Dave Lindorff

The point about the arrest Monday by a Cambridge Police sergeant of Harvard Distinguished Professor Henry "Skip" Gates is not that the police initially thought the celebrated public intellectual, PBS host, and MacArthur Award winner might have been a crook who had broken into Gates' rented home. Anyone capable of seeing a 58-year-old man with a cane accompanied by a man in a tux as a potential burglar might make the same mistake, given that a neighbor had allegedly called 911 to report seeing two black men she thought were breaking into the house.

But after Prof. Gates had shown the cops his faculty ID and his drivers' license, and had thus verified his identity, and after he had explained that he had just returned home on a flight from China and had been getting help from his limo driver in opening a stuck door, the cops should have been extremely polite and apologetic for having suspected him and for having insisted on checking him out.

After all, a man's home is supposed to be his castle. When you violate that sanctity, you should, as a police officer, appreciate that the owner might be upset.

But where it really goes wrong is what happened next.

Technorati Tags: Dave Lindorff

Let me say from the outset that I have the greatest sympathy for 23-year-old Bowe R. Bergdahl, the U.S. soldier in Afghanistan who was captured and is being held by Taliban forces, and for his family, who must be going through a living hell worrying about what is going to happen to him.

But I'm willing to bet you that all of them are wishing, right now, that the U.S. had not decided back in 2001 to begin a campaign of torture and murder against the Taliban fighters that it was capturing in Afghanistan, and against others that it has rounded up in the so-called War on Terror.

I sure know that if my son were ever so unfortunate as to be suckered into joining the U.S. military and was then dispatched to fight and kill people in some far-off land where the U.S. had no reason to be in the first place, and if he were to be captured, I would want to know that my own country had been living up to the letter of the law in respecting every clause of the Geneva Convention regarding the treatment of captives.

Technorati Tags: Dave Lindorff

The Democrats in Congress have sold out their supporters in the labor movement by giving up the so-called "card-check" feature of the embattled Employee Free Choice Act, which makes the "reform" legislation that has been billed as labor's "number one issue" much less of a reform. Instead of being hammered into line on this issue by party leaders and by President Obama, who has long pledged to back EFCA, conservative Democrats in the House and Senate were allowed to join Republicans in opposing the measure, leading to its replacement with a vague plan to require quicker secret-ballot elections in union-organizing drives.

But largely unnoticed by the corporate media, there has been some really important good news for working people and the labor movement: the appointment of three people to fill the long-vacant empty seats on the five-member National Labor Relations Board, which has the ultimate job of adjudicating issues under the National Labor Relations Act.

The Bush Administration basically gutted the NLRA by simply failing, since 2007, to fill the three seats that had been emptied as prior board members' five-year terms had expired. This had left the NLRB with only two members, one a Democratic pro-labor appointee, and one a Republican pro-management appointee.

Technorati Tags: Dave Lindorff

Of course I could be wrong. Congress could turn around and pass some cockamamie scheme to kick the issue of health care reform down the road, offering some kind of minimal insurance coverage to a few million more people, and cracking down on this or that particularly egregious health provider ripoff, and then staging a "mission accomplished" photo op.

But real health care reform of the kind that Democratic candidates were promising during last year's presidential campaign is dead, killed by the timidity of the promiser-in-chief, President Barack Obama (and by the massive corruption of the Democrats in Congress, who have accepted the tainted coin of the health care industry).

Obama could have come to the American people as a newly elected leader and addressed us as adults, saying: "Look, we know what needs to be done. Plenty of countries in Canada, Europe, and elsewhere have figured it out already. They set up the government as the single payer to health providers -- doctors and hospitals, etc. -- and the government bargains and sets the prices those private providers of health care can charge. Of course, that means you'll all pay higher taxes to finance such a plan, but the record of all those countries shows that you'll be saving money overall, because you won't be paying for health insurance, your employer won't be paying for health insurance, you won't be paying co-pays and deductibles, and you won't be getting gouged for drugs or hospital stays or doctors' bills. You won't be paying state taxes for Medicaid either, nor will your insurance and local property taxes have to subsidize the hospital care of indigents. On balance, you'll all be saving money, and you'll never have to worry about disease or injury bankrupting you. Nor will employers be able to hold you hostage any longer. The reality is that the countries that have a single-payer plan are spending half of what we spend per capita for health care, they have no uninsured citizens, and their health overall, as measured by such things as longevity, infant mortality, etc., is better than ours."

Technorati Tags: Dave Lindorff Barack Obama health care public option single payer Obama Administration

If this were the democracy that the Founding Fathers thought they were creating, word from CIA Director Leon Panetta that his agency had lied to Congress and specifically that it had lied repeatedly from 9-11-2001 through the end of 2008 concerning an as-yet undisclosed secret program, would have virtually every member of Congress in a state of rebellion, demanding answers.

After all, the CIA is required by law to report to at least the majority and minority leaders of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees and to the majority and minority leaders of both houses of Congress about such things.

But not only did the spy agency not report on what it was up to; but also it lied about what it was up to.

Technorati Tags: Dave Lindorff

All you need to really know about the Obama health "reform" initiative is that it is being supported by retail giant Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart, a corporation that was built on the philosophy of treating workers like dirt (the company famously locks its employees inside its buildings at night, forces workers who have checked out of their shifts to continue to serve customers, off the clock, if they are asked for help on their way out of the store, has bitterly resisted offering any health benefits, and has one of the worst records of labor law violations of any company in the country), is now signing on as an endorser of the Obama health reform effort, saying:

"We believe now is the time for action on this vital issue. We commend the leadership of elected officials who are committed to enactment of reform, and we appreciate the commitment to inclusion and transparency which has been present thus far.

"We are entering a critical time during which all of us who will be asked to pay for health care reform will have to make a choice on whether to support the legislation. This choice will require employers to consider the trade off of agreeing to a coverage mandate and additional taxes versus the promise of reduced health care cost increases."

Why would a company such as Wal-Mart, with its Paleolithic attitude towards its own workers, be supporting a plan that, at least ostensibly, claims to be trying to provide health coverage for the working poor?

Technorati Tags: Dave Lindorff

When it comes to reforming America's disastrous health care "system," there are two issues that need to be considered: access and cost.

The so-called reform proposals being offered by the Obama White House, the House and the Senate, are failing on both counts, and deserve to die.

No progressives should allow themselves to be suckered into promoting one or the other.

Here's the problem. As long as the health insurance industry is permitted to be the primary paymaster, the cost of medical care will continue to soar, not least because the insurance industry is so concerned about minimizing its own outlays that it is forcing the system to devote nearly 30% of every health care dollar spent to administrative costs (compared to 3-4 percent for Medicare, and even less for single-payer systems such as Canada's). That's true whether there is a so-called "public option" government-run health insurance plan or not. Note that 30 percent of America's $2.5-trillion health care bill per year is $750 billion a year, a sum that does absolutely nothing to make a single person more healthy or less ill. Even if one were to assume that the lion's share of those administrative expenses were only for the private funded portion of America's health care system, and for Medicare, the state-run but partly federally funded portion that is famous for its paperwork mess, and the uninsured, who also consume a lot of paperwork when they do get treated at hospitals under mandated free-care provisions of at the expense of local governments, we'd be talking about 30% of $1.5 trillion, or about $450 billion going to administrative costs every year -- still a staggering sum.

Technorati Tags: Dave Lindorff

Reports are starting to appear suggesting that laid-off or underemployed Americans, and the long-term unemployed, are losing patience with the Obama Administration's and Congress' economic stimulus plan, which thus far has not done anything to arrest the growth of unemployment, now at close to 20 percent of the U.S. workforce, at least as unemployment used to honestly be counted in the 1970s and early 1980s.

While millions of jobs have been lost since the beginning of this year alone, the number of jobs that have been created as a result of the Obama Administration's signature $780-billion stimulus spending package is under 150,000 -- a far cry from the 3.5 million that were promised when the bill was being put before Congress.

There has been a lot of hype from Washington sources, dutifully reported with little analysis or criticism in the corporate media, suggesting that the recession is bottoming out. One example was a report last week that the number of people receiving unemployment had, for the first time in six months, dropped slightly. Unmentioned was the hard reality that the reason for this drop was that many laid-off workers are now reaching the end of their 26 weeks of unemployment benefits in states that do not offer any extended benefits program. On inspection, that is hardly good news.

There is also a mantra, trotted out regularly by administration officials, that unemployment figures are a "lagging indicator," and thus are no indication that the recession is continuing to worsen. The problem with this sleight-of-hand is that unemployment itself, when it is rising rapidly as it has been now for a year, is a cause of deepening recession. When one in five workers is unemployed or unwillingly underemployed, that represents not only a huge drop in consumer demand for everything from basic necessities to luxuries, but also a huge dark cloud of anxiety that hangs over most of the rest of the public, leading everyone to cut back on their spending, thus dragging down the economy further.

Technorati Tags: Dave Lindorff Barack Obama stimulus package unemployment employer corporate media

The Obama Administration and the Congressional Democrats are finally hitting the inevitable wall that was bound to confront them because of the president's congenital inability to be a bold leader, and because of the party's toxic decades-old decision to betray its working class New Deal base in favor of wholesale corporate whoredom.

The wall is health care reform, which both Barack Obama and the Democratic Party had hoped would be the ticket for them to ride to victory in the 2010 Congressional elections and the 2012 presidential election.

But you cannot achieve the twin goals of reducing health care costs and providing access to health care to 50 million uninsured people, while leaving the profit centers of the current system -- doctors, hospitals, and the health insurance industry -- in charge and in a position to continue to reap profits.

Technorati Tags: Dave Lindorff

President Barack Obama, referring to the violent attacks on protesters against the controversial election results in Iran's just-completed presidential election, this week lectured Iran's government, saying, "Peaceful dissent should never be subject to violence."

Referring to the tens and hundreds of thousands of frustrated and angry Iranians who have taken to the streets accusing Iranian authorities of rigging the election in favor of incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Obama said that "the Iranian people and their voices should be heard and respected."

But there is a certain hypocrisy going on here.

Just days ago, the ACLU of Northern California issued a press release announcing that it had filed a complaint over a Pentagon anti-terrorism training manual. That training manual, aimed at Pentagon personnel, describes domestic protests as "low-level terrorist activity."

Technorati Tags: Dave Lindorff