‘Tis the season once again.  How fast it sneaks up on us!  I’ve planned nothing and done nothing in that regard, so I guess that’s pretty much what I can expect.

What I CAN do is to extend a holiday greeting to you, my Xanga and Facebook friends, some of whom are (or were at one time, or have become) also friends in what we in this computer and internet age term “real life”.

I am getting old now, and the health of the body which I once took so much for granted is deserting me at what seems a frightening rate.  About nine months ago I was diagnosed with prostate cancer – a common ailment, it turns out, of older men.  If you must have cancer, prostate cancer is one of the better cancers to get, as it is slow-growing and gives you more time to get your affairs in order.  It also has one of the higher cure rates if it is caught before it has metastasized outside the prostate itself.

After some deliberation, I chose to have external radiation therapy.  It seemed a no-brainer, actually, between doing nothing and waiting to die on the one extreme, and having the prostate surgically removed on the other extreme, with the surgery’s attendant higher risks of impotence and incontinence. 

The therapy consisted of 44 trips to the local cancer clinic, every weekday for about 9 weeks, where I changed into a gown, walked down a long hall, and was slid halfway into a large machine similar to an MRI machine.  I was first scanned, then subjected to about 4.5 minutes daily of highly concentrated radiation.  The whole time in the machine occupied about 15 minutes and was completely painless, and the entire process from arrival to departure was slightly less than an hour.  After the first few visits I started napping while the radiation procedure was going on.  The hospital staff was wonderful, and I got a free lollipop each day.  I actually began to look forward, in a certain strange way, to my daily visits.  They provided some structure for my day and got me out of the house, and the people there were nice. 

Nevertheless it was a marathon.  And radiation, concentrated though it may be, destroys normal cells as well as cancer cells, so despite the painlessness of the treatment itself there are side effects.  In most cases they are manageable, and could be described as inconvenient more than debilitating.  The effects of radiation are cumulative, and the side effects get worse as time goes on, but at the same time they’re supposed to go away or at least get better after the conclusion of the radiation treatments, which for me was about a week ago.  We shall see.

I won’t go into detail about the side effects, except to say that fatigue is one of the primary and more debilitating ones.  I’ve always been a relatively low-energy person, but the combination of older age and radiation has given new meaning to the term.  I’ve taken to falling asleep pretty much anywhere and at any time of day or night – in my kitchen chair while reading a book, or in my computer chair while reading an e-mail.  I can pass several peaceful hours sound asleep in such positions, with my head lolling about on my neck but otherwise somehow remaining upright and in the chair.

Tonight I had an odd dream.  There was a young man whose head and one arm had been intentionally severed from the rest of his body.  He was conscious and could communicate.  He was being “worked on” in some manner by a medical person of some sort.   It seemed to be an ongoing treatment, in which his head would be reattached to the rest of his body following his treatment each day, but then the next day he would go through the entire elaborate procedure all over again.  When I asked how this detachment and reattachment of his head each day was possible, I was told cryptically that it was volunteers like me who made it possible for him.  I could only assume that my contribution was somehow connected to the pain I felt in my neck each time I awoke from one of my naps in the kitchen chair or desk chair.

And so it goes.  As I said, my 44 radiation treatments were finished about a week ago, and now I wait to see if the side effects will go away and if the cancer has been eliminated from my body.  I also wait, of course, to see what life will bring my way next.  As my late mother grew increasingly fond of saying, “Old age ain’t for sissies.”  It’s very true.

Happy holidays to each and every one of you.  Whether or not you bask this season in the glow of good health and family conviviality, remember that we are ALL connected in mysterious but profound ways.  For my part, I love you, and am happy to count you among my friends. 

Will Goldman Sachs Prove Greed is God?

The investment bank’s cult of self-interest is on trial
against the whole idea of civilization – the collective
decision by all of us not to screw each other over even
if we can

By Matt Taibbi

April 24, 2010

The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/apr/24/will-goldman-prove-greed-is-god

So Goldman Sachs, the world’s greatest and smuggest
investment bank, has been sued for fraud by the
American Securities and Exchange Commission. Legally,
the case hangs on a technicality.

Morally, however, the Goldman Sachs case may turn into
a final referendum on the greed-is-good ethos that
conquered America sometime in the 80s – and in the
years since has aped other horrifying American trends
such as boybands and reality shows in spreading across
the western world like a venereal disease.

When Britain and other countries were engulfed in the
flood of defaults and derivative losses that emerged
from the collapse of the American housing bubble two
years ago, few people understood that the crash had its
roots in the lunatic greed-centered objectivist
religion, fostered back in the 50s and 60s by ponderous
emigre novelist Ayn Rand.

While, outside of America, Russian-born Rand is
probably best known for being the unfunniest person
western civilisation has seen since maybe Goebbels or
Jack the Ripper (63 out of 100 colobus monkeys recently
forced to read Atlas Shrugged in a laboratory setting
died of boredom-induced aneurysms), in America Rand is
upheld as an intellectual giant of limitless wisdom.
Here in the States, her ideas are roundly worshipped
even by people who’ve never read her books oreven heard
of her. The rightwing “Tea Party” movement is just one
example of an entire demographic that has been inspired
to mass protest by Rand without even knowing it.

Last summer I wrote a brutally negative article about
Goldman Sachs for Rolling Stone magazine (I called the
bank a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of
humanity”) that unexpectedly sparked a heated national
debate. On one side of the debate were people like me,
who believed that Goldman is little better than a
criminal enterprise that earns its billions by bilking
the market, the government, and even its own clients in
a bewildering variety of complex financial scams.

On the other side of the debate were the people who
argued Goldman wasn’t guilty of anything except being
“too smart” and really, really good at making money.
This side of the argument was based almost entirely on
the Randian belief system, under which the leaders of
Goldman Sachs appear not as the cheap swindlers they
look like to me, but idealised heroes, the saviours of
society.

In the Randian ethos, called objectivism, the only real
morality is self-interest, and society is divided into
groups who are efficiently self-interested (ie, the
rich) and the “parasites” and “moochers” who wish to
take their earnings through taxes, which are an unjust
use of force in Randian politics. Rand believed
government had virtually no natural role in society.
She conceded that police were necessary, but was such a
fervent believer in laissez-faire capitalism she
refused to accept any need for economic regulation -
which is a fancy way of saying we only need law
enforcement for unsophisticated criminals.

Rand’s fingerprints are all over the recent Goldman
story. The case in question involves a hedge fund
financier, John Paulson, who went to Goldman with the
idea of a synthetic derivative package pegged to risky
American mortgages, for use in betting against the
mortgage market. Paulson would short the package,
called Abacus, and Goldman would then sell the deal to
suckers who would be told it was a good bet for a long
investment. The SEC’s contention is that Goldman
committed a crime – a “failure to disclose” – when they
failed to tell the suckers about the role played by the
vulture betting against them on the other side of the
deal.

Now, the instruments in question in this deal -
collateralised debt obligations and credit default
swaps – fall into the category of derivatives, which
are virtually unregulated in the US thanks in large
part to the effort of gremlinish former Federal Reserve
chairman Alan Greenspan, who as a young man was close
to Rand and remained a staunch Randian his whole life.
In the late 90s, Greenspan lobbied hard for the passage
of a law that came to be called the Commodity Futures
Modernisation Act of 2000, a monster of a bill that
among other things deregulated the sort of
interest-rate swaps Goldman used in its now-infamous
dealings with Greece.

Both the Paulson deal and the Greece deal were examples
of Goldman making millions by bending over their own
business partners. In the Paulson deal the suckers were
European banks such as ABN-Amro and IKB, which were
never told that the stuff Goldman was cheerfully
selling to them was, in effect, designed to implode; in
the Greece deal, Goldman hilariously used exotic swaps
to help the country mask its financial problems, then
turned right around and bet against the country by
shorting Greece’s debt.

Now here’s the really weird thing. Confronted with the
evidence of public outrage over these deals, the
leaders of Goldman will often appear to be genuinely
confused, scratching their heads and staring
quizzically into the camera like they don’t know what
you’re upset about. It’s not an act. There have been a
lot of greedy financiers and banks in history, but what
makes Goldman stand out is its truly bizarre
cultist/religious belief in the rightness of what it
does.

The point was driven home in England last year, when
Goldman’s international adviser, sounding exactly like
a character in Atlas Shrugged, told an audience at St
Paul’s Cathedral that “The injunction of Jesus to love
others as ourselves is an endorsement of
self-interest”. A few weeks later, Goldman CEO Lloyd
Blankfein told the Times that he was doing “God’s
work”.

Even if he stands to make a buck at it, even your
average used-car salesman won’t sell some working
father a car with wobbly brakes, then buy life
insurance policies on that customer and his kids. But
this is done almost as a matter of routine in the
financial services industry, where the attitude after
the inevitable pileup would be that that family was
dumb for getting into the car in the first place.
Caveat emptor, dude!

People have to understand this Randian mindset is now
ingrained in the American character. You have to live
here to see it. There’s a hatred toward “moochers” and
“parasites” – the Tea Party movement, which is mainly a
bunch of pissed off suburban white people whining about
minorities consuming social services, describes the
battle as being between “water-carriers” and
“water-drinkers”. And regulation of any kind is deeply
resisted, even after a disaster as sweeping as the 2008
crash.

This debate is going to be crystallised in the Goldman
case. Much of America is going to reflexively insist
that Goldman’s only crime was being smarter and better
at making money than IKB and ABN-Amro, and that the
intrusive, meddling government (in the American
narrative, always the bad guy!) should get off
Goldman’s Armani-clad back. Another side is going to
argue that Goldman winning this case would be a rebuke
to the whole idea of civilisation – which, after all,
is really just a collective decision by all of us not
to screw each other over even when we can. It’s an
important moment in the history of modern global
capitalism: whether or not to move forward into a world
of greed without limits.

     “The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labor power without producing anything that can be consumed. A Floating Fortress, for example, has locked up in it the labor that would build several hundred cargo ships. Ultimately it is scrapped as obsolete, never having brought any material benefit to anybody, and with further enormous labors another Floating Fortress is built. In principle the war effort is always so planned as to eat up any surplus that might exist after meeting the bare needs of the population.”

“Hope, Paul said to me once, which whispered from Pandora’s box only after all the other plagues and sorrows had escaped, is the best and last of all things.  Without it, there is only time.  And time pushes at our backs like a centrifuge, forcing us outward and away, until it nudges us into oblivion…”

“…Like all things in the universe, we are destined from birth to diverge.  Time is simply the yardstick of our separation.  If we are particles in a sea of distance, exploded from an original whole, then there is a science to our solitude.  We are lonely in proportion to our years.”

Ian Caldwell & Dustin Thomason, The Rule of Four, p. 196.

 Peace Doesn’t Work, Obama Informs Nobel Committee
       Accepts Peace Prize by Defending Merits of War
       by Jason Ditz, December 10, 2009

President Barack Obama accepted his Nobel Peace Prize today, and as
expected he acknowledged that even he isn’t clear why he got the prize,
noting that there were millions of people more deserving.

But President Obama’s “acceptance speech” was far from an expression of
contrition, spending most of the speech defending his War in
Afghanistan as an inherently just war, and rambling on about all the
other recent American wars and his ostensible justifications of them.

Then, in what must’ve been one of the least humble and least
appropriate speeches ever given before the Nobel Committee, Obama
declared non-violence to be impractical and insisted that the “limits
of reason” meant that the American military would continue to have to
be used for “moral” reasons.

In extolling the virtues of war while accepting what was supposed to be
a prize for radical advocates of peace, President Obama had what could
only be called one of the quintessential jerkass moments of American
history, an embarrassing exhortation to the advocates of peace to
accept violence as the one true way of solving the world’s problems.

Here’s a very prescient analysis and a fascinating suggestion for change that seems to have some traction in Ecuador and the U.K.  Could it ever work in the U.S.?  One Illinois representative thinks so.

**********

Have the Rich Won?

Maybe not. A new approach to capping income at the top is starting to gain momentum.

By Sam Pizzigati

Everywhere we all looked, we saw people hurting, we saw
unfairness, we saw economic injustice. Now today, 35 years later, I’ve
come to understand what we didn’t see: the big picture.

Yes, back then in 1974, we certainly did face injustice at
every turn. But we were living, thanks to years of struggle—and
success—by our activist forebears, in a society where politics actually
revolved around confronting those injustices and making change that
could really help average working people.

And, even better, we had a realistic shot at achieving that
change. The reason? Our activist forbears had sliced the single
greatest obstacle to social progress—the rich and powerful—down to
democratic size. In 1974 we were living in a society with an enfeebled
wealthy, and we didn’t know it.

Shame on us. By not understanding—and not appreciating—the
equality our progressive predecessors had battled so hard to achieve,
we failed to defend it. We let the wealthy come back. We let grand
concentrations of private wealth reconstitute themselves across the
American economic landscape. We let the super rich regain their power
to dictate and distort America’s political discourse.

How rich—and powerful—have today’s rich become? Some numbers
can help tell the story. In 1974, the most affluent 1% of Americans
averaged, in today’s dollars, $380,000 in income.

Now let’s fast-forward. In 2007, the most recent year with
stats, households in America’s top 1% averaged $1.4 million, well over
triple what top 1% households averaged back in 1974—and, remember, this
tripling came after adjusting for inflation.

Americans in the bottom 90%, meanwhile, saw their average
incomes increase a meager $47 a year between 1974 and 2007, not enough
to foot the bill for a month’s worth of cable TV.

The bottom line: top-1% households made 12 times more income than bottom-90% households in 1974, 42 times more in 2007.

The numbers become even more striking when we go back a bit
further in time and focus not on the top 1%, but on the richest of the
rich, the top 400, the living symbol of wealth and power in the United
States ever since America’s original Gilded Age in the late 19th
century.

In 1955, our 400 highest incomes averaged $12.3 million, in
today’s dollars. But the top 400 in 1955 didn’t get to enjoy all those
millions. On average, after exploiting every tax loophole they could
find, they actually paid over half their incomes, 51.2%, in federal
income tax.

Today’s super rich are doing better, fantastically better, both
before and after taxes. In 2006, the top 400 averaged an astounding
$263 million each in income. These 400 financially fortunate paid,
after loopholes, just 17.2% of their incomes in federal tax.

After taxes, as a group, the top 400 of 2006 had $84 billion
more in their pockets than 1955’s top 400, $84 billion more they could
put to work bankrolling politicians and right-wing think tanks and
Swift Boat ad blitzes against progressive candidates and causes.

How could America’s super rich have so little, relatively
speaking, back in 1955 and so much today? What has changed between the
mid 20th century and the first decade of the 21st? We have lost, simply
put, the economic checks and balances that so significantly discouraged
grand concentrations of private wealth in the years right after World
War II.

Among the most important of these checks and balances: steeply
graduated progressive tax rates. Over most of the quarter-century
between the early 1940s and the mid 1960s, America’s richest faced at
least a 91% federal tax rate on “earned” income over $400,000. By 1974,
that top rate had dropped, but only to a still steep 70%. The top rate
today: 35%.

Tax rates on income from the sale of stocks, bonds, and other
property—capital gains—have traveled the same trend line. In the
postwar years, the wealthy paid a 25% tax on capital gains. The current
rate: just 15%.

So what should today’s activists for economic justice do about
all this? Hit the repeat button and re-fight the struggles of our
activist forbears?

That course certainly seems reasonable. Our forbears, after
all, pulled off quite a stunner. They faced, a century ago, a super
rich every bit as rich and powerful as the super rich we confront
today. Over the course of the next half-century, they leveled that
super rich.

By the 1950s, the incomes of America’s richest had been
“hacked to pieces,” as best-selling author Frederick Lewis Allen would
marvel in a 1952 book. The grand estates of the super rich, jubilant
postwar progressives would add, had become housing tracts and college
campuses for the first mass middle class nation the world had ever
seen.

But this triumph would not stand the test of time. The 20th
century would end as it began, with phenomenal wealth and power
concentrated at America’s economic summit. By century’s end, the
leveling institutions our progressive predecessors had fought so hard
to win—progressive tax rates, a vital trade union presence, regulatory
restrictions on corporate behavior—had all come unraveled.

Maybe we ought to ask why, before we rush to re-fight the
struggles our forbears so nobly waged. Why, for instance, did the
single most potent leveling instrument of the mid 20th century, the
steeply graduated rates of the progressive income tax, prove
unsustainable?

These steep rates, in their time, certainly did work wonders.
In the mid 20th century, with these rates in effect, the U.S. economy
essentially stopped generating colossal new concentrations of wealth
and power. Of the 40 richest individuals in U.S. history, not one made
the bulk of his fortune during the years of this progressive tax rate
heyday.

The big fortunes that did amass in these years mostly belonged
to oil magnates. They enjoyed what the rest of America’s rich did not:
a super loophole, the oil depletion allowance, that essentially
shielded them from the stiff tax rates that applied to every other deep
pocket.

But steeply graduated tax rates have an Achilles heel. The rich
hate them with an incredibly intense passion. That wouldn’t matter, of
course, if everyone else loved these rates with equal fervor. But they
don’t—because high tax rates on high incomes only impact the wealthy
directly. The wealthy feel the “pain.” They also see no
benefits—because they don’t need or use the public services high taxes
on high incomes make possible.

Those who do benefit from these public services, on the other
hand, don’t automatically connect the availability of these services to
progressive tax rates.

The end result of these political dynamics: Steeply graduated
tax rates—as traditionally structured—have never been able to stand the
test of time, anywhere. The rich attack these rates with far more
single-minded zeal than the general public supports them.

High tax rates on high incomes typically only come into effect
during periods of great social upheaval, during wars and severe
economic downturns that knock the wealthy off their political stride.
But after these upheavals, amid “normalcy,” the wealthy’s fervid and
focused opposition to high rates eventually wears down the public
political will to maintain these rates. The rates shrink, wealth
re-concentrates.

Today’s mainstream policy makers and politicos seem to have
concluded, from this history, that any attempt to tax the rich
significantly make no sense.

The Obama White House, for instance, wants to up the top
income tax rate on the wealthy, but just to the 39.6% rate in effect
before the George W. Bush tax cuts. If the top U.S. tax rate does rise
to 39.6%, America’s rich would be paying taxes at less than half the
rate they faced in the 1950s under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a
Republican.

Even worse: Merely repealing the Bush tax cuts, as current
White House economist Lawrence Summers himself acknowledged in a 2007
Brookings Institution paper, would only wipe away one-sixth of the
income inequality the nation has experienced since 1979.

Similar tax games are playing out in Britain, where the
current government is upping the top tax rate on some high incomes from
40 to 50%. The new rate would still constitute a bargain, by historical
standards, for the British rich, who, at one point last century, faced
a 97% top rate.

Progressives in the UK, not surprisingly, are challenging their
government’s tax-the-rich timidity. But they’re not stopping there.
These progressives are also arguing that we need to go well beyond the
traditional progressive tax remedies previous progressive generations
put in place, beyond taxing the rich to actually capping their income.

And this capping, these British progressives believe, ought to
be done in a manner that gives average working families a clear and
powerful vested self-interest in keeping the caps in place. How do they
propose to accomplish this goal? They’re suggesting we link income
ceilings at the top to income floors at the bottom. In effect, they
seek a “maximum wage” tied to a minimum.

With a “maximum” set as a multiple of a minimum, society’s
richest and most powerful would only be able to increase their incomes
if the incomes of society’s poorest and least powerful increased first.
These rich, to become richer, have historically sought to depress
wages. A maximum coupled to the minimum would instantly create a
counter-incentive: the higher the wage at the bottom, the better for
the rich—and the better, of course, for the bottom, too.

In this new maximum wage environment, unions and other
traditional advocates for higher wages at the bottom might suddenly
find quite a few new—and distinctly wealthy—people in their corner.

Leading UK progressives have opened a campaign to inject these
notions into Britain’s mainstream political discourse. This past
August, 100 British progressive luminaries—all-stars who included three
dozen members of Parliament, veteran activists and economists, and the
UK’s most important labor leader, Trades Union Congress general
secretary Brendan Barber—called on their government to establish a
“High Pay Commission” and “launch a wide-ranging review of pay at the
top.”

This High Pay Commission, the progressive luminaries urged,
“should consider proposals to restrict excessive remuneration such as
maximum wage ratios.”

Thousands of British grassroots activists have since signed on
to the High Pay Commission call. And one party in the British
parliament, based in Wales, has already made advocacy for a UK-wide
“maximum wage” part of its official platform.

How exactly could a “maximum wage ratio” principle be
implemented? Top-bottom ratios could be tied directly to the
expenditure of tax dollars. A government could, for example, insist
that all publicly owned enterprises limit the pay between their top
executives and their workers.

Late in 2007, delegates to Ecuador’s Constituent Assembly
enacted legislation along this line. They created a remuneración
máxima—a “maximum wage”—for all agencies and enterprises that take in
over half their financing from tax dollars. The cap limits the pay of
top executives in Ecuador’s publicly subsidized sector to 25 times the
Ecuadorian minimum wage.

Executives at Ecuador’s Banco del Pacifico, a huge bank
nationalized after a 1999 financial crisis, have been able to exploit
and expand exceptions in the original legislation. But the principle
still stands.

Governments could also apply that principle much more broadly,
by mandating top-bottom pay ratios for any enterprises that seek
government contracts or subsidies or tax breaks. The British
government, as campaigners for a High Pay Commission note, could insist
on “reasonable pay structures” within private enterprises that gain
“public procurement contracts.”

Under current law, in both Britain and the United States,
private enterprises that win government contracts can pay their top
executives as much as they please. The CEO at Lockheed Martin, a
company that feeds almost exclusively off government contracts, last
year took home $26.5 million. That’s over 700 times the take-home of
the average American worker.

Lockheed, of course, only represents the tip of the
taxpayer-subsidized iceberg. Almost every major corporation and bank in
the United States is currently raking in big-time taxpayer dollars,
either through government contracts, economic development subsidies and
tax breaks, or, most recently, outright billion-dollar bailouts.

These taxpayer dollars are making rich people richer. Since
the beginning of 2008, the Institute for Policy Studies recently
reported, the 20 U.S. banks that have received the most bailout dollars
have laid off 160,000 workers. The 100 top executives at these 20
banks, in 2008 alone, collected a combined $791.5 million in personal
compensation.

Our tax dollars, in short, are increasing economic inequality
in the United States. They are growing the gap between our richest and
everyone else. That need not be. If we leveraged the power of the
public purse—as we already do in the struggle against gender and racial
inequality—our tax dollars could be helping us narrow, not expand, the
economic gaps that divide us.

Under existing U.S. law, companies that discriminate against
women and minorities in their employment practices cannot gain
government contracts. As a society, we’ve decided that we don’t want
our tax dollars subsidizing companies that increase gender or racial
inequality. So why should we let our tax dollars subsidize companies
that increase economic inequality—by compensating top executives at
levels that dwarf the pay that goes to average workers?

Rep. Jan Schakowsky, a progressive Democrat from Illinois,
doesn’t think we should. Schakowsky has introduced legislation, the
Patriot Corporations Act, that would give tax breaks and a preference
in the government contract bidding process to companies that pay their
executives less than 100 times what they compensate their lowest-paid
workers.

That standard, suitably expanded and strengthened, could become
a progressive principle worth rallying around: No tax dollars, in any
way, shape, or form, for any companies or banks that pay their
executives at over 25 times what their workers receive.

Why 25 times? The President of the United States currently
makes just under 25 times the annual pay of the lowest-paid federal
worker. Why then should we let our tax dollars go to executives who
demand—and get—hundreds of times more than their own workers?

Back in 1974, in a far more equal United States, we never needed to ponder questions like these.
Now we do.

Sam Pizzigati is a labor journalist and an
associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, in Washington,
D.C. He edits Too Much (www.toomuchonline.org), an online weekly on
excess and inequality.

The S-Word and Dr. Kevorkian’s
Accountant

Health care Rx from my socialist fire
department

Thursday 15 October 2009
by: Greg Palast, t r u t h
o u t | Op-Ed

Wendell Potter tells Greg Palast health insurers’
dirty secret. (Photo: BobFest)

Tell me where it hurts,
Mr. President.

What’s killing you, Barack, is what’s killing us
all: an evil germ called “Medical Loss Ratio.”

“Medical Loss Ratio”
[MLR] is the fancy term used by health insurance companies for their slice,
their take-out, their pound of flesh, their gross – very gross – profit.

The “MLR” is the difference between what you pay an insurance company
and what that insurer pays out to doctors, hospitals and pharmacists for your
medical care.

I’ve totted it up from the raw stats: The “MLR,” insurance
companies’ margins, is about to top – holy mama! – a quarter
trillion dollars a year. That’s $2.7 trillion over the next decade.

Until the 1990′s, insurers skimmed only about a nickel on the dollar for
their “service,” Wendell Potter told me. Potter is the CIGNA insurance company
PR man who came in from the cold to tell us about what goes down inside the
health insurance gold mine. Today, Potter notes (and I’ve checked his accuracy),
porky operators like AIG have kicked up their Loss Ratio by nearly 500 percent.

The industries’ slice is growing to nearly a quarter of your insurance
bill. All of it just paperwork and profiteering.

President Obama is
never going to pull the insurance company piggies from a trough this big,
especially when the industry has made room for Congressional snouts.

So what’s the Rx? Easy: Kill the pigs and call the fire
department.

The only solution to Loss Ratio piggery is to kill the
pigs: eliminate health insurers from the health industry entirely.

We
can’t cure our ills, as our president has attempted, by attacking the problem
ass-backwards. No, Mr. Obama, we don’t need HEALTH INSURANCE for
everyone, we need HEALTH CARE for everyone. There’s a giant difference.
Instead of concentrating on PAYMENT, we need to focus solely on providing
the health SERVICE.

From my London days writing for The Guardian,
I can tell you the British do NOT have national health insurance. They have a
National Health Service.

The government builds hospitals, hires
doctors and, when you need the service, you just go and get it. It’s kind of
like the fire department. When your house is on fire, you don’t call your fire
insurance company, you call THE FIRE DEPARTMENT. We care first about the
service, not the payment.

The British government hires the
doctors, like firemen, and Brits use them, like firemen, as they need them.

It works. My mother-in-law, a nurse, on a visit to England, was stunned
at the speed, quality and absence of mad paperwork to fix her broken arm.

But, you might say, that’s, that’s SOCIALISM! Well, yes, it is.
And I’m not afraid to use the S-word: Socialized Medicine. Just like America’s
Socialized Fire Departments. (Fun fact: socialized, i.e. publicly funded, fire
departments were ‘invented’ by the revolutionary Ben Franklin.)

And
Yes We Can get socialized medicine passed into law.

Really.
It’s simple: we sneak it in with the kids.

We can learn from Lyndon
Johnson’s sale of Socialist Medicare. Johnson knew that no one could argue that
Granny do without a doctor. Can the “Pro-Life” Republicans now tell us that
pregnant moms and children ages 0 to 3 should be denied care? Therefore, to the
Medicare program for those 65-or-older, we simply add “Kiddie Care,” for those
from Negative 9 months through age 3.

But instead of the wallet-busting
Medicare system, in which doctors and hospitals are paid for each suture, bag of
blood and pat on the head, Kiddie Care will be provided by Kiddie Care Service
salaried doctors.

How do we get doctors (who now AVERAGE $240,575 a
year) to take well-paid, but not pig-paid, posts? We grab’m while they’re young.
We pay doctors the full cost of their medical education; and we treat them as
humans during internship, not as in the current system where interns are treated
as medi-slaves. In return for the public paying for their medical education, the
public gets the young doctors’ ten-year commitment to work for the health
service at a reasonable salary.

That’s not my invention. The
free-education idea for staffing a national health service had long ago been
proposed by that wily old dog Ted Kennedy. (Damn, we miss him.)

Once the
first wave of three-year-olds are about to turn four and their families face
having to buy them health insurance, these millions of parents will become an
unstoppable army of lobbyists screaming for the extension of Kiddie Care to age
four, then to age five, then to age six and so on. Get it?

Yes, Mr.
Limbaugh, I am another bleeding heart trying to sneak socialized medicine into
America. Yes, I am trying to rid us of the “free-market” insurers who are
causing the bleeding. Health insurers are as useful to our health care system as
a bicycle is useful to a goldfish.

Free-Market Fantasia

There ain’t no such thing as a “free market” in medical care, as there
is a free market in food. You can eat peanut butter instead of dining at
Maxime’s. But you can’t tell the surgeon, “No thanks, I can’t afford a new
kidney this week – I’ll just have a broken arm.”

A free-market
for-profit insurance system means that, when you need a new pancreas, your fate
is left to an insurance company computer programmed by Franz Kafka, Dr.
Kevorkian and his accountant. It’s you versus the Medical Loss Ratio. Good luck.

In olden days, doctors would attach leeches to suck a patient’s blood.
Today, we have insurance companies’ Medical Loss Ratio. Both can kill you. If
Obama and America want to end this sickness in the body politic, start with Dr.
Kennedy’s sure-fire cure: a national health service for kids – and get rid of
the bloodsuckers.

***

I Quit: A Personal Note

I
learned of the Kiddie Care solution during my brief and ill-starred tenure at
the Center for Hospital Administration Studies at the University of Chicago
“Billings” Hospital. I couldn’t make up that name. Years later, they hired
Michelle Obama as their vice president for community affairs.

In my
time, three decades ago, “Billings” handled the affairs of that poor community
by shipping the uninsured, sometimes bleeding, to poor-folks hospitals. One
wounded patient died on the poverty shuttle.

I quit, and swore that one
day I’d write about it. I just did.

*********************

Forensic economist Greg Palast is author of the New York Times
bestseller, “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.” His investigations for BBC TV
and Democracy Now! can be seen by subscribing to Palast’s reports at www.GregPalast.com. Hear Wendell Potter
tell Greg Palast about health insurers’ dirty secret here.

The hoariest and most oft-repeated cliche in American politics may
be that America is the greatest country in the world. Every politician,
Democrat and Republican, seems duty bound to pander to this idea of
American exceptionalism, and woe unto him who hints otherwise. This
country is “the last, best hope of mankind,” or the “shining city on
the hill,” or the “great social experiment.” As if this weren’t
enough, Jimmy Carter upped the fawning ante 30 years ago by uttering
arguably the most damning words in modern American politics. He called
for a “government as good as the American people,” thus taking
national greatness and investing it in each and every one of us.

Carter was speaking when Watergate was fresh, and government had
been disgraced, but still. The fact of the matter is that whenever
anything really significant has been accomplished by our government, it
is precisely because it was better than the American people.

Think of World War II, America’s entrance into which was strenuously
resisted by the populace until Franklin Roosevelt carefully laid the
groundwork and Pearl Harbor made it inevitable. Think of civil rights,
which Lyndon Johnson pressed despite widescale opposition, and not just
in the South. Even then it took more than 100 years. Or think of the
current health care debate in which Americans seem to desire some sort
of reform, just not a reform that would significantly help people in
dire need, while the Obama administration is pushing to provide that
assistance. In the end, government has inspired Americans far more than
Americans have inspired their government. They are too busy boasting.

There is nothing wrong with self-satisfaction or national pride. But
the incessant trumpeting of our national superiority to every other
country in the world is more than just off-putting and insulting. It is
infantile, like the vaunting of a schoolyard bully that his Dad is
better than your Dad. It is wrong. And it might be dangerous both to
ourselves and to the rest of the world.

Consider what it means. By what standard is one nation any greater
than any other nation? Yes, the United States has vast material
resources – we rank eighth in gross domestic product per capita – but
we also have, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation
and Development, the “highest inequality and poverty rate” in the
world, outside of Mexico and Turkey, and things are getting worse.
Nothing to boast of there.

Yes, we have a relatively high median income, but our standard of
living as measured by the Human Development Index of the United Nations
ranks us only 15th in the world, behind, among others, Norway, France,
Canada, and Australia. Are they better than we are? Even our home
ownership rate trails that of the citizens of Canada, Belgium, Spain,
Norway, and even Portugal.

Yes, the United States has the best system of higher education in
the world, but, according to an Educational Policy Institute report, we
rank 13th in the affordability of that education, and we are much less
successful with lower education – 11th in the percentage of the 25 to
34 population with a high school diploma and 22d in science education.

And though Americans love to crow about the “best health care” in
the world, the fact is that according to the World Health Organization
Index, we actually rank 37th in the quality of our health care. And we
are still the only industrialized country in the world without a
national health care system.

Even when one considers anecdotal evidence – “If this isn’t the
greatest country then why do so many people want to come here?” – the
case isn’t particularly persuasive. Mexicans cross the border to the
United States for economic opportunity. Turks go to Germany, Indians
and Pakistanis to Great Britain, Arabs to France. This isn’t a sign of
our special greatness, just a sign that desperate people seek a more
powerful economy for their betterment.

The point of all this isn’t that America doesn’t have a lot to be proud of. It does. The point is that just about every country
has a lot to be proud of, and America has no more right to assume it is
the greatest nation in the world than does France, Switzerland, China,
or Russia.

None of this would make much difference if the self-congratulation
was just harmless bragging. But there are consequences. A country that
believes it is the greatest in the world is also less likely to be
constrained by that world. One could argue that the Iraq war was a
direct result of a sense of national infallibility. So was our
willingness to torture, our reluctance to admit our mistakes in
Afghanistan, our culpability in the global recession, and our
foot-dragging on global warming. Such a nation is also less likely to
introspect or to strive for true greatness because it believes its
greatness has already arrived.

There is something bizarre about a country whose leaders have
constantly to toady to their constituents and in which any criticism is
tantamount to a lack of patriotism, but that describes America today.
Every politician feels compelled to ape Jimmy Carter’s old words to the
point where our alleged greatness has also become our national mantra.

It seems eons ago when Bobby Kennedy, a politician who didn’t like
to stroke even his own supporters, actually scolded a rally for booing
Lyndon Johnson because, Kennedy said, Johnson couldn’t have done what
he did in Vietnam if he didn’t have the American people, including
Kennedy’s audience, as his facilitators.

We aren’t going to hear that sort of honesty from political leaders
any more because the American people are too thin-skinned and arrogant
to tolerate it. Arrogance in an individual is unbecoming. It is no more
becoming for a nation. The Greeks understood that the gods punished
mortals for their hubris – for feeling that they were godlike. They
knew that overweening pride preceded a fall. One suspects that nations
are no more immune to punishment than individuals. A nation that brooks
no criticism, a nation that feels it is always better than any other, a
nation that has to be endlessly flattered and won’t face the truth, a
nation whose people think they possess some special moral exemption and
wisdom, a nation without humility is a nation spoiling for calamity.

We’ve been living in a fool’s paradise. The result may be a government that is as good as the American people, which is something that should concern everyone.

You’ll probably want to read this one to the very end for the surprise finale.  It’s actually an e-mail that was sent to a friend of mine in 2007, from a gentleman in France.  Every word is true; nothing is made up or altered.

Socialist healthcare horror story
by Jerome a Paris
Fri Apr 20, 2007 at 09:15:40 AM PDT

As the next exam for my son gets near (next week), I though I’d provide
a short summary of my family’s dealings with a socialist, centralised,
single-payer healthcare system.

As a reminder, my (then 4 years old) son was diagnosed 2 and a half
years ago with a brain tumor. He underwent surgery, then chemotherapy
for a year and a half. Early last year, he appeared to have been cured,
but the tumor reappeared last autumn, and he underwent radiotherapy
this winter.

Next week we’ll know how that is working.

In the meantime, as a consequence of surgery, he is handicapped and only very partial use of one arm.

He was first diagnosed by our pediatrician, a private sector doctor,
who sent us to the (public) specialised pediatric hospital in Paris for
additional exams. We did a scan and a MRI the same day, and that
brought the diagnosis we know.

He was hospitalised the same day, with surgery immediately scheduled
for two days later. At that point, we only had to provide our social
security number.

Surgery – an act that the doctor that performed it (one of the world’s
top specialists in his field) told us he would not have done it five
years before – actually took place the next week, because emergency
cases came up in the meantime.

After a few days at the hospital, we went home. At that point, we had
spent no money, and done little more than filling up a simple form with
name and social security number.

Meetings with the doctor in charge of his long term treatment, and with
a specialised re-education hospital, were immediately set up, and
chemiotherapy and physical therapy were scheduled for the next full
year.

Physical therapy included a few hours each day in a specialised
hospital, with a varied team of specialists (kinesitherapy,
ergotherapy, phychologist, orthophonist) and, had we needed it,
schooling. As we lived not too far away, we tried to keep our son at
his pre-school for half the day, and at the hospital the other half.
Again, apart from filling up a few forms, we had nothing to do.

My wife pretty much stopped working to take my son to the hospital
every day (either for reeducation or treatment) – and was allocated a
stipend by the government as caregiver, for a full year (equal to just
under the minimum wage). Had we needed it, transport by ambulance would
have been taken care of, free of charge for us (as it were, car
commutes to the hospital could also be reimbursed).

During the chemotherapy, if he had any side effects (his immune system
being weakened, any normal children’s disease basically required him to
be hospitalised to be given full anti-biotic treatment), we’d call up
the hospital and just come around. Either of us could spend the night
with him as needed.

We never spent a dime.

After a year at the specialised hospital, ongoing re-education was moved to another institution
specialised in home and school interventions.

In practice, a full team of 5 doctors or specialists come to see him
over the week, either at home or at school, to continue his treatment
(such follow up, possibly less intense than at the beginning, will be
needed until he reaches his adult size). Of course, they manufacture
braces and other specialised equipment for him and provide it free of
charge to us.

Check up exams take place every 3 months, with all the appropriate
exams (usually including a MRI), and we’ve never had to wait for the
appointments.

Again, no cost for us, no funds to be fronted.

When he relapsed, our doctors considered all available options. In the
end, the most promising technology was in another Paris hospital. Such
technology, linked to nuclear research, exists only in 3 places in the
world, one in Boston and one in Switzerland, so the French system
itself was able to provide a cutting edge option. But had we needed to
go to Germany, the UK or even the USA for treatment because that’s
where the best hope was, the costs of that would have been covered too
by French social security.

Our son is in first grade, he has the right to special help for
handicapped children at school (a fairly recent law), and he now
benefits from part time help – a person who is around about 20 hours
per week to help him do his work and catch up when he is absent for his
therapy. This is paid by the city of Paris and the ministry of
education.

Oh, and as he is officially handicapped, I recently discovered that we
actually benefit from an additional tax break (in France, the taxes you
pay are roughly divided by the number of people in the family; the
handicap counts as an additional person for that purpose).

So, we did not have to spend a single cent. We got support to be
available for him. He gets top notch treatment. We never had to wait
for anything. And this is available to absolutely everybody in France,
irrespective of your job, age or family situation. If you are badly
sick or injured, you simply do not have to worry about money at any
time, nor about lack of care.

An interesting twist to that story is that we do have private
healthcare insurance in France. Basic healthcare is covered by social
security, but only partly: except for the poor (under a certain income
level), there are co-payments for most expenses like medecine and
doctor visits, and doctors are also allowed to charge you more than the
official tariff (and you have to pay the difference, in addition to the
co-payment on the official price). Thus many people buy private (or
mutual) insurance to cover that difference partly or fully. Such
insurance is often provided by your employer. But whenever you have
“major” expenses, you switch to 100% coverage of expenses by the public
system – except that, if you had a private insurer, it has to pay to
the public entity a portion of the costs. In my case, as I had a good
insurance via my bank, this is what’s happening, and thus the private
sector bears a portion of “catastrophic risk.” (And they have no say in
what care is provided. They just pay an agreed fraction of it.)

Thus there is solidarity across the system.

This is not to say that all is well in French healthcare. As in other
countries, costs are barely under control, spending increases every
year, and there are many ways the system could be improved for doctors,
nurses and patients. But the fact remains that if you are badly ill,
you will be taken care of; you will not need to give up your job (or if
you do, you’re helped); you will not need to sell your house; and you
will not be denied healthcare (see my second comment below).

It’s been tough enough to deal with a sick child; I simply do not want
to imagine what it would have been like if I had to beg for care or to
scurry around for money in addition.

It’s just inconceivable. And thus, I was happy to pay taxes before, and
I’m really, really happy to pay taxes now to provide that level of care
for those who really need it.