Newshoggers.com

Veterans, Abortion and Right Wing hypocrisy

Commentary By Ron Beasley

The right wingers are pro life until the baby is born but then it and it's family is on their own when it comes to medical care or proper diet or living conditions that would allow a life worth living - hypocrisy!  

The same can be said for the right wing support the troops meme.  They support the troops by sending them off to illegal and unnecessary wars then once they have served they are on their own - hypocrisy! An excellent article in the New York Times brings this front a center today.

Gen. Eric Shinseki was famously shunned by the Bush administration for daring to state the true costs of occupying Iraq. As President Obama’s secretary of veterans affairs, he is, thankfully, no less candid about the grinding problems veterans face at home. They lead the nation in depression, suicide, substance abuse and homelessness, according to data that Mr. Shineski is delivering in salvos in his current role.

About one-third of all adult homeless men are veterans, and an average night finds an estimated 131,000 of them from five decades bedding down on streets and in charity sanctuaries. About 3 in 100 of them are back from Iraq and Afghanistan. The problem of homelessness for Vietnam veterans is, shamefully, well known. But the men and women in this growing cohort took just 18 months to find rock bottom, compared with the five years-plus of the previous generation’s veterans.

I am a Vietnam era veteran and I did all right but many of my friends and relatives did not fair so well.  Many of them came back drug and or alcohol addicted and were never able to reenter society.  I thought it was bad then but it's must worse now.

General Shinseki has promised to galvanize the Department of Veterans Affairs to lead a national drive to end veteran homelessness in the next five years. Is that anywhere near possible? “Unless I put an ambitious target on the table, I don’t know how we’ll start,” the secretary told a forum of wounded veterans.

[.....]

We believe he has the mettle to pull this off. He will need a lot of help from the White House, Congress and communities across the country. The general-turned-secretary is appealing to thousands of worthy organizations already in the field to double their efforts to help.

Our veterans shouldn’t be forced to battle on their own just to survive at home.

No Bill Is Better Than A Bad Bill?

Commentary By Ron Beasley

I have have said that a bad health care bill is worse than no bill at all.  Dr Marcia Angell agrees:

Conservative rhetoric notwithstanding, the House bill is not a "government takeover." I wish it were. Instead, it enshrines and subsidizes the "takeover" by the investor-owned insurance industry that occurred after the failure of the Clinton reform effort in 1994. To be sure, the bill has a few good provisions (expansion of Medicaid, for example), but they are marginal. It also provides for some regulation of the industry (no denial of coverage because of pre-existing conditions, for example), but since it doesn't regulate premiums, the industry can respond to any regulation that threatens its profits by simply raising its rates. The bill also does very little to curb the perverse incentives that lead doctors to over-treat the well-insured. And quite apart from its content, the bill is so complicated and convoluted that it would take a staggering apparatus to administer it and try to enforce its regulations.

None of the current bills do anything to fix the systemic problems in the current health care system.  Ezra Klein disagrees with both Dr Angell and me.

Failure does not breed success. Obama's defeat will not mean that more ambitious reforms have "a better chance of trying again." It will mean that less ambitious reformers have a better chance of trying next time.

Conversely, success does breed success. Medicare and Medicaid began as fairly limited programs. Medicaid was pretty much limited to extremely poor children and their caregivers. Medicare didn't cover prescription drugs, or individuals with disabilities, or home health services.

But once the programs were passed into law, they were slowly and continually improved. They became more expansive, with Medicaid growing to cover not only poor families but also poor adults, and the federal government giving states the option, and matching dollars, to include more people under the program's umbrella. Medicare was charged with covering people with long-term disabilities, and it was eventually strengthened with a drug benefit, more preventive coverage, the option of supplementary plans and much more.

This is a convincing argument except I remain convinced that we don't have time for the slow and continued improvement that Ezra talks about.  The health care system is going to implode very soon - perhaps within the next two years.  There will be nothing in any bill passed this year that will help avoid that implosion.  If an inadequate Democratic health care bill passes the likelihood is that  it will be blamed for the implosion.  The best case scenario for the Democrats is a bill, even a bad one, being filibustered in the Senate. 

The media and the Republicans

By Ron Beasley

This is a follow up to Jay's post below.  The corporate media just like the Republicans think that if they say something often enough it will become reality.  A case in point is all the recent talk of a Republican come back because the Republicans won two governors contests against two really bad Democrats.  At the same time the Democratic House wins the same day in a red district in NY and a purple district in CA are said to be anomalies. As Chris Edelson points out the Republican Party remains a very unpopular failed party.

Not surprisingly, media insiders are missing the story.  They are transfixed by gubernatorial elections in 2 states last Tuesday, and are talking up the idea of a Republican resurgence.  They're losing sight of some central facts that are unaffected by Tuesday's elections:

The Republican party has a favorable rating of 23% and an unfavorable rating of 66%.  (Democrats are at 42%-50%).  Republicans in Congress have favorable-unfavorable ratings of 15% and 70% (Democrats are at 40-53).  If this is a resurgent party that has captured the national mood, I'm Herbert Hoover.

It's no coincidence that voters give Republicans such abysmal ratings.  The Republican party stands for absolutely nothing other than the pursuit of power.  For 30 years, the Republicans have claimed to stand for 3 things: (1) small government (2) family values and (3) strong national defense.  They don't actually stand for any of these things, and it's not clear that they ever did. 

Why Would Anyone Listen To Joe Lieberman?

Commentary By Ron Beasley

Senator Joseph Lieberman, (Zionist), Israel,  has decided that the Fort Hood Massacre is a terrorist act. 

Sen. Joe Lieberman called the Fort Hood massacre an act of "Islamist extremism" - even as top Army brass warned Sunday against guessing at a motive, fearing backlash against Muslim soldiers.

"There are very, very strong warning signs here that Dr. Hasan had become an Islamist extremist and, therefore, that this was a terrorist act," Lieberman (I-Conn) told Fox News on Sunday.

"If the reports that we're receiving of various statements he made, acts he took are valid, he had turned to Islamist extremism."

The Army disagrees:

Lieberman's comments were in stark contrast to U.S. Army chief of staff George Casey, who told CNN he's deeply worried "that the speculation could cause something that we don't want to see happen."

"It would be a shame - as great a tragedy as this was - it would be a shame if our diversity became a casualty as well," Casey said.

The former Iraq war commander said on ABC that focusing on Hasan's religious roots might "heighten the backlash" against all Muslims serving in the armed forces.

It's Joe Lieberman who is the terrorist and the fact that he remains chairman of the Homeland Security Committee is inexcusable.

The Same Old Drama

Commentary By Ron Beasley

Thomas Friedman has been taking some reality drugs.

The Israeli-Palestinian peace process has become a bad play. It is obvious that all the parties are just acting out the same old scenes, with the same old tired clichés — and that no one believes any of it anymore. There is no romance, no sex, no excitement, no urgency — not even a sense of importance anymore. The only thing driving the peace process today is inertia and diplomatic habit. Yes, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process has left the realm of diplomacy. It is now more of a calisthenic, like weight-lifting or sit-ups, something diplomats do to stay in shape, but not because they believe anything is going to happen. And yet, as much as we, the audience, know this to be true, we can never quite abandon hope for peace in the Holy Land.

He continues:

This peace process movie is not going to end differently just because we keep playing the same reel. It is time for a radically new approach. And I mean radical. I mean something no U.S. administration has ever dared to do: Take down our “Peace-Processing-Is-Us” sign and just go home.

Right now we want it more than the parties. They all have other priorities today. And by constantly injecting ourselves we’ve become their Novocain. We relieve all the political pain from the Arab and Israeli decision-makers by creating the impression in the minds of their publics that something serious is happening. “Look, the U.S. secretary of state is here. Look, she’s standing by my side. Look, I’m doing something important! Take our picture. Put it on the news. We’re on the verge of something really big and I am indispensable to it.” This enables the respective leaders to continue with their real priorities — which are all about holding power or pursuing ideological obsessions — while pretending to advance peace, without paying any political price.

Let’s just get out of the picture. Let all these leaders stand in front of their own people and tell them the truth: “My fellow citizens: Nothing is happening; nothing is going to happen. It’s just you and me and the problem we own.”

The only thing he doesn't see fit to mention is that when the US goes home it needs to take it's military aide with it. The politicians on neither side want peace, they want the other side dead or gone.  I don't think the same can be said for the people on either side.  With the US military aide to Israel we are simply encouraging continued violence - it has become fairly obvious that Israel is using arms received from the US in was not allowed by treaty. We need to quit giving the politicians cover and make them explain to their people why there is continued violence.

As one would expect uber Zionist/neocon Barry Rubin has a different take and makes the following outrageous claim in a guest post over at TMV.

Israel is proving flexible while the Palestinian Authority refuses even to talk no matter how much the Administration panders to and coddles it.

Since when is continuing to build settlements on Palestinian land flexible?

A Bad Bill Is Worse Than No Bill At All - Part II

Commentary By Ron Beasley

A few days ago I wrote A Bad Bill Is Worse Than No Bill At All.

I remain convinced that there was never any possibility of a health care reform bill that actually reformed anything.  Obama just wants a bill - he really doesn't care what's in it.  This is not only wrong but politically stupid, more about that later.  As lawmakers do they just want it to look like they did something without pissing off any of their sugar daddies.  They first thing that made any possibility of meaningful reform impossible was the concentration on the insurance side while ignoring The Medical Industrial Complex. The reality is the only way to reduce costs is to do one of the things that the insurance industry is criticized for doing - not approving procedures, tests and medications that don't have any real value to the patient.

Well a bad bill with a few good points is just what we got.  Just as expected this bill sorta goes after the insurance industry without "reforming" any of the other problems.  As a result the US health care system will continue to implode and the vast majority of Americans will see their health care deteriorate.  This is bad for the country and bad for the Democrats politically if not in 2010 then certainly by 2012.  The bill not only doesn't remedy but actually forces one of the main things wrong with both our health care system and our economy - employer based health insurance.  It does nothing to curb the unnecessary and often harmful medical procedures that drive up health care costs.  This should not be a surprise.  In a corporatocracy lawmakers can't go against too many of their sugar daddies if the expect to be reelected.

Lee Stranahan points out that there was one brave vote yesterday - Dennis Kucinich.

There were plenty of cowardly votes in the House last night but there was only one truly brave one. The unsung hero of the night was Ohio Representative Dennis Kucinich. Despite enormous pressure to support H.R. 3962, Rep. Kucinich did the right thing and voted 'no'. Unlike the Blue Dog votes against the bill, he did it for all the right reasons.

In a principled and practical statement, Rep. Kucinich said what a growing number of progressives have realized as we've watched real health care reform be compromised again and again.

During the debate, when the interests of insurance companies would have been effectively challenged, that challenge was turned back. The "robust public option" which would have offered a modicum of competition to a monopolistic industry was whittled down from an initial potential enrollment of 129 million Americans to 6 million. An amendment which would have protected the rights of states to pursue single-payer health care was stripped from the bill at the request of the Administration. Looking ahead, we cringe at the prospect of even greater favors for insurance companies.

But even Kucinich is only addressing the insurance industry and not the Medical Industrial Complex.

As bad as the House bill is whatever can be passed in the Senate will be even worse.  The best thing that can happen now to insure real health care reform in the future would be for any bill to be stopped in the Senate.  This would also be best for the US economy and the long term political success of the Democrats because a bad bill will eventually hurt them more politically than no bill at all.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lee-stranahan/kucinichs-brave-health-vo_b_349857.html&cp

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lee-stranahan/kucinichs-brave-health-vo_b_349857.html&cp

Picture of The Week

By Ron Beasley

 

Click on picture for larger image.

Occupiers

By Ron Beasley

As Steve noted below Obama's National Security Adviser, James L. Jones has some serious doubts about sending additional troops to Afghanistan. As Jones said:

"we can't want this more than the Afghans"

Well increasingly the Afghans want it less.

“What have the Americans done in eight years?” asked Abdullah Wasay, 60, a pharmacist in Charikar, a market town about 25 miles north of Kabul, expressing a view typical of many here. “Americans are saying that with their planes they can see an egg 18 kilometers away, so why can’t they see the Taliban?”

Such sentiments were repeated in conversation after conversation with more than 30 Afghans in Kabul and nearby rural areas and with local officials in outlying provinces. The comments point to the difficulties that American and Afghan officials face if they choose to add more foreign troops.

If the foreign forces are not seen so by Afghans already, they are on the cusp of being regarded as occupiers, with little to show people for their extended presence, fueling wild conspiracies about why they remain here.

The feeling is particularly acute in the Pashtun south, but it is spreading to other parts of the country. More American troops could tip the balance of opinion, particularly if they increase civilian casualties and prompt even more Taliban attacks.

There may have been a time when we could make a difference in Afghanistan but that time is long past.

Corporatocracy 101 Part IV

By Ron Beasley

John Cole asks:

What does it cost to get $2.4 billion in unemployment benefits extension?

The answer - $24 billion.

You see- you aren’t allowed to just pass a bill extending unemployment benefits at the cost of $2.4 billion dollars, because that would be socialism. It takes another $21.6 billion to grease the palms of the people who own the “moderates” and the “fiscal conservatives,” and once you get the cost up to $24 billion, you have achieved “capitalism.”

No John - then you have achieved corporatism.

Related:

Corporatocracy 101 Part III

Corporatocracy 101 Part II

Picture Of The Week Plus A Rant

So It Looks Like They Are Doing Something

We've Been Robbed

Further Down The Road To Fascism

Corporatocracy 101 Part III

Commentary By Ron Beasley

Barack Obama ran his campaign on the platform of change but by the time the election rolled around a year ago he had already been bought and paid for by Wall Street and the Financial Industry. James Lieber explains:

We've Bailed out the Banks. When Do We Go After the Crooks Behind our Financial Collapse?

When Barack Obama donned the crusader's mantle during the 2008 presidential campaign, his Web-savvy campaign team created KeatingEconomics.com and pushed it on millions of voters. The main video showed the Ichabod Crane–like Charles Keating—the wealthy, politically connected poster child of the '80s savings-and-loan scandal—in handcuffs.

The Obama video portrayed John McCain as Keating's stooge and likened the S&L crash to the 2008 Wall Street meltdown, except that the current crisis is global and its bad guys bigger and badder. Today's corporate villains were flashed on the screen, among them AIG, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac. The opening narrator was Bill Black, a Ph.D. criminologist and lead lawyer at the Office of Thrift Supervision, who helped steer the brilliant federal effort that cleaned up the S&L industry and won more than 1,000 felony convictions of senior insiders while recovering millions of their ill-gotten dollars.

Those watching the compelling attack ad (still online) had every reason to believe that Obama's approach would be just as hard-edged, and that felon-busting G-men would rout the crooks and recover our money.

This was not to be.

As it stands now, there is only one federal prosecution related to the credit crash and bailout cycle, and it was begun by the Bush administration's Justice Department in June 2008.

So what happened?

Black says that Obama's current efforts are doomed to fail—and, in a twist, it's for lack of trying. "There is not a single successful regulator giving him advice," says Black. Obama's is a fresh face, but those of his crew aren't. Black pointedly views Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and SEC Chair Mary Schapiro as flops in the prelude to the crisis, who flacked for the financial industry's "self-regulation." Some of Obama's appointees have a history as ardent advocates for financial crooks and active foes of regulation. Because neither the Obama team nor its proposed reforms pack the requisite punch, Black predicts, "There will be far more catastrophic losses." That would be on top of the trillions of dollars already lost.

[.....]

So, where is the justice in the current crisis? Why have there been so few prosecutions and only feeble attempts, at best, to claw the money back? One reason may be that, in such infamous cases as the Lehman Brothers collapse and Bank of America's absorption of Merrill Lynch, the Fed and the Treasury were intimately involved with the financial elite's deal making at the time. It's difficult to prosecute others for securities fraud if you condoned the deals to begin with.

With many economists telling the administration that the two big to fail banks should be broken up and that the Glass-Steagall should be reinstated.  With the financial industry fully in charge the Obama administration has taken a different and more sinister path.

Instead, the new administration is putting its energy into creating what it believes will be a meltdown-proof new system of elite "too-big-to-fail" banks, regulated by a beefed-up Federal Reserve.

Even the business establishment's Wall Street Journal used the word "oligopoly" when it noted this summer that the Obama administration, "after saving the banks, is now planning regulatory changes that could establish an elite group of U.S. institutions with large investment-banking activities" that will be "hard to join and compete against."

Update:

Great comment from tr at the Corporatocracy 101 post:

Tax dollars go to banks, banks distribute them evenly among politicians... finally we have public campaign financing!

See, there is an upside to everything!

Go read the rest of this long article.

Related:

Corporatocracy 101 Part II

Picture Of The Week Plus A Rant

So It Looks Like They Are Doing Something

We've Been Robbed

Further Down The Road To Fascism