Dave Lindorff

If you want to fix the disaster that is called the American healthcare system, the first thing to do is to clearly point out what its major failings are, and there are two of these.

The first is cost.  America is the most expensive or one of the most expensive places in the world to get sick or injured. The corollary of that is that it is one of the best places to make a killing if you are in the medical business, whether as a doctor, a hospital company, a pharmaceutical firm, or a nursing home owner.

The second is access.  One in six Americans -- a total of 50 million people at latest count -- have no way to pay for that care. Too young for Medicare, too "well off" for Medicaid, but too poor to buy private health insurance or too sick to be admitted into a plan, or employed by a company that doesn't provide health benefits, these people get no medical care until they get so sick that they are brought into a hospital emergency room where they get treated (often too late) at public expense, or at the hospital's expense, with the cost shifted onto taxpayers or onto insured patients' premiums.

Any reform of this atrocious "system" must address these two major failings or it is no reform at all.

And that's where all the various versions of Obamacare fall flat.

Technorati Tags: Dave Lindorff

My bank, a small regional institution that was not involved in sub-prime lending, and that was not a recipient of any TARP bailout money, cut off my home equity line of credit two weeks ago. They did it abruptly, with no notice -- I only discovered it had happened when I tried to get a $500 advance from it to cover a payment I was making on my credit card. When I asked what was going on, the local branch manager informed me that "we are closing out a lot of credit lines while we reassess the value of houses in this region, which have been falling."

Now in my particular case, this was ridiculous. First of all, in our county, just north of Philadelphia, property prices have been static, but not falling. Furthermore, I had taken out a $160,000 mortgage 12 years ago, and it was now paid down to $60,000, and my balance on the home equity credit line was pretty small, so there was no way that we were in any way "under water" -- in fact our equity in our home is much higher than it was 12 years ago.

The bank informed me that it was no problem. I could simply take out a new credit line, at no charge, and transfer the balance on the current line over to the new one. The only hitch: Instead of paying one percent over prime as I had been, I would be paying nearly 4 percent over prime on that balance, effectively doubling the cost of borrowing money.

Technorati Tags: Dave Lindorff

If the government were to actually take charge of GM, instead of playing the pathetic role of passive owner, the bankrupt and seriously troubled auto giant could move beyond just making more cars and more problems to become a forward-thinking pioneer in actually solving problems.

Instead of just cranking out more and more steel dinosaurs and contributing more to the greenhouse gas crisis and the country's reliance on imported oil, a state-owned GM could start making and selling a line of electric vehicles, maybe marketing them as a package deal to car-buyers together with installed solar panels or wind generators, so that each car buyer would have his or her own source of off-the-grid electric power.

By selling solar and wind units in the millions, GM could bring down the cost of personal power generation to reasonable levels, making a huge dent in the nation's carbon footprint.

GM, by becoming a major alternative power producer, would also have a whole new source of revenue and domestic jobs, as well. It might even become an exporter again.

Technorati Tags: Dave Lindorff

Just imagine for a moment that you are a retired contractor, struggling to get by on your pathetically shriveled 401(k) when your ne-er-do-well child suddenly comes to you saying he's got this idea to start buying derelict homes and rehabbing them for resale. He asks you to stake him with a $100,000 loan (about half of what you've got left in your retirement fund), promising to repay you when he sells his first couple of houses. You know the kid's flat busted and has been laid off from his job as a dishwasher, so you want to help, but you've also seen his carpentry skills: the doghouse he build in high school fell apart on a windy day, and his own house has a leaking roof, needs repainting, and all the plumbing leaks. You've also seen his business skills: He plays the Lotto excessively, hasn't saved a penny, and buys most of his supplies at the local 7-Eleven.

Would you front this kid half your money?

Well, if you really loved the kid, and if he was in danger of losing his house, you might want to help. But the smart thing to do would be to offer to go in with him in the business, acting as the contractor, so that you could train him in the necessary business and contracting skills, and at the same time make sure the rehab jobs got done properly.

That might work out. Your son might never learn to be a master carpenter, but at least you'd have a good shot at getting your investment back.

Technorati Tags: Dave Lindorff

Sunday's cowardly assassination of abortion doctor George Tiller demonstrates once again that the U.S. is not all that different from Pakistan.

One thing that these two violent societies share is having a group of rabid religious fundamentalists who are each on a jihad against those in their nation with whom they disagree, and who are ready to kill and maim their enemies without mercy or hesitation.   The other thing -- perhaps the more dangerous thing -- that they share is a government apparatus in which certain elements are overtly or surreptitiously supportive of the jihadists, and in which other elements are cowed into silence and inaction.

In Pakistan it is the Taliban and related organizations and groups that have the tacit support of some elements within Pakistan's military, police and intelligence services, and political parties.  These elements encourage, assist, and protect Taliban terrorists in their attacks on the larger society.

In the U.S., groups such as Operation Rescue and other militant anti-abortion groups and the violent American "jihadists" who are attracted to them, have terrorized women seeking abortions or abortion counseling, and that have terrorized the doctors and nurses who have bravely tried to provide women with the health care they want and need, including the constitutionally protected right to an abortion.  And political officials such as Phillip Kline, attorney general in Kansas from 2000-2006, and who during that time repeatedly harassed and initiated criminal investigations against Tiller and his women's health clinic in Wichita, are ones who incite these groups to violence.  

Randall Terry, a founder of Operation Rescue, even after Tiller's murder, called the victim, who was slain as he handed out brochures as a volunteer at his church, "a mass murderer" and "an evil man" whose "hands were covered with blood."

Technorati Tags: Dave Lindorff

I don't know at this point whether Judge Sonia Sotomayor is a good choice for Supreme Court Justice or a bad one.

She certainly is a lousy judge for writers and other creative people, having ruled (and been overruled by an appellate court and then, when that reversal was upheld, by the U.S. Supreme Court in a case called New York Times Inc. v. Tasini) that the Times and periodical publishers could reprint, without any additional compensation, any freelance works they contracted on the basis that they had a general copyright on each entire issue they publish.

And she appears to have rarely met an insurance company that she didn't feel was more deserving of court succor than any insured person suing an insurer. In a report in the Philadelphia Inquirer, reporter Joseph N. DiStefano quotes an insurance attorney named Randy Maniloff as saying that in cases involving insurance companies and insurance policyholders "It's insurers by a landslide."

Such a pro-corporate position would put her in league with the Roberts/Alito/Scalia/Thomas wing of the court, and would be consistent with her pro-corporate stance vis-à-vis writers and artists and copyright law. (In fairness, Sotomayor did rule against an insurance firm and in favor of a policyholder's family in 2005.)

Technorati Tags: Dave Lindorff

You'd have to say that the American prison system is a rank failure. With two million inmates, it is the largest and at over $60 billion a year, the costliest prison system in the world, not just in the percent of the population that is kept behind bars, but in actual numbers. But it is also a failure because it doesn't prevent crime, and might even increase it. According to a recent study, two-thirds of inmates who are released from jail after serving their time are re-arrested for new crimes within three years, and half of those so arrested end up being sent back to jail on new charges.

I thought about this dismal record of non-rehabilitation when I read an AP story today reporting that a Pentagon study has found that just 5 percent of the prisoners held at Guantanamo, after release, returned to their old "terrorist" ways. Okay, another 9 percent of those released were said to have "joined or rejoined" the "fight against the U.S. and its allies." But that's really a different thing entirely, and I was surprised to see the Pentagon's number crunchers making the distinction.

For in fact, if you were an Iraqi, or an Afghani, you might well see fighting against U.S. forces in your country not as a "terrorist" activity, but as an act of supreme patriotism and national honor, and in any case, it's hard to see how you can call a fighter in either of those countries who is shooting at American troops a "terrorist." He or she is a soldier fighting another soldier, and if anyone is the terrorist in that picture, it's the one who has done the invading, which is the Americans.

Technorati Tags: Dave Lindorff

There may have perhaps been a time when America was a land of at least some brave people, although arguably a nation that celebrates as heroic a history that features lots of people with modern guns and cannons conquering and destroying another people who were living in the stone age and fighting back with bows and arrows, and that built its economy on the backs of men and women held in chains certainly has a tough case to make. What is clear though is that there is nothing brave about modern-day America.

Whatever we were, we have degenerated into a nation that finds glory in deploying the most advanced high-tech, high-explosive weaponry against some of the world's poorest people, that justifies killing women and children, even by the dozens, if by doing so it manages to kill one alleged "enemy" fighter. A nation that exalts remote-controlled robot drone aircraft that can attack targets in order to avoid risking soldiers' lives, even though by doing so, it is predictable that many, many innocent people will be killed. A nation that is proud to have developed weapons of mass slaughter, from shells laden with phosphorus that burns to death, indiscriminately, those who are contacted by the splattered chemical to elaborately baroque anti-personnel fragmentation bombs that spread cute little colored objects designed to look like everything from toys to food packages, but which at the slightest touch explode, releasing whirling metal or plastic fleschettes which shred human flesh on contact.

The Marines who battled their way up the hillsides of Iwo Jima, or the soldiers who struggled ashore under withering fire on the beaches of Normandy would be appalled at what passes for heroic behavior in today's American military. But that's not the worst of it.

The worst of it is back home in the USA, where millions of citizens who bitch about their taxes and who pay as little attention as possible to the fact that their nation is deeply mired in two wars, routinely refer to those who do their fighting for them as heroes, but then want nothing to do with the consequences of those wars (or for that matter the people who actually fight them).

Technorati Tags: Dave Lindorff bravery Guantanamo

A new study of 1,004 union organizing drives conducted by the director of labor education research at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations has found that two-third of the companies involved were violating U.S. labor law by holding one-on-one interrogations of workers, by threatening workers about their union support, by firing union organizers, or using half a dozen other illegal tactics to defeat unionization campaigns.

Prof. Kate Bronfenbrenner, author of No Holds Barred: The Intensification of Employer Opposition to Organizing, says that these illegal tactics by employers have been used to drive union representation at American companies down to only 12.4 percent from a level of 22 percent just 30 years ago.

If a similar level of illegal behavior by companies was reported dealing with, say, false billing of customers, deceptive reports to shareholders, or violation of environmental laws, there would be a clamor for action in Congress, and among the public, but so far, there is no outcry over this wholesale violation of the nation's labor laws.

One reason may be because nobody except the unions themselves and the companies breaking the law would know about this particular corporate crime wave.

The only article I've seen on this study was published by The New York Times, but it was run in an inside page of the Times business section, which is largely ignored by most readers.

Technorati Tags: Dave Lindorff

When doctors started reporting that some of the victims of the U.S. bombing of several villages in Farah Province last week -- an attack that left between 117 and 147 civilians dead, most of them women and children -- were turning up with deep, sharp burns on their body that "looked like" they'd been caused by white phosphorus, the U.S. military was quick to deny responsibility.

U.S. officials -- who initially denied that the U.S. had even bombed any civilians in Farah despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, including massive craters where houses had once stood -- insisted that "no white phosphorus" was used in the attacks on several villages in Farah.

Official military policy on the use of white phosphorus is to only use the high-intensity, self-igniting material as a smoke screen during battles or to illuminate targets, not as a weapon against human beings -- even enemy troops.

Now that policy, and the military's blanket denial that phosphorus was used in Farah, have to be questioned, thanks to a recent report filed from a remote area of Afghanistan by a reporter from The New York Times.

C.J. Chivers, writing in the May 14 The New York Times in an article headlined "Korangal Valley Memo: In Bleak Afghan Outpost, Troops Slog On," wrote of how an embattled U.S. Army unit in the Korangal Valley of Afghanistan, had come under attack following a morning memorial service for one of their members, Pfc. Richard Demeter, who had been killed the day before by a mine.

Technorati Tags: Dave Lindorff