No lawyers, no politicians-- with exceptions

Libertarian Chimera Hurt More Than Help

2011-12-19T14:11:00.000-08:00

To follow through on the cry for removing government regulations and thereby allowing a free market to restore America's commercial primacy and eliminate unemployment, consider the Presidential aspirants' discussion of nuclear waste storage. As a viable energy source, private industry certainly could build a nuclear power plant without government "controls," "regulations," and other labelled 'deterrents' to free market capitalism. Individual companies would build, operate and sell electrical power at prices that provide the return on investment required to their owners/stockholders desired increase in the capital worth of the businesses.

Additionally, the individual power companies would be left to market forces to determine the most economically viable means--if any--to dispose of the nuclear waste from their operations. What better way than to sell it and recover operating costs?

There are no market mechanisms, no "guiding hand" inhibiting their options regarding the handling of nuclear waste or, for that matter, for managing their nuclear rod inventories.

Experiences demonstrate how real the risks of deregulation are:

I ask you to look at Fairchild's contamination of San Jose, California, by operating its microchip and disc manufacturing under the banner of "a clean industry" and no effective health and safety oversight by that city.

The absence of government oversight enabled the economic devastation of the Gulf Coast from BP's contractor's inadequate oil rigging and operation. Millions of people were affected in the coastal regions, thousands of businesses interrupted possibly never to resume, and thousands of acres of arable land mass was rendered useless due to contamination or poisoning of the resident eco-systems of birds, animals and plants?

Cf. Greg Palast documentary on LinkTV.org "The Vulture's Picnic," based on his book by the same name, in which he explains "why we occupy" to a UC Berkeley audience.

The nuclear power plants in the US were built a long time ago. How confident are we that these facilities, built under a set of standards amended several times since, operated or maintained as if forgotten by the general public. I wonder how many of the residents within a 200-mile perimeter of the Hanford, Washington, nuclear facility know that it was built using the same design as was the plant in Chernobyl, Ukraine?

Remember when all of the CEOs of the domestic tobacco products companies testified under oath to Congress that cigarettes did not pose a health threat in America? How many of those men have been prosecuted for perjury for their testimony?

The heads of the domestic-based petroleum corporations and the heads of the U. S. automobile industry testified under oath that they had done nothing wrong. At least the oil companies did not ask for more federal funding support; they already had it. These men were all there, I have to point out, to support federal interference in their market economies through subsidies, capital loans, tariffs, whatever would keep them in their market positions for a predictable period of time.

How could the heralded, Free Market have improved the outcomes or have prevented those disasters in the first place? No one from the media or from within the political parties is calling the libertarians and pseudo-libertarians on this problem with Adam Smith's version of unfettered capitalism. Without some legislated consequence for remedy when a collateral disaster happens in an unregulated economy, where is the incentive for taking responsibility for safety of employees, customers, and others directly or collaterally affected by an owner's actions? Personal morality? Please, this is business.

None of these ideas are new.

None have brought enough votes to elect a conservative Republican candidate. Since the 1950s, the same, tired platitudes have been repeated, but every new President has discovered that the real world is controlled by forces never debated in their campaigns. Poor Newt is just ignoring that his own personal life decisions resulted in his losing the Speaker office and his House seat due to his 1998 censure by his peers for unacceptable conduct (vote was 375-50), his decades of lobbying for K Street clients, and his hypocrisy about family values by his several marriages.

Perhaps the real problem is that the people who may be most qualified to be President are too busy living their lives with integrity, empathy, happiness, spiritually rewarding situations and wisdom. If this is the case, then we have one more reason for the widening gap between Washington and the public. If the qualified men and women of the Republican Party have withdrawn from the candidate pools, then the federal government has become even less relevant to business and consumption within our economy.

WHEYE-IZ-IT?

2011-12-09T14:04:00.001-08:00

I have been thinking about some nagging questions about issues with federal and local government agencies, some of which I have had for some time. The following items describe my gripes and frustrations with the status quo. I also think these issues could offer some common ground for the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street participants to challenge their elected representatives and public agencies at all levels of government.

1. There have been no federal or state special prosecutors investigating personal involvement/culpability/conspiracies in the banking industry, the financial services industry, and the regulatory agencies regarding the manipulation of our economy--and the world economy--between 1990 and 2009 that resulted in the current, Great Recession?

Were there agreements among lenders to raise revenues in an unregulated, retail credit market? Since 2009, have there been collusive agreements or practices within the banking industry to maintain standardized, underwriting rules on new mortgage loans that have resulted in the sharp decrease in available home mortgage or small business operating loans?

My experience was that all the bankers looked at their daily calendars to see what other lenders were charging mortgagors or small business owners and then would adjust theirs to conform to "industry practices."

2. Across the nation, foreclosed residential properties can remain unoccupied for months or years after the mortgagees/lenders kicked out the mortgagors/homeowners.

Why do local governments allow empty, usable housing stock to exist more than 90 days before taking over the ownership using eminent domain?

Local housing authorities, veterans housing contractors and active duty military individuals and families could use the increase in inexpensive housing stock without having to have their residence costs underwritten by public funding programs or housing allowances.

Note: Would create jobs for carpenters, plumbers and electricians to rehabilitate vacant housing to qualify for occupancy. Provides incentives for local small business to become property management firms. Increases job opportunities for additional office personnel to support increased business activity.

3. Local, state and federal planning boards and their legislative bosses do not require developers to install all power utilities, such as power and telecommunication cables, underground, and to include this in their project concept proposals for residential housing, commercial buildings and inter-city grid connections.

How much money has been spent restoring power after ice storms, heavy snow storms, hurricanes, tornadoes and electrical storms? How would the total amount expended over the past 20 years compare with a one-time cost of eliminating overhead power lines throughout our districts, neighborhoods, rural areas and commercial buildings?

Currently, to retro-fit utilities from above-grade to below-grade, utility companies assess individual homeowners thousands of dollars each to bury existing electric power lines in the public easements between properties. Why should customers pay for the supplier’s ability to provide underground utility services? Local planning and use codes could be changed to support constituent property owners and aesthetics value, rather than the utility companies’ costs of operations.

After all, the utility suppliers have real incentives to pay the cost of supplying services to each property line, such as cost avoidance from restoring power interrupted by weather phenomena; avoid liability for building above-grade improvements that are potentially hazardous to drivers, small airplanes, birds, surface vegetation and persons; and fully cost the products they provide to their customers.

Note: Would create jobs for removing electrical junction boxes, telephone poles; for digging up ground, placing conduits, sub-contracts for job phases, fiber optic cable manufacturing and distribution, technicians for installing, testing and certifying power and other utilities installation and ongoing quality control of grids; for connecting individual consumers (residential and commercial) to utility grids.

[Memo to local municipalities and authorities: tap into federal stimulus funding for small business grants to spur contractors to hire more people.]

[Memo to Readers: This post may become a repeating theme, especially if readers supply their own issues or send me ideas for bringing common sense to such imponderables.]

An Old Maxim of Free Market Capitalism Runs Into Government Transperency

2011-10-26T13:02:00.000-07:00

Health care insurers in New York are objecting to the state's plan to publish their rate justification documents because they are trade secrets and must not be released to the public. 'Pricing' is one of the most closely held information by vendors in a competitive market.

A good part of the reason for not allowing pricing algorithms, elements of cost and profit margins that a business uses to put a price on its products comes from the 19th Century abuses of capitalism by the "robber barons" and others who formed trusts and interlocking directorates to prevent competition in the markets. The public's reaction to such abuse of free markets resulted in a series of federal anti-trust legislation beginning under Grover Cleveland. After Teddy Roosevelt's progressives left the Republican Party in the 1914 elections, anti-trust legislation did not expand until the Taft-Hartley Act focused on labor in 1948.

I recall, while working for Mobil Oil Corporation in the 1970s, how the corporation put safeguards on its pricing practices similar to the military's Top Secret safeguards. Some of you may recall that Regular grade gasoline sometimes fell to 17¢ per gallon in a price war among dealers in a micro-market. Even with the job title of 'pricing accountant', my authority extended only to compliance and payments according to published price schedules. All pricing policy and price determinations were made at corporate headquarters' equivalent of Langely, VA for government intelligence operations.

To have published the details of pricing retail and wholesale petroleum products would have exposed Mobil and the other petroleum corporations to charges of anti-trust violations. So, I can understand the rationale of the insurance companies in New York. I believe, however, that they will lose in favor of the public's call for transparency in the bureaucracies of government. The issue may result in litigation by the insurers that could cause some significant changes in the private health insurance industry as the companies try to compete when all aspects of their strategies are visible to their customers.

By the way, the November 2011 edition of Money, a publication of CNN, has an excellent and elegant decision-making graphic for choosing the best Medicare options for 2012. [cf. Amanda Gengler and Matthew Hollister (Graphics)"Medicare in America: Special Money Series Part 2 of 3, internet: www.cnnmoney.com, November 2011.] I now have to recalculate my own choice by the December 7, 2011, deadline, but now I know what data I will need to compare plans.

All of this issue would go away, along with an estimated 40 percent of bureaucrat paperwork by every provider of health care, if we had a single-payer system that was not predicated on how poor one is. Just saying….

Another Old Guy Agrees with Me about the Economy

2011-10-26T12:02:00.000-07:00

I wonder when the President and his economic strategists will hear the OWS and other plainly upset people about the cause and effect of the banking industry's malevalent, greedy and short-sighted push for profits over long-term economic viability. In todays NYTimes, a guest opinion by history professor James Livingston echoes my last blog entry "It's the Banks, Stupid, It'sJobs, Dummy."

According to a New York Times/CBS News poll in May, a majority of Americans believe that increased corporate taxes “would discourage American companies from creating jobs.”

But history shows that this is wrong.

Professor James Livingston (Rutgers University) contradicts public perception by explaining the historical function of tax increases and decreases during the 20th Century. He draws the following conclusions:

… [C]orporate profits do not drive economic growth — they’re just restless sums of surplus capital, ready to flood speculative markets at home and abroad. In the 1920s, they inflated the stock market bubble, and then caused the Great Crash. Since the Reagan revolution, these superfluous profits have fed corporate mergers and takeovers, driven the dot-com craze, financed the “shadow banking” system of hedge funds and securitized investment vehicles, fueled monetary meltdowns in every hemisphere and inflated the housing bubble.

It's time for Timothy Geitner to change his spots or to leave the economic policy of the nation to a non-banker.

It's the Banks, Stupid! It's Jobs, Dummy!

2011-10-23T15:31:00.000-07:00

The primary obstacle against reviving of our nation's economy is the banking industry's control of credit. I could get behind that slogan. Calls for reducing or eliminating regulatory controls on banking and other financial services are, at least in the public political arena, split between the haves and the have-nots.

Why are so many people pushing for less regulation when they do not have sufficient savings or other forms of wealth (land, inheritance, stocks, bonds, etc.) to have a worry-free retirement or to pay for their own health care? Why are there poor-White Republicans and second-generation Latinos embracing the ways and means that benefit only the wealthiest people in the country?

Why are some financial commentators lauding politicians who are proposing radical changes to the federal tax code such as a flat tax? Most people already pay flat taxes or sales taxes in their home states? Cities also levy flat taxes through additional sales taxes. Why don't the sales taxes fund government sufficiently? When I buy a box of bandaids for $4.00, the retailer collects an additional state sales tax of 34¢, so I pay $4,34 out of pocket. No one escapes the sales tax on most retail goods. If the customer did not pay the extra 34¢, the retailer would still have to pay 34¢ to the state. State tax code allows the seller to collect sales tax from the customer, but the state says that the tax is levied on the amount of the seller's price. Sales tax revenue is not the customer's responsibility.

When filing California state income tax forms, there is a place for the taxpayer to enter the sales tax amount avoided by purchasing goods on the internet for which the internet seller did not charge California sales tax. Essentially an honor system, if the internet retailer has no business presence in California other than the Internet, there is no basis for the state to impose a sales or use tax on the seller. If the seller does maintain a business presence, has a license to do business, then the internet seller must report the sale and pay the sales tax to the state. Amazon.com is currently contesting this policy. Should Amazon.com win, then the State has to revise the tax code to place the sales tax burden on the internet customer rather than on the vendor.

Another form of flat tax is the property tax. In California, county assessors use 1.3 percent of the property's market value (reset whenever property changes owners to the selling price), which can be adjusted within a 2 percent range without voter approval. In addition, cities and special voting districts ask voters for additional taxes to repay bond issues, to pay for additional public fire services, to pay for anything the local government sees itself unable to pay for out of their existing revenue streams. The result is a flat tax amount added to the property tax assessment. When I owned a condo in Oakland, California, one third of my property tax payments were flat tax add-ons resulting from voter approvals that had nothing to do with the assessed value of my property.

Watching CNN-TV this morning, I noted that the invited guests were very enthusiastic about a flat tax, referring to Steve Forbes' proposals during his unsuccessful run for the Republican nomination. Following that discussion was another pair of invited commentators opining on the OWS movement and sit-ins around the country. Each commentator took a very conservative financial viewpoint for describing this popular phenomenon. "What do they want?" "Are they more favorable to the Democrats?" "Who are they?" were questions raised but not answered. Not answered because to date no one voice from these groups of protestors has told the press why they were there--except that individuals all seem to have different reasons for being there. Poor media.

I wonder if this growing physical statement of dissatisfaction can be rendered into a single agenda. Some protestors seem to be calling for equal opportunity while others are advocating equal outcomes. A common theme is their perception of the current American way of life is unjust, that neither equal opportunity nor equal outcomes are possible. What could this mean?

In employment, salaries are stagnant except at the highest echelons of an organization. If middle and lower echelon job salaries were to rise at rates deemed "fair" vis à vis senior managers' and executives, the companies would move their operations overseas or to a non-union state so that costs would be lower. So how is a person supposed to find a job with a better wage? If in their current jobs they have vested retirement benefits, health care insurance cost-sharing, or tenure, the risk of changing jobs becomes complex and stressful, especially because of their partners' job status and location, their children's schooling, and the first-in-first-laid off status on the new job.

Even if one can go to school part-time online or at a local college while working full-time, the required physical and mental effort to become more marketable in the higher paying job markets is very high. I cannot put into words how much I admire the single parents who manage to work one job, be a parent and go to school at the same time.

I've heard there are 45 million unemployed persons today in the US, but there also are 3.1 million jobs employers are unable to fill from native American applicants. So, there are calls for changing the Immigration Law to attract and hire foreign nationals to fill these jobs. So, among the OWS are the unemployed who see the Immigration Law as unjust because it is not being enforced, as evidenced by the number of illegal immigrants working in the US. Of course, who is employing undocumented workers and for what wages and kinds of jobs is lost in the overall emotion of injustice toward those who have played by the rules and are being ignored. If the current Immigration Law were adhered to by US employers, I really wonder how many legal residents would leave their present location, where they cannot find a job, and relocate to work in jobs now filled by undocumented workers. People did move in the Great Depression, but we have not seen comparable migrations in the Great Recession. Why?

Others among the OWS believe that the Immigration Law is unjust when families are split up due to some members being documents and others not, when children of undocumented persons are allowed to attend public schools and receive private funding for attending post-high school educational institutions. The term "anchor babies" has currency in today's political discussions, especially in our southern states, that I find offensive and racist. The Constitution accepts de jure and de facto full citizenship to anyone born in the United States, but Immigration Law and state laws denigrate and punish such citizens should one or both parents be undocumented residents at the time the child is born.

[Side note: As more and more states begin to define the biological status of personhood as "at inception" or "at conception" (I fail to know the difference) will Immigration Law require all women of child-bearing age to take a pregnancy test before obtaining a visa to enter the United States, Puerto Rico, or the other U.S. territories? Once in the US, what if that woman becomes pregnant? Even if she leaves the US, would not her child be born a US citizen by reason of birth? Just asking....]

Free, public education has enabled America to aspire to being a nation of literate citizens, providing an informed electorate, a knowledgeable working populace, and the dream of social and wealth advancement undeterred by lack of access to the skills needed for achievement. At different times in our history, the age-guaranteed education supported agriculture and basic working skills for boys, basic housekeeping skills for girls; then, the addition of at least two years of high school provided the skills for the industrial revolution and the expansion of America's industrial base. Now kindergarten-12th grade is the norm. Many states have built extensive community college systems for those who want to acquire better knowledge of some high school curricular subject so they can meet the entrance aptitude requirements for a college or university. Other community colleges offer certification in specialized trade skills for men and women who either do not want to go to college, who want to pursue a crafts skilled career, or who want to bring current skills acquired before there were significant technological changes in their chosen employment or who wish to become part of the workforce.

In high school, it seems that most of the teaching effort is predicated on an assumption that every student wants to go to college. Indeed, many public service jobs now require or give hiring preference to candidates with college degrees: police officers, clerical and secretarial positions, and most public employment openings. Ten or twenty years out of high school, I wonder how many students believe they are better off with a 4-year college degree that their classmates who became electricians, plumbers, other skilled trade members. Even those students who went directly into an unskilled job such as an assembly line worker, steel worker, longshoreman job can become as wealthy and achieve socially upward mobility for their children, especially if their initial job required joining a union.

This brings up a question for me: Who is better off? Who is achieving the mythical American Dream?

Is it the high school teacher earning $40,000 with guaranteed benefits, nine-month work years or the independent owner of a plumbing shop able to charge $75/hr for labor plus retail for parts bought at wholesale. who has his own home, an at-home spouse who is raising the children and seeing that they can achieve their own ambitions, or whose spouse is a manager of an office, earning a substantial wage with comparable benefits?

Is it the college professor who, as an associate professor on a tenure track, earns $55,000 teaching History of Renaissance Europe, not finding much opportunity for additional income except from book royalties, guiding private tours in Europe, and loves his students and his teaching. How just does she see her profession as a highly ranked scholar and teacher when her counterpart in Bio-engineering or Computer Science earns $65,000 and has access to additional income and increasing academic status through research grants and contracts with public and private funds, from consulting fees with private enterprises and from patent royalties?

Is it the entrepreneur high school-educated person who invents a new technology, who creates a unique software system and licenses it exclusively?

Is it the financial wizard who accrues tremendous personal wealth by working 12-16 hours per day, but lacks a personal life, a partner with whom to share the fortune or whose wealth could disappear in a market crash?

Is it the person whose values, personal ethics are not necessarily matched to the social position, personal earning power or inherited wealth, and values free time to help others achieve their immediate or long term needs?

Can it be a person who joins a religious order and forgoes all personal assets to pursue a spiritual path?

Is it the person who just doesn't care what other people think or who lacks ambition or who doesn't think about such things as social status, wealth or education? Lots of people just want to live their lives unbothered, hassle-free and enough money to feed, clothe and watch television without someone telling them what they should do or what they should want.

My elusive dream is to attain contentment that allows for love, serendipity, spiritual illumination, fun, companionship and the occasional fantasy holiday.

Long Ago and Still to Come

2011-10-16T13:02:00.000-07:00

I cried today after watching a film of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech in August 1963. My emotions were a mixture of sadness, frustration and anger as tears welled up. So much of his dreams came true, yet there are so many parts still unfulfilled. In the 48 years since that speech, our generation spawned two more. We inherited the institutions and culture of the so-called "Greatest Generation" who, following World War 11 and during the Cold War, created The Great Society. Ironically, it was this "Greatest" Generation who legislated the federal and local programs that the Tea Baggers and other ultra-conservatives want to get rid of today. Programs supporting anti-discrimination in public education, housing, health care, short-term income loss due to unemployment, ending and correcting the effects of pollution, and regulatory systems of financial transactions and currency reflect the perils of American living before 1965.

The "Greatest Generation" had experienced two world wars, the totalitarianism of Franco, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin and Mao Tse Tung, the Great Depression, and the Berlin Blockade with the subsequent Cold War of fifty years. Why else would they have voted for local, state and federal representatives who advocated and produced programs intended to help Americans have lives that were better than theirs had been? The "Greatest Generation" set up these programs for their children (the Boomers) and their children's children's benefit.

Those in the Tea Party mind-set must think their parents did not know the realities of life! Certainly there was vehement opposition to the New Deal, but one has to wonder where the bitterness and disgust of government comes from today. With a few exceptions, the voices of Retro-Conservatives and its Tea Party are Boomers and their children who grew up with the social programs, with the absence of conscripted military service, and with institutional safeguards against poverty and starvation. What disasters have they experienced that are comparable to those Americans born before 1946?

Perhaps the "Greatest Generation" went too far in its attempts to create an America that would never have to suffer the pains of their and prior generations' lives. Or, perhaps, the "Greatest Generation" did not understand how fundamentally different social norms grew out of the 1960s.

Did the Boomers who approved the rules and regulations hold different ethical norms because they rejected those of their parent generation in the domestic civil war of 1967-1973? Have Boomer efforts become tantamount to a rejection of a radical change in the domestic perception of the American Dream from Equal Opportunity to Equal Outcomes for All? Does change in the contemporary, perceived purpose of government mean that only personal success through greed [no longer a negative norm?] can free the individual to achieve one's best life possible?

Have the children of Boomers, after seeing effects of the social revolution of Question Authority,-Don't Trust Anyone Over 30-Hell No, We Won't Go! [disintegration of nuclear families, recreational drugs and alcohol for stress, and abuse of program privilege], as kids of the 1970s and 1980s, grown to view personal privilege as better than community well-being?

In 1963, I had a dream, too. My tears today reflect my sadness, frustration and anger that my parts of a dream, articulated so well by Martin Luther King, Jr. 48 years ago, remain a dream.

Trying to Keep Washington Politics in Historical Perspective

2011-09-05T01:08:00.000-07:00

Image via WikipediaFor those of you readers unfamiliar with the elected representatives to the House of Representatives by district or by name, my experiences conform to the old real estate saw: location, location, location. When voting for the first time in 1966, the incumbent for my Beverly Hills and Birmingham area was a Republican, Bill Broomfield. He had been our district's representative for as long as I could remember. My parents liked him, along with most other local Republicans.

For the 1968 General Election, I voted by absentee ballot from Ft. Belvoir, VA because I was at the Army Corps of Engineers Officer Training School. By this time, I had come to the conclusion that I was born a Democrat into a Republican household. I have to confess a fondness for Barry Goldwater, however, and still have his book The Conscience of a Conservative written in 1964. I volunteered for indefinite active duty status, rather than the draftee's 2-yr. normal active duty time, because Richard Nixon had just been elected President. I reasoned if the war was still going on in late 1971, with the 1972 elections approaching, Nixon would want to have ended the war. It worked out for me, because Nixon did announce a reduction in the need for combat engineer officers in Viet Nam in July 1971, so I remained in the Frankfurt-am-Main and Hanau bases for the subsequent 18 months.

Meanwhile, our President Nixon was creating a new model for the Chief Executive, the Imperial Presidency. Remember the new uniforms for the White House guards? Recall his sense of omnipotence that caused him the scandal of Watergate and forced his resignation? Lyndon Johnson had been the consummate power manipulator on the Hill, but failed as President. Nixon used the Hill to put in place most of the Great Society programs that LBJ could not get through Congress. Nixon saw himself above the law and that is how he did a lot for America and that is how he destroyed himself. The Imperial Presidency.

One attribute of an imperial President is that he is the ultimate problem solver [the Decider] for the nation. Issues would boil up to the White House staff and the Executive would take action despite or without regard to Congress.

Gerald Ford just tried to hold everything together, a nice enough guy, a regency reign.

Jimmy Carter was a micromanager and, as intelligent as he was especially in matters scientific, he was unable to rise to a stature of Head of State that he seemed desperate to want. It says something about him when the Ayatollah announced, after booting out the Shah, that he would not talk with President Carter as long as he was in office. A weak reign.

As President, Ronald Reagan actually reigned. By 1984, the Republicans had taken control of Congress and Speaker Newt Gingrich had issued his Contract for America, the ultimate Republican strategy statement for the balance of the 20th Century. His erstwhile Chancellor Dick Cheney still waxes nostalgic for the Gipper.

So, ten years after Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace, imperial President nonetheless, the nation and its Congress began to adjust to having a strong, ideologue man as President and who better to carry it off than Ronald Reagan (1980-1988). In the reigns that followed: Bush I, Clinton, Bush 11 and now Obama, Congress finds fault whenever a President acts less than imperial.

What is your plan, Mr. President? How can you criticize our [viz. Congress] plan when you have none of your own? It almost seems as if Congress is asking for another FDR or that other Roosevelt to oppose. There is little a President can do other than through the Administration's responses to legislation. There's the rub: Congress has broken all of the mirrors in its hallowed halls and we, the electorate, have to worry about shards all over again amid the farce of palace games.

Gordon Gecko Gets to YouTube

2011-09-05T00:42:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately, YouTube/Google has decided to prevent anyone from downloading any videos from its site. When I first began using DARPA, internet's predecessor, in the 1970s, the purpose of free communication media was the betterment of everyone through sharing among academics, not just those who could afford the time and money to purchase a book, attend a convention or write a letter using distribution lists that were wasting paper, postage and time.

For the past several years, YouTube functioned in the same manner, i.e., without boundaries, enabling millions of people to expand their knowledge of the world beyond what television and films allow. As of Saturday, anyone trying to compile a video database using downloaded YouTube videos is out of luck. Further, trying to find the content owner presents quite a challenge on a public media forum that suddenly decides that downloading equals stealing of intellectual property. No one forced individuals to upload any videos, so it seems obvious that anyone wanting to protect copyrighted material would not upload it to YouTube. Are subscriptions for full access to Wikipedia next?

Of course, there probably is some stolen content in some of the videos uploaded to YouTube, but to banish downloading from YouTube seems a bit late in the property protection game.

Many videos are advertising for subscription site owners, for movie trailers and other vendors who haven't thought how Google might react to their complaints that "their" copyrighted media was being stolen off of YouTube by downloading.

As of September 6th, once you delete your YouTube account, you can never open another YouTube account using the same username. Did I hear a tear drop softly? It wasn't my tear; I feel rather liberated that Google has one less point of access to me and about me.

Now I am looking for an alternative blogging site, since Google owns blogspot.com, too.

The Palin Presence in Iowa

2011-08-14T17:08:00.000-07:00

Image via WikipediaLast November 10, I suggested that Karl Rove decided to mold Ms. Palin into an icon of Middle America so that she would not involve herself in Presidential politics again. Wise move, Karl. It seems that Sarah Palin likes the role. First, she has celebrity stature, she's in the right generation and is a crowd pleaser. She is able to raise significant money for the Republicans and will be quite an asset for local and state races.

Fmr. Gov. Palin has the campaign trail experience to endear her to conservatives and she could be a significant force to get Republicans and Independents out of their chairs and into the voting booth. Now, if she just doesn't blow it by becoming a national spokesperson for the Party. That's what the candidates are for.

The Republicans seem to have rallied behind the most attractive men even while Bachwoman gets the most votes in Iowa. I think Michele strikes fear into the Republican establishment who want to attract more Centrist voters. And, BTW when did the job of Texas Governor become a sufficient qualification for Presidential candidates? The governor is not supposed to run the state, as opposed to New York, but to keep the Texas legislature on track with their part-time jobs and two-year budgets.

Sarah Palin will be the Republicans' symbol of common sense, not a font of knowledge, but nice to look at and to have a conversation about where and how much money the big donors will give her for the Party. I don't think the media get it.

Saving the Grand Canyon from Unfettered Capitalists

2011-07-29T23:35:00.000-07:00

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

A Conservative political stance is to maintain the integrity and soundness of our Nation's resources and culture. Thus, true Conservatives guard against imprudent spending of federal funds without corresponding revenues, maintaining an appropriate defense capability, preserving of the national symbols of the American promise and accomplishments, and the artistic, commercial and educational institutions that have fostered this country's unique history. America's existence has a domestic and international role as a home for self fulfillment, inter-class social mobility, lack of barriers to creativity and innovative enterprise and resulting benefits, and our belief in a fair legal system. A true Conservative represents, in my view, the views of the majority of Americans regardless of political affiliation. On certain issues, I believe we all are Conservatives and unite as such.

I am calling to your attention a current piece of legislation that is against the Conservative philosophy of maintaining and protecting of basic parts of what America is. The Interior Department's Appropriations bill threatens the Grand Canyon and other national parks and I urge that you oppose this bill. This Appropriations bill contains other provisions that threaten our national parks and the authority of the President to designate national monuments under the Antiquities Act.

Please vote "No" on this bill as written and on all legislation that would take away these means of protecting what America is built upon and that remind us of the Divine blessing of this diverse environment.

The Grand Canyon is a very special place in the world that deserves to be treated as such. Increased mining in the area surrounding the Grand Canyon would threaten the integrity of this special place for the Navajo Nation and the US.

The water passing through the canyon is a vital water resource for 25+ million people downstream. The US Chamber of Commerce has the data to show that the Grand Canyon, the four surrounding states and the Navajo Nation are tremendous tourism draws for domestic and international visitors. Any diminishing of tourism threatens an economy of hundreds of local businesses and vendors whose livelihoods depend on the Grand Canyon as one of the great wonders of the world.

I also cannot abide this bill's allowing for giving away national assets without requiring commercial users to pay significant royalties to compensate the American people and the Navajo people for such a fundamental change in this area's land use.

(The requirement for royalties should apply to all leases and commercial use permits issued on federally owned land, water rights, off-coast US areas and mineral rights. Royalties should be considered a normal cost of doing business exploiting our country's natural resources and a significant source of revenues.)

Please oppose the contents of the Interior Department Appropriations Act concerning Grand Canyon uranium mining provision and any provisions limiting the President's authority in the Antiquities Act.

[Sent to Darrell Issa, (R-CA) 28 July 2011]

Using Medicare and Medicaid Entitlements as Bargaining Chips

2011-07-29T19:17:00.000-07:00

After the President's speech to the nation this week, not only did I provide my Congressional Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA) with my views on the political shenanigans of the Tea Party in obstructing a balanced, i.e., frugality with increased revenues, I wrote to the President about my views of his own attempts to make government work better. Here's what I wrote:

Dear Mr. President:

No Democratic President should ever consider letting the benefit entitlements for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid be part of any political negotiation with Congress.

The Republicans have tried to dismantle these programs since 1936 and 1965. There have been worse economic circumstances and they have it wrong about America and how we run our government and its finances. In last night’s reaction to Speaker Boehner’s grandstanding, you referred to the several times Ronald Reagan raised the debt limit. I believe that the problem of national debt began in the 1980s and that President Reagan led the country and commerce into a comfort zone that lasts until today of using debt proceeds for current operating expenses. Reagan was wrong as were all succeeding Presidents who did not require Congress to reveal the effect of new debt burden on the discretionary portion of federal expenditures. As the issue of what the federal government will pay for has brought our political process to this point of failure of Reason, for your meeting later this morning, I offer a quotation from Plutarch:

An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.

To me, I see you as trying to force Congress to do its job as framed by the Constitution. If I am correct, then I suggest you make this point much more obvious in your television appearances. For too long, the phenomenon of an imperial presidency has haunted our government and your putting Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid “on the table” just continues this distortion. Please take them out of this discussion.

Sincerely,

Peter Sherfy Millington

Update 29 July 2011

As Speaker Boehner was rallying support for his House bill, he admitted almost shamefully or at least ironically that he had put some revenue items "on the table" during negotiations with Democrats. From now until the 2012 General Election, the most visible campaign button worn by members of both parties with say "NOT ME!" because of the voters' wrath at incumbents who created the debts without budgeting revenues to repay them.

NOT ME! . . .just wait and see.

2011-16972 Pl-Physician Fee Schedule Proposal

2011-07-29T18:43:00.000-07:00

I just glanced through the 621-page Proposed Rule for Medicare Payment Policies under the Physician Fee Schedule. I am appalled by the size of this regulation and by much of the content I read. How does this Proposed Rule improve the health of Medicare beneficiaries? What evaluative studies has the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) commissioned to support the kinds of measures proposed for determining appropriate health care by physicians? Who is supposed to use this Proposed Rule and for what purposes?

Someone should look closely at the value of such CMS rules. CMS is the implementation agency for our national, public health insurance programs. This agency's mission is to establish and maintain a federal bureaucracy for improving the health outcomes of those receiving Medicare and Medicaid services. Congressional oversight from the ISSA Committee of the House looks for fraud and abuse at CMS. The Committee's process is akin to the farmer's wife spending her days picking up chicken droppings in the yard, while overlooking that her purpose was to harvest eggs. (Apologies to Achan Chah),

GOP Leadership Stoops Even Lower Until . .

2011-06-20T01:58:00.000-07:00

Last night, at the GOP Leadership Council meeting, the entertainment got the hook. Donald Trump must have wished for similar power at the Press Club last month when he was the butt of a few jokes. The comedian Reggie Brown was hired to do a routine to include Anthony Weiner's downfall and including an impersonation of President Obama as he is not, as if the New Hampshire GOP debate already had not served the purpose.

Dangerous thing, comedy. USA TODAY carried this article: http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2011-06-18-republicans-obama-parody_n.htm?csp=hf#.

For those Republican Party members who may not know who have taken over the message reins, this article should leave no doubt. This is a shame. After all, I was raised in a Republican family--both sides--and I have met and respected many individuals who happen to be Republican Party members. In the last half of the 20th Century, it was reasonable to me for someone to vote for Republicans because they believed they were voting in their best interests, usually financial.

Certainly there were those who complained about how similar our two political parties were, yet the parties contained their fringe members to the extent that the GOP was on the right half of the political bell curve and the Democrats were on the left. Real differences could be seen when either party member of the legislatures or executives strayed more than a predictable standard deviation from the mean. The resultant consistency in foreign and domestic policies and programs, within the centrist leeway, sustained a vibrant Middle Class and offered hope to those not yet there.

The GOP message today, however, is not based in conservative ethics, financial responsibility or preservation of the American spirit. So I wonder if the 20th Century GOP majority within the party will have the gumption to stand up to the Tea Party radicals. How many Independents will recognize the threat to our country's future that the Tea Partiers represent? How many Libertarians will realize that their ideals are very much threatened by the Tea Party proponents who will destroy the very political and social environment in which libertarian principles can exist?

I think the current disconnect between party members and party leadership began during the Dot-Com Bust. The job market changed with the loss of dream jobs, the belief among those employed who saw the failure of their benefit packages to make company loyalty worth it, the key to social and financial advancement becoming the starting salary, employment bonus and changing jobs being the only power an employee retained in the workplace over their bosses. The final blow to conservative, long-time employment was the elimination of designated benefit packages, the early retirement buy-outs of senior employees and the age bias against job-seekers over 50, many of whom had just been forced to retire. So, Republicans could no longer trust that their employers had their best interests at heart--only most didn't see it.

The second disconnect between party members and their leadership occurred when the 2000 Presidential Election went to the Supreme Court after some very dubious moves within state election organizations to garner sufficient popular votes for winning electoral votes. Rightly or wrongly, the ultimate win for George W. Bush turned millions of voters, mostly Democratic Party voters, against the legitimacy of our elected federal government. That the results of the Commission's report were ignored and forgotten speaks to the divide beginning to appear more clearly between the general populace and our elected representatives in government.

The third disconnect resulted from 9/11. As we in American began to recover from our initial grief and shock, the Bush Administration began its military attacks on the Taliban Regime in Afghanistan for harboring Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, who claiimed responsibility for 9/11. Little did the country know that behind the scenes, the Administration was planning to invade Iraq as soon as they could convince the Congress and the UN of the need.   The first request for funding the Alfghanistan invasion was for $87 billion. Ten years later, our government is spending $19 billion a week for the Alfghan War. After Secretary of State Colin Powell lied to the Security Council about the clear and present danger posed by Sadaam Hussein in Iraq, Congress again approved emergency funding of about $70 billion for the effort to change the Ba'athist Regime in Iraq. Eight years later, there are still 100,000 US military personnel in Iraq. Despite street protests across America and Europe during 2002 and 2003, pleas from every leader of the world's religions not to invade Iraq, nothing seemed to dissuade members of Congress or the Administration from these two wars. So many of us felt powerless despite all efforts.

The Great Recession of 2008 was the catalyst that broke free the torrent of recriminations, public expressions of hatred, total despair for highly leveraged small businesses and farms, tragic loss of family homes to foreclosure and short sales, predatory destruction of personal credit by over-extended banks and a soaring unemployment.

These factors: 1) the DotCom Bust and the revolution in employee compensation methods; 2) the destruction of faith in our electoral process during the 2000 Presidential Election; 3) the outright deceiving of Congress, the UN and the American people of the reason for invading Iraq in March 2003, while drawing down military efforts in Afghanistan; and 4) the Great Recession of 2008 have caused the full range of alienation of the people from legitimate government in practice or as an ideal.

I hope Republicans will do some soul-searching about supporting any of the current individuals declaring candidacy for their nomination in 2012. Well, perhaps Mitt Romney will clarify his centrist positions before he loses too many convention votes.   I hope Democrats will form coherent, public positions to counter the slash and burn polemics of Tea Partiers. Both political parties' leadership need to stand up to hate, to naivete and to their consultants and lobbyists who have only self-interest at heart.

-Sherfdog

The American Middle Class

2011-06-16T04:54:00.000-07:00

Our country's Middle Class following The Great Depression and World War II was created by the struggles and victories of labor unions. The general strike of 1948 by railroad workers, dock workers and other union members who refused to cross picket lines demonstrated how powerful the labor unions had become in America. Labor unions of the AFL-CIO, the Teamsters, Longshoremen and the SEIU negotiated wages and benefits contracts that non-represented employees, and by consequence supervisors and management, also would receive in comparable measure. The only way to avoid having a work force unionized was to equal or better the pay and benefits that union-represented employees had.

Since the 1980 defeat of the air traffic controllers union by the Reagan Administration, union membership and concomitant power to negotiate wages and benefits has diminished almost to the point of non-existence. Abuses of power by labor unions have spurred their decline as well. Labor intensive manufacturing moved overseas where labor was cheap, abundant and non-union, closing down factories and cutting jobs in the US.

Today pundits write about the diminishing Middle Class and how the members of the Class of 2011 will not inherit the expectations of the Class of 1968 for home ownership, vacations, increasing salaries and benefits, and a comfortable retirement.

My question is: what will or could replace the power of labor unions for generating Middle Class incomes for blue collar and white collar workers in 2011?

Why Hillary Clinton Is So Busy in Yemen

2011-06-16T04:04:00.000-07:00

If anyone doubts the political influence of the petroleum and petroleum services industries, the Administration has had very little to say about the forceful suppression of dissidents in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. In Yemen, however, the US has a significant, strategic interest in being able to establish a permanent base for our military and military support facilities: to protect our petroleum supply from that region.

Yemen is not an oil producer, but from that country a military presence can control commercial shipping going through the Red Sea to and from the Indian Ocean and protect pipelines from the oil fields in Saudi Arabia. The US tried to establish its regional military position in Somalia, Eritrea and Ethiopia only to see that region dissolve into failed nation states and ongoing tribal warfare.

The loss of strategic location in Africa meant that the importance of Yemen remaining available for future US military bases has grown significantly for the protection of our petroleum supply. To lose Yemen to a radical Al-Qaeda political governance would jeopardize Saudi Arabia directly and enable an Al-Qaeda link with terrorist operatives in the Horn of Africa that could cut off the Red Sea passage for trade between the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean.

One interested party has remained silent, yet should Yemen become a nation base for international terrorism, China could see its mineral and chemical concessions in Northern Sudan and an independent southern Sudan threatened by such an outcome.

The changes in strategic political and military alliances caused by Chinese active involvement in resolving the Yemen and southern Sudan threats from local Al-Qaeda forces could make for strange yet logical bedfellows on the Security Council and in strategic alliances.

GroupThink Lurks in the Media

2011-06-16T03:09:00.000-07:00

You've heard of GroupThink if you read TIME magazine in the 1960s and given its rotten reputation for group dynamics one would like to believe that no reputable news organization today would be guilty of it. The consolidation of television broadcasting company ownerships over the past fifteen years has had the result of the same corporations owning the "major networks" and the cable news channels. They all run the same stories with the same emphasis. On cable stations, CNN, NBC and Fox are the major competitors. In the Los Angeles broadcast area, the public broadcasting stations carry The News Hour with Jim Lehrer at 6 PM only, once the goto news program for real issues of importance and good investigative reporting. Besides its own channel news programs, BBC-America world news is carried by two PBS stations in the LA region. MSNBC vs. Fox News offers cable viewers (who subscribe to expanded channel packages) ongoing gotchas between liberals and conservatives presented earnestly and loudly, as if each is trying to get everyone in the room's attention by speaking over all other conversations.

Fox News and MSNBC provide each other with the daily issues, to be given their respective political slant, according to what is happening in Congress, the Administration, the President--always in the barrel, and individual political icons in office or not.

For political issues domestic and foreign, it really does not matter if one watches CNN, ABC, CBS, or NBC. Viewers choose the anchor person, rather than content.

CNBC and Bloomberg vie for financial news audiences. Talk about GroupThink--these two broadcasters focus on Wall Street, international finance, the Treasury Department and Commodities. The financial markets thrive on rumors and gossip, which daily display raw, unbridled GroupThink among traders, buyers and sellers, and CNBC and Bloomberg present viewers with exemplars who believe their market perceptions are uniquely formed to optimize the accumulation and retention of capital.

About the year 2005, a new phenomenon in television news broadcasting came in the form of comedian commentary on what the "legitimate" news broadcasters were reporting. Johnny Carson had established the role of the Opening Dialogue in late night talk shows and Jay Leno on NBC and David Letterman on CBS continued to entertain with material full of irony, satire and rhetorical questions about the news. On the Comedy Network, Jon Stewart's The Daily Show became the primary news source for students and progressives. Bill Maher's series on HBO offers more sarcastic commentary or simply let situations and politicians speak themselves into idiocy. He could not be renewed on ABC due to the often R-rated, rambunctious discussions among his guests. The Democratic Party's majority in the House by the November 2006 elections and the Presidency in 2008 could in part be attributed to the public's ability to see the nation's leaders try to doubletalk through serious ineptness, stupidity and hidden crimes thanks to the efforts of these comedians.

Our current political parties in Congress and in state legislatures, however, seem enslaved by public opinion poles and behind-the-scenes party operatives, like Karl Rove and Jim Carvill, while campaign coffers swell with donations from lobbyists. I really distrust the public opinion polls, because most of the public understands the news and editorial opinions from the major media sources listed above.

One example of the dangerous status of broadcast news media is illustrated by coverage during the current recession:

Back in 2008, the Bush Administration found itself faced with the collapse of the mortgage credit market, Wall Street giant, financial services entities fearing bankruptcy, rising rates of unemployment and seemingly paralyzed financial markets.

In October 2008, the Treasury Department proposed a $700 billion bailout or rescue plan to be funded by the government consisting of loans of cash to major banks and investment firms and the automobile industry, but without any increased taxation or revoking of Bush's tax cuts intended to enable the wealthiest individuals to provide more investment capital to stimulate the economy. Since Ronald Reagan began the supply-side, monetary theory of Milton Friedman in the 1980s, the Republic Party has viewed income tax cuts as the primary means for limiting or reducing the role and size of the federal government.

In June 2011, the Republican majority in the House is trying once again to reduce the size of government by cutting funding for entitlement programs and by blocking any attempt to increase tax revenues--despite a growing deficit and a rising national debt. Even as some conservative Republicans and some Democrats state they are willing to block legislation to increase the national debt limit, they refuse to consider raising taxes and cutting subsidies to industries. GroupThink among these legislators unchallenged by broadcast television news content may cause the US dollar to lose its status as the primary safe currency for world capitalism. If Treasury Bonds require higher interest rates to attract purchasers, our national debt problems could overwhelm the international financial system. Billions of people would be affected and so many will be hurt or destroyed should this happen.

Wanda Sykes' commentary from October 2008 remains apt. Hers was not comedy then nor is it now.

Health Care, Again or is it Still?

2011-05-24T00:41:00.000-07:00

In prior posts, I have argued that we will not resolve the problems of our current health care system without first taking a public health perspective of it. T. R. Reid's recent book The Healing of America: a Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Medical Care defines the error of America's attempt at a national health care system. Reid writes that health care is a moral issue, not a financial issue. Until the popular consensus understands this difference, we will continue to try to fit the problem to a particular solution.

Do the American people believe that universal health care access is a good thing? That is the radical health care issue facing our country today. If the answer is "yes," then the voters, politicians, providers, manufacturers and financiers will know what the end result must be. For now, we need to watch Vermont and Massachusetts, because those states seem to have decided how they will address the moral imperative of ensuring that all of their citizens have access to health care.

What if a state decides that "no, universal health care access is not a morally right thing?" I cannot recall anyone saying that they would deny access to care except when arguing the issue from a libertarian or capitalist political perspective. Yet, unless the debate is re-framed to address the moral issue of health care access, vested interests in the current, sub-optimal system will win.

Our President sends a legislative package to Congress to reform our national health care system and the result is a miss-mash of tweaks and changes that changes procedures and mandates, but not the system. As T. R. Reid points out, "All the other countries like us--that is, wealthy, technologically advanced, industrialized democracies--guarantee medical care to anyone who gets sick. Countries . . . have concluded that everybody has the right to health care--and they provide it." [Reid, T. R., The Healing of America: a Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Medical Care. Kindle, Penguin Press, 2010. Prologue] We do not have a consensus on the definition of the best public health outcome or goal for the citizens of the United States.

Unless we know what moral result we want to achieve, how can we expect to design and promote the means to get there? It is time to change the discussion.

Sherfdog

Get Your Act Together, Congress

2011-04-01T01:24:00.000-07:00

Dear Readers,
I sent the following letter to Senators Boxer and Feinstein and Representative Darrell Issa (R-49). I really resent the closed door, last minute manner of coming up with a "sellable" budget. Why do we have to cut anything just to extend it? I want Nancy Pelosi back. I want President Obama to act like a Democrat, not as a Conciliator. I want to win the latest Publishers Clearing House grand prize. I want all of my family and friends to live in contentment, comfort and beauty.
Sherfdog

To My Elected Representation in Congress:

I am sick and tired of the lack of consideration by Congress of my needs and opinions during this week’s haggling over the temporary funding legislation. Pass the damn legislation without those $61 billion cuts, then make sure the next temporary funding bill includes the revenue side (Taxes) not just spending.

For the past four decades, the Democrats have claimed their share of discretionary expenditures in the form of “Entitlements” and the Republicans claimed “Defense and some Treasury” as exempt from the discretionary budget. As far as I can recall, the only time there was a bi-partisan reduction in the “Entitlements” segment occurred in the 1994 reform of several welfare programs under President Clinton. From 2001-2009, $1 trillion was appropriated with almost total bi-partisan support as additional or “emergency” appropriations for Defense and Homeland Security and yearly operating budgets followed the usual partisan process.

Since 2008, annual budgets under the Obama Administration have incorporated the heretofore “emergency” appropriations into the annual budget process. As I see it, the increment to the Defense and Homeland Security budget proposals were brought to Congress as part of a sacrosanct whole and the resultant budget deficit has fallen completely on the sacrosanct Entitlement program budget proposals to solve.

Until the annual “Guns versus Butter” proposals reach a parity that we, the electorate, can endorse, you need to work with deficits and surpluses in responsible ways--some years you have to borrow and sometimes you pay down debt more rapidly.

Sincerely yours,

I Thought I Voted for Change. . .

2011-02-21T13:16:00.000-08:00

I voted for change in a number of foreign policy directions of the US government back in 2008. My vote must have been lost or just ignored.

To give voice to my plaint, I shall dare to touch the third rail of US foreign policy since 1967: unwavering, international political, financial and military support for Israel regardless of the issue. This weekend, the UN Security Council voted to forbid Israel from building new settlements in Occupied Territory and to withdraw from previously seized land and buildings on the West Bank. The vote was 14 to 1 and, because the US is a charter member, the "no" vote by Ambassador Rice defeated the measure. Had the Security Council passed the measure, the United Nations would have become obligated to enforce it. Despite the fact that acquiring occupied territory and forcing the displacement of conquered populations is already against international law, UN procedures require a Security Council vote to act with UN resources.

Secretary Clinton and President Obama have expressed displeasure with the Israeli government's continual expansion of Israeli settlements for laying claim to Palestinian territory. Once, as I recall, Israel put a halt on new construction because of American complaints. Not this time. It appears to me that Vice President Biden, a fiercely loyal and vociferous supporter of anything Israeli, won the day when Clinton and Obama discussed the UN vote with him. I find it ironic that George Bush and Dick Cheney decided early on that paying attention to the Israelis and Palestinians really didn't matter in the larger scope of Middle East politics and so they ignored the 50+ year conflict.

The mass media and the American public seem to have forgotten Arial Sharon's prophetic dictum on building the State of Israel with new settlements and controlling the infrastructure in the West Bank. "Facts on the ground." To date, only internal political pressure within Israel has caused settlements to be closed and the Gaza region to regain some political autonomy from Israeli occupation.

I admired the way the newly inaugurated President Obama went to Cairo in 2009 and spoke in rational terms about his Administration's intended relationship with the nations of the Middle East and North Africa. He spoke as if Christians and Muslims were equally and validly religious. He said he would withdraw combat [viz., occupation] forces from Iraq by 2011, but that he would pursue Al Qaeda terrorists throughout the region and the world. The speech was well-formed and conciliatory. Since then, Secretary Clinton, Special Envoy Holbrooke and General Petraus have pursued a behind-the-scenes diplomacy of encouraging stability and of more reasoned actions by that region's governments. Uncertainty about Pakistan and Afghan political predictability consumed most of the public discourse in the US media and Administration speeches. I still believe that Pakistan remains the greatest threat to the Pax Americana. Another threat would be any involvement of Al-Qaeda in the piracy operations in the Indian Ocean and Coastal Africa.

Then last month, the governments of Tunisia and Egypt fell and street demonstrations in Yemen, Jordan, Syria, Bahrain and Libya revealed significant, popular dissatisfaction with their governments.

Several policy wags in Washington declared that President Obama was blind-sided by these very important developments within our regional allies. Initial Egyptian reports from US media concluded that the success of Tunisia's ousting of its president caused a spontaneous uprising of the people in Egypt and chat our major concern was a Muslim Brotherhood takeover. Fortunately, news from Cairo came via Al-Jazeera after Western reporters were harassed into hiding by pro-regime operatives. [This was change: at one time the Bush Administration had designated Al-Jazeera a terrorist organization! Now, it is a respected news organization.] I watched as many as possible of Al-Jazeera’s broadcasts on FreeSpeechTV. They provided additional programming about the history of the Egyptian resistance movement and, guess what, the "spontaneous" uprising's organizers had begun planning it nine years ago. Al-Jazeera's contextual reporting was not picked up by CNN. To me, though, the long-term planning and training by anti-Mubarak groups could not have gone on without the knowledge of US Intelligence. I believe President Obama received good advice from his staff and concluded that US direct intervention would be neither wise nor necessary.

However, this weekend's vote in the Security Council and the US veto signaled "no change" in US policy re the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Didn't anyone learn the radical message delivered by the horrific attacks of 9/11? Until the US begins to treat the Israelis and Palestinians as equal entities, each with valid if conflicting objectives and wounds, there will be the same, underlying cause of emotional and visceral disdain of the US government's Middle Eastern political goals among the people in the Middle East. Almost all reasoning has disappeared from US policy; unquestioning support of Israel is intuitively good--even when our policy causes the 9/11 mentality among radical terrorists aiming to attack the US, its real and perceived allies, and American citizens abroad.

The governments of Jordan and Yemen have initiated internal talks about making their respective governmental processes more inclusive. Predictably, Syria, Bahrain and Libya responded with armed suppression of dissent. Saudi Arabia’s population has a large, immigrant faction but they do not vote and can be expelled easily. In Iran, another area of knee-jerk punditry on American television, its internal political pendulum appears to be moving back toward the mullahs. The zealot civilian government has failed to keep the mullahs’ support and Iran’s middle class is demonstrating for a regime change there. Because Iranians are not Semitic, any interference by Iran into the Arab countries’ internal politics would be tolerated only in the short-run, because the predominant Islamic sect among the Arabs of North Africa and the Middle East is Sunni.

Milton, You Left Your Pétard Behind

2011-01-24T17:20:00.000-08:00

Macro-economics. Boo! Hoowey!

When I was an undergraduate majoring in economics at the University of Michigan, our economics faculty was in full academic combat with the faculty at the University of Chicago. We were Keynsians; they were Monetarists. Milton Friedman was in his academic prime in Chicago preaching the errors of FDR's fiscal reforms of the New Deal.

Of course, it did not help matters that my macro lecture was at 1:00, right after lunch. The long gone Waterman Gym had been converted to classroom use for the Economics Department. The heating system was steam, so the inside humidity was quite high and, typically Midwestern, so were the thermostat settings. In winter, wearing galoshes, long underwear, parkas and scarves kept me from freezing to death walking to and from campus and between classes. Poor macro-economics could not stimulate me sufficiently to overcome the enveloping warmth of the room, my clothes and my full stomach.

All of these elements conspired to provide me with some very good sleep during class. You know it's a losing battle when you fall asleep while the professor is answering your question. Well, he wanted to be back in Washington anyway as the President's economic advisor, his prior job, and he could have cared less about teaching macro-economics to undergraduates.

I think the academic, macro-economists should confine themselves to theoretical issues and not try to invent and impose an applied field of macro-economics. Unfortunately, it seems that the Federal Reserve Board and its staff, plus members of the Treasury Department are infected with monetary theory and have been trying for the last three decades to apply macro-economic assumptions and theory to policy options of federal fiscal actions that direct our domestic economy.

Macro-economics, which considers national financial debits and credits, never appealed much to me. It was too theoretical, much like the state of political science academics was and remains. To my spongy mind, discussions and theories about the economy's demand graph versus the supply side of the national equation were about the wrong things.

For me, micro-economics deals with the elements of budgeting, measuring and commercial effects on our society from the bottom up. I think that good fiscal policy comes from micro-economic forces that look to macro-economic factors for assistance and trend analysis, but macro-economist conclusions are inappropriate for setting the limits of national fiscal policy.

"Supply Side" economics under President Reagan had its roots in Friedman's ideology and his fertilizer that produced the neo-conservative financial policies of the 1980s until today. Let me just say at this point that I still fail to comprehend global economic forces, especially in contemporary debates about reserve currencies, current accounts and short-term infusions of cash by the IMF. Congress seems to view our economic situation as either fodder for intervention or as fields better left fallow.

The Treasury Department and the Fed Chairman are talking about the options and determinants for legislation and governance using macro-economic theories and Congress has the perspective of the other economic theories that are more relevant to micro-economics. Same terms, words used in testimony and proposals for action, yet very different meanings that vary according to where one sits. No wonder Congress becomes impatient or defiant when the Treasury or the Fed takes actions that make little sense or have little timely effect on the day-to-day issues of our economy and the needs it entails for individuals.

For those of you who want to explore these topics, keep in mind the importance of "Bretton Woods," currency value tied to sterling or gold, and the contentious topic of a establishing an SRC, Single Reserve Currency, derived from the U.S. dollar, the euro, the British pound, and the Chinese yuan. These issues were discussed at the recent G20 meeting in Seoul, without resolution. Small wonder.

My Current Reading List and the "Seven Circles of European History"

2011-01-24T16:21:00.000-08:00

Hasn't January just flown by? I have been reading a lot, because I am avoiding national politics on the major networks. I should also mention that I received a Kindle for Christmas. I love my Kindle! I especially like the ability to sample books before buying; all three samples resulted in not buying any of them. However, I have two ongoing books on Kindle. The price is right, though not as reasonable as is the Murrieta Public Library.

I find the Kindle to be very handy when taking my car in for service or for waiting room reading at the doctor's office. It is so convenient, especially with a case that has a stand in its cover. It's great for reading at Denny's or another restaurant if eating by myself. It is less noticeable than having a laptop beside your salad plate and it allows me to use both hands for eating. I'm not able to use the iPad to its full advantage plus I hope that its price will come down to an affordable one.

My first book (on Kindle) is a newly published biography of Theodore Roosevelt's life after office: Colonel Roosevelt by Edmund Morris. William Howard Taft is President (1910-1914). In 1912, Roosevelt travels through Central Africa then down the Nile through Sudan and Egypt to Cairo. Animal lovers may want to skip that section of the book. Roosevelt was famous for his hunting expertise. From Cairo he travels to Italy with his wife and daughters. This portion is a very interesting glimpse into the high society and politics just prior to the outbreak of World War I. The rest of the book is about Roosevelt, the Republican Party Progressives and his break with the Republican Party for the 1914 Presidential election. This biography, so far, is a reminder that if we forget or do not learn from history, we are bound to repeat it.

The second book is a mystery/thriller by Dan Fesperman, The Arms Maker of Berlin. I have just started it, so no review as yet. It reads well.

The internet technology brings several sources of news and commentary of a myriad of subjects. One, in particular, "the Eurozine" is great for learning what is being written in Europe, from the perspectives of several journals. It has links to full articles of interest, plus it may include a longer article separate from the abstracts. It's free, too.

In its December 20, 2010, edition, there is an excellent treatise on migration, immigration, past sins and memories that affect European countries today: "Seven Circles of European History", an excerpt from the Introduction to Ein Schlachtfeld wird besichtigt. Der Kampf um die europäische Erinnerung [A Battlefield is Surveyed. The Struggle over European Memory], to be published in 2011, by C. H. Beck, Munich.

Mr. Beck's writing is devoid of American perspective, although our country's role is interwoven among his descriptions and analyses of European history. I am not sure why he uses the paradigm of Dante's seven circles of Hell. I think the historians among you will enjoy it as well.

Beck omits one part of European history that we in America experienced with great effect on our nation's development. There is no mention of the millions of Europeans who emigrated to America in the 19th and 20th Centuries. The reduced populations in European countries must have fared very differently than had this huge migration not occurred. The Irish were starving and the English government could not feed them; poverty in other countries caused many to emigrate; and the religious minorities and persecuted religious communities such as German and Russian Anabaptists [Amish, Mennonite, Brethren], separatist sects from major Protestant religions, and those who were persecuted or suffered from not belonging to the state religions in Europe. America and American democracy evolved from including immigrants into the whole of society.

It seems to me that the European democracies are just learning the demographic and political imperative to learn the difference between statehood as cultural and historical, social homogeneity and statehood as inclusive, political and cultural community. This article explains some major hurdles European Union and individual states now face.

Tucson Reactions

2011-01-12T23:00:00.000-08:00

Tonight our President spoke to the Arizona tragedy and to the sense of loss and confusion that follows acts of violence to the survivors and to those who empathize with them. Before his speech, CNN and other television news broadcasters were billing the President's speech as "his Clinton moment" and often led off their punditry with the question: "Is Obama up to the task?" Such presumptuous bilboarding gives one true insight into the purpose and bias of commercial television whether broadcast or cable. Greed and pride catering to potential viewers' prideful biases. No such billboard ads preceded George W. Bush's speech to the nation following 9/11, yet his prowess for oratory had been mocked prior to and subsequent to his election in 2000. Why do this to Obama? I am not going to attempt an answer; rather, to suggest you derive your own conclusions.

For equal consideration, I thought it might be interesting to you to see two video clips one of which you may have seen, but most likely not both.

Video of Sarah Palin's statement on the Tucson killings:

Sarah Palin: "America's Enduring Strength" from Sarah Palin on Vimeo.

What is your reaction to Palin's statement? Now, compare it to Jon Stewart's statement on Monday, January 10, 2011:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Arizona Shootings Reaction

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Daily Show Full Episodes

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I wish more people would listen to Jon Stewart's comments. His eloquent words on action and verbiage is remarkable, in my opinion. There is a theme going through the business leader education forums and other venues encouraging initiative and action. Observe-React-Learn or Think-Act-Redesign and so forth. These mottos intend to break through "groupthink" and killing of ideas by committees and bureaucracy. If such an approach empowers individuals to think creatively within an organization or empowers an individual to take common sense action in an emergency, I say "Great!" I would hope that there is more substance to such promotional programs that provides the skills needed in action and reflection. Some people seem to begin talking before engaging their brain's gears. Others think out loud regardless of time, place or appropriateness. I and those reading this post have the luxury of being able to see, to think about and to learn from such tragedies.

For those who pray or meditate, consider using the front page or screen of a daily newspaper or source as a basis for directing your thoughts. For instance, as a result of the assassination attempt in Tucson, the family of the would-be assassin have lost a son, a cousin, a brother, too. Imaging having to bear that loss with having to live in public as related to the murderer--however motivated. Think about everyone, not just the victims, during your reflections. I believe we can learn from this approach, too.

Cruel and [Un]usual Punishment in Mississippi

2010-12-31T01:53:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, The New York Times published a news article about two sisters in Mississippi. Gladys and Jamie Scott were convicted of armed robbery in 1994 and each was sentenced to life imprisonment. They will be eligible for parole in 2024. Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R) announced that he was suspending their sentences "because they no longer pose a threat to society. . . ." Plaudits for the governor? Here are some of the reported, disturbing details of this supposedly humanitarian gesture by Gov. Barbour.

The Scott sisters were convicted, though there is conflicting evidence about their guilt, for a theft of $11.00. Eleven dollars! For this a judge sentenced them to life imprisonment!!

Article 8 of The Constitution states: "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted."

Gov. Barbour suspended the sisters' imprisonment contingent upon Gladys Scott donating one of her kidneys to Jamie Scott, currently receiving dialysis and ill.

Gov. Barbour, in addition to declaring the sisters no longer a threat to society, said his action was due to the high cost of the state's providing health care for Jamie Scott.

Under federal law, according to a Medicare representative contacted by the Times, the sisters qualify for Medicaid, so the state would not have to fund their health care.

The original article can be found at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/31/us/31sisters.html?_r=1&hpw

I am outraged. First, I think that a life sentenced for an $11.00 armed robbery represents a punishment so out of proportion to the crime that it should have been and still is a cruel and unusual punishment. I also think that racism pollutes this entire situation, from 1994 to now. I cannot understand why this injustice did not make national news in 1994. The women claim innocence and maintain the court did not consider a post-conviction appeal with exculpatory evidence. Even if they were guilty, the punishment does not fit the crime. If they were innocent, then the Mississippi state court needs to be investigated for a miscarriage of justice. Why weren't the sisters pardoned unconditionally or their sentences rescinded? Would the sisters be jailed to complete their original sentences if Gladys refuses or could not be a kidney donor for her sister? There are other blood relatives, including children, who could be candidates. After all, their sentences are only suspended on a unique condition. Stuff like this makes my blood boil.

There is another indication that racism played a part in this case. The victims were two Black men. If the victims had been White, would the women and the others involved ever lived to see a trial? Was the crime less dire because it was Black-on-Black crime and thus did not matter as much? How many white prisoners received comparable sentences and how many are still incarcerated in Mississippi jails? Call me cynical.

I also cannot believe the governor's justifying of his action on the cost to the state of Jamie Scott's medical treatments. Perhaps prisoners are not eligible for Medicare or Medicaid benefits, but I doubt it. If Mississippi is not billing Medicare and Medicaid for health care costs of its prisoners, they have a bigger problem than Ms. Scott. Further, I wonder if she was diabetic prior to being in prison and forced to survive on prison food. What would Linsey Lohan do? The cost issue is a political red herring.

I think this sad story reveals the continuing overt racism against African Americans in Mississippi. Just last week, the same Haley Barbour praised the Citizens Committees that effectively kept Jim Crow politics and police tactics alive in that state throughout the last century. How can the citizens of Mississippi tolerate the governor's actions?

Do we have to go back to the tactics of the 1950s and 1960s to root out continuing racism in America?

So far, our national press has been asleep or is pretending sleep on this issue. Is racism becoming more tolerated again or do too many people forget about or weren't taught about the history of racism in America?

DADT and Repeal Legislation

2010-12-21T00:33:00.000-08:00

Last Saturday, December 19, 2010, Congress completed its legislation to repeal prior legislation [1950. 1993] that prohibited homosexual individuals from serving in the U. S. military services. Saturday's action by the Senate repealed a law and effectively does away with DADT. I want to share some of my learning about DADT and my own opinions and conclusions drawn.

I knew President Clinton's directive establishing DADT in 1993 was not law, so I have been wondering why Congress was involved in its repeal at all. I also knew President Obama could have revoked DADT on January 22, 2008, and his failure to do so seemed like yet another betrayal of his campaign promises. For a definitive explanation of Presidential and Congressional roles, I recommend reading a blog entry about how the media and gay lobbyists have confused the public about process. http://www.themediaprose.com/blog/why-gays-are-wrong-on-dont-ask-dont-tell/

Now I know why Congress had to legislate before DADT could be rescinded or rendered moot.

As the referenced article points out, had President Obama simply rescinded President Clinton's directive, he would have re-criminalized a service member's homosexuality regardless of conduct or service record and restored the punishment. After I left active duty, I learned that one of my drill sergeants at Ft. Dix (way before DADT) had been sentenced to 20 years in Ft. Leavenworth Military Prison for being a homosexual and would receive a dishonorable discharge. In my view, there were sufficient, other infractions of the UCMJ to warrant the sergeant's punishment, but none were brought forward nor were any needed because the law prohibited homosexuals from being in the military. At least DADT enabled homosexual service members to be discharged with honor and, as soon as the President signs the legislation into law, any man or woman discharged under DADT can re-enlist.

None of the Congressional opponents of repeal referred to the costs incurred by the Defense Department because of DADT. In 2009, Colonel Om Prakash, USAF, wrote an essay while a student at the National War College. "It won the 2009 Secretary of Defense National Security Essay Competition." The full essay, minus illustrations or graphics, can be read at: The efficacy of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell".

The Debate Departs From Rational Discourse
As anyone who watched or listened to network or cable news and talk commentary during the past weeks knows, this repeal legislation was not a consensus item. The floor debates in the House of Representatives and the Senate were difficult for me to watch. Many of the comments made me want to take a shower to be rid of the stench and vitriol coming into my home via C-SPAN.

Much of the "debate" consisted of the same statements made against desegregating the military in 1948, against the Communist menace during the Cold War, against desegregating public schools, against opponents of the war in Viet Nam, against feminists, against Jews, against Arabs, against Muslims, against Latinos or Hispanics and against immigrants, particularly undocumented persons.

When I was in the Army from 1968-1974, I encountered every social, racial, religious and gender bias and often the violence among soldiers resulting from those biases. As a commissioned officer and unit commander, I had the job of enforcing the UCMJ, sometimes as an instructor, a plaintiff representing the Army, a witness in a trial, and as prosecutor, judge and jury in Summary Courts Martial disciplinary proceedings. From Basic Training through Officer Candidate School, we were taught most aspects of the UCMJ and the Geneva Convention. As an officer, however, I had to know the UCMJ completely. Despite the bigotry among the military, including the Chain of Command, it was clear that the UCMJ did not encourage, enforce or condone out-and out bigotry.

The UCMJ spells out the rules and boundaries of personal and professional conduct, actions not beliefs or opinions, and sets up the procedures of due process for all members of the military. Just as The Constitution has been interpreted and used to justify discrimination, segregation, dis-enfranchisement based in racial and gender biases, so has the UCMJ been cherry-picked to support a variety of opposing opinions.

Dire Predictions. Believable?
On the Web, all sorts of commentary exist on DADT and what the repeal legislation does. For a flavor of counter-arguments and negative reactions to repealing DADT, you should visit one of the blogs. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2644909/posts?page=51

I think that predictions of requiring segregated latrine and shower facilities, i.e. gay and straight men's communal facilities, is a non-issue for military personnel. After all, an estimated 65,000 gay soldiers, sailors and marines already use the existing facilities plus barracks, too.

Regarding dangers lesbians pose for the women in military service, study after study report that heterosexual rape and sexual abuse happens to a majority of women in the service, but that the hierarchy does not give these crimes the attention and prevention truly deserve. Partly, this inattention is due to under-reporting and to fear of reprisal. On the other hand, I have not seen any information about homosexual rape among men or women, yet opponents of rescinding DADT foresee uninvited sexual harassment, open sexual acts by homosexuals, lesbian rape and pedophilia jeopardizing the children of military families (though in reality a pedophile usually is heterosexual). In short, the repeal of DADT is the latest part of the gay and liberal agenda that comprises a threat to and an imminent disaster to the American way of life.

I am confident the military will get it right and probably sooner than later. For the country, however, I do not have such confidence for overcoming homophobia.

So, I leave this post with a quote from the anchorite Julian of Norwich, from Showings (c. 1413):

And so our good Lord answered to all the questions and doubts which I could raise, saying most comfortingly: I may make all things well, and I can make all things well, and I shall make all things well, and I will make all things well; and you will see yourself that every kind of thing will be well. . . .

And in these . . . words God wishes us to be enclosed in rest and in peace.

Sherfdog

Sarah Palin- Republican Icon of the American

2010-11-24T00:07:00.000-08:00

I have not heard any of my friends or family comment on Sarah Palin's new reality show on the Discovery Channel. I have seen brief portions and commend it to you. And, I think I know why Karl Rove dreamed this up for her.

I believe that Karl Rove and his cabal do not want Ms. Palin as a political candidate. They know they really made a mistake on several levels back in 2008. The biggest mistake was to shatter the unity of the Republican Party by giving a voice to a populist, reactionary group that became the Tea Party. Despite regaining majority status in the House, the Republican Party leadership knows it will have its work cut out to control the Tea Party members. The Democrats have the same though lesser problem. Another mistake was to think that Sarah Palin was astute enough to be a national level politician. Never gonna happen, so can she still be of use?

The assignment given to Republican strategists is to reconstitute the Party as it was in the 1950s. I think the Discovery Channel program, Sarah's reality show, is an effort to turn her obvious public celebrity presence into a living symbol of basic American, middle class values. An icon of the ordinary American and American family. The question is: will she take the role?

Gee 20

2010-11-23T23:46:00.000-08:00

It seems our President still wants to take care of Wall Street at the expense of an effort to create jobs. As Thom Hartmann said on his show yesterday, a vigorous domestic employment program led by the White House is not going to happen as long as Larry Summers lives within ten minutes and Tim Geitner is Treasury Secretary.

In our merchantile, globalized world of business, I fail to see how an agenda of the G20 can proceed as if international politics, U. S. foreign policy, has no place at the table. This club of presidents and prime ministers seems to feel the need to meet way too often. Ever since Greenspan and Summers came into their prominence during the 1980's and 1990's, Wall Street, Treasury and the Fed put the public spotlight on matters about international finance, national or sovereign debt, and discussions about the dollar remaining the international trade currency of reference. I think our government believes we care about the G20's agenda and how it affects America's domestic economy. The Obama Administration, like its predecessors, uses the Secretary of the Treasury as its point man. Did not the November election raise a flag that the voters are sick of government bureaucracy and decision-making about things only a tiny percentage of Americans understand? No wonder the Democrats lost so many seats. If the evening news is consumed with international trade or financial situations, and I am afraid I will be laid off soon, is it any wonder that the public feels completely left out? If Wall Street is so important, then why hasn't it created more jobs and made consumer lending easier?

I think that the Administration should step back and think real hard about what it plans to do for the next two years. I have some suggestions to offer:

1. The President should inform the Congress and the nation of the two or three domestic policy goals he plans to champion. The State of the Union speech should contain this. Also, he needs to change his style. More often, Mr. Obama seems as if he is functioning as an Arbitrator for resolving conflicts, rather than seeing himself as a leader, proponent, champion of the nation.

2. The Cabinet should have its departments reorganized to reflect modern governance. There are too many generals at the President's table, metaphorically speaking.

First, I would transfer the Trade Office from Treasury to Commerce and State. Do governments ever separate trade issues from political issues? No. So why does the U. S. Trade Representative report to the Secretary of the Treasury rather than to the Secretary of State? Isn't Commerce about business and the economy? Then Commerce should have the functions in its portfolio. Further, Commerce should have a separate office for administration of the internet, wi-fi, and other means of electronic communications. (Or, consolidate all electronic communications, infrastructure and licensing into a new Cabinet department).

Reassign offices and functional responsibilities of Labor and HHS to Commerce so one Secretary of Commerce can provide more balanced staffing as equal to the Secretaries of State and Treasury.

Streamline the Department of Defense by moving duplicate offices and functions into other departments. For instance, there is no true justification for the Army to have medical research that could be done by NIH in HHS. Cut back overseas deployment of our military for non-combat duties. Use the Navy and Air Force for first response and keep combat troops on home soil until needed.

Merge the Veterans Health Services and Tri-Care into Medicare for better coverage. The Veterans Administration can continue to operate its outpatient, specialized clinics for combat-related mental health treatment, rest and recuperate and train new veterans for re-entry into civilian society.

Merge Medicaid into Medicare. Let the states take charge of the social services eligibility and provision.

3. Finally, we should not let the media determine our priorities for government.

There, Happy Thanksgiving to All!

What is Wrong With This Picture?

2010-11-15T17:58:00.000-08:00

U S Foreign Policy:
President Obama met his July 2010 deadline for removing all combat troops from Iraq. Non-combattant military personnel remaining number slightly over 56,000 men and women. Won't this end the US occupation of Iraq?
Iraqi matters are now the responsibility of the State Department, as part of its foreign policy portfolio. By the way, WAR is an integral, unique aspect of foreign policy though in America, we charge the Department of Defense, formerly War) with conducting this violent form of foreign policy.
Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, in a recent funding request to Congress, has asked for additional monies to pay for the estimated 111,000 military/security contractors who she has decided are needed to secure US diplomatic locations throughout Iraq. During her unsuccessful campaign for the Democratic Party nomination in 2008, then-Senator Clinton (D-NY) was against the military by contract that many refer to as mercenaries. The New York Times reported on August 19, 2010, the following State Department plans for its diplomatic mission to Iraq:

To move around Iraq without United States troops, the State Department plans to acquire
60 mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles, called MRAPs, from the Pentagon; expand
its inventory of armored cars to 1,320; and create a mini-air fleet by buying three planes to
add to its lone aircraft. Its helicopter fleet, which will be piloted by contractors, will grow to
29 choppers from 17. [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/19/world/middleeast/]

Around 2004-5, contractor military personnel were earning around $100,000 per deployment. Just saying that were true, and without overhead costs, the Defense Department would have been paying $11,100,000 to Haliburton subsidiary KBR and Blackrock. None of these reports contain information about facilities construction and maintenance for the State Department's objectives.

Keeping The Constitution Up-to-Date

2010-11-15T17:54:00.000-08:00

I think there should be line-throughs within the body of the basic Constitution and Amendments 1-10 [the Bill of Rights] with references to particular, subsequent Amendments 11-24 and legal references. Legislation that the Supreme Court has ruled in conformance with the Constitution should be added to the list of formal Amendments. Readers of the Constitution should know that universal suffrage includes the content of the 1965 Voting Rights Bill as renewed and any others. By listing all legislation-based clarifications separately would enable readers to view a complete and current Constitution.

Periodic publication of an up-to-date Constitution should be the responsibility of the Library of Congress.

Neo-Con Court Activism

2010-11-15T17:53:00.000-08:00

How can NGOs raise funds for humanitarian assistance to populations within a nation that our federal government designates as "terrorist" or to a school in Iran, for example? The Supreme Court has decided that it will be illegal for an individual or organization to provide "material support" within a region, country or area that the Department of State lists as "terrorist" or "fostering terrorism."

I understand and appreciate a prohibition of giving aid and support to an enemy of the United States. Nevertheless, the list maintained by the Department of State depends on current politics and unusually broad definitions of "material support." Does a donation to an American university's endowment constitute "material support" if the faculty or students of that university have demonstrations and stated positions decrying actions by the federal government? Would SNCC, Viet Nam Veterans Against the War, Cairo University, Bir Zeit University be illegal under this recent provision? There are valid arguments and living examples to define educational institutions as the breeding grounds of terrorists. What input would the FBI have? Will this prohibition exclude domestic organizations?

The definition of 'terrorist' or 'terrorism' is not self-evident to all persons. When is a person's action defined as 'riotous', 'hooligan', 'insurgent', 'freedom-seeking' from some perspectives defined by others as 'terrorist'? Would a donation to the Fraternal Order of Police Officers of Montgomery County [a fictional name] in 1968 fall under the actions now prohibited as providing "material support" to a terrorist organization? Oh, but the police are not terrorists? Please explain why not to the Blacks of Montgomery County in 1968.

I hope this issue returns to the Congressional agenda very soon. The SCOTUS activism should receive Congressional scrutiny and revised legislation, if that is Congress' intent.

Coping with Lawyers Who Are Politicians

2010-07-12T17:36:00.000-07:00

I made another mistake this morning--yes, even I have “moments.” I turned to C-SPAN this morning during breakfast. I compounded my mistake by not changing the channel or nor turning the tv off. Four items I watched from this morning’s Senate broadcast were:

Senator Shaheen (D-New Hampshire) asked for unanimous approval of a bill that passed the House with 450 “Yea” and 1 “Nay.” The bill would enable subpoena power for the Commission investigating the BP oil assault on the coastlines and wetlands of at least three states, including the Mississippi River delta; subpoena power for access to BP’s internal records regarding that firm’s involvement [viz. responsibilities] in an ecological disaster on the Gulf of Mexico and on the economic livelihood of our country’s commercial viability; and on the very well-being of the people, land and sea animals, and the food chain they all rely upon.

The Republicans objected so the request for approval failed.

Senator Dodd (D-Illinois) made an impassioned speech asking for the passing of the Financial Reform act as passed by the Joint Conference Committee of the Senate and the House. He noted that his party had only 58 members in the Senate, just two votes short of the 60 votes required for approval in the Senate. Senator Dodd emphasized that the bill is a compromise from what almost everyone wanted included, but that the process had been unique because the press and the public had open access to the 70 hour deliberation of the Conference Committee. He spoke in the spirit of restoring the trust that Americans and the world need to have in our financial policies and risk management.

Senator Dodd hoped that the response to the prior item would not characterize the manner with which the Republicans would vote on the Conference Committee’s bill.

Senator Barrasso (R-Wyoming) rose to ask the Senate to repeal the Health Care law. He said this has been a weekly request since the law was enacted. As an orthopedic physician, he asserted that the outcome of that law would increase health care costs for small businesses and for families. His anecdotal example did not refer to rising health care costs, but to the inability of a small businessman to qualify for a $35,000 tax credit. The small businessman said he could qualify if he split his company into two companies.

The senator’s example spoke to two of my concerns: 1) that the new law will eliminate current insurance coverage by 2014 for all individuals with a Medicare Advantage plan. I have such a plan with Blue Cross that uses Medicare provisions for prescriptions and physican/hospital cost reimbursements. I pay BC no premium for this coverage; I do pay $98.50 monthly for Medicare Parts A,B, and D health insurance plus co-pays; 2) that all federal assistance programs to support individuals establilsh qualifications that require individuals to bankrupt themselves, sell all assets-including home, vehicles and retirement savings (IRA) before they can become eligible. The only exceptions appear to be Social Security, Medicare and in commerce the financial institutions. Even veterans benefits for health care services have a means test based on a veteran's financial resources be equal to the official Poverty level.

Senator Brown (R-Massachusetts) rose to chastise the Democratic members for increasing government expenditures without having the funds for them. He asked whether the Senate should use its credit card or its checking account to pay for the new federal governmental programs or for extending unemployment benefits. Notably, he did not suggest deferring some already budgeted expenditures to pay for immediate needs. Clearly, Senator Brown was foreshadowing that the Republicans will vote against extending unemployment benefits. Why would the most junior member of the Senate issue such a challenge? It is comparable to one’s seeing a large cumulus cloud far to the West and a clap of thunder with flash of lightning. Senator Brown would be the cloud, Senator McConnell would be the more dangerous sign of imminent destruction.

I would like to hear that same warning before the Senate votes on the Emergency Supplemental Funds Act to funds wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I would support moving such supplemental funds from the DoD to pay for unbudgeted unemployment insurance. Neither political party will make such a trade-off.

The most immediate actions for the federal government are 1) to contain and clean up the oil released into the Gulf of Mexico and 2) to authorize extension of unemployment benefits for the next six months. The upcoming November election will focus on “local issues” whereas the 2012 general election will address Presidential issues: 1) our foreign policy and the use of military forces around the world as part of it; 2) the National Debt and deficit spending; 3) the national health plan in operation; 4) states rights, i.e. the 10th and 14th Amendments; and 5) activist federal court judgments, as both too conservative or too liberal.

You can put into order of importance the next tier of Senate urgent actions we need:

FINANCIAL SERVICES REFORM
JOB CREATION
ADJUST SPENDING PRIORITIES within the federal departments including the Supplemental funding for the Department of Defense, the Treasury , DHHS Medicaid assistance to the states, Department of Education assistance to the states for federal program requirements, and others. Budget offsets for social programs in health care and education should use offsets from Department of Defence budgets.
WARS IN IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN - and what should we do?

These will be the core issues of the November elections for most voters. Other diverting issues may dominate campaign media away from the above: immigration reform or repeal, dependence on foreign sources of oil, Don't Ask Don't Tell (DADT), abortion funding, health care reform, unemployment, anti-incumbent voices, shrinking government, i.e. starve the federal government agency interference by reducing taxes. By diverting the campaign attention away from the core issues about which there is sufficient public knowledge and support, Republicans and blue-dog Democrats can obscure public opinion and win elections.
The "diverting issues" I list have been raised in every Congressional and Presidential election since 1976. They are really important issues, but none have resulted in significant Congressional actions in the past 34 years; why should we expect action now? Incumbents and challengers alike need to spell out their plans and proposals for resolving campaign issues. We cannot "Just Say NO!" without putting forth concrete proposals and efforts on all issues facing our country.

Sherfdog

Comments?

Rebalancing Government

2010-07-12T16:15:00.000-07:00

Recently I have considered changing the title of this blog, or beginning a new one. The reason behind all of this deep thought is my wanting to create a distance between the world of the Bush/Cheney years from the new world of Obama/Biden and beyond.

I will keep the same title for now. I had great hopes for the Obama/Biden administration after the 2008 November election. Many of my hopes vanished when Nancy Pelosi announced that the bringing of legal proceedings against the prior administration was not on the table. In addition, I find the current appellation is still relevant to the way the Obama Administration operates. This saddens me because I believe there were criminal actions for which people should be tried. Mr. Obama's approach to governing, his mode of trying to make each branch of government work as they were intended, may be the approach our country needs at this time.

Since Nixon was President, more and more power accreted to the Executive Branch and that trend culminated in the most willfull distain for our Constitutional form of government by George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condelezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld in our history. It should not surprise anyone that the public continues to look to the White House for the definitive word for solving our problems. When President Obama waits for Congress to initiate and fund actions in response to a crisis, the media and the Republicans criticize him for weakness or for failing to act. Even his senior staff seem prone to wait for word from the Oval Office before going public with their responses and actions. I write that off to the number of long-timers who occupy senior positions in the Obama Administration.

One criticism of Mr. Obama is that he has lost touch with the people who elected him. Over this past weekend, one political commentator compared Barack Obama to Franklin D. Roosevelt. The comparison to FDR did not go well for Mr. Obama. The commentator emphasized the difference between these two Presidents by playing a film clip from the 1944 funeral cortege watchers on Pennsylvania Avenue. A teary-eyed Black woman was asked by a reporter if she had known FDR. The woman replied, "No, I did not know the President, but he knew me."

He knew me. Mr. Obama has tremendous responsibilities for righting the economy, for bringing into a consensus the Democratic majority in Congress, for continuing measures to implement the Health Care Act and for embodying civilian leadership in the conduct of two wars. I doubt that anyone could make the case that Barack Obama faces more difficult tasks than did FDR. FDR, however, did not succeed in every way, such as his failure to nationalize many aspects of the economy needed to climb out of the Depression, nor did he address racial discrimination in America. His failures reflect the workings of our political dynamics of the 1930's and 1940's. So, today, Mr. Obama's failures are not symptoms of inadequacy or weakness; they reflect the interactions of the Congress, the Supreme Court and the Executive as separate, equal centers of governing power in 2010.

What Mr. Obama cannot afford to do is lose connection with the public. As a lawyer, he needs to understand his clients better. This task cannot be delegated to his lieutenants or limited to periodic town hall meetings. President Obama needs to hear from us more directly in a way that is unfiltered by administrators with their own agendas.

His clients--you and me--have to speak our minds about our concerns, too. We have to be more forthcoming in our letters, emails and phone calls to the White House, in addition to our elected Congressional members. We have to do our part for him to do better.

Sherfdog

How Not to Launch Landmark Legislation

2010-03-04T16:26:00.000-08:00

To the Progressive Democrats organized in 2008 for electing a new President, I believe that exhorting your contributing memberships could be more efficient if directed toward Congress and the Executive. The public push, by the Democratic leadership in Washington, has been for bi-partisan cooperation for "The Change" we voted for. This is my response to your continued calls for contributions and letters to Congress demanding a public option, single-payer design and other, longtime aspirations most of us have concluded are required for real reform and universal coverage.

My comments expand on or offer different perspectives than your call for Progressives to organize for influencing the bill that comes out of the Conference Committee. First, I agree with your exhorting the factions to focus on what is, not on what could have been. As you say, unless an unforeseen disaster happens, the Senate's bill will go to the Conference Committee for reconciliation with the House's bill. Despite the histerical polemics of Republicans and some bluedog Democrats, the use of reconciliation as a means for avoiding floor fights in both houses of Congress is not an unknown, devious option. A commentator on NPR reminded us that 'reconciliation' was used to pass the 1965 Medicare Act and the 1984 Contract for America, among others. When asked about the power balance within the Conference Committee between the House and the Senate, David Guerkin responded: "The Senate has more power because of its precarious majority." One day, I wish C-SPAN would broadcast those negotiations live, but I'll not hold my breath.

Furthermore, I share your frustration with the persons who make up our Democratic Party majority, and their leadership, in both Houses of Congress. I like Nancy Pelosi and her leadership style. She seems well-qualified for being second in line to succeed as President. Harry Reid does not inspire me due to his public style. Perhaps the presence of Joe Biden as President of the Senate, there might have been fewer signs or actions of dissidence or power grabbing by Joe Lieberman during the Senate debates. The Democrats could have controlled the Republicans much better, despite the Republican senators games and perhaps illuminating Republican obstinance, disingenuous use of parliamentary procedures, and unrepentant distortion facts or contrivance of falsehoods during sound bytes or said to appear as facts showed they were wrong. Using the proposed legislation in specific challenges to Republican platitudes could have educated the public about the bill's content while forcing the Republican senators to confine their remarks to relevant disagreement.

As for President Obama, he should have presented a national health system to which we should aspire as a nation. Instead, he chose during the campaign and in office to frame need for changes in America's national health care system by its faults. He chose to elicit change through blaming bad actors in the way we provide health to the nation. I think a better way would be to define for Congress and the nation his new view to what we should aspire for America's national health system. By focusing attention with a strategy of blame, the legislative efforts have been driven by the factions and their lobbyists, being blamed. First among others, are the private insurance industry who sell health care insurance for outrageously costly premiums plus limits of coverage. With a publicly known vision for America's potential in a national health system, a different approach might have been to ask private health care insurers to offer ways they could see themselves contributing to its attainment.

Another blamed group has been Big Pharma, an industry sector owned and directed by manufacturers based in Switzerland, not in the US. Has the US Trade Representative been a front line actor for reducing the costs of Big Pharma's products sold in the US, as brand or generic items? Most of the trade agreements made with countries during the Bush Administration contain agreement to purchase from US drug marketers and to restrict use of drugs that affront Evangelicals in the US.

Two other industry groups have been blamed for raising the high cost of health care: physicians fees and hospitals. Physicians are blamed for high professional fees, for unnecessary diagnostic testing and for practicing defensive medicine for fear of malpractice litigation. Hospitals are blamed for the lack of control over ever-increasing costs of their facilities, personnel and clinical equipment.

Rather than blaming the physicians for their professional fees and the hospitals for unreasonably high charges to patients, they could have been required as an entrée for participation in the focus groups to develop novel approaches given their respective roles and knowledge of new technology becoming available. The White House panels did not need to hear arguments for the status quo; there is sufficient data available to demonstrate that the status quo cannot be sustained. The status quo, the private insurer and cost passthrough approach, fails to provide health care for Americans that is universally available, affordable and of optimal outcomes. The current system does not support the public health policy goals for the United States.

Alas, the Administration and Congress are at the point wherein enacting health care financial reform will be a reconciliation process a year later than it could have been. Not all elements of the Progressive agenda will be in this bill, but major improvements in the system will happen.

What remains as the opposition's primary focus for its public statements is the funding of the estimated $970 billion additional cost in the federal budget. Here, too, I think the Administration could have proposed a different approach to funding reform. None of the new system seem to be funded by reductions in Defense Department budgets. This week Congress will approve a $700 billion Defense Department budget funding without the fiscal scrutiny that social programs receive. If fiscal conservatives are honest in their quest for a minimum goal of government spending via a zero-sum budget (i.e., same total, different uses reflecting changing requirements), then Defense Deparment funding must be included among the trade-offs needed to reach that goal.

Hey, Republicans! Try This One!

2009-12-10T22:49:00.000-08:00

Hey all you nay-saying, fumbling opponents to a single-payer health insurance system, you might have come up with your own plan, but I guess when you say you are not "pro-choice", that does mean in everything, eh. Okay, instead of being dead serious, I'll just be serious on this topic and suggest there is at least one other way to reform our national health system. Read on. . . .that means you Democratic senators who cannot commit to an position if it is right in front of your face, blocking your re-election views.

From my perspective of almost 30 years of auditing and management consulting in the patient care institutional settings, I believe that hospitals and clinics should consider a different approach to recording and accounting for patient care revenues, contractual adjustments, accounts receivables and bad debt write-offs.

The first step to change the current, ubiquitous approach for patient receivables would be to stop the Admissions practice of having the patients agree to be financially responsible for all charges related to their care. Especially because 1) most patients do not have the financial resources to pay cash or the debt access [thanks, banks!] to pay the tab, 2) the uncertainties of the upcoming changes in health care insurance from both federal and state governments, and 3) the possible continuing, arcane, cost accounting policies that differ among non-profit, governmental and for-profit insurers, to require the patient to assume an unknown financial burden seems moot, at best, bad business at worst.

The admitting institution should have full financial responsibility because it has to bring in enough revenue to cover at least its direct and indirect costs to remain in business.

Normal purchasing by individuals is a decision made by price, perceived quality of product or service, and, with services, a comprehensive knowledge of what is being bought at point of sale. Price lists would help to choose among providers. I have yet to see human health care priced to allow for the patient to decide between providers, or, once admitted, whether to incur the costs entailed in further pathology interventions available, or to expect to have tiered, treatment decisions that incorporate incremental costs that may be chargeable to the patient as part of the often available consent discussions presented to patients prior to various treatment protocols. [As a side note, I doubt whether patients have the information and knowledge to make an informed, conscious decision whether to agree or not to agree to the content of existing, informed consent forms.]

The other health care system in the US is veterinary practice. I know when I take my dog to his veterinary clinic how much an office visit, a procedure and, if needed, boarding, will cost--barring unforeseen issues. I also have opportunities to decide whether to put my pet through a procedure because of possible quality of life effects as well as because of price. We could argue about the difference in the emotional environment of such a decision, but how many patients are willing to bankrupt their families to live a few months more? *

I believe that hospitals and clinics should bill their costs of treatment and care plus all other charges from physicians, pharmacy, ancillary and others) directly to whatever insurance entity is applicable to a given patient and to whichever research grant or beneficiary fund is appropriate, if appropriate. Further, any billing sent to the patient should be net of any contractual allowances and other write-downs the institution makes. Such a procedure could result in the patient receiving one bill for the entire care and treatment services (including any ED, physician professional fees, ancillary charges and pharmacy) for illustration sake, of $5,000 instead of $190,000. The patient would receive one bill, from the hospital only. The hospital would be responsible for remitting professional fees that now are billed separately to the patient.

The hospital would receive revenue for all costs incurred during the particular patient's care and treatment while in the hospital, net of professional fees for physicians. The patient would be able to compare posted prices to billed prices in a clearer, more understandable manner. The billing institution would have the option of initiating the patient billing concurrent with billing insurers and others, thereby speeding the time between billing and receiving payments--or with establishing a specific accounts receivable amount and payment program with the patient. The billing institution would have to bear the amount of net revenue and could have a more timely balance sheet for operating management.

Such a divergent change from long established pricing and billing procedures could reap additional benefits if hospitals published price lists. A clearer, more transparent competitive market would enable patient and referring physician to make more informed decisions about appropriate providers offering various, more intensive options for treatment and care.

My point is radical, yet if we in the US are serious about offering the best care for the market-bearing prices, it would be easier to have a single biller and still remain a privately financed, national health care system. There will always be a need for a publicly fund for health care, but no one wants to offer a single biller structure for institutional care as aviable alternative to the moral benefits of a single payer structure for our nation's health care system.

* Since our relationship with our pets is custodial or of stewardship, the ethical imperative for me is to minimize my pet's exposure to pain and suffering, if there were no realistic potential for recovery. My dog has not spoken to me in years, but I can tell when he is in pain and that he would want never to have to go out in the rain again, if possible. I do equate human choice about humans with the choice humans make for animals who are dependent on us humans for the quality of their lives. It's in the Bible. ( "God entrusted animals to the stewardship of those whom God created in God's own image." n. 2417, ref. Gn 1:26)

Bottoms Up! Revisited

2009-11-01T19:57:00.000-08:00

[Please note: This is a revision of an earlier posting in November 2009 due to comments I received from one of my cousins with years of family farm experience. Thanks, Mike.]

It is time for some solutions, practical ones that can help the majority of Americans now. First, we need a tax deduction for interest and fees charged by the banks for our credit purchases. Second, we need small business enterprise regions supporting the restoration of local merchants and services to boost local employment. Third, we need to create much smaller, fully funded, family farms to produce the food we eat locally, not as determined by an international agricultural conglomerate.

How do we do it?

A Tax Cut. As a temporary boost to taxpayers' net income, Congress should approve an additional tax deduction on their tax returns, beginning with 2009 IRS rules, for 45 percent of money spent on credit card interest rates and fees. For me, that would be the minimum level for deduction. This approach would allow consumers to manage their retail debts within the stagnant income levels most have. Further, it would lessen the depletion of personal savings just to pay bills and income taxes. The loss in tax revenues should be funded by unallocated Stimulus Funds or from recovered TARP loans. Such a deduction would benefit the largest number of taxpayers this year. Congress might want to have a defined period for this deduction, but in the meantime there will be help for those not seeing any benefit from the trickle down approach of the Wall Street bailout.
Small business enterprise regions, rather than zones. In the just recently passed legislation for small business administration, there was no requirement for applicants to provide business plans for assessment by the Administrator. Perhaps individual Administrators would require such documentation, but it should be a universal requirement following FASB accounting principles. The business plan should include all years for which federal funds are borrowed and repaid. Thus, a one-year business proposal will not suffice if the purpose is to rebuild the small business portion of our economy. There also were no provisions for standardized audits of borrowers under this plan. The GAO lacks the resources, just as do most federal audit agencies. Each region should have enough independent, financial and operations auditors to periodically assess the user of borrowed federal funds for the Administrators. Optimal use of SCORE volunteer consultants could help many small businesses to succeed.
Rebuild the family farm infrastructure for domestic food needs. With the implementation of corporate agricultural combinations and NAFTA, the small family farmer industry has been decimated. Using Stimulus Funds, regional Administrators should establish requirements for lending federal funds to small farm applicants. As with the small business loans, each applicant should have to provide business plan covering the years that include federal funds. For the purpose of this federal action, a small farm cannot exceed two sections in size and with no restrictions on the number of farmers included in that limit. [Note: 1 section = 1 sq. mile = 640 acres] In the US, a township measures 36 sections. The intent for these small farms would be to provide local produce, meat and produce for local retail grocers, especially near major urban centers. The corporate agriculture companies can focus on exports and packaging. The funding process would extend for a year: upon receipt of an eligible application and business plan, a Regional Administrator would grant the applicant the prospective year's capital and operating expenses and family support income to establish a sustainable farm business. In Year Two, the Regional Administrator would evaluate the grantee's family farm business and offer recommendations for improvements or for additional grant funds if the initial grant could not succeed due to natural disasters, including storm damage, floods, infection of crops. If the recipient of a full grant for establishing and maintaining a family farm business fails, then the Regional Director will oversee the sale of grantee assets to another applicant.

Sherfdog

Who Should Be Billed for Healthcare Received?

2009-10-30T16:01:00.000-07:00

Despite all of the maneuvering and deal makinng going on in the House and Senate, I am still promoting a Medicare for all baseline from which individuals and employers/unions can buy group policy offerings that would be a. in addition to Medicare's services or b. as a competitive option for those who want to opt out of Medicare. So, I'm sending this message to members of Congress:

1) Congress should pass legislation to change the Medicare eligibility to include every US citizen, even those still in the womb, and the non-citizen, legal residents.

2) Congress should pass legislation to remove Medicare Part D's restriction against negotiating prices for prescription medication. The government/tax payers should get the lowest prices simply because it is government procurement.

3) Congress must require providers to identify the insurance company payer and not the patient for all financial responsibility. This change would eliminate the dual accounts receivable for each provider whether for inpatient or outpatient care.

I believe that now is the time to let our representatives and senators what we really want as a health care reform bill. The most important message to send is your opinion on the form of a public plan, such as Medicare for All, an insurance company co-operative pool. or no public option. Deals are being made but they will vanish if we weigh in on the elements we really want.

Focus, Focus, Focus! Politicians Do Not Want Reform. . .

2009-09-26T01:08:00.000-07:00

This is why it is so tough to change health care in America: no one who makes money in the present system will support any change. Ka-ching. It seems some senators wanted to revisit the $86 billion "deal" President Obama made with BigPharma to lower the cost of prescription pharmaceuticals to Medicare or to the public-option plan, I forget which. Such a deal. That's like asking BigPharma to take a 10 percent price cut for selling to the largest market it has. I presume that BigPharma decided that what it lost in pricing, it would make up in the increased volume when everyone would be forced to buy medical care insurance. I would conclude that BigPharma knows its game better than the Administration. The very idea that a government-funded program would negotiate the lowest prices available, why that's absurd! Why should taxpayers cheat private industry out of their profits?

You're right it is absurd! Here is an excerpt from FiercePharma, an industry blog today, Tracy Staton wrote:

You'll recall that Democratic senators backed an amendment to require bigger discounts on drugs for low-income folks on Medicare. Early estimates said it would have cost drugmakers $86 billion. Another provision would have closed the medicare doughnut hole, bringing the cost up to more than $100 billion over 10 years. Proponents, including Sen. Charles Schumer and Sen. Bill Nelson, said they weren't party to the $80 billion industry deal.

Opponents voted the measure down for a variety of reasons: Some Democrats said they wanted to stand by the promise made to PhRMA, saying "a deal's a deal." Republicans such as Sen. Charles Grassley called the mandatory rebates "price controls" and said they'd end up raising drug prices for private patients.

We wonder whether any of them thought about the millions and millions of dollars PhRMA has promised to spend on advertising in support of healthcare reform. They were certainly aware of the fact that drugmakers would be angry. Delaware Sen. Thomas Carper (D) said extracting more money from drugmakers would cause a backlash from the industry: "I know I would walk away" from supporting healthcare reform, he said.

Thomas Carper, the senior senator from Delaware, a close friend of Joe Biden, the Vice President whose pledged to carry out an agenda of health care reform, waffles on his support for the Administration's agenda. Someone else, perhaps Senator Dianne Feinstein, must have voted with the Republicans on defeating the Shumer/Nelson Amendment.

What happened to the Democratic Party on the day it clinched its 60-member majority of the Senate that could allow this to happen. What "backlash" could come from the industry, one wonders. We, the American people, are the biggest customer BigPharma has. It is about time that Democrats acted like they control the Senate. Do it, dammit, and then make it work.

Pass legislation that provides a Medicare for All health care system, discontinue Medicaid, and get on with it. Geesh! Between 65 and 70 percent of the voters--who, by the way, elected you to your jobs, say they want a public option. What could be simpler than providing Medicare for All, negotiated prices that Medicare pays for medications as it has always negotiated prices for professional fees and inpatient care, and let the insurance industry adapt to its changed market mix.

Do it, Congress! Do it, Democrats!

What's It All About, Barry, Really?

2009-09-21T17:40:00.000-07:00

This health care reform thing--what's it all about, Mr. President, Madam Speaker and President of the Senate? Why are people tearing at each other, breaking up friendships, losing any sense of decorum and civility in public meetings, let alone on the Internet?

I always think about health care reform in America in terms of ways to improve the overall health of our citizens. Why are we not looking at ways to improve the survival of new born babies? How can we avoid or eradicate or cure most cancers, human immune virus contagion and influenza? Why do we tolerate hospitals and clinics where we are more at risk for an infection than not?

The current efforts are addressing a system of private insurance company viability as businesses that grew from the 1965 introduction of Medicare and then Medicaid. We now have a health care system dependent upon the goals of private, commercial financial results--which is a sociological, economic and political realm. Please, read Adam Smith's second volume about community and capitalism. Do the proposed reforms address community needs and expectations of living a full life despite disease and trauma? Where is the profit in educating children and adults about how to live a healthy life so as to minimize the care needs provided by these same, commercial entities?

We need to reform the paradigm of societal expectations and norms regarding how we individually and in our community expect for living healthy lives, beginning with considering physicians, hospitals and clinics as working for us.

We hire them or check-in to a hospital because we believe that this or that is where we find help and answers about living as best we can.

My priority is to find out what I don't already know, especially when the timing of treatment and period of care are unknown. I like to know what is going to happen in my life when there are other people involved in determining my situation and my future.

I have had to seek emergency assistance when I sliced deeply into one of my fingers while preparing a meal. I cannot stop it from bleeding. I do not need an admission process that requires my entire life health history. I want my wound treated, not to sign away my financial future or absolve the Emergency Room from liability for any mistakes or accidents.

My health care is being diminished for the lack of a single-payer system. I still bleed while my insurance is validated. I need someone to stop the bleeding and to stitch up the wound on my finger. That's all. With the admissions process having to ensure my treatment will be paid for and waiting for a physician to approve treatment so I can wait for someone to treat me, I spent hours for a 15-minute treatment. Then, later came the bills, invoices that are addressed to me, even though my insurance will pay them.

The current efforts by Congress and the White House is to legislate a process that does not have a health care goal or public expectation about health care in America. The goal of the Congress and the Administration focuses on the HOW and BY WHOM actions to attain a political goal that is so broadly stated in three words: Health Care Reform.

Other developed countries think about health and health care and their national programs' primary purpose is to meet the expectations of the people who live there. That purpose comes first and, though different countries have different means to meet those expectations, the health of the populace, individuals drive the means and the resources of the governments, the health care professionals result from the legislative process and public participation.

What do we Americans want? Seventy percent of us, according to published polls, want a single-payer system as an entitlement of citizenship and resident non-citizens. We declared our nation's independence to enable us to pursue unalienable [sic.] rights to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. We should be healthier for this goal. We have failed as a nation to remain true to the attainment of those Rights.

My Reasons for Wanting a National Health Service for All

2009-09-19T16:00:00.000-07:00

I have had to import medication from Canada because it was more affordable a few years back, I have too much money in my remaining IRA investments intended for retirement, accordingly, I have been spending down those IRA savings to afford my living expenses and health care expenses since 1991. I cannot access my veterans benefits nor can I receive coverage under Medicaid because of their means tests. And others have worse challenges than I have. How many parents discover that their child must wait two years for Medicare eligibility if, God forbid, their child develops an immune system disease or has brain damage from meningitis? The parents' private insurance coverage may alter or cancel their family's health insurance and, assuming there is an income-producing person in the household, the parents cannot afford the necessary health care costs until Medicare enrolls the child. The child would be eligible for disability income if they meet the criteria established by Social Security. Someone with lupus, for example, can work, live normally or a little slower and with greater fatigue, yet any physician office visit charges, lab charges and medication charges have to be paid by the afflicted person in addition to housing, food, utilities, cell phones, Internet access costs of daily living. Suddenly the afflicted person, before Medicare coverage, has new claims on the paycheck that may amount to more than the take-home pay for the month.

Often, I should note, the providers will have a sliding scale fee structure so a person without health car coverage should ask the physician or lab or pharmacist about such arrangements. They do not want to charge full rates if they see that they will not be paid anything. So, we ask for financial arrangement that help, but still may overwhelm one's budget.

It seems that every federal program for the good of Americans, including veterans health care, requires the recipient to be impoverished. Find me one that does not- for health care. Try living on the SSDI stipends for shelter, food, transportation and miscellaneous expenses of living. Because I am single, my net $1,700 monthly SSDI income puts be above the poverty level.

I know the health care system very well, because of my executive role for a major university medical center, research laboratories, patient care in two hospitals, administrative process and budgeting, and construction of new laboratories or hospitals or upgrading facilities in place. I led the office that evaluated those operations for 12 years, until I could not handle the stress of my job mentally or physically. Is it not ironic that I cannot make a living from providing guidance and opinion, because my PTSD of institutional politics and my inability to reconcile political and reality perspectives do not allow for full-time employment. You see, my disability prevents me from focusing on a subject or tasks of a job for more than two hours after which I must disengage completely from work type situations and discussions. My former employer, Stanford University, went psychiatrist hunting to avoid paying me any disability income and access to other benefits,even though their first psychiatrist and my psychiatrist validated the nature and effects of my disability. It was several years before I could even think about taking the institutional and legal steps to restore them. I would have difficulty today, psychologically, making the effort to claim disability benefits to which I was entitled as an employee.

I have two more years to go before I will have depleted my IRA that had been created to supplement my pension income from an employer. I was not able to work long enough to generate any pensions, so I will become entirely dependent on government programs for life and pursuit of happiness. There should have been a point after which my IRA did not have to be used for health care related expenses. For me, a national health service with a single payer, would have enabled me to remain in my home and lead a decent, middle class life without having to access any future government programs. My paying out-of-pocket my entire investment portfolio value cash in distributions could have been avoided had we had a national health service for everyone, regardless of income, assets, job, etc. In retrospect, what I should have done is go to France or Italy in 1993, after being enrolled in Medicare A and B, and used my Social Security and Medicare benefits as my contribution to their national health systems. We have bi-lateral treaties with other countries that enable such exchanges, depending on the country where you pay income taxes.

My own health suffered from trying to do too much and the cost of ongoing psychotherapy and associated medications were depleting my IRA at a rate higher than my rent. Another trip to Italy, using the points awarded from charging so much medicine costs, convinced me there was a better way to live, a way without worrying about going broke paying for health care while living on my SSDI for all other living costs. What delayed my obtaining the visas was gathering the required paperwork and submitting my application. What takes most people an hour or two on the phone or filling out forms with accompanying support documents, takes me weeks and months to do. This post has already consumed ten hours today and additional hours of editing just to arrive at this draft.

Now, I may not have sufficient financial resources to move to Italy which still has a much better approach to health care than does the country of my birth and that I defended.

Until a single-payer, like Medicare for all, demonstrates that this country puts the health of its citizens before the profits of private insurance companies and the pharmaceutical manufacturers, I don't see myself as letting go of this issue and my anger.

Ed

2009-09-12T21:41:00.000-07:00

On August 30, 2009, Edward R. Kuhn, DMD, ended his life early in the day, using the semi-automatic rifle he had at home because he had been a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force Active Reserves. I received a call from a mutual friend about four hours later. Neither of could say anything; we were in shock. Marion said he would pick up Ed's daughter at LAX along with his own son and drive them to Palm Springs. Later that afternoon I called Ed's wife and when her cousin answered the phone, I asked her to relay my deepest sympathies to her. I had to go to Palm Springs to be there at their house. I did that, stayed overnight with friends, and went to Ed's home again on Monday. Those are the facts of the beginning of a period of grief, sitting with Ed's in-laws not knowing what to do or how to be helpful. The sudden loss due to suicide does that.

I met Ed and Marion at the Officers Club in Pionier Kaserne, Hanau-am-Main, West Germany in early 1969. Over the next two years, we became friends, good, close friends in the special way that bonds soldiers stationed together. I have never had such close friends before or since. I had other friends from my own unit with whom I kept in touch years after I finished my term of duty. But none was as close as were we, known at the Club as the Mod Squad. Marion was the Provost Marshal in Hanau. Ed, one of Marion's platoon leaders was stationed in Auschaffensburg as provost marshal. Ed, whose hair never made it short enough for US troop standards, and I was the intelligence officer for our combat engineer brigade who, like them, would rather be in the States and were politically and morally against the war on the other side of the planet. We hated the racism that began to infect the troops on base. Marion and I would get into deep discussions about racism in our culture, and what US troops encountered with the Germans. Plus, back home society was having its own war between the mores of The Greatest Generation, hippies, and African-Americans. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated just months before. Anger and frustration characterized the times. Also, the Tet Offensive happened in Viet Nam during this period and the level of fighting ratcheted up another notch. Ed would participate to some extent in our talks, yet was rarely seriously engaged and angry. He was the hippy of our group. His relaxed way of talking was soft and earnest, but I could tell he'd rather be out on his surfboard off Goleta, waiting quietly for a good wave.

Ed knew just the time to break into our significant discussions with his eyes twinkling and a devilish smile. Ed found humor in our daily lives that we were too serious to notice. Ed would quietly ask if we wanted to go to his apartment, one he often shared with his current girlfriend of the season, and get high. For the rest of that evening we would laugh at ourselves, our circumstances and listen to the music of the times. I think we drank German beer from flippies, inexpensive brews in bottles kept closed by a porcelain cap one had to flip open to drink those really good beers of Germany.

Ed and Marion were transfered to Korea for 1971, while I remained in West Germany. Our three-year commitments were over in the Christmas and New Years holidays beginning 1972. Marion and I corresponded a lot while he was in Korea and he kept me current on Ed.

We kept in touch over the next three decades, celebrating marriages and children, professional education that made Ed a dentist and Marion an attorney. I became an administrative executive in higher education and health care institutions. I was in the San Francisco Bay area for most of the intervening time and Marion was studying law at the University of California, Berkeley. Ed bought a practice in Palm Springs. As fate would have it, Marion moved from his job in Detroit to Orange County and was able to enjoy Ed's company on bike marathons, hiking and was Ed's patient even. Time passes and we led our unique lives, always knowing were the other two were.

In May 2008, we had a reunion of the Hanau Mod Squad in Palm Springs, Marion with his wife Amanda, Ed with his wife Patti, and me. The three of us felt the bond of 40 years friendship. I had moved to Southern California, too, so it was especially comforting to me to live close to them. In fact, it Ed who was one of the reasons I was planning to move to Palm Springs, as well as the other attractions and people I liked there. To me, Ed was the linch pin of our group. The three of us truly enjoyed each other as a family. Then I received Marion's call.

During the 1980s and '90s I was living in San Francisco during the worst years of the AIDS epidemic. Friends and partners were dying, I would go to concerts and memorial services at least once a week; a one point, I was overwhelmed with the loss of a generation of San Francisco's most talented, creative and interesting, mostly gay men. I had to choose carefully among which memorials I would attend. It was during that period that I read Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's "Wind, Sand and Stars," written during his French air corps experience early in the 1940s. This one passage captured the survivor's life during the AIDS epidemic; it came to mind after Ed died:

...hidden gardens, gardens inaccessible, but to which the craft leads us

ever back one day or another. Life may scatter us and keep us apart; it

may prevent us from thinking very often of one another; but we know

that our comrades are somewhere 'out there' ---where, one can hardly

say---silent, forgotten, but deeply faithful. And when our path crosses

theirs, they greet us with such manifest joy, shake us so gaily by the

shoulders! Indeed we are accustomed to waiting.

"Bit by bit, nevertheless, it comes over us that we shall never again

hear the laughter of our friend, that this one garden is forever locked

against us. And at that moment begins our true mourning, which,

though it may not be rending, is yet a little bitter. For nothing, in truth,

can replace that companion. Old friends cannot be created out of hand.

Nothing can match the treasure of common memories, of trials endured

together, of quarrels and reconciliations and generous emotions. It is

idle, having planted an acorn in the morning, to expect that afternoon to

sit in the shade of the oak.

"So life goes on. For years we plant the seed, we feel ourselves rich;

and then come other years when time does its work and our plantation is

made sparse and thin. One by one, our comrades slip away, deprive us

of their shade."

¸

Antoine de Saint Éxupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars, 1943

ˇ

Ed, rest in the peace you sought. We miss you a lot.

Decorum

2009-09-11T17:28:00.000-07:00

When has it become acceptable behavior to shout out "You lie" at the President of the United States giving an address to a joint session of Congress?

How did this individual, an elected member of the House of Representatives, believe that it is proper to act this way, in these circumstances, toward this man? What outcome did he want from vocalizing these words? Why would it even occur to him that doing what he did would be the right thing to do? There seems to have been more media attention to this man's action than to any criticism and subsequent action by his colleagues to show disapproval and sanctions for it. This guy walks among them.

Clearly, the standards of civility and decorum, even appropriate dress codes, have changed significantly in the past forty years, by two generations and condoned by "the Greatest Generation." Through experience, I do believe the social maxim that "you act according to the way you dress." Every so often, young people will discover this and I am somewhat heartened by the life span for this maxim.

As I was learning to write in grammar school, in the early 1950s, I was taught that one always capitalized the "p" when writing about the President of the United State, but for no other presidents. This spelling maxim applied to any derivative of 'President' as well. Sure that was a time of hyper-patriotism, yet I still consider the maxim appropriate as the proper title's spelling, even when used without the current President's name.

All my life, when the President of the United States gave a nationally broadcast speech, on radio and later television, I was raised to listen closely, attentively and even at home, respectfully. I will admit to ignoring most of GWB's speeches after 2004, yet he was our President and deserved the high respect considered for that office. When I reacted, having read GWB's speeches, by sending him letters by fax, I was courteous and respectful of his office even though I could not respect the man. Until the 1968 election, I heard Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson being accorded the respect of his office by the press and the audiences. That public respect did not mean there were no dissenters or extremists in opposition to those Presidents; however, people respected the Presidency.

By 1968, however, President Johnson was the target of significant numbers of public demonstrations against the Viet Nam War. Maybe this cause created more disrespect for the Office than respect. Even though most soldiers were draftees, the common reaction to a man in uniform was antagonistic rather than grateful. Television brought that war into our homes so that the realities of war's evil conduct and outcomes became visible to all, not just to the soldiers, adding significant numbers of persons who became antagonistic to any participant in it. Then, the treatment of opposition groups assembled to demonstrate at the Republican Convention in Chicago fortified war opponents and the candidates for the Presidency in 1968.

I was stationed in Europe for most of Nixon's first term of office, after having been relatively isolated to what was happening in the public arena since February of 1968. When I returned to the States in late December 1971, I had missed what I consider to be a social revolution that had changed America. Everyone was using first names at the office, even the executives. President Nixon had implemented most of LBJ's "Great Society" vision with Congress, and Senator McGovern was running for President as an opponent of the Viet Nam War.

So, besides the significant degree of change in society's interpersonal mores, seen in popular music, on television and in the theaters, when Watergate occurred in 1972 and Nixon's unwilling resignation from office in 1974, I believe that most of the nation had lost their traditional respect for a President. There was no longer any distinction between the Office and the man who was President.

This change, for me, has been most unfortunate. Civility in social discourse seems to occur only under power-based circumstances and not automatically. A person's integrity can be challenged and damaged without having any basis in fact. Criminal trial trials seem anachronistic when the public has already found blame in the person on trial. Our courtroom-based television shows do not portray a defendant or a suspect as presumably innocent of any crime, and the prosecutor has to be the hero bringing justice to the victims. The screenwriters actually present the way British juris prudence functions, that the defendant has to prove his or her innocence of the charges. American juris prudence has its stated ethos that a person is innocent until the state's prosecutor proves the person to be guilty of the charge. Just the opposite paradigm from the British system.

Fictional, criminal cases on television and in movies concentrate on the likely person that the police or detective is looking for, rather than on the viewpoint of the district attorney who must find sufficient evidence to arrest and charge the suspect, let alone to have sufficient evidence to convince a jury or judge that the defendant at trial is culpable for crimes against society. The same "bad guy" person will be portrayed in plots that involve the President. Even if innocent of any criminal behavior by someone in his Administration, innocence becomes equivalent to incompetence as President for not knowing about the criminal activity. The last time I checked, incompetence is not a crime in and of itself.

Respect in social settings seems to have fallen victim to an inversion effect, so that most persons worry about the respect they are shown versus any respect they accord as due to others. In the recent town meetings of August 2009, individuals among the constituents in attendance showed no respect for their elected representative, senator or President. The media reported only the most "exciting" reactions to the announcement of President Obama's speech to the nation's children in school. Mothers were accusing the President of interference with parental rights, with dictating school curricula that are the right of local school boards to make.

Several parents said they would not allow their children to see the President of the United States address the nation's children because it would harm them. The media dwelt on these incidents of disrespect without commentaries that such conduct is the wrong attitude to have to judge the anticipated content of the speech without knowing the content. No one criticized these individuals about their behavior and lack of respect for their own elected official. Indeed, there were organized groups shouting opposition to any Presidential address who traveled from location to location. The degree of expressed anger, outrage and righteousness far exceeded civility, let alone respect.

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