The Largest Minority

October 28th, 2009 by D.C.

As most of you probably know you should get the H1N1 vaccination. And as most of your probably know you shouldn’t get the H1N1 vaccination. Kind of confusing isn’t it? At least I think so. While I think doctors and healthcare professionals can provide us with useful information on what a person should do, I say this as a generalization. I point this out because I have come across an “Opinion” in the Globe and Mail written by Juliet Guichon and Ian Mitchell. Guichon has a L.L.D., and works in the Office of Medical Bioethics at the University of Calgary (UofC). Mitchell on the other hand is a professor of pediatrics and bioethics at UofC.

These two professionals present an article that is pure opinion.In their article I find three things quite disturbing:

1) When I first read the article I did not like the idea of fear-mongering people into getting the H1N1 vaccination.They state, and I quote:

Mass H1N1 vaccination refusal similarly might destroy (at least temporarily) our health-care system, with the threatened 100,000 people in hospital.

Might destroy our healthcare system! Really? Well, although I agree that H1N1 is very serious and it is important to be informed, people should be free to make their own decisions. Like many people have argued, the seasonal flu kills many people each year, but the popular media has chosen to focus on the H1N1 related deaths to the point that this all that gets reported. We don’t get to hear about the hundreds of people that die from other strains of the flu because media has become saturated with H1N1.

2) The second point I find distressing is their comparison to the cod stocks crisis that closed the fishery on the Atlantic coast in the early 1990s. While the article insinuates that Atlantic fishermen were unable to recognize that their overfishing was destroying codstocks, this is simply not the case. Fishermen in Newfoundland for instance, were cognizant of the environmental effects of the fishery as early as the 1900s. Fishing off the coasts had been going on for hundreds of years, so it is not as ’spur of the moment’ as Guichon and Mitchell make it seem. What were fishermen to do? Were they to lay down their livelihoods overnight and give up fishing? It is not an easy thing to answer. It may have helped the codstocks, but then again it might not have. Even today, with the fishery being regulated the codstocks aren’t back up to normal. So on this comparison, I give them a big thumbs down. People face just as hard a decision over whether to get the vaccine or not as the fishermen did in the 1990s.

3) My last point is to argue against one of their last statements:Moreover, lay people can be confused by publicly available scientific information because they don’t understand the scientific method or conversations scientists have among themselvesOh, I’m sorry I guess just because I’m not a doctor I will be easily confused by jargon and acronyms. I have found that the general public, when given the right circumstances to understand something are not as “lay” or dumb as some people like to think they are. If you break the largest, most complicated problem down, it becomes composed of commonsense problems. Give people enough time and energy and they can produce a commonsense answer to a problem (this is in general I might add, there are always extreme cases). We, as non-medically educated people may not be scientists, but I am pretty sure they are using a language of some sort which people have experience with. They may not initially be able to comprehend complex concepts, but they can discern what is important and what is not. ALSO, if Guichon and Mitchell believe the “lay people” to be so misinformed it might have been very helpful for them to actually address some of those issues more explicitly, rather than labeling people that do not get vaccinated as destroyers of healthcare.

People are able to make their own informed opinions, and they should not be guilted into something by either the mass media, government or professionals that present a one-sided opinion. H1N1 may be quite serious, but it still does not change ones individual rights to choose the best course of action for themselves.

September 25th, 2009 by Manila Ryce

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Stephen Colbert has giant brass balls. Can we all agree that by now the Right has left no doubt to anyone that they are unabashedly racist?

I sympathize with people whose legitimate criticisms of President Obama are derided as racist, just as my criticisms of Israel have been derided as anti-Semitic. Still, it is important to draw a distinction between opposition from the Left and opposition from the Right. The arguments coming from the Right are simply not legitimate. They’re more like temper tantrums from angry and irrational children.

For example, calling Obama a Socialist (as if that’s a bad thing) is more than just hilariously inaccurate. It’s seeded in the deep fear that black people steal from hard-working white Americans. The president has done nothing to indicate he’s anything more than a corporate capitalist, yet the Right immediately links a black man to Socialism because they think both are synonymous with theft. That is the base of their “criticism”, and it really ought to be called out for what it is.

h/t RaceWire

September 10th, 2009 by Allison Kilkenny

During his speech before a joint session of Congress, President Obama called for the creation of insurance exchanges, a system designed to allow consumers to see varying prices and programs so they can comparison shop. Obama only mentioned the P-word once, and even then the public option name drop was immediately followed by the caveats “We should remain open to other ideas that accomplish our ultimate goal,” and the public option is only a “means to an end.” Read: It’s a nice idea, but drop it.

Elsewhere, Obama recycled the usual reasons for why single-payer healthcare, the Progressives’ other favored solution, just isn’t possible right now (at the mere mention of single-payer sporadic cheers broke out in the audience.) “I believe it makes more sense to build on what works and fix what doesn’t, rather than try to build an entirely new system from scratch,” said the president. This dismisses Marcia Angell’s idea of a gradual expansion of Medicare, a slow transition that wouldn’t have violently jolted our beloved system of privatized healthcare.

But nevermind. Back to the insurance exchange idea. Obama means citizens will be required by law to purchase their coverage from private insurers. Similarly, Max Baucus’s disastrous recent proposal calls for mandates that will literally force individuals and families to purchase insurance from the enemy — and one of the great culprits of the entire reform debate — Big Insurers. Without a serious public option (and not the “I’m humoring them, have they shut up yet?” approach Obama seems to be suggesting,) the insurance industry has a captive market, the American people, who will be held hostage in a for-profit health insurance scheme.

Read the rest of this entry »

August 31st, 2009 by Guest

It’s time to get angry about the fact that an opportunity for health care reform is slipping through our grasp, writes Nancy Welch.

THE MORNING after the November election, I visited my father in a Cleveland rehab hospital. Weak from surgery to reinforce his disintegrating spine, he was nevertheless grinning as I walked in. “We’re going to get national health care,” he said.

My father was not a radical, not even a lifelong liberal. But having suffered through a layoff in the mid-1970s, he later watched with helpless frustration as his children struggled with multiple layoffs, a home foreclosure, loss of health insurance and mounting debt.

What I should say, then, is that my father was not born a radical, but if supporting a national health program is a radical position, he–like millions of others–had become one by the time he died, 101 days into Obama’s presidency.

My father didn’t live to see the resurrection of the lunatic far right, nor the sad confusion–”Keep government out of my Medicare!”–that results when we debate health care just once every 20 years, and without any mobilization to counter the misinformation that the intractable opponents of reform are bound to spread.

My father would also never learn that well before the corporate deployment of angry mobs to derail the August town hall meetings, President Obama had promised the pharmaceutical industry not to seek lower drug prices for “public option” beneficiaries nor allow the re-importation of cheaper drugs from Canada. If he had lived, my father might have concluded that Obama, like the Clintons in 1992, had been routed by an industry lobby whose power is too great, an American “your-health-your-problem” individualism too deeply entrenched.

But before any of us exchange “Yes, we can” for “No, we can’t,” consider:

– With rising unemployment swelling the ranks of the uninsured toward 50 million, with medical costs the leading cause of personal bankruptcy even for people with insurance, and with thousands lining up in a single day in one Los Angeles suburb for the free care offered at a M.A.S.H.-style clinic, the desperate need is plain.

– With all credible studies demonstrating that public insurance provides better care to more people at less cost than our government is already spending on health care, and with Medicare’s 44-year track record, an affordable–and popular–solution to this crisis is at hand.

– With clear Democratic majorities in the House and Senate and a national economic meltdown that forced even Alan Greenspan to admit his free-market faith was mistaken, Obama should have been well poised to advocate not merely for limited reform of private insurance accompanied by a public option, but for a government-administered, taxpayer-funded national health insurance program–single-payer or “Medicare for All.”

– With 556 union organizations in 49 states endorsing Congress’s Medicare for All bill (introduced by John Conyers in the House and Bernie Sanders in the Senate), joined with the grassroots army of Obama volunteers whose aspirations for change soared beyond getting their candidate elected, the means to launch a mass popular campaign for single-payer was–and still is–at hand.

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IF 2009 seems like déja vu, it’s because Obama took a page from the Clintons’ sorry playbook. Like Hillary Clinton, who in 1992 told Physicians for a National Health Program’s David Himmelstein that she had no interest in polls showing 70 percent of Americans favoring national health insurance, Obama and the congressional Democrats barred single-payer from consideration, going so far as to arrest 13 doctors and nurses in May who sought a place for single-payer at the Senate’s “public roundtables.”

Like Bill Clinton, who struck a deal with the “Jackson Hole” insurance-industry insiders not six weeks into his presidency, Obama asked corporate insurers to help Congress draft the various bills.

Yet even a bill that would expand the private insurance market by requiring people to purchase high-deductible policies and that would hand corporate insurers public dollars to peddle skimpy polices to the young and poor doesn’t satisfy industry lobbyists and the “Blue Dog” Democrats tucked in their pockets.

Meanwhile, in the vacuum created by Democratic Party leaders when they shut out single-payer advocates lest they frighten the big business “stakeholders,” the Republican far right has staged a comeback.

Where we should have seen thousands demonstrating for the services urgently needed in an economic crisis, we have hundreds holding signs that aren’t only ridiculous, but vilely racist and, especially when accompanied by firearms, frightening. My father was shaken by the rabble who turned out for Klan-like Palin rallies across Ohio last summer. He would have been stunned to witness their return from November’s defeat.

I suspect, however, that my father would also have been–like his favorite commentators–righteously angry. Consider Rachel Maddow castigating Obama for his “collapse of political ambition,” and Bill Maher calling for a progressive party to “represent the millions of Americans who aren’t being served by the Democrats.” What a welcome change from 1992 when most commentators blamed a supposedly government-phobic American public for the demise of a national health plan Clinton never sought.

Maher’s call for a party of the people is reminiscent of the mid-1930s, when burgeoning support for a labor party spurred a reluctant Roosevelt into delivering much of the New Deal. Even more welcome are signs of stirring among activists on the ground, from the boycott against Whole Foods, whose CEO opined against health care reform in the Wall Street Journal, to Vermont’s Health Care Is a Human Right campaign, whose carpools carried hundreds–many carrying “Single-Payer Now!” signs–to August’s town-hall meetings.

An Oregon group called “Mad as Hell Doctors” plans a September cross-country caravan to demand “Health Care for People–Not Profit!” Imagine them joined by “Mad as Hell Nurses,” by “Mad as Hell Patients”–and also by “Mad as Hell Women” demanding, with “Medicare for All,” the repeal of the Hyde Amendment so we finally have full reproductive health care rights.

My father may not have been a radical, but he understood radical action might be needed for winning health care, reversing the Bush tax cuts, stopping the wars. In November, he said, “See what he does. Then you can say, ‘To the barricades.’” I think he’d agree: The time is now.

h/t Socialist Worker via Vermont Woman

August 27th, 2009 by Manila Ryce

We know that single payer works, and is the only option that ever has. Way back in 1948 the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which declares that health care is a human right. Profit can not play any role in deciding who is afforded that right. So why are hardly any Democratic representatives or their constituents pushing for a single payer system?

Any American liberal that accepts anything less than a single payer system is not a true liberal, period. Poor people are dying because liberals of privilege continue to capitulate to big money. The real problem with America is not its crazy Right, but its cowardly Left which never achieves anything truly progressive for the masses. They are complicit in the continued violation of the human right to health in the United States.

August 6th, 2009 by Manila Ryce

Rachel Maddow does a terrific service here, exposing the corporate players and PR firms behind this so-called “grassroots” movement against health care reform. Nothing gets old white people riled up to defend their way of life (aka privledge) like the words “socialism”, “liberty”, and of course “founding fathers”. Astroturf campaigns were perfected overseas decades ago as a way for corporate America to justify the overthrow of democratically-elected governments who threatened their rule.

My one addition to Maddow’s commentary is the same for any commentary which points the finger squarely at Republicans. BOTH parties are preventing meaningful health care reform through PR and manipulation, both work for the benefit of drug and insurance companies, and both claim their pro-corporate plan is what average Americans are screaming for. One case in point is Obama’s reliance on the pharmaceutical industry to shape a plan he claims average Americans want.

While this particular PR campaign against health care reform is directed towards Republicans, PR firms often target both parties. One PR firm working for the “clean coal” industry actually seemed surprised that they found no political resistance to their agenda by either candidate during the presidential election.

Back to health care. What polls have shown for years is that Americans want a single-payer system. Democrats and Republicans are two wings of the Business Party who share the common goal of violating the most basic of human rights for the benefit of big business. By taking sides with either party in this faux debate we’re once again fighting against our own interests.

July 26th, 2009 by Guest

Here’s a truism: The wealthiest 1 percent have never had it so good.

According to government figures, 1-percenters’ share of America’s total income is the highest it’s been since 1929, and their tax rates are the lowest they’ve faced in two decades. Through bonuses, many 1-percenters will profit from the $23 trillion in bailout largesse the Treasury Department now says could be headed to financial firms. And, most of them benefit from IRS decisions to reduce millionaire audits and collect zero taxes from the majority of major corporations.

But what really makes the ultra-wealthy so fortunate, what truly separates this moment from a run-of-the-mill Gilded Age, is the unprecedented protection the 1-percenters have bought for themselves on the most pressing issues.

To review: With 22,000 Americans dying each year because they lack health insurance, Congress is considering universal health care legislation financed by a surcharge on income above $280,000 — that is, a levy almost exclusively on 1-percenters. This surtax would graze just 5 percent of small businesses and would recoup only part of the $700 billion the 1-percenters received from the Bush tax cuts. In fact, it is so miniscule, those making $1 million annually would pay just $9,000 more in taxes every year — or nine-tenths of 1 percent of their 12-month haul.

Nonetheless, the 1-percenters have deployed an army to destroy the initiative before it makes progress.

The foot soldiers are the Land Rover Liberals. These Democratic lawmakers secure their lefty labels by wearing pink-ribbon lapel pins and supporting good causes like abortion rights. However, being affluent and/or from affluent districts, they routinely drive their luxury cars over middle-class economic interests. Hence, this week’s letter from Boulder, Colorado’s dot-com tycoon Rep. Jared Polis, D, and other Land Rover Liberals calling for the surtax’s death.

Echoing that demand are the Corrupt Cowboys — those like Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mt., who come from the heartland’s culturally conservative and economically impoverished locales. These cavalrymen in both parties quietly build insurmountable campaign war chests as the biggest corporate fundraisers in Congress. At the same time, they publicly preen as jes’ folks, make twangy references to “voters back home,” and now promise to kill the health care surtax because they say that’s what their communities want. Cash payoffs made, re-elections purchased, the absurd story somehow goes that because blue-collar constituents in Flyover America like guns and love Jesus, they must also reflexively adore politicians who defend 1-percenters’ bounty.

read the rest at AlterNet…

July 11th, 2009 by Manila Ryce

Anyone still believing in the virtues of capitalism must have a blind eye towards the environmental devastation and human rights violations occurring in the Third World. With the unchecked power of business, health and prosperity are no longer inalienable rights, but commodities only the bourgeoisie can afford.

In 1993, a class action lawsuit was filed against Chevron in New York on behalf of roughly 30,000 indigenous Amazon residents for polluting their environment. The oil giant succeeded in having US courts send the case to be heard in Ecuador, where it has been re-filed.

In the event that Chevron should lose the case, it has filled a claim with the American Arbitration Association to have Petroecuador, a state-owned Ecuadorian oil company, take on any clean up costs and legal fees. The Ecuadorian Government has been successful in temporarily suspending those arbitration proceedings with New York’s Supreme Court.