Daily Topics - Friday - March 12th 2010
By Louise
Quote: The labor movement means just this: It is the last noble protest of the American people against the power of incorporated wealth -- Wendell Phillips
Hour One - "Brunch With Bernie" Sen. Bernie Sanders
Hour Two - President, AFL-CIO, Richard Trumka www.aflcio.org Topic: Jobs, Whirlpool jobs going to Mexico, healthcare, Employee Free Choice
Upcoming Events with Thom Hartmann:
Friday, March 19th, 6-8pm Demos and the New York Law School Chapter of the American Constitution Society present an evening with Thom Hartmann - "When Corporations Became People." Thom will also talk about his updated book "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights"...event is at New York Law School Auditorium, 185 W Broadway, New York, NY...free tickets at www.demos.org (and click on events)
Comments
#2
#3
Hey Zero G and charles, I left some last minute answers for you on yesterdays chat page, can you check it out?
#4
@Nels- these do seem to be a little too interesting for me sometimes!
#5
@Zero G my computer got a worm and I missed the chat room. I agree the US press is vilifying Chavez. I still think he' s no hero. Maybe he used to be, but power has gotten to him. However, haven't yet had time to read your last lengthy missive on the subject.
#6
moonbat666,
One of my favorite movie scenes:
The last scene from the original "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" includes a discussion of economics by survivors of the "B-Ark" --- a spaceship containing the "useless" part of the population expelled from the planet Golgafrincham which populated the planet Earth. It ends with the song "What a Wonderful World."
#7
@Nels... I believe that it’s the right of every citizen to be able to vote their conscience and get some representation. As a Progressive I can vote FOREVER and never be represented. So I believe IRV is useful in some situations such as presidential races. Needless to say that would have to go along with the abolition of the EC.
I am also in favor of party-based proportional representation. I think we should turn the Senate into a national body where if the Greens or Libertarians each get 10% of the national vote, they'd each get 10% of the seats. I also believe in local representation and to avoid the single-member-district problem where 49.9% of the votes don’t count, I think we should move to multi-member districts. In such elections a ranking system might be preferable.
#8
This whole health care reform is a complete sham, everyone form Ed Schultz to the ridiculous Dems are falling for this corporatist bullshit called reform:
Death to Obamacare!: Kill Bill
By DAVE LINDORFF
When Obama came to my neighborhood this week to press for public support for his health “reform” bill, he wasn’t just greeted by teaparty hecklers. Speaking to a large group of mostly supportive students and local residents at Arcadia University in Glenside, the president at one point mentioned that “people on the left” want “single-payer.” But before he could add that that approach wasn’t going to happen, he found himself drowned out by cheers calling for Medicare for all and single-payer.
That kind of says it all.
I’m with Marcia Angell, editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. The Obama plan for health care “reform”, as well as the two versions passed by the House and the Senate, are all devious disasters that do nothing to solve the nation’s burgeoning health care crisis, and in fact, will make it worse.
The only thing to do at this point is to take the whole stinking pile of paper and put it in the compost heap. Kill it.
This whole effort was never about reform from the day last March when the new president called on Congress to begin deliberations on health care reform. It was about catering to the wishes of the big players in the Medical Industrial Complex--the big pharmaceutical multinationals, the hospital companies, the physicians and, most of all, the insurance industry. People and their health care needs had little or nothing to do with this.
That’s why we’ve ended up with proposals that would do nothing to control costs, that would force health young people to buy unregulated, high-cost and high-profit plans that would be money in the bank for the insurance industry, and that would finance any subsidies for the poor by cutting back on benefits for the only group of Americans who currently have a form of single-payer insurance--the elderly with their Medicare.
President Obama began this whole obscene nightmare with a lie, when he said that even though single-payer systems clearly work to open access to all and keep costs down while providing better overall health results in places like Canada and some European countries, they cannot be applied in America “because that would mean starting over from scratch.” He knew when he said it that this was a lie. America already has a well-run and successful single-payer healthcare program in place that is bigger than the entire Canadian health care system, and that’s Medicare, which was established in 1965, and which currently finances the care of 45 million Americans. You just have to be 65 or disabled to be eligible for it.
As Dr. Angell pointed out on a recent Bill Moyers Journal segment, the simplest way to solve America’s health care crisis would be to just start a gradual expansion of Medicare, say by lowering the age of coverage to 55, and then 45, and then 35, until everyone was covered and the insurance industry was pushed out of the health sector. The right-wing couldn’t use their scare tactics about a “government takeover of your medical care,” because the elderly love Medicare, and besides, far from “inserting a government bureaucrat between you and your doctor,” Medicare gives the elderly a freer choice of physician and treatment than any but the most gold-plated private insurance executive health care plan.
Obama continued this lie when he claimed, in his last mention of the issue during his State of the Union address to Congress, that he and Congress had considered every idea. In fact, he and Congress have for the last year, carefully prevented any consideration of the idea of single-payer, or of expanding Medicare to cover every American. Bills that would do that, authored by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) in the House and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in the Senate, were in fact blocked from hearings or votes in both Houses by Democratic leaders, at the White House’s urging, while the White House itself barred single-payer advocates from any of its discussions.
Instead the president met behind closed doors with the lobbyists of the various health care industries, to cut deals with each sector in order to gain their support for his “reform” plan. It was as if the Department of Justice had called meetings with the various crime families of the Cosa Nostra in order to cut deals before developing a plan to “tackle” the Mafia.
The plan being proposed to “reform” health care--actually they long ago stopped calling it health care reform, acknowledging that this was never even contemplated, and started instead referring to what it being contemplated as health insurance reform--is, we are told, going to cost about $100 billion a year. That wouldn’t be bad if what we got in return was universal health care, but we don’t even get that. Instead we have a measure that will reduce access to health care for the middle class by taxing benefits and encouraging higher deductibles, that will force the poor, the young and the self-employed to buy terrible, over-priced plans offering minimal coverage, that will chip away at the coverage provided to the elderly, and that will ultimately lead to higher costs for everyone, and that will still leave nearly 20 million people with no coverage. The US currently devotes 17.5 percent of Gross Domestic Product to health care, and if this “reform” in any of its guises is passed, that share of the economy devoted to health care will quickly rise past 20 percent, with no end in sight.
This is madness. Expanding Medicare to cover everyone, as I have written earlier, would actually save everyone money immediately, and the country as a whole. Consider that the most expensive consumers of health care--the elderly--are already in the system. Adding younger, healthier people to Medicare would cost incrementally much less. That’s why the Canadians spend about 9 percent of their GDP on healthcare, while covering every Canadian, while we spend nearly twice as much and leave 47 million of our citizens uninsured and unable to visit a doctor. How could it be cheaper to add everyone to Medicare? Expanding Medicare to cover everyone would probably cost somewhere between $800 billion and $1 trillion a year. That sounds like a lot of money, until you consider that we already spend $100 billion a year to care for veterans through the Veterans Administration, and $400 billion a year to care for the poor through Medicaid. We also spend $300 billion a year subsidizing hospitals that have to provide “free” charity care to the poor who don’t qualify for Medicaid, too. Since all those people would be covered by Medicare under Medicare-for-All, that’s $800 billion a year in current expenditures saved right there.
So even if my higher figure of $1 trillion for adding everyone to Medicare were correct, we’d only be talking about an extra $200 billion annual expense. And that could be covered by increasing the Medicare tax paid as a payroll deduction. You don’t want to pay more taxes? Well wait. If you were covered by Medicare, you and your employer would no longer have to pay for private insurance, which would mean a savings to workers of thousands of dollars a year, and even more to employers who currently pay the majority of health insurance premiums for employees. The net savings would be enormous.
Nobody has talked about this.
Universal Medicare would make American companies more competitive in the global marketplace, where other companies are not responsible for health care costs of their workers. It would make Americans wealthier, because they would no longer be paying for health care out of their own pockets. It would make everyone more secure, because they would no longer have to fear losing access to health care if they lost their job, and would eliminate most bankrupties, which are reportedly caused by medical bills.
So we know what needs to be done.
And we know that the current “reforms” on offer don’t do it.
So Dr. Angell is right. Obamacare needs to die.
There is reason to hope that it will die. Republicans oppose it, though not for any decent reason. They want unregulated private insurance and unlimited profits for health care industries. Ditto some conservative Democrats, who are also anti-government ideologues whose wallets are stuffed with health industry swag. But their reasons for oppposing health bill don’t matter. All that is needed is for a few progressive members of the House and Senate to admit that the health bills being considered are not reform, but the antithesis of reform, and to also vote against it, and Obamacare will be dead.
At that point we can start seriously demanding that the Congress and the President act to bring us real health reform in the way that really works: expanding Medicare to cover everyone.
Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback). He can be reached at dlindorff@mindspring.com
#9
What's still hard for me to fathom is why so many Americans seem to be opposed to their own best interest, i.e., reform of health care insurance and runaway costs, including single-payer or at least a "public option". I propose we do this: contact our representatives forcefully and frequently in support of real reform; write letters to the editor; call in to talk shows; chat up our friends and neighbors in as many places as possible, e.g., church or synagogue or mosque, coffeshop, barbershop, check-out lines.... We must reframe the debate: "Why is it that the Republicans don't want us to have a cost-saving health insurance plan?"
#10
Here is something that you won't see reported on the cable shows. Some pro-life catholics and evangelicals came out today urging the PASSAGE of the health care reform bill. They went on to say that there is no need for further abortion restrictions than there already are (like the Hyde Amendment, etc). Since their actions are not sowing division (as Fox would like them to), it is likely this will not even be reported. There is a christian left out there. I would love to hear Jim Wallis on your show some time. Glenn Beck has been smearing him this week for speaking out FOR social justice.
http://ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/pro-life-group-urges-congress-pass-...
#11
Sorry I couldn't comment while the show was on (my TV and computer are in different rooms), but I've been watching you regularly for the last few months on FreeSpeech and absolutely love your show. In that short time, I have learned incredible things from you, both in terms of the actual content of your show, and also about the way to argue/express political ideology without boring the listener. You, along with Amy Goodman and Laura Flanders, stand out as one of the last voices of honesty and reason in an era of news dominated by a corporate thug-ocracy, either spinning stories like they're PR campaigns, or obsessed with infotainment devoid of any importance to the average person. GE's ties to purchases of military equipment to be used in Iraq and Afghanistan should be enough for legislators to intervene and stop the madness... In Europe, no country would allow a prime member of its military industrial complex to own one of the top four traditional TV broadcasters, the top business news cable channel, and one of the top three cable news stations, each charged with reporting objectively on events like... the wars in which they have a direct financial interest. Regardless, thank you so much for everything you do! The "tag, you're it" line has motivated me to become politically active, both online and in my community.
However, my reason for commenting is the following. On your show today, a caller brought up the wealth dichotomy in the United States in respect to (access to and information about) health and wellness. While the way he phrased his point came off (to me, at least) as classist and (perhaps, more subliminally) racist, this issue is of critical importance if we ever want to realize social justice or equality of opprtunity in this country. In my opinion, it also relates directly with your claims about the decay of American culture.
Have you ever wondered why during pharmaceutical commercials, the announcer sometimes reads a line like, "African Americans are more susceptible to [insert malady here]"? First, a rhetorical question: Does this have anything to do with genetics? NO! The underclass of this country, which includes people of color more often than not, is subjected to horrid environmental conditions and (what I will term here) cultural pollution from birth, a direct result of being born on the metaphorically less fortunate side of the tracks. Vast amounts of literature have exposed the prevalence of former topic, so I will focus on the latter, less simple to distinguish one, here.
Compared to wealthier households, why do impoverished ones suffer from health problems such as heart disease, obesity, diabetes, etc at dramatically higher rates? Because our culture has been engineered by corporations to accent ignorance over intellectualism, celebrity over philosophy, and processed foods over fresh fruits and vegetables. For example, when one walks into a particular grocery store (that shall remain nameless because I don't want to advertise for them) on Tamiami Trail in Newtown (commonly known as "the ghetto" of Sarasota, Florida), one finds a very limited selection of half-rotten produce, none of it organic. It almost seems like the store threw it in as an afterthought, an obligatory, yet non-profitable token. The store's design (which must date from the '70s or '80s, because it is not an attractive building) clearly devoted the lion's share of floorspace to aisle after aisle of cheap processed foods, largely made from refined and re-refined (and triple-refined) corn, oils, sugars, and fats, most of the latter hydrogenated. Manufacturers source these ingredients from genetically modified crops doused in pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, etc. If an animal-related item is listed in the ingredients, you can rest assured that the animal from which it came underwent intense rounds of injections of growth hormones and antibiotics during its development. This goes without mentioning that the finished product contains unnatural preservatives (that remain questionable in terms of safety - i.e. TBHQ and BHT - yet the FDA had no second thoughts when approving their use), colorants (which have been found to cause ADD and ADHD), flavor enhancers (MSG), and addiction-supporting chemical combinations (because the brain becomes unconsciously obsessed with the desire for homeostasis via a constant source of salt, sugar, and fat input). On top of all of this, the companies that make this food enjoy colossal tax breaks and subsidies because they "maintain jobs" - which is a bitter irony considering our country has gone from a largely agrarian society a few decades ago to only 1% of the population participating in agriculture... but I digress, that is another subject entirely.
The point is, when living on a fixed budget or income, in a nation where subsidies for industrial food growth and manufacturing forces organic companies to price their products two or three times more than the "conventional" (using quotes here because there is nothing truly conventional about modern industrial agribusiness) equivalent, is it no wonder that the underclass' diet revolves around these "foodstuffs," "cheese-like" substances, "dairy-derived" additives, laced with hydrogenated lipids and coated in high fructose corn syrup?
Another two miles down that same road, closer to Sarasota's gentrified downtown and high-priced condos, one can walk into a competitor brand's store that was built in the last five years around a "green" theme. Organic products seems to take up half of that store's shelf space, with ample selection in terms of variety and price range (genuinely organic products from small companies side by side with the pseudo-organic industrial food makers' attempts to retool their product lines). This, my friend, is the American food caste system in all its glory! How can the occupants of one neighborhood have a life expectancy twenty or thirty years lower than those of another? They've been raised on absolutely destructive "food," devoid of nutrition. In Detroit and other decaying industrial cities along the Rust Belt, sociologists and urban studies experts now term some parts of town "food deserts" because there is literally no produce available within a ten- (or sometimes twenty-) mile radius. Instead, people are expected to thrive on fast food and processed junk from convenience stores. What's convenient about them? The diseases they offer, perhaps, but little else.
Our world has been engineered to oppress and perpetuate oppression, an aspect of modern capitalism that I cannot and will not support. In fact, I want to make it my life's work to demolish this paradigm. Grosso modo, I hope this helps you understand something along the lines of what that caller meant to express, but failed to, in my humble opinion. Also, I would appreciate it if you were more sensitive to issues of racial, economic/social, and sexual orientation justice on your show. I agree that Citizens United must be reversed and I believe it's admirable that you have made it your conquest... but I sincerely hope it doesn't take up airtime to the detriment of defending the defenseless and speaking for the voiceless.
#12
Hi. I wanted an energy efficient dishwasher, and ended up buying a Bosch dishwasher. When I did research, I found they built an appliance plant in North Carolina in 1997. It's the only US manufacturer to have the 'Energy Star' qualification on all its products. So, tell the people worried about Whirlpool moving out of America to check out a Bosch.
#13
re Granny D: Granny D's walk was from New Hampshire to D.C. She skied thru parts of Appalachia.
#14
re: stuff made in America: I buy shirts and pants on the web from union-made, USA - made factories. You can probably get clothes cheaper at Wal-Mart, but i dont buy that many clothes. It may not be such an easy option when buying for families. Buy you can always go to Goodwill or others if you're not too proud.
#15
I have a correction on Thom's address. I sent him a letter on Thom's blog. the letter was addressed:
Thom Hartmann
Houseboat
Portland, Oregon
Houseboat is such a bland word.
His actual address is:
Thom Hartmann
The Loveboat with Louise and Higgins
Portland, Oregon
Thom's Blog Is On the Move
By webmaster
Hello All
Thom's blog in this space and moving to a new home.
Please follow us across to hartmannreport.com - this will be the only place going forward to read Thom's blog posts and articles.
Images of Thom
Thom & Louise at a "private audience" with His Holiness Pope John Paul II at his summer palace, Castle Gandolfo, Italy
From Screwed:
"Thom Hartmann’s book explains in simple language and with concrete research the details of the Neo-con’s war against the American middle class. It proves what many have intuited and serves to remind us that without a healthy, employed, and vital middle class, America is no more than the richest Third World country on the planet."
From The Thom Hartmann Reader:
"Thom Hartmann seeks out interesting subjects from such disparate outposts of curiosity that you have to wonder whether or not he uncovered them or they selected him."
From Unequal Protection, 2nd Edition:
"Beneath the success and rise of American enterprise is an untold history that is antithetical to every value Americans hold dear. This is a seminal work, a godsend really, a clear message to every citizen about the need to reform our country, laws, and companies."
Quark,
Throw in a bit of a showman...