’s largest insurers, hospitals and medical groups have hired more than 350 former government staff members and retired members of Congress in hopes of influencing their old bosses and colleagues, according to an analysis of lobbying disclosures and other records.

…

The hirings are part of a record-breaking influence campaign by the health-care industry, which is spending more than $1.4 million a day on lobbying in the current fight, according to disclosure records. …

The push has reunited many who worked together in government on health-care reform, but are now employed as advocates for pharmaceutical and insurance companies.

⁷ ‘An Inside Story of Wall Street Bank Crashes’ The Paragraph, December 26th, 2008

⁸ ‘Capital City’ by Kevin Drum, Mother Jones, Jan.-Feb. 2010

let’s take a virtual stroll down K Street and see what everyone is spending on the world’s second-oldest profession. It’s all laid out for us by OpenSecrets.org. The defense lobby? Pikers. They contributed $24 million to individuals and PACs during the last election cycle. The farm lobby? $65 million. Health care? We’re getting warmer. Health care was the No. 2 industry, at $167 million.

And the finance lobby? They’re No. 1, with a very, very big bullet. They contributed an astonishing $475 million during the 2008 election cycle. That’s up from $60 million almost two decades ago.

⁹ ‘Don’t Reinflate the Old Bubbles’ By Steven Pearlstein, Washington Post, October 14, 2009

What we’re witnessing here is pretty simple: another bubble in financial assets. All that “liquidity” created by the Federal Reserve and other central banks has accomplished its task and prevented a global financial meltdown. But unless they move now to begin sopping up that liquidity, the central bankers run a serious risk of reinflating many of the same bubbles that got us into this mess in the first place.

…

The problem is that because we didn’t get into this recession in the normal way, the normal analysis and remedies are not appropriate. Slow growth and high unemployment are indeed going to be a big problem over the next several years, but they aren’t going to be solved by pumping out lots of cheap money that is used to speculate in stocks, bonds and commodities rather than be invested in the real economy. And if all this speculation has the effect of driving up the price of commodities and driving down the value of the dollars we use for imports, then it is perfectly possible to wind up with high inflation and high unemployment at the same time — as happened in the late 1970s.

The right policy response is for the Fed to begin withdrawing some of this extraordinary monetary stimulus even as the rest of the government steps up its effort to stimulate the real economy. That means more money for extended unemployment benefits; more aid to the states so that they can maintain the most vital public services; and more money to expand mass transit, state college and university systems, efficient energy production and basic scientific research. The economist Paul Krugman estimates that for every dollar in extra debt that will be required to finance this fiscal stimulus, about 40 cents will be repaid almost immediately in the form of tax revenues from higher short-term economic growth. And if the money is invested wisely in quality projects with high returns, the other 60 cents could wind up being a boon to future generations, rather than a burden.

¹⁰ ‘Wisconsin statutes. 1919: embracing all general statutes in force …, Volume 2, section 4479a’ edited by Lyman Junius Nash, Arthur Frederick Belitz

¹¹ ‘DEMOCRACY FOR SALE: How Ohioans Kept Corporations out of Politics; How and When They Re-entered’ — American Friends Service Committee

By Quinn Hungeski – Posted at TheParagraph.com

I hope to work with [Chairman Leahy] and other members of this committee to make further improvements as this bill goes forward. In the end, however, Democrats have to decide if they are going to stand up for the rights of the American people or allow the FBI to write our laws. For me, that’s not a difficult choice.⁸⁸

Feingold: “We’re not the Prosecutor Committee”

JUSTICE Act Senators

The senators sponsoring the JUSTICE Act are:

• Russ Feingold (D-WI)
• Daniel Akaka [D-HI]
• Jeff Bingaman [D-NM]
• Richard Durbin [D-IL]
• Robert Menendez [D-NJ]
• Jeff Merkley [D-OR]
• Bernard Sanders [I-VT]
• Jon Tester [D-MT]
• Tom Udall [D-NM]
• Ron Wyden [D-OR]

The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Sources

⁸⁰ ‘WATCH: DoJ Official Blows Cover Off PATRIOT Act’ by Ryan Grim, The Huffington Post, 2009-09-23

⁸¹ ‘Dems Block PATRIOT Act Excesses – Your cousin may breathe easier’ The Paragraph, 2005-12-23

⁸² ‘USA PATRIOT Act of 2001’ U.S. Government Printing Office Short Title: Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism

⁸³ ‘Myths and Realities About the Patriot Act’ – ACLU

The government attributes convictions it says are terrorism-related that have nothing to do with the Patriot Act. The “400 convictions” claim overstates actual number of convictions and omits a number of key facts related to these numbers. Only 39 of these individuals were convicted of crimes related to terrorism. The median sentence for these crimes was 11 months, which indicates the crime the government equated with terrorism was not serious.

⁸⁴ ‘Patriot Act – Eight Years Later’ – ACLU

National Security Letters (NSLs). The FBI uses NSLs to compel internet service providers, libraries, banks, and credit reporting companies to turn over sensitive information about their customers and patrons. Using this data, the government can compile vast dossiers about innocent people. Government reports confirm that upwards of 50,000 of these secret record demands go out each year.

⁸⁵ Sneak-and-Peek Report for 2008 – Administrative Office of the United States Courts, 2009-07-02 – pdf

⁸⁶ JUSTICE Act Overview 2009-09-17

⁸⁷ JUSTICE Act text – pdf See SEC. 201. LIMITATION ON AUTHORITY TO DELAY NOTICE OF SEARCH WARRANTS.

⁸⁸ ‘It’s Not the Prosecutors’ Committee, it’s the Judiciary Committee’ by Senator Russ Feingold, Daily Kos, 2009-10-08

By Quinn Hungeski – Posted at G.N.N. & TheParagraph.com

For a terse telling of the Flint sit-down strike story, click this link: Flint Workers Sat Down and U.S. Middle Class Rose Up.

Sources

⁶⁰ Flint Workers Sat Down and U.S. Middle Class Rose Up

⁶¹ ‘Union Membership Trends in the U.S. Private Sector’ – Political Calculations, 2006-03-20

Sources: Union Sourcebook 1947-1983; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Compiled by Labor Research Association.

⁶² ‘The American Dream died in February 1973’ Realitybase 2009-03-10

The income line since 1973 is roughly flat, but should actually be going down, because the Consumer Price Index has understated inflation since the early 1980’s. (See the next note.) — QH

Update: The Bureau of Labor Statistics answers the claims from the next note that it has understated inflation.

⁶³ ‘Consumer Price Index’ – John Williams’ Shadow Government Statistics, 2006-10-01

The CPI was designed to help businesses, individuals and the government adjust their financial planning and considerations for the impact of inflation. The CPI worked reasonably well for those purposes into the early-1980s. In recent decades, however, the reporting system increasingly succumbed to pressures from miscreant politicians, who were and are intent upon stealing income from social security recipients, without ever taking the issue of reduced entitlement payments before the public or Congress for approval.

In particular, changes made in CPI methodology during the Clinton Administration understated inflation significantly, and, through a cumulative effect with earlier changes that began in the late-Carter and early Reagan Administrations have reduced current social security payments by roughly half from where they would have been otherwise. …

…

In the early 1990s, press reports began surfacing as to how the CPI really was significantly overstating inflation. If only the CPI inflation rate could be reduced, it was argued, then entitlements, such as social security, would not increase as much each year, and that would help to bring the budget deficit under control. Behind this movement were financial luminaries Michael Boskin, then chief economist to the first Bush Administration, and Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.

…

Up until the Boskin/Greenspan agendum surfaced, the CPI was measured using the costs of a fixed basket of goods, a fairly simple and straightforward concept. The identical basket of goods would be priced at prevailing market costs for each period, and the period-to-period change in the cost of that market basket represented the rate of inflation in terms of maintaining a constant standard of living.

The Boskin/Greenspan argument was that when steak got too expensive, the consumer would substitute hamburger for the steak, and that the inflation measure should reflect the costs tied to buying hamburger versus steak, instead of steak versus steak

…

Aside from the changed weighting, the average person also tends to sense higher inflation than is reported by the BLS, because of hedonics, as in hedonism. Hedonics adjusts the prices of goods for the increased pleasure the consumer derives from them. That new washing machine you bought did not cost you 20% more than it would have cost you last year, because you got an offsetting 20% increase in the pleasure you derive from pushing its new electronic control buttons instead of turning that old noisy dial, according to the BLS.

By Quinn Hungeski – Posted at G.N.N. & TheParagraph.com

• Just before 9-11, Bush ignored warnings of a coming Osama bin Laden terror attack, but it was Reagan who, as part of his campaign against the Soviets in Afghanistan, boosted fanatical jihadists and gave bin Laden his start.⁴¹⁴²⁴³

• Bush, on his first week in office, planned for carving up the oil fields after an Iraq invasion, but it was Reagan who took the solar panels off the White House and returned the nation to its oil-guzzling ways.⁴⁴⁴⁵

• To muster support for invading Iraq, Bush published phony intelligence reports, like those claiming that Iraq was working with al-Qaeda.⁴⁶ In that he followed the lead of Reagan, who, to gain support for aid to brutal regimes in Latin America, set up “The Office of Public Diplomacy” to use CIA propaganda techniques against the American people, and who, to gain support for his military build up, edited radio transcripts to give the false picture that the Soviets willfully shot down civilian flight KAL-007.⁴⁷⁴⁸

• Bush, in his “Global War on Terror”, pursued torture of captives and dragged the nation’s honor into the muck, but he was just bringing home the policy of Reagan, who supported torture by Latin American regimes fighting leftist rebellions.⁴⁹⁵⁰

• Bush broke laws with programs such as his domestic warrantless wiretapping, just like Reagan, with programs such as the Iran-Contra caper, which secretly bypassed Congress’s ban against aiding the brutal Contra rebels against the people of Nicaragua.⁵¹⁵²

• Bush pushed corporate deregulation and slowed anti-fraud enforcement during a time of massive Wall Street fraud, which helped bring about the Bush Economic Crash — putting millions out of work and causing trillions in bank bailouts, but he was riding out the deregulation wave started by Reagan, who signed the deregulation law that brought about the huge Savings and Loan Crash in the 80’s.^53545556

• Bush fiddled for eight years while global warming climate change mindlessly marched ahead, and, like Reagan, ignored and cut enforcement of environmental standards.⁵⁷⁵⁸

Now, President Obama has just signed a law to plan remembrances for Reagan on the 100th anniversary of his birth (on Feb 6, 2011).⁵⁹ Let’s take the occasion to do more than honor Reagan with a postage stamp — let’s honor our country by teaching a factual history of his regime and its effects to our children.

Sources

⁴⁰ ‘‘Bush’ sewage plant proposal makes ballot’ – AP, July 18, 2008

A measure seeking to commemorate President Bush’s years in office by slapping his name on a San Francisco sewage plant has qualified for the November ballot.

…

“We think that it’s important to remember our leaders in the right historical context,” said McConnell, a member of the group that was formed after friends came up with the renaming idea.

“In President Bush’s case, we think that we will be cleaning up a substantial mess for the next 10 or 20 years,” he said. “The sewage treatment facility’s job is to clean up a mess, so we think it’s a fitting tribute.”

⁴¹ ‘The Bush-Bin Laden Symbiosis’ By Robert Parry, August 11, 2006

The CIA tried to warn Bush about the threat with the hope that presidential action could energize government agencies and head off the attack. On Aug. 6, 2001, the CIA sent analysts to Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, to brief him and deliver a report entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.”

Bush was not pleased by the intrusion. He glared at the CIA briefer and snapped, “All right, you’ve covered your ass,” according to Suskind’s book.

Then, ordering no special response, Bush returned to a vacation of fishing, clearing brush and working on a speech about stem-cell research.

⁴² ‘Ronald Reagan: Worst President Ever?’ By Robert Parry, June 3, 2009

[The Afghanistan] war was dramatically ramped up under Reagan, who traded U.S. acquiescence toward Pakistan’s nuclear bomb for its help in shipping sophisticated weapons to the Afghan jihadists (including a young Saudi named Osama bin Laden).

⁴³ ‘Pakistan and the ‘Global War on Terrorism’‘ by Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, January 8, 2008

In December 1984, the Sharia Law (Islamic jurisprudence) was established in Pakistan following a rigged referendum launched by President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. Barely a few months later, in March 1985, President Ronald Reagan issued National Security Decision Directive 166 (NSDD 166), which authorized “stepped-up covert military aid to the Mujahideen” as well a support to religious indoctrination.

…

“ … the United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings, part of covert attempts to spur resistance to the Soviet occupation.

“The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system’s core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books, …” (Washington Post, 23 March 2002)

⁴⁴ ‘Bush’s Belated Accountability Moment’ By Nat Parry, ConsortiumNews.com, November 12, 2006

In Ron Suskind’s The Price of Loyalty, O’Neill described the first NSC meeting at the White House only a few days into Bush’s presidency. An invasion of Iraq was already on the agenda, O’Neill said. There was even a map for a post-war occupation, marking out how Iraq’s oil fields would be carved up.

O’Neill said even at that early date, the goal of invading Iraq was clear. The message from Bush was “find a way to do this,” according to O’Neill, who was forced out of the administration in December 2002.

⁴⁵ ‘Prodigal Sun’ – Mother Jones, March 2000

The [DOE’s Solar Energy Research Institute] study, a yearlong investigation by some of the nation’s leading scientists, provided a convincing blueprint for a solar future. It showed that alternative energy could easily meet 28 percent of the nation’s power needs by 2000. The only thing that solar and wind and other nonpolluting energy sources needed was a push, the study concluded — the same research funding and tax credits provided to other energy industries, and a government committed to lead the way to reduced reliance on fossil fuels. … [Reagan’s] Energy Secretary Jim Edwards killed the study, all right, but not before it had been published in the Congressional Record.

… The budget for the solar institute — which President Jimmy Carter had created to spearhead solar innovation — was slashed from $124 million in 1980 to $59 million in 1982. Scientists who had left tenured university jobs to work under Hayes were given two weeks notice and no severance pay. The squelching of the institute — later partly re-funded and renamed the National Renewable Energy Laboratory — marked the start of Reagan’s campaign against solar power. By the end of 1985, when Congress and the administration allowed tax credits for solar homes to lapse, the dream of a solar era had faded. The solar water heater President Carter had installed on the White House roof in 1979 was dismantled and junked. Solar water heating went from a billion-dollar industry to peanuts overnight; thousands of sun-minded businesses went bankrupt. “It died. It’s dead,” says Peter Barnes, whose San Francisco solar- installation business had 35 employees at its peak. “First the money dried up, then the spirit dried up,” says Jim Benson, another solar activist of the day.

⁴⁶ ‘Pentagon Officer Created Phony Intel on Iraq/al-Qaeda Link’ By Matt Renner, t r u t h o u t, Friday 06 April 2007

Newly released documents confirm that a Pentagon unit knowingly cooked up intelligence claiming a direct link between Iraq and al-Qaeda in order to win support for a preemptive strike against the country.

A report prepared by the Defense Department’s Inspector General for Carl Levin, the Democratic Chairman of the Armed Services Committee, explicitly shows how former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith used his Defense Department position to cook intelligence claiming a connection between the terrorist organization and Saddam Hussein’s regime.

…

But according to the IG’s declassified report, “a Senior Intelligence Analyst working in the Joint Intelligence Task Force-Combating Terrorism (JITF-CT) countered point-by-point, each instance of an alleged tie between Iraq and al-Qaida …”

⁴⁷ ‘Iran-Contra’s ‘Lost Chapter’‘ – By Robert Parry, June 30, 2008

That chapter — which we are publishing here for the first time — was “lost” because Republicans on the congressional Iran-Contra investigation waged a rear-guard fight that traded elimination of the chapter’s key findings for the votes of three moderate GOP senators, giving the final report a patina of bipartisanship.

…

The American people thus were spared the chapter’s troubling finding: that the Reagan administration had built a domestic covert propaganda apparatus managed by a CIA propaganda and disinformation specialist working out of the National Security Council.

“One of the CIA’s most senior covert action operators was sent to the NSC in 1983 by CIA Director [William] Casey where he participated in the creation of an inter-agency public diplomacy mechanism that included the use of seasoned intelligence specialists,” the chapter’s conclusion stated.

“This public/private network set out to accomplish what a covert CIA operation in a foreign country might attempt — to sway the media, the Congress, and American public opinion in the direction of the Reagan administration’s policies.”

However, with the chapter’s key findings deleted, the right-wing domestic propaganda operation not only survived the Iran-Contra fallout but thrived.

⁴⁸ ‘GOP & KAL-007: ‘The Key Is to Lie First’‘ By Robert Parry

One of the baldest — and now admitted — lies was the case of Korean Air Lines flight 007. On the night of Aug. 30, 1983, the KAL 747 jumbo jet strayed hundreds of miles off-course and penetrated some of the Soviet Union’s most sensitive air space, by flying over military facilities in Kamchatka and Sakhalin Island.

Over Sakhalin, KAL-007 was finally intercepted by a Soviet Sukhoi-15 fighter. The Soviet pilot tried to signal the plane to land, but the KAL pilots apparently did not see the repeated warnings. Amid confusion about the plane’s identity — a U.S. spy plane had been in the vicinity hours earlier — Soviet ground control ordered the pilot to fire. He did, blasting the plane out of the sky and killing all 269 people on board.

The Soviets soon realized they had made a horrendous mistake. U.S. intelligence also knew from sensitive intercepts that the tragedy had resulted from a blunder, not from a willful act of murder (much as on July 3, 1988, the USS Vincennes fired a missile that brought down an Iranian civilian airliner in the Persian Gulf, killing 290 people, an act which Reagan explained as an “understandable accident”).

But in 1983, the truth about KAL-007 didn’t fit Washington’s propaganda needs. The Reagan administration wanted to portray the Soviets as wanton murderers, so it brushed aside the judgment of the intelligence analysts. The administration then chose to release only snippets of the taped intercepts packaged in a way to suggest that the slaughter was intentional.

⁴⁹ ‘Report: Torture started with Bush’ By Mark Benjamin, Salon.com

“The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive (interrogation) techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees.” That is one of the raw conclusions of a two-year Senate investigation into torture.

…

According to the report, the torture ball started rolling with the president and his Feb. 7, 2002, memorandum stating that the Geneva Conventions didn’t apply to al-Qaida or the Taliban. The CIA and the Department of Defense began scurrying to establish their brutal interrogation regimes, while the White House and top Bush administration officials brushed aside legal hurdles and approved specific, horrifying techniques.

⁵⁰ ‘Lost History: ‘Project X’ & School of Assassins’ By Robert Parry © 1996

For years, human rights activists have accused the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas of teaching torture and assassination techniques to military officers from around the Western Hemisphere. For just as long, the Pentagon has denied the charge.

Then, late on Friday afternoon, Sept. 20, the Pentagon released a report admitting that some of those concerns were well-founded. From 1982-91, the School of the Americas used seven U.S. Army intelligence training manuals, written in Spanish, which advocated executions, torture, blackmail and other forms of coercion, including the kidnapping of a target’s family members.

…

… In winning the election in 1980, President Reagan had publicly renounced President Carter’s strong emphasis on human rights.

In the months immediately after Reagan’s election, right-wing Salvadoran “death squads” went on a rampage of political slaughter, including the rape-murder of four American churchwomen. In 1981-82, the “death squads,” often consisting of plain-clothes soldiers, butchered thousands of perceived leftists with little criticism from a White House that was drawing a line against communism. In December 1981, a U.S.-trained Salvadoran battalion swept through the remote village of El Mozote and massacred about 800 men, women and children.

The Reagan administration also warmed up to the Guatemalan army as it launched extermination campaigns against suspected leftist strongholds among that country’s Indian population. Most controversial of all, the CIA began organizing the Nicaraguan contra rebel army to overthrow the leftist Sandinista government. The contras, too, gained a quick reputation for human rights atrocities during raids into northern Nicaragua.

⁵¹ ‘Spying on the Nation’ – Frontline, PBS

Although the president told the nation that his NSA eavesdropping program was limited to known Al Qaeda agents or supporters abroad making calls into the U.S., comments of other administration officials and intelligence veterans indicate that the NSA cast its net far more widely. AT&T technician Mark Klein inadvertently discovered that the whole flow of Internet traffic in several AT&T operations centers was being regularly diverted to the NSA, a charge indirectly substantiated by John Yoo, the Justice Department lawyer who wrote the official legal memos legitimizing the president’s warrantless wiretapping program. Yoo told FRONTLINE: “The government needs to have access to international communications so that it can try to find communications that are coming into the country where Al Qaeda’s trying to send messages to cell members in the country. In order to do that, it does have to have access to communication networks.

⁵² ‘Weinberger, Bushes & Iran-Contra’ By Robert Parry, March 29, 2006

In the early-to-mid 1980s, Ronald Reagan had sought to avoid a head-on clash with Congress by taking his foreign policy underground, using cutouts like Israel to ship missiles to Iran and White House aide Oliver North to funnel supplies to the contra rebels fighting in Nicaragua.

After those operations were exposed in 1986, Congress also tried to avert a constitutional showdown by papering over the illegal presidential actions and accepting the cover story that top officials, such as Reagan and Bush, were mostly out of the loop.

But those unresolved constitutional questions exploded back to the surface after Sept. 11, 2001, when George W. Bush asserted virtually unlimited presidential authority to override or ignore federal law as Commander in Chief. In effect, the younger George Bush was staking out power openly that Reagan and the elder George Bush had exercised only in secret.

⁵³ ‘Bush and Ken Lay: Slip Slidin’ Away’ By Sam Parry, February 6, 2002

Other parts of the Bush energy plan tracked closely to recommendations from Enron officials. Seventeen of the energy plan’s proposals were sought by and benefited Enron, according to Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., ranking minority member on the House Government Reform Committee. One proposal called for repeal of the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935, which limits the activities of utilities and hindered Enron’s potential for acquisitions.

⁵⁴ ‘Bush II Slowed SEC During Financial Fraud Fury’ – The Paragraph, June 18th, 2009

⁵⁵ ‘An Inside Story of Wall Street Bank Crashes’ – The Paragraph, December 26th, 2008

⁵⁶ ‘Reagan Did It’ By PAUL KRUGMAN, May 31, 2009

“This bill is the most important legislation for financial institutions in the last 50 years. It provides a long-term solution for troubled thrift institutions. … All in all, I think we hit the jackpot.” So declared Ronald Reagan in 1982, as he signed the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act.

…

The immediate effect of Garn-St. Germain, as I said, was to turn the thrifts from a problem into a catastrophe. The S.& L. crisis has been written out of the Reagan hagiography, but the fact is that deregulation in effect gave the industry — whose deposits were federally insured — a license to gamble with taxpayers’ money, at best, or simply to loot it, at worst. By the time the government closed the books on the affair, taxpayers had lost $130 billion, back when that was a lot of money.

But there was also a longer-term effect. Reagan-era legislative changes essentially ended New Deal restrictions on mortgage lending — restrictions that, in particular, limited the ability of families to buy homes without putting a significant amount of money down.

These restrictions were put in place in the 1930s by political leaders who had just experienced a terrible financial crisis, and were trying to prevent another. But by 1980 the memory of the Depression had faded. Government, declared Reagan, is the problem, not the solution; the magic of the marketplace must be set free. And so the precautionary rules were scrapped.

⁵⁷ ‘The four global warming impact studies Bush tried to bury in his final days’ by Joseph Romm, Grist, 21 Jan 2009

… For eight years [the Bush administration] have avoided their statutory obligation to detail the impacts of climate change on this country. And they have systematically muzzled government climate scientists from discussing those impacts with the public or the media.

It was easier to find people in the Bush administration to talk about torture or warrantless wiretaps, than it was to get someone to speak on (or off) the record on the likely impact of Bush’s policy of unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions on Americans.

On Friday January 16, the U.S. Climate Change Science Program actually released four major Synthesis and Assessment reports. You may remember the last report the CCSP released — U.S. Geological Survey stunner: Sea-level rise in 2100 will likely “substantially exceed” IPCC projections, SW faces “permanent drying” by 2050. I was told by scientists knowledgeable about the CCSP process that all of the major impact reports were slowed down in the review process to make sure they came out after the election.

…

These are all substantive and comprehensive studies, almost on a par with the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment.

⁵⁸ ‘A look back at Reagan’s environmental record’ Grist, 10 Jun 2004

“The Reagan administration adopted an extraordinarily aggressive policy of issuing leases for oil, gas, and coal development on tens of millions of acres of national lands — more than any other administration in history, including the current one [Bush II],” said the Wilderness Society’s David Alberswerth.

Before delving further into Reagan’s track record, it’s worth recalling his infamous public statement that “trees cause more pollution than automobiles do,” and that if “you’ve seen one tree you’ve seen them all.” This is not, in other words, a president who demonstrated much ecological prowess.

…

The list of rollbacks attempted by these administrators is as sweeping as those of the current [Bush II] administration. Gorsuch tried to gut the Clean Air Act with proposals to weaken pollution standards “on everything from automobiles to furniture manufacturers — efforts which took Congress two years to defeat,” according to Clapp. Moves to weaken the Clean Water Act were equally aggressive, crescendoing in 1987 when Reagan vetoed a strong reauthorization of the act only to have his veto overwhelmingly overridden by Congress. Assaults on Superfund were so hideous that Rita Lavelle, director of the program, was thrown in jail for lying to Congress under oath about corruption in her agency division.

The gutting of funds for environmental protection was another part of Reagan’s legacy. “EPA budget cuts during Reagan’s first term were worse than they are today,” said Frank O’Donnell, director of Clean Air Trust, who reported on environmental policy for The Washington Monthly during the Reagan era. “The administration tried to cut EPA funding by more than 25 percent in its first budget proposal,” he said. And massive cuts to Carter-era renewable-energy programs “set solar back a decade,” said Clapp.

Topping it all off were efforts to slash the EPA enforcement program: “The enforcement slowdown was staggering,” said a staffer at the House Energy and Commerce Committee who helped investigate the Reagan administration’s enforcement of environmental laws during the early ’80s. “In the first year of the Reagan administration, there was a 79 percent decline in the number of enforcement cases filed from regional offices to EPA headquarters, and a 69 percent decline in the number of cases filed from the EPA to the Department of Justice.”

⁵⁹ ‘Obama designates day for Reagan’ By Michael Collins June 2, 2009

… [Nancy Reagan] stood with her hand on Obama’s shoulder as he signed the Ronald Reagan Centennial Commission Act into law.

The bill will create an 11-member panel that will recommend and carry out plans to celebrate Reagan’s 100th birthday, such as special stamps or commemorative coins. No federal money can be spent on the commission or its activities.

Sewage pipe image found HERE.

By Quinn Hungeski – Posted at G.N.N. & TheParagraph.com

Cartoon Credit: John Jonik

See Also

‘Public v. Corps in National Health Care Debate’ The Paragraph, 2009-05-17

‘John Kerry Swats Insurance Company Bargaining Chip’ The Paragraph, 2009-05-23

‘119 Million Americans Must Be Wrong’ By Robert Parry, Consortiumnews.com, June 5, 2009

Sources

³⁰ ‘Weiner Amendment Vote Moved to Wednesday’ – PDA, 2009-07-21

The silence in the House of Representatives around single-payer healthcare and H.R. 676 will end this Wednesday. Rep. Anthony Weiner, (D-NY09) … will move to amend the current bill. His proposal is essentially to replace H.R. 3200 with H.R. 676—single payer Medicare for All.

³¹ H.R. 3200 – ‘America’s Affordable Health Choices Act’ Summary, 2007-07-15 – pdf

³² ‘Canadian Straw Man’ Factcheck.org, July 17, 2009

³³ CBO Report to House Ways and Means Committee, 2009-07-14 – pdf

By Quinn Hungeski – Posted at G.N.N. & TheParagraph.com

Sources

Cartoon credit: ‘U.S. Senate of Trusts’ by Joseph Keppler of British Puck magazine circa 1880.

Top caption says: “This is a Senate, of the Monopolists, by the Monopolists, for the Monopolists.”

¹⁰ ‘Public v. Corps in National Health Care Debate’ – The Paragraph, May 17th, 2009

¹¹ ‘Health insurers offer to stop charging women more’ by Erica Werner, et al., Associated Press, 2009-05-06

¹² ‘Health Insurers’ Strategy Divide and Conquer?’ by ramara, Daily Kos, Thu May 07, 2009

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) on Tuesday introduced legislation (S. 969) that would prohibit insurers from considering gender when setting premium rates. Kerry said the premium disparity is “just plain wrong, and it has to change.” … (New York Times, 5/6).

¹³ S.969 – govtrack.us

Title: A bill to amend the Public Health Service Act to ensure fairness in the coverage of women in the individual health insurance market. Sponsor: Sen John Kerry [MA]. Introduced 5/5/2009. Cosponsors: Sen Debbie Stabenow [MI]. Referred to Committee.

By Quinn Hungeski – Posted at G.N.N. & TheParagraph.com

As the U.S. Congress works on a national health care bill, people have lined-up behind three main proposals. The one most favored by citizens and doctors — and many Democratic lawmakers — is the single-payer system, which would improve and extend Medicare to all persons.x¹ With this system everyone chooses one’s own doctors, and no one has to shop for health insurance. This type of system has been proven to work well in many other developed countries.x² But both Congressional committees working on the national health care bill have taken single-payer off the table, saying that moving to it from today’s huge for-profit insurance system would be “disruptive”.x³ The second proposal, favored by much of the national Democratic leadership, is the public option, where a person would pick one from a menu of several insurance company plans and a non-profit government insurance plan.x⁵ Like single-payer, the public option would be free of the huge costs in marketing, executive pay and profits of insurance company plans. But, to keep the public option viable, lawmakers would have to tool the system to guard against insurance companies cherry-picking the healthiest persons. To get the public option passed, proponents might have to deal with renegade Democrats sympathetic to insurance company gripes of not being able to compete.x⁶ The third proposal, favored by insurance companies, and those Republican lawmakers who favor any proposal at all, keeps an all-private insurance system, which would have some new regulation while requiring all persons to buy insurance.x⁷ This type of system was adopted three years ago in Massachusetts, but has failed to control costs and provide health care to all.x⁸ Still, the millions of dollars the insurance business has put into lobbying and lawmakers’ campaign chests might sway Congress to choose this system.x⁹ So, while it appears that corporate pull has yanked single-payer off the table, it remains to be seen if the people have enough pull in Congress to at least get a viable public option.

Sources

Cartoon credit: ‘Count Bleed-Ya-Dry’ by Bill Jarcho via The Backbone Campaign

¹ ‘AMERICAN PUBLIC OPINION: TODAY VS. 30 YEARS AGO – January 11-15, 2009’ CBS NEWS/NEW YORK TIMES POLL – pdf

Americans are more likely today to embrace the idea of the government providing health insurance than they were 30 years ago. 59% say the government should provide national health insurance, including 49% who say such insurance should cover all medical problems.

Poll by Annals of Internal Medicine, 1 April 2008 – pdf

More than one half of the respondents from every medical specialty supported national health insurance legislation, with the exception of respondents in surgical subspecialties, anesthesiologists, and radiologists. Current overall support (59%) increased by 10 percentage points since 2002 (49%). Support increased in every subspecialty since 2002, with the exception of pediatric subspecialists, who were highly supportive in both surveys.

H.R.676 cosponsers

Title: To provide for comprehensive health insurance coverage for all United States residents, improved health care delivery, and for other purposes. (This is the single-payer bill in the House; it has 75 cosponsers.)

² ‘Rep. McDermott: The Medical-Industrial Complex in this Country is Bigger than the Military-Industrial Complex’ – Democracy Now! 2009-04-01

REP. JIM McDERMOTT: Basically, a single-payer system, which is what every industrialized country in the world, except the United States, has adopted, is a system in which you guarantee a set of benefits for every citizen of the country. No matter how much money, where they live, what color they are, what ethnicity they are, whatever, everybody is entitled to the same generous benefit package. And that’s true in France, and it’s true in Germany, and it’s true all over the place. The French, for half the money that we spend, are getting, by the World Health Organization, the best healthcare in the world.

Now, the second thing that you have to have besides a generous benefit package is a single-payer system. And you can put the money together through the government, or there are a lot of different ways it’s done in all the countries of the world, but when a patient goes into a hospital in Canada, they hand a card in for the national plan, and that’s the end of it. And you are not threatened with bankruptcy in Canada, Britain, Germany, France, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Japan, Italy, Spain. None of these countries can a citizen be bankrupted by their illness. But it is the leading cause of bankruptcy in the United States, because we have put the emphasis on individuals doing it.

³ ‘Doctors Arrested at Senate Roundtable on Healthcare’ – Institute for Public Accuracy, 2009-05-05

Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), chair of the Senate Finance Committee, has stated on multiple occasions that single payer is “off the table” of health reform.

‘Pelosi Pushes For Truth Commission’ – Hotline On Call, 2009-04-22

As our members came back from their recess, a great deal of what they heard out there was public options, public options, public options, public options. In our caucus, over and over again, we hear single payer, single payer, single payer. Well, it’s not going to be a single payer. … We had an opportunity for that awhile back, and it was not realized. And that’s not what it’s going to be. So we had to take people from a place that they see universal, affordable, quality health care available best in single payer and say this can be achieved in other ways.”

‘Proposal would require all to have health coverage’ By RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR and ERICA WERNER, Associated Press, 2009-05-14

The summary of the House proposal says one of its main goals is to “minimize disruption” for people who already have coverage by allowing them to keep their coverage. All Americans would be protected by an annual limit on out-of-pocket costs, a safeguard already in the best private plans.

⁵ ‘HEALTHY COMPETITION: How to Structure Public Health Insurance Plan Choice to Ensure Risk-Sharing, Cost Control, and Quality Improvement’ By Jacob S. Hacker, Ph.D., UC Berkeley Department of Political Science and UC Berkeley School of Law, April 2009 – pdf

⁶ ‘Ben Nelson Plans To Oppose Public Health Plan’ by Ryan Grim, The Huffington Post, 2009-05-02

Nelson’s problem, he told CQ, is that the public plan would be too attractive and would hurt the private insurance plans. “At the end of the day, the public plan wins the game,” Nelson said. Including a public option in a health plan, he said, was a “deal breaker.”

…

As he so often does, Nelson said, according to CQ, that he planned to form a “coalition of like-minded centrists opposed to the creation of a public plan, as a counterweight to Democrats pushing for it.”

⁷ ‘Republicans Dithering on Health Care’ By Philip Klein, The American Spectator, 5.13.09

The major fault line that is emerging between Republicans and Democrats is over the creation of a new government-run plan modeled after Medicare that would be offered alongside private insurance plans on a government-run and regulated national insurance exchange. …

…

[Republican Senators] Enzi, along with Grassley and Hatch, have all come out strongly opposed to a government-run plan, meaning that if Democrats go ahead with it, bipartisan reform will fall by the wayside.

⁸ ‘Massachusetts’ Plan: A Failed Model for Health Care Reform’ by Dr. Rachel Nardin with Drs. David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler, all of Harvard Medical School, February 18, 2009

⁹ ‘Health Sector Has Donated Millions to Lawmakers’ By Dan Eggen, The Washington Post, Sunday, March 8, 2009; Page A09

Health insurers and drug makers have showered members of the 111th Congress with millions in campaign contributions over the last four years, with a special focus on leaders who will play major roles in shaping health-care legislation, according to a study to be released tomorrow.

Health insurers and their employees contributed $2.2 million to the top 10 recipients in the House and Senate since 2005, while drug makers and their employees gave more than $3.3 million to top lawmakers during that period, according to an analysis of federal elections data by Consumer Watchdog, a California-based advocacy group.

By Quinn Hungeski – Posted at G.N.N. & TheParagraph.com