Category: Politics

Government in the U.S. today spends more per capita on health care than any nation on earth, including those with national health insurance.

Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, [an author of the Harvard Medical School study published in the journal Health Affairs] and an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard, noted: “We pay the world’s highest health care taxes. But much of the money is squandered. The wealthy get tax breaks. And HMOs and drug companies pocket billions in profits at the taxpayers’ expense. But politicians claim we can’t afford universal coverage. Every other developed nation has national health insurance. We already pay for it, but we don’t get it.”

Start asking why.

Good news! Our trusty fascist government is no longer holding most of those arrested in racist sweeps after September 11! Nope. The bad new is that we threw them out of the country without hearings or trials, ensuring they will not be able to rejoin school, work, friends, families, even wives and children.
The Bill of Rights applies to every person in America, whether citizen or not, but it has been trashed once again by the junta in Washington. None of these South Asian and Arab residents and visitors have been charged with anything relating to terrorism, and only about half of the some 1200 arrested were detained for any irregularity, notably immigration violations like overstaying a visa. All but 74 of those had been secretly expelled as of several weeks ago, and except for a small handful, those remaining are still in custody, their identities essentially hidden to the world.

[Some] expulsions of the Sept. 11 detainees have been so abrupt that family members did not know for days after the fact.
In the case of Ali Yaghi, a Jordanian detainee who had applied for residency, his American wife and three children in Albany were never told that he was deported to Jordan on June 24, after spending nearly nine months in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn on an immigration charge.
Mr. Yaghi has not been heard from since, raising fears in his family that Jordan’s security services may have been so suspicious about his long detention that they arrested him upon arrival.

Even now, Washington refuses to disclose names or to open hearings on any of the past or continuing cases. Federal lawsuits brought by civil liberties groups working through the judicial system continue to be resisted with the full authority of the executive branch.
If visitors have no rights on American soil, we have no rights either.

[the impact of Bushie’s speech on Wall Street today]
I really love the BBC site at the moment. The lead story is that speech, and even in the skeletal form of their headlines they’ve taken the opportunity to tell it like it really is.

“BUSH DEMANDS ‘NEW ERA OF INTEGRITY’
“The US president calls for longer jail terms for corporate fraudsters and demands higher ethical business standards.
“Analysis: Bush delivers too little too late
“Shares dive in US
“Scandals’ shadow over politics
“In Depth: Corporate scandals
“News in Video: ‘US economy is confidence-based’
“Talking Point: Has Bush convinced you?”

The Dow and NASDAQ each plunged about 2% today after the little talk.

Gore Vidal, described in an interview as also perhaps the nation’s last republican [small “r”], has a chance to do what he does best, elegantly cut through the muck of ignorance and mendacity to describe what really is happening to our world.
Those who are even the least bit interested in this item should note that he is not known to have been wrong in the past.

I don’t think we, the American people, deserved what happened. Nor do we deserve the sort of governments we have had over the last 40 years. Our governments have brought this upon us by their actions all over the world. I have a list in my new book that gives the reader some idea how busy we have been. Unfortunately, we only get disinformation from The New York Times and other official places. Americans have no idea of the extent of their government’s mischief. The number of military strikes we have made unprovoked, against other countries, since 1947-48 is more than 250. These are major strikes everywhere from Panama to Iran. And it isn’t even a complete list. It doesn’t include places like Chile, as that was a CIA operation. I was only listing military attacks.
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And people in the countries who are recipients of our bombs get angry.
….
[So it’s not true that people like Osama bin Laden] just come out of the blue. You know, the average American thinks we just give away billions in foreign aid, when we are the lowest in foreign aid among developed countries. And most of what we give goes to Israel and a little bit to Egypt.

[excerpts from a letter to the editor in today’s NYTimes]

What to do when it appears that the president engaged in financial misdealings before taking office?
We know what steps the Republicans think appropriate: hire a political appointee from the opposing party to investigate, give him essentially unlimited, unaccountable power, keep the investigation dragging on indefinitely, and expand it to include unrelated matters.

We just don’t hear enough from independent and courageous people any more, and in fact we cannot ever hear enough from them. So, does everyone else really believe it’s unamerican to do anything but cheer the chief?

“We have a president who owes his election more to a dynasty than to democracy,” said [veteran civil rights leader, Julian] Bond, chairman of the NAACP board, in an ardent opening address at the George R. Brown Convention Center.
“When he spoke to our convention in Baltimore in 2000, he promised to enforce the civil rights laws,” Bond said. “We know he was in the oil business. We just didn’t know it was snake oil.
“We have an attorney general who is a cross between J. Edgar Hoover and Jerry Falwell. And too often, one political party is shameless and the other is spineless.”

Referring to massive disenfranchisement during the 2000 election, especially of blacks, Bond said, “There is a right-wing conspiracy, and it is operating out of the United States Department of Justice.”
And this from the Chairman of a very respectable, too often painfully conservative, century-old institution! Can we then hope it’s not too late?

Can the writer to the Daily News really be wondering how the 9th Circuit Court feels about religious oaths?

Bronx: The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in California says reciting the Pledge of Allegiance is unconstitutional because of the words “under God.” I wonder how the court feels about a witness placing his or her hand on the Bible and swearing to “tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God.”

Somehow I prefer the sense of the letter which follows that one.

Toms River, N.J.: How different are we from the Taliban if we let government force religion on our children?

This headline and story beggars comment.

[At the Bushie vacation palace’s local Kennebunkport church] Chaplain M.L. Agnew, in honor of his powerful guests, diverted the congregation from the usual service briefly to lead them in the Pledge of Allegiance, a pledge of loyalty to the U.S. flag and “one nation under God.”
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As the Bush family prepared to take the Episcopal communion, Agnew called Bush the “spiritual and political leader of the greatest nation in the world.”

Maybe it’s just wishful thinking, but there may be signs that sanity, and the courage of sanity, is returning to the people. Keep those cards and letters (and the questions, and the demonstrations) going, and don’t let the highjackers in Washington rest.

The fresh questioning of the war on terrorism is also a phenomenon of the Democratic left. But if I have learned anything in four decades of covering politics, it is to pay heed when you hear the same questions — in almost the same phrases — popping up in different parts of the country.
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I am not sure where this skepticism comes from or which media voices are spreading it. But the consequences can be guessed. Until now, most of the major Democratic leaders have said, “We stand shoulder to shoulder with the president in the war on terrorism.” Some, such as House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, have virtually given Bush a green light to go after Saddam Hussein.
But if Democrats begin hearing doubts about the costs of the war — and its consequences for civil liberties — from some of their most vocal constituents, that support may not last long.

Somebody needs a jump start, and right away! The Arab world is a mess, and we’re part of the problem.

[The UN has just published a report “written by a group of distinguished Arab intellectuals”] analyzing the three main reasons the Arab world is falling off the globe. (The G.D.P. of Spain is greater than that of all 22 Arab states combined.) In brief, it’s due to a shortage of freedom to speak, innovate and affect political life, a shortage of women’s rights and a shortage of quality education. If you want to understand the milieu that produced bin Ladenism, and will reproduce it if nothing changes, read this report.
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There is a message in this bottle for America: For too many years we’ve treated the Arab world as just a big dumb gas station, and as long as the top leader kept the oil flowing, or was nice to Israel, we didn’t really care what was happening to the women and children out back — where bad governance, rising unemployment and a stifled intellectual life were killing the Arab future.