Corporate Power

In America, Selfishness and Lack of Solidarity Know No Bounds

dlindorff — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 11:14:32 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

As the strike by transit workers in Philadelphia enters its fifth
day, it is clear why unions have such a tough time in the United
States, where fewer than one in eight workers is covered by a union
contract.

Although the average pay of transit workers is just $50,000 a year
(that represents take-home pay of less than $35000 take-home after
taxes or about $3000 a month to live on for a typical family of four),
the suburbanites who feel put out because they have to brave huge
traffic jams to get to and from work in the city are grousing that the
transit workers are greedy for holding out for a slightly-less-than 4%
per year pay increase over the three years of their contract.

I just got into a debate at the local YMCA gym with an older guy who
probably makes over $100,000 a year and whose children are already
grown, who was incensed that the "greedy bus and subway drivers" were
asking for a raise at this time "with the economy in such a mess."

But I also noticed, as I drove my son into school this week in the
traffic crush, that these same suburbanites are, for the most part,
continuing to drive to work one to a car. What a lack of creativity!

My wife, who frequently travels to Rome to do research, has on
several occasions landed in that city during one of its frequent
transit strikes. She reports that the people of this ancient city take
these job actions in stride, getting out their bicycles, taking
leisurely walks to school, or simply going on holiday for the duration.
People don't get mad at the workers. In Italy, it's understood that
when one group of workers fights for better pay or working conditions,
everyone benefits in the end.

This fellow I was arguing with about the Philly transit strike,
said, "It's not like this is the 1920s or '30s, when unions were really
needed because people were being exploited."

"Oh really?" I said. "You don't think the workers at Wal-Mart or in
your local supermarket are being exploited?" The truth is that working
conditions for American workers have been getting progressively worse
in recent years, while pay has actually been falling in real dollars,
because union representation has been falling for several decades from
a high of over 35% back in the early 1950s. Those unions, like the
transit workers union in Philadelphia, which are still fighting the
good fight, are really all that stands between ordinary American
workers and a truly nightmarish return to a Dickensian era.

Does anyone believe that the type of manager that we have seen
pillaging the economy on Wall Street, or stealing jobs and already
earned pay from workers at Republic Window & Door in Chicago, is an
exception to the rule? Hell no. American managers are congenitally
ruthless exploiters of human beings constrained only by unions or their
fear of unions, and by the protective legislation, such as minimum wage
laws, occupational safety and health laws, etc., which Congress has
grudgingly passed because of the pressure from unions and their workers.

We should all be cheering the workers of the Transport Workers Union
Local 234 in Philadelphia for their grit and determination in standing
up to the management of the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation
Authority. Their fight is our fight. They like us are struggling to pay
rent or mortgage bills, to buy food for their families, and to pay
their medical bills.

Workers all around the Philadelphia area should be organizing
car-pools, getting their bikes out of the garage, and collectively
telling their own bosses to cut them some slack if they're late to work
or have to stay home for the day because of the strike.

We should also all be writing letters condemning the bias of the
local media in Philadelphia, which have as a group focused entirely on
the hardship to commuters caused by the strike, and not at all on the
issues confronted by the transit workers themselves.

Furthermore, it is not the fault of the SEPTA workers in
Philadelphia that bus and subway fares are too high. Nor is it their
responsibility to accept low wages to subsidize lower fares. It is the
responsibility of the state of Pennsylvania to keep those fares
affordable. Mass transit cannot and should not be self-financing. It is
a social good. It helps protect the environment by reducing air
pollution from cars, reduces wear and tear on roadways, and helps
reduce the nation's dependence upon oil imports.

Instead of complaining about the union for calling a strike, we
should all be cheering them on. America needs more labor militancy, not
less.
________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book
is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

The Democrats: Really, You Just Gotta Laugh

dlindorff — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 18:46:07 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

The Democrats in Congress, and their main man Barack Obama in the
White House, have taken tens of millions in legal bribes from the
health insurance industry over the past year, and have obligingly been
hammering out in Congress a health “reform” bill that, instead of
helping people, has been designed to help the insurance industry.

They started out by immediately blackballing any discussion of real
health reform in the form of an expansion of Medicare to cover everyone
of every age, which of course would have ended the problem of the
uninsured, while cutting the nation’s overall health bill by at least a
third, but in the process shutting down the private health insurance
business.

Then they chipped away and are at this point on the verge of
eliminating any so-called “public option” or government-run health
insurance plan to even compete with the private insurance sector.

Finally, in a move as breathtakingly accommodating of the insurance
industry as was the multi-trillion-dollar bailout financial bailout of
Wall Street’s biggest banks, they proposed to require (on pain of a
$3800 fine by the IRS) to require everyone in America to buy a health
insurance plan from the private sector—a gift to the industry of some
40-50 million new captive customers.

But a combination of public outrage at this forced program of
compulsory insurance and recognition that the inevitable government
subsidy of low-income insurance buyers would be humongous has led
Congress to backtrack, and start backing away from the mandatory aspect
of this plan.

And now the private insurance industry, not satisfied that it has
managed to practically dictate the terms of the health reform
legislation so far, and angry that it might not get those 40-50 million
new forced customers, is reportedly threatening to turn around and
knife the president and the Democratic Congress in the back,

They’re threatening to (gasp!) start running attack ads on the “reform” legislation.

Remember the old “Harry and Louise” ads the industry ran attacking
Hillary and Bill Clinton’s health reform proposal back in the early
1990s? Well, this time, it’ll be Harry and Louise attacking ObamaCare.

I can see it now. America’s Health Insurance Plans, the lobby for
the insurance industry vultures, will set up some nice-sounding front
group with a name like People for a Healthier America, and they’ll fund
a new ad campaign like this:

Harry will be sitting at the breakfast table, reading the local
paper. He’ll look up from his coffee as Louise is puttering around by
the sink.

“This ObamaCare looks like it’s gonna drive up our insurance premiums, hon.”

“What do you mean Harry?”

“Well it says here that they’re not going to force the poor
folks to buy insurance, so most of ‘em will probably wait until they
get sick and then buy it.”

“Well what’s wrong with that, dear?”

“Nothin’ ‘cept that the law would also prohibit the insurance
companies from charging those sick folks higher premiums when they do
finally come in to buy insurance.”

“Well, wouldn’t it be unfair to charge them more, when they need it?”

“It might seem that way Louise, but if the insurance company
has to take a loss on them, they’re going to make it up by charging us
good folks who have insurance more.”

“Oh my god, Harry! We’re already paying $6,000 a year for our insurance. What will our premiums go up to?

“Says here they could go up by another $1000 a year!”

Announcer: Don’t let Congress make you pay for the uninsured.
Call your Senators and Representatives and the White House, and tell
them to demand that every American be required to buy insurance
immediately! This announcement is brought to you by People for a
Healthier America.

It’s funny really, to see Sen. Max Baucus (D-Montana), the biggest
recipient in Congress of insurance industry money, who has spent the
last few months working hand-in-glove with the insurance industry
lobbyists to craft a bill to their liking, suddenly accusing his
erstwhile financiers of doing a “hatchet job” on his bill. Actually,
his bill has been a hatchet job itself on the whole concept of health
care reform.

All of this, of course, was entirely predictable. Like HillaryCare
before it, ObamaCare has been doomed from the start by its
unwillingness to address the basic issue behind America’s twin crisis
of health care: lack of access for those with lower incomes, and
absurdly high cost for everyone.

What makes it all so pathetic is that America already has
an excellent model for delivering quality health care: a single-payer
system called Medicare. Everyone in America gets this program, just
like in Canada, Germany, France, Taiwan, Japan and elsewhere. The only
difference is that in those other countries, people get it from the day
they’re born. In America, you have to wait until you are permanently
disabled, or until you reach the age of 65.

Far from having to “start from scratch,” as Obama duplicitously
claimed in his last address to Congress in explaining why he was not
proposing a single-payer solution despite its obvious success in other
countries, solving America’s health crisis by adopting a single-payer
system would be a simply matter of taking a well proven system that
works and is popular, and expanding it to cover everybody.

But of course that would have made the insurance industry furious.
They’d have to go back to just selling life insurance and homeowners
insurance and car insurance.

And so we can expect a new round of “Harry and Louise,” and ObamaCare will go down in flames.

You have to laugh at these Democrats. Even when they brazenly try to sell out, they get screwed.

________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author
of “Marketplace Medicine: The Rise of the For-Profit Hospital Chains”
(Bantam Books, 1992) and most recently of “The Case for Impeachment”
(St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Our Neighbors' Keeper: Local Cop Chiefs Want to Create a Nation of Snoops

dlindorff — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:54:04 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton and other big city cops
are calling for a new system of “citizen watch” programs, allegedly to
help them spot hidden terrorists. I view this new call for a nation of
private spies with a deep suspicion born of experience with the LAPD
and its historic penchant for spying on law-abiding residents of that
city.

Back in the late 1970s, together with a band of other doughty
journalists, including Tommy Thompson, Ron Ridenour, Ben Pleasants, I
co-founded and ran a spunky little news weekly called the LA Vanguard.
In the course of just one year, we broke stories about secret “security
offices” run by local phone companies (Pacific Telephone and GTE) which
provided unlisted numbers and credit information to police and other
government agencies without requiring a warrant, about the killing of
unarmed citizens by police, about the LAPD’s “shoot to kill” gun use
policy, about judges in landlord-tenant cases who were slumlords
themselves, and many other stories that were being ignored by the LA
Times and the rest of the local establishment media.

For our efforts, we found out years later, we were targeted by the
LAPD’s “red squad,” known at the time as the Public Disorder
Intelligence Division (PDID), for an intensive program of spying that
including planting a young cop, Connie Milazzo, as a member of our
editorial collective. We only learned of Milazzo’s real identity years
later when she admitted disclosed it herself to a judge in a public
hearing (she wanted to avoid being sent to the county lockup along with
a group of activists she had “joined” undercover who had all been
arrested during a protest and who were refusing to provide their
identities to the court).

A subsequent lawsuit filed with the help of the ACLU of Southern
California, eventually settled for a payment of $1.8 million by the
City of Los Angeles, disclosed that the PDID had for years been using
as many as 20 undercover cops to infiltrate and spy on over 200 legal
political and activist organizations in the Los Angeles area, gathering
rooms full of files on everyone from members of the National
Organization for Women to the staffs of certain members of the city
council. We also learned that the LAPD was providing those files to a
shadowy private outfit in San Francisco called Western Goals, which had
links to the ultra-right John Birch Society. Western Goals was
apparently seeking to serve as a private repository of dossiers on
leftists and political activists collected by local police all around
the country in a kind of end run around the restrictions on domestic
spying by the FBI that had been imposed after the post-Watergate
revelations about the abuses of the COINTELPRO era.

This is why Bratton’s idea stinks. Local police, because they are
local, are even more prone to rogue activities that will never be
exposed or monitored than are federal police.

As accommodating of police-state tactics as Congress has been,
especially since 9-11, at least some members of that body have raised
concerns and demanded investigations of some of those abuses by
organizations like the FBI and the Defense Intelligence Agency. But
city councils have been notoriously uninterested in monitoring the
unconstitutional activities of their local police around the country,
who have extremely powerful political connections and the support of
local media establishments.

Any attempt to organize a citizen’s watch program to look for
suspicious activity is bound to devolve into a police program of spying
on those who are outside of the “norm”: minorities, leftists,
activists, loners, people with alternative life-styles, artists, etc.

Let’s be honest. America faces no existential threat from
terrorism. It does face such threats from rampaging climate change,
political corruption, corporate power, economic collapse, and many
other things, but it is hardly threatened by terrorism, which has
killed far fewer people even in 2001 than have auto defects,
contaminated food, and insurance company denials of care.

Back in 2001, the Bush/Cheney administration stoked an irrational
fear of terrorism in order to win passage of the Patriot Act and
acceptance of other actions, such as creation of a program by the
National Security Agency to use supercomputers to monitor millions of
Americans’ electronic communications. Many of those threats to freedom
remain in place today. Now Chief Bratton and his compatriots in police
departments around the country are trying to stoke that same irrational
fear of terrorism to move the country even further towards a
police-state mentality.

The last thing we need in this era of corporate-media-induced
conformity and citizen passivity is a bunch of self-appointed citizen
snoops calling in to the cops with reports on every neighbor who looks
or acts a little bit different.
______________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is
“The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2009). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Pentagon Fraud and the ACORN Standard

davidswanson — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 13:47:02 -0400

WASHINGTON, October 2 – The Senate last night passed an amendment by
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) that would require the Department of
Defense to calculate how much the Pentagon pays companies that
committed fraud.

The measure, added to a defense appropriations bill, also would make
the Pentagon recommend how to penalize contractors that repeatedly
cheated the government out of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Sanders contrasted the sweeping scope of defense contractor fraud to
misdeeds by a few employees of the Association of Community
Organizations for Reform Now. The ACORN workers were fired for what
Sanders called “an outrageous and absurd discussion with actors.” The
sledge-hammer response in the House of Representatives and the Senate
was to cut off federal funds for ACORN.

“Virtually every major defense contractor in this country has been
engaged in systemic, illegal, and fraudulent behavior, while receiving
hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money. We’re not talking
here about the $53 million that ACORN received over 15 years. We’re in
fact talking about defense contractors who have received many, many
billions in defense contracts and year after year, time after time,
violated the law, ripping off the taxpayers of this country big time,”
Sanders said.

According to the nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight, the three
largest government contractors – Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Northrop
Grumman – all have a history riddled with fraud and other illegal
behavior. Altogether, the three companies engaged in 109 instances of
misconduct since 1995, and were fined $2.9 billion. How were they
punished? In one year alone, the big-three pocketed $77 billion in
government contracts in 2007.

With a $12 trillion national debt and the biggest budget deficit in
history, Sanders said, “Taxpayers want to know that the money we spend
– whether it is for defense, housing, education, or any other purpose –
is spent as wisely and as cost-effectively as possible. They also want
to know that the corporations and institutions and individuals who
receive this funding are honest and trustworthy.”

To read the senator’s floor statement and for a copy of the amendment, click here. To watch his speech, click here.

It's Congress: Don't Forget to Wash Your Hands After Hearings

dlindorff — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 11:06:35 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Some years ago, my wife and I, together with our young daughter,
took a circuitous summer train trip through France, Italy, Austria and
Germany. The last leg was an overnight express from Berlin that
deposited us at the Gare du Nord in Paris just at sunrise. Feeling
washed out from the ride, we made our separate ways to the facilities.
I was standing at the urinal with a bunch of other men, relieving
myself, when I heard this awful groaning coming from a stall. The
groaning grew louder and more painful sounding. Some guy was obviously
having a terrible time with his bowels. The agony continued, to the
point that we who were by now washing our hands at the sinks were
looking at each other in puzzlement, wondering what was going on. I
even wondered if someone should ask if the poor wretch if he needed
help.

Finally there was this enormous, impossibly long fart of incredible
volume and duration. This was followed by a long sigh of relief and an
awful stench.

We men in the rest room all looked at each other, shrugging and
stifling laughs. A few of us couldn’t contain ourselves and actually
burst out laughing.

There was a shuffle in the stall, and the latch was turned. We
couldn’t resist. Everyone turned to see who had just produced such a
prodigious noise and odor, expecting to see some huge, ponderous guy
lumber out. Instead, a shrivled little old man left the booth, nodded
silently at the rest of us, and exited the room.

I’m reminded of this incident by the recent efforts in Congress to
produce a health care reform bill—especially of the efforts in Sen. Max
Baucus’s Senate Finance Committee, which yesterday, after weeks of
allegedly painful negotiating among the so-called Gang of Six—three
conservative Democrats and three Republicans—and several weeks more of
discussions among members of the whole committee, produced a bill that
essentially leaves us with the status quo, except with some rather
smelly additions, such as a mandate that the uninsured and unemployed
buy some crummy health insurance plan offered by the private health
insurers or face a stiff fine by the IRS.

If the stench of corruption from the legal bribes of the insurance
industry lobby were not so vile and pervasive, we would all be rolling
in the aisles at the tiny fart produced by all that straining and
pushing on the part of Sen. Baucus (D-Montana) and his Finance Committee
colleagues.

Of course, it’s not over yet. Once both houses of Congress have
voted to approve the bills that have emerged from committee in House
and Senate, there will be another session on the pot—this time in a
secret conference committee, where members of the leadership of both
houses will negotiate to come up with a single bill to send back to
their respective houses for an up-or-down vote.

It can be safely predicted that the final legislation will resemble
much more the Senate version than the House version, because Senate
Democrats long ago surrendered control of that body to the minority
Republicans by accepting the so-called Rule of 60, whereby any
Republican can simply threaten to filibuster a piece of legislation and
the Democrats will immediately take it back and hack off any offending
piece of it to ensure that either all Democrats will vote for it, or
that one or two allegedly sane Republicans will join the majority of
Democrats, thus making a filibuster impossible.

Not once since at least 2006, when Democrats took over the Senate,
has the Senate Democratic leadership demanded that all Democrats in
that body support a bill or face retaliation, in the form of lost
committee assignments or sabotage of a bill important to local
constituents—the kind of thing that Republicans have done with their
members for years.

Indeed, Democrats seem to like the imaginary Rule of 60, as it
gives them a ready excuse to never have to actually do anything
progressive, as demanded by their electoral base.

And so, whether it’s health care reform, financial industry
regulation and reform, climate change legislation, civil liberties,
investigations into torture and war crimes, or ending the wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan, Congress has come to resemble a French railway station
lavatory, with committees grunting away in the stalls behind closed
doors, while a little old lady in the corner collects change from the
visitors who regularly come in to take a piss and monitor the
proceedings.
________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-area journalist. His latest book
is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

The Best Health 'Reform' Money Can Buy

dlindorff — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 14:29:29 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

When the White House or Democrats in Congress talk about health
care reform, and about wanting to preserve the central role of the
private insurance industry in health care, it pays to look at just what
it is that they they’re so anxious to preserve.

According to the Health and Human Service’s department’s National
Health Expenditures report, private insurers will pay out $854 billion
in medical claims for health insurance policyholders this year. That
represents about one-third of the nation’s estimated $2.5-trillion
medical care bill for this year. But that’s not the whole story. The
premiums paid for those claims payments will total $1.2 trillion, which
includes $179 billion in “administrative” costs (21% or over $1 out of
every $5 dollars spent on health care) and another 150 billion in
profits (a tidy 15% return). That is money that was paid out in
premiums by individuals and by employers (who every year are shifting
more of the cost of health coverage onto employees).

A big part of that $179 billion you and your employer pay for
insurance company “administrative expenses” goes to fund private “death
panels” whose job, as insurance company whistleblower Wendell Potter
has testified in Congress, to deny coverage to sick policyholders.

And that $179 billion wasted on administration (Medicare, a
federally-run program, only devotes 4% of costs to administration by
way of comparison), isn’t all. Doctors, hospitals and pharmacies also
spend a similar sum on administrative expenses, much of it devoted to
fighting to get paid by those same insurance companies. How many of us
have spent hours struggling over claims forms, and getting signatures
from physicians in order to get reimbursed for care, or on the phone
arguing with insurance company “customer service” people on the phone?
Doctors, hospital administrators and pharmacists do the same thing.
That’s why your doctor’s office has such a large staff of people who
aren’t there to take your pulse or blood pressure—just to work with
paper.

Insurance companies, in their discussions with investment analysts,
actually refer to their payouts for patient care vs. their premium take
as their “medical loss ratio,” a figure which they vow to improve by
clamping down on “losses” (meaning benefits paid).

I took a look at the latest 10-Q financial statement filed by
Aetna, one of the nation’s largest private health insurers. Through
June 30, Aetna took in $14 billion in premiums, $10.7 billion of that
amount from employers and employees, $2.9 billion more from Medicare
recipients who bought a supplemental insurance plan to cover the gap in
what Medicare covers, and another $400 million for handling Medicaid
claims. Aetna reports that it paid out $11.9 billion in health care
reimbursements, and $2.3 billion in administrative expenses (20%).

By the way, this same Aetna is headed by CEO Ronald A. Williams,
who earned 24.3 million in 2008 according to Forbes magazine (about the
norm for insurance CEOs), as well as another $296,639 as a board member
of American Express. Williams also has unexercised options on Aetna
stock worth $194.5 million, according to Forbes. He owns a palatial
home in Farmington, CT assessed at $1.7 million. According to
Opensecrets.org, Williams has spent close to $10 million on lobbying
activity for his company and the insurance industry since 2005.

Somebody tell me why this is a system we not only want to keep, but
that, under proposals working their way through House and Senate, would
force another 40-50 million currently uninsured people, most of them
low-income, to pay into under threat of being assessed a $3800 tax
penalty by the IRS.

Common sense says that if this insurance intermediary were removed
from the process, besides Williams and the other industry CEOs and
other executives losing their fat paychecks and bloated homes, planes
and portfolios, the whole American healthcare system would run a lot
more smoothly and cheaply.

I remember back in 1990, when I was working on my book Marketplace Medicine
(Bantam 1992) about the for-profit hospital industry, talking to the
administrator of a Canadian hospital in Ontario. He told me he had
formerly worked as a hospital administrator in the US. He reported that
back then, when new less-invasive technologies, as well as reforms
introduced to Medicare, had begun reducing the amount of time people
were spending in hospital beds, his hospital had been able to shut an
entire wing because of a declining patient census. “But one year later,
we had to reopen it to accommodate all the staff needed to deal with
paperwork from the insurance industry,” he said. That problem has only
gotten worse over the ensuing two decades. Meanwhile, this same
administrator told me, “In Canada, I have only three people doing
paperwork for the whole hospital: one for Canadians, and two to deal
with paperwork for the occasional American tourist who gets sick or
injured.”

Let’s be clear. The only reason Congress and the White House are
pushing a plan that relies on the private insurance industry is that
the private insurance industry is flooding the capital with money. It’s
a great investment for them. If health insurers are collectively
earning $150 billion in profits in a year, and it only costs them
perhaps $50 million in legal bribes to keep their scam operating,
they’re earning a 3000% return on investment!
We would all be far
better off if Congress just passed Rep. John Conyers’ bill, HR 676, to
expand Medicare to cover everyone. As I have explained in an earlier article,
expanding Medicare would result in no net increase in taxes, and
because it would eliminate insurance premiums, workers’ comp and public
employee health expenses while also lowering car insurance rates, not
to mention lowering the prices charged by doctors, hospitals and
pharmaceutical companies, also a substantial savings for all Americans.

Some people worry that if we were all on Medicare, medical research
would suffer. But this is a spurious fear. Much of the most important
research in medical care and treatment is funded by the federal
government through the National Institutes of Health. In fact,
arguably, the profit motive leads industry to focus research on highly
profitable, but much less urgent things, so we get research on cosmetic
uses for Botox, but little or no research on finding a cure for Malaria
or drug-resistant TB.

There may be a valid argument for competitive markets, say for cars
or food production and distribution. But it should be abundantly clear
by this point that when it comes to health care, the market doesn’t
work. In fact, it is perverse. The end user—your and me—will never have
the information needed to make a wise decision regarding either cost or
quality. Furthermore, unless we were all buying our own insurance and
selecting our own doctors unimpeded by “preferred provider” or HMO
lists, we are being forced to chose, if we get any choice at all, from
a limited selection made available by our employers, who are motivated
only by bottom-line concerns. In fact, in countries like Canada or
France, which have Medicare-like single-payer systems, people have
vastly more choice as to physician and hospital than any American
patient.

Some people also worry that a government-run single-payer insurance
system, by pushing down the reimbursements to doctors and hospitals
through its monopoly position as sole paymaster, would lead to a
defunding of hospitals and would drive away the “best” students from
choosing the medical profession. But really, if you look at what
hospitals in the current “competitive” market spend much of their money
on, it turns out to be cosmetic things like fancy building exteriors,
pretty rooms, etc.—things that help lure patients, but that do nothing
to improve patient care. As for future doctors, does anyone really
think that having people go into medicine because of the prospect of
earning millions of dollars and driving fancy sports cars results in
better doctors than having people choose a medical career because of a
passion to serve humanity, or a passion for research into curing
disease? What changes is not the quality of the medical students, but
their motivation.

All the sturm and drang in Washington and in the media over the
course of health care “reform” in Washington is really much ado about
nothing. We are not getting real reform.

In a replay of last year’s to-do over mess in the banking industry,
we are watching our dysfunctional and corrupt government simply, to
quote President Obama, “kick the can” down the road, leaving the next
Congress and the next President to deal with the same disaster.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Americans will continue to die
needlessly every year because the care they need will be denied to them
by insurance companies that are focused on making as much money as
possible, and by a government that has sold its soul to the lobbyists.
_______________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of
“Marketplace Medicine: The Rise of the For-Profit Hospital Chains”
(Bantam Books, 1992) and more recently of “The Case for Impeachment”
(St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

The New York Times Trashes Single-Payer Health Reform

dlindorff — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 16:54:50 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

In an article in the Sunday New York Times, headlined
“Medicare for All? ‘Crazy,’ ‘Socialized’ and Unlikely,”reporter
Katherine Q. Seelye did her best to damn the idea of government
insurance for all with faint praise.

To begin her article, Seelye quoted from a 2005 episode of the NBC
drama “West Wing,” in which two presidential candidates, a Democrat
played by Jimmy Smits and a Republican played by the always loveable
Alan Alda, are discussing health care reform. The Smits character says
his “ideal plan” would be Medicare for all. “That’s crazy” counters the
Alda Republican. Then Seelye sequed to an opinion piece recently penned
by real-life one-time Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern
(a noble figure who nonetheless has long-since been type-cast as an
out-of-touch extreme liberal loser), who favors expansion of Medicare
into a national single-payer system.

Turning to the real world, Seelye then trotted out several
economists, ostensibly to give a broad spectrum of arguments about the
idea of single-payer, but in fact carefully avoiding including anyone
who actually supports the idea of expanding Medicare.

As her representative liberal, she quoted Brandeis economist Stuart
Altman, an Obama adviser during the presidential campaign, who said
that while he is not “ideologically uncomfortable” with expanding
Medicare, such a move would be “disruptive.” Going then to what she
described as “the other end of the political spectrum,” Seeley quoted
Robert E Moffit, of the right-wing Heritage Foundation, who claimed
Medicare would mean too much government power over heatlh care.”
Finally, seeking what she could call middle ground, Seelye turned to
Dartmouth economist Jonathan Skinner, who claimed that expanding
Medicare would be good because it would cover everyone, but bad because
it would mean tripling the Medicare tax, currently 2.9% of paychecks.
If we were looking at a political yardstick here, Seelye started at the
16” mark (Altman), then went to the 36” mark (Moffit), and finally went
to the 24” mark (Skinner).

But where was an economist from the real left end of the political
spectrum, over in the single digits of that yardstick? Altaman,
representing the private insurance-based Obama approach, was hardly it!

Seelye might have gone to her colleague, columnist Paul Krugman, a
Nobel Prize-winning economist at Princeton, who has on a number of
occasions written and stated that a single-payer system such as
Medicare for all would be “far cheaper” than any private
insurance-based system. Krugman, at least, would be over by the 10” or
12” line on a political yardstick.

Never has the Times really analyzed the true costs and
benefits of the plan espoused in a bill, HR 676, authored by House
Judiciary Chair John Conyers (D-MI), which would expand Medicare to
cover every American. Seelye mentions Rep. Conyers’ bill, but says
innocently that it is “going nowhere” in the House. In fact, his bill,
despite having been co-sponsored by 86 members of the House, has been
blocked from getting a public hearing in committee by Nancy Pelosi and
the House leadership, at the behest of the Obama White House, which is
dead-set against a single-payer reform of health care.

The reason the Times and the insurance industry-besotted
White House and Congressional leadership don’t want that analysis is
that it would show clearly that a single-payer system would mean vast
savings for all Americans.

Seelye quotes economist Skinner as claiming that Medicare expansion
to cover every American would mean a tripling of the Medicare payroll
tax—currently set at 2.9% of wages. But even if we accepted Skinner’s
math, it is meaningless without looking at the savings side.

Sure expanding Medicare would mean higher Medicare taxes, but what about the following:

Medicaid, the program that pays for medical care for the poor, and
is funded by federal and state taxes, would be eliminated, saving $400
billion a year.

Veterans’ care, currently running at $100 billion a year, would be eliminated.

Perhaps two-thirds of the $300 billion a year spent by federal,
state and local governments to reimburse hospitals for so-called
“charity care” for treatment of people who have no insurance but don’t
qualify for Medicaid, would be eliminated.

Individuals and employers would no longer have to pay for private insurance.

Several hundred billion dollars currently spent on paperwork by private insurers would be eliminated.

Car insurance would be cheaper as there would no longer have to be coverage for medical bills.

Federal, state and local governments would no longer have to pay to insure public employees.

In short, if every person were on Medicare, the overall savings
would overwhelm the small increase in the Medicare payroll tax of 5.8%.

The bottom line is that Canadians, who have Medicare for all,
devote 10% of GDP to health care. Americans, who have
private-insurance-based health care except for the elderly, devote 17%
of GDP to health care.

Seelye and the Times have never mentioned any of this. Neither does President Obama or the Democratic Congress.
______________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work
is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Thoughts on Saving an Old Barn

dlindorff — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 16:05:22 -0400

Corporations have no more place in a democracy than carpenter ants and mold have in the beams of an old barn.

By Dave Lindorff

For the last two weeks, I’ve been contemplating the mysteries of a post-and-beam barn, trying to work out how to rescue the long-ignored structure from the fate of many barns of its vintage (probably about 150 years old), which is total collapse.

This particular barn was left unattended for years by its last owner, and I am guilty of continuing that neglect for the 12 years that I have owned it. I knew that the shingles on its roof had long passed their sell-by date. When we first bought the property, the shingles had that telltale roughness that announced that they were eroded and brittle. The chronically wet ground floor was also a pretty convincing sign that the roof wasn’t doing its job of keeping the rain out. But the real evidence of looming disaster were the plants that began to sprout right out of the roof this wet summer. Big plants. Even a few young trees. And the mushrooms growing out of the ends of exposed beams. Not a good sign.

I made my way gingerly up the rickety stairs to the second floor in August, and looked around at the underside of the roof. Someone had obviously once re-roofed the structure perhaps two decades ago or more, using plywood sheathing over the old slats, but the plywood from the front wall on up halfway to the ridge was all rotten. One corner of the roof had actually fallen in, so there was an eight-foot-by-four-foot unimpeded view of the sky. Several rafters were so rotten they had cracked and were sagging downward, held up only by the rusty nails coming down into them from the gimpy plywood and slats above them.

I’ve never attempted anything this big, but I decided I simply had to rescue this sad old building. Someone had once put an enormous effort into its hand-hewn ten-inch-by-ten-inch beams (probably chestnut), notched and pinned together by wooden pegs. There had probably been a community barn-raising to erect the thing, once upon a time.

There’s no community today to do this kind of work, unless you’re part of one of the Amish communities in central Pennsylvania or Ohio. I have a few friends I could probably get to hold a ladder, or maybe help me hoist some shingles to the roof, once I get to that point, but nobody would likely want to devote a week or two to the hard labor of rebuilding a dangerous old barn, just for the sake of community spirit or camaraderie. Those days are gone. People are just too busy trying to get by.

So I’m doing this project myself.

I started from the ground up, using a hydraulic house jack to lift giant floor joists whose tenons had rotted away, and installing heavy uprights posts made of treated lumber, to fend off the inevitable carpenter ants that are attracted to damp wood like bees to clover. Then I moved to the second floor, and began replacing the planking that had rotted away to the point that it could no longer hold a child’s weight. (It didn’t help things that the last owner of the property had let a flock of chickens inhabit the second floor, and that, until I had cleaned it out, it was four or five inches deep in desiccated chicken shit.) Once I had a sound second floor, so I could walk around freely without having to test each board before stepping on it, it was time to tackle the roof.

That’s when I first noticed that the front of the barn was actually tilting forward, as if poised to take a dive.

Uh-oh.

This was an urgent fix. I raced out to Deck’s, an old family-owned hardware store in the next town—a throwback to an earlier time, with floor-to-ceiling cabinets that had the items inside mounted on the doors, so you could see what you were looking for, instead of having to struggle to explain to the shop personnel the shape of some item, the name of which you could never, in a million years, recall, if indeed you had ever known it. In my case, it was a humongous turnbuckle—a device with welded eyes at either end on threaded bolts, one reverse-threaded. By attaching this turnbuckle to an eye-bolt that was put through the sill beam and clamped down with a nut and a large washer on the outside, and attaching one end of a big cable to the other, with the cable stretching to another eyebolt running through the opposite sill beam, I could crank the thing around and shorten the cable, pulling the barn together, I figured.

When I got back to my barn and assembled this apparatus, drilling the holes through the two sill beams, and began the cranking process, I could see immediately that the tilted upper story was pulling back, but then it dawned on me: How did I know I wasn’t also pulling the other ood wall over with the bad one? I checked it out with a level, and it was still nice and vertical, but obviously I couldn’t count on its staying that way. I needed to put in some angle braces against the opposite sill to keep it from moving.

But there was still something I hadn’t anticipated. I kept cranking in the outer wall, and managed to mover its top about four inches back towards true. It was still leaning out about four inches though, and the cable was getting disturbingly taut. Then I noticed that the eyes of the huge eyebolts I had put through the sill beams were starting to pull away from their nice round shape!

Damn! I should have found bolts with welded eyes, or taken these to be welded.

I couldn’t bring myself to re-loosen the cable, so I gave the turnbuckle a couple more careful cranks, checked the eyes, and then decided that was as far as I could go.

Later, I was talking with a contractor who does renovations of old houses about the problem, and, after first declaring me “crazy” for attempting a project of this scale on my own, he explained that unbeknownst to me, when I was cranking the wall back, I was also trying to lift the entire roof of the barn with that turnbuckle. It was actually the slumping and spreading of the heavy roof’s angled rafters that was forcing the front wall out. In trying to pull it back, I was actually trying to force the roof back up to its original angle.

Can’t be done. If I wanted to really pull the wall back to true, I’d have to get a few big jacks and jack up the peak of the roof at the same time, to take the pressure off the wall.

Good enough, I decided. Mine would be a crooked barn. At least it wouldn’t fall over now.

Next it was time to tackle the rafters. There was a total of 12 of these. Two had to be completely replaced, or else I had to run a double alongside of them—the option I chose. Again I used treated lumber—two 14-foot lengths of beam that I bolted through the good wood I could find in the old rafters.

The other rafters all had varying degrees of rot, but all of it seemed to be near their lower ends, where most of the rain water had settled over the years of my and others’ neglect. That made reinforcing them a little easier, but it created another problem: the rot had extended out past the wall to the eaves, which were starting to fall off the barn as a result.

I would have to replace the ends of the rafters, right out to the end of the eaves.

What this meant was bolting new sections of rafter to the good wood of the old rafters, and extending each one out past the wall to the length of the desired eave—about 14 inches.

Once I had done this all the way across the length of the barn, it was time to get up on the roof to start replacing the rotten plywood. But with 1 15-foot drop to the ground from the edge of that roof, I didn’t want to be up there without protection, so I had to construct a scaffolding that would both give me a platform to work on at the base of the roof, and a fence strong enough to hold me back if I were to accidentally slide off the roof at some point.

My answer to this challenge was to nail several 2X4 beams horizontally along the inside of the wall, just below the sill beam, and to then cut holes through the wall every four feet large enough to run other 2X4 beams out through them projecting out about three feet from the wall. Inside the barn, I let these latter beams extend about six feet, and then tied them into upright studs that extended from floor to ceiling. These solid horizontal beams would support a couple of 2X10 planks just below and beyond the eaves. I then hung 18’ lengths of 2X4 from the ground up past the planks and linked them with several runs of 2X4s to make safety railings. Lower down, I ran cross ties in to the barn wall to keep the uprights from moving inward if the fence were hit, and also diagonally from one upright to the next, to stabilize these “legs” of the scaffold.

With the barn structure completely reinforced, I’m now pulling up the rotten plywood roofing and am replacing it with god plywood. I’ll cover that with tarpaper and then a layer of 30-year shingles, which should, since I’m 60, guarantee that it’s the last roof I have to do in this life.

With luck, I’ll have the whole project completed before the first frost.

Saving an old barn is an immensely satisfying activity, even for someone like me with only basic carpentry skills. It also makes one think about other things that need saving and repairing.

Take our political system. The old US political system is, like my barn, shot through with rot and in imminent danger of collapse. We Americans have been busy with our lives for too long, and have allowed the whole structure to decay. Greedy corporations and individuals, like mold and carpenter ants, have infested every post and beam and have been eating them away for years. Now, as we start to become aware of the extent of the rot, many of us are saying that fixing the mess will be just too difficult. Many just turn away and focus on smaller things. Others suggest that just tearing the whole thing down and building something new would make more sense. But I think that given the effort that went into constructing the thing in the first place, we owe it to ourselves and the people who came before us to try and fix it.

That means first of all cutting away all the rot. Corporations deserve absolutely no place in the process of politics and governance. The Constitution refers to We the People, not to We the People and Corporations. Indeed, the whole idea of corporations is profoundly antithetical to democracy. Corporate law was designed to separate ownership from personal liability, and to free owners and managers from personal responsibility for their actions. You cannot have any kind of decent political or governmental system where organizations that are free to act recklessly and without regard to consequences can influence decisions, anymore than you could allow a barn to be built—or repaired—by someone who had no responsibility for the finished project (that’s why contractors have to be, or should be, bonded).

It also means thinking ahead in a long-term way. I doubt that I’ll be living on this property and owning this barn 20 years from now. If we are lucky, my wife and I will be living in some tropical paradise when we’re in our 80s. But I could not live with myself if I just put 10 or 15-year shingles on this barn roof, making it likely that it would start leaking again before long, again putting the long-suffering framing at risk. No, it never occurred to me to do anything less than put the most durable type of 35-year shingle on the roof. In fact, I would have opted for slate if I could afford it.

Yet, in our politics, we Americans keep refusing to think long-term. We refuse to pay for anything, whether it’s schools or wars, preferring to borrow for everything, and passing on a country buried in debt to our children and grandchildren. The fiscal soundness of a nation is no less important than the structural soundness of a barn, and we ignore that truth at our, and especially our children’s peril.

I fixed my barn myself, but no one can fix this country by her or himself. It’s got to be a collective effort.

The first step is recognizing the problem.

That shouldn’t be hard. When you look at the corrupt process underway in Washington today as the White House and the Democratic Congress try to produce what they are euphemistically calling a “health reform” bill, you can see the problem. The whole process is being distorted and controlled by the very corporations that have produced the dysfunctional system that we have today. It’s as if one were expecting the ants that were eating away the beams to rebuild my barn.

When you look at the war in Afghanistan, which is getting bigger and uglier by the day, even as nearly two thirds of the public says they want it to be ended, you can see how little democracy we have left in America. The only ones really benefiting from this war are the war industries—and of course the military, which keeps eating up more and more of our collective wealth.

The way I see it, it’s time to take matters back into our own hands. We need to get out the wrecking bars, the hammers and the saws, and start ripping out the rot and the decay, and rebuilding the structure with solid, durable materials. We don’t have to rebuild it the way it was—installing solar panels would make sense, and maybe we could add more windows to make the whole thing more visible than it used to be.

We should however, vow this time to keep all the manure down in the stalls in the basement.

No more chicken shit on the upper floor.
_________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a journalist and sometime carpenter living outside Philadelphia. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net

'My Fellow Americans...': The Speech President Obama Should Give to Congress Next Week

dlindorff — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 14:20:48 -0400

As imagined by Dave Lindorff

My Fellow Americans.

I stand before you a chastened president. I made a mistake. Two mistakes really. (wild applause from Republican side)

I thought that Congress could do its job and through the
deliberative process, produce a health care reform plan that would win
broad support across the aisle and among all of you. But I’m afraid
that I was wrong. Health care is an enormous industry—maybe the biggest
and most powerful industry in the country—and it has far too much power
in Washington. Literally thousands of lobbyists, carrying tens of
billions of dollars in campaign contributions—have invaded these halls (and my house!) (relieved laughter)
and distorted the process, and in the end have stymied reform. (some hissing)

Meanwhile, I have realized that the answer has been staring us in the face all along.

And that was my second mistake. I told the American Medical
Association that while single-payer medical plans, where the government
is the insurer, might work well in other countries, the idea of
government running health care was not part of our American tradition.
In fact, it is, and has been since 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson
signed into law the Medicare program. Medicare is a single-payer
program, and polls and surveys show it is enormously popular with older
and disabled Americans. Medicare has relieved our parents and
grandparents from the fear that they will not get medical care when
they stop working, and it has lifted the enormous burden and worry off
of younger Americans over how to pay for the care of their elders, and
it has done this with enormous efficiency, all while allowing
recipients to choose their own doctors and hospitals. (applause)

So we really don’t need to re-invent the wheel here. There is no
point in members of Congress having to hold endless hearings, and to
sit and listen to the pitches of lobbyists from the medical
establishment. We can just expand Medicare to cover everyone. (applause)

How much would that cost? Well, we know that 10% of the elderly—the
oldest and sickest among us--account for 50% of total Medicare costs,
so that means the other 90% only cost some $200 billion a year. Even if
we assumed that the rest of the population’s medical bills were as high
as those 90% or older Americans, it would mean that expanding Medicare
to cover them would cost less than $1 trillion a year, and probably
closer to $750 billion. So roughly speaking, we’re talking about adding
$750 billion a year to the cost of Medicare.

Now that’s a big number, and I know that some of you—a lot of
you—worry about higher taxes. But let me assure you, expanding Medicare
to cover everyone is going to save you money—virtually
everyone. Let’s look at why that is, and why you cannot just look at
the federal tax when you consider those savings.

Today, the United States spends nearly 20 percent of GDP on health
care. That is more than double what any other country in the world
spends on health care. And you know what? We don’t get our moneys’
worth for all that dough. Canadians, who spend half that percentage of
their GDP on health care, and who have what amounts to Medicare for all
with their single-payer system (they call it Medicare too), have longer
lifespans and better infant mortality statistics than we do. In fact,
Cuba and Mexico have better child health statistics than we do!

By the way, I want to introduce, in the gallery, Shirley Jean
Douglass, whose father, Tommy Douglass, was the founder of Canada’s
Medicare program. We will be consulting closely with experts and
administrators of Canada’s Medicare program as we move forward with our
own reform. (applause)

Now I've been accused of lecturing (laughs and applause),
and I don’t want to sound like a college professor here, but let me
just highlight a few reasons why simply expanding Medicare to cover all
of us makes not just moral, but also economic sense. If we were to make
that change, we could immediately eliminate the Medicaid program, which
as you know is funded by the states, and costs them (and you) about
$400 billion a year, mostly to cover low-income families and
individuals. Now that money would not be totally eliminated, because
Medicare currently doesn’t cover all health care costs—just 80%. And
Medicaid covers the remaining 20% for those elderly and disabled people
who cannot afford to pay for Medi-Gap private plans--something the government would continue to do with an expanded plan. Even so,
eliminating Medicaid for the poor, who would be switched to Medicare,
would save at least $300 billion. We could also eliminate the Veterans
Administration—which incidentally is an excellent example of true
government healthcare, with publicly owned hospitals and doctors on
salary, and it runs very well and very efficiently.

Something those folks at last month’s town meetings who were saying government can’t do anything right should think about. (wild applause from Democratic side)

Sorry. I just had to say that. (more applause)

Anyhow, eliminating the VA would save another $100 billion so we’ve
already saved more than half the amount that was added to the cost of
Medicare in order to cover everyone. (applause)

But there are far more savings.

One of the biggest would be the elimination of about $300 billion
that is spent each year by hospitals and doctors to provide care to
people with no insurance who end up in hospital emergency rooms. The
cost of this “charity care” is factored into higher hospital and
physician bills, and ultimately into higher insurance premiums paid by
the rest of us. Since all those people would now be covered by
Medicare, that expense would vanish.

American companies currently pay about $25 billion a year in workers
compensation insurance—money that ultimately comes out of workers’
paychecks. That would no longer be necessary, because people injured on
the job would be covered by Medicare. (smattering of applause, mostly from Republican side)

Car insurance rates would be dramatically lower, because car
insurance would no longer have to pay for medical costs following an
accident. The same is true for homeowners insurance, which would no
longer have to cover the costs of someone being injured on your
property. (applause from Pennsylvania delegation, with among highest car insurance rates in the nation)

And of course, the biggest savings of all—about $3000 per person or
$12,000 per family every year—namely the cost of private insurance
premiums paid by you and/or your employer, would be gone. Think about
that a minute: no more co-pays, no more annual deductibles, no more
employee share of insurance premiums for yourself or your family. And
for businesses that provide health care coverage, a huge savings that
will make them more competitive in the global marketplace, and that
will also allow them to pay higher wages to their employees. (prolonged applause)

Oh, and there is one other huge, if unquantifiable savings to
consider. If everyone has Medicare, the total cost of health care will
go down dramatically, because everyone will be getting timely
treatment, instead of having to put of exams and early treatment of
illness or injury. And no one will suffer the terrible anxiety or
worrying about whether they can pay for health care for themselves and
their families.

So yes, your Medicare withholding will be perhaps 25% higher if we
expand Medicare to cover everyone. That tax is currently set at 2.9%
for you and 2.9% for your employer, so it would go up to about 0.75% of
your paycheck. For someone earning $600 a week, that would represent an
increased deduction of about $4.50 a week. For someone earning $1200 a
week, it would be an increased deduction of $9. That is a pretty good
deal for not having to pay for insurance coverage any more, wouldn’t
you agree? (applause, plus some boos from largely silent Republican side)

Now for you folks already receiving Medicare, there have been a lot
of scare stories out there, some of them being promoted by some
irresponsible people right in this chamber (pause for applause and nervous laughter), suggesting that if we expand health care coverage, it will come off of your benefits. Don’t you believe it! (applause)

We live in a democracy, and when a lot of people want something, or
benefit from something, they collectively defend that particular thing.
In the case of Medicare, if everyone is receiving it, and receiving it
in the same manner as everyone else, that creates a huge voting bloc in
favor of defending that benefit, so by expanding Medicare to all, we
would be creating a powerful political force that will defend Medicare
from attack, just as the universality of Social Security has made that
program bullet-proof (something my predecessor learned when he tried to
promote the idea of privatizing it). (wild applause from Democratic side)

So here’s the deal.

I’m admitting it was the wrong move to try to lay it on your poor
folks in Congress come up with some completely new, complicated reform
our existing health care system—if you can even call it that. My good
friend and former colleague in this building, Chairman John Conyers,
had it right all along: We have a great system that we just need to
expand to cover everyone.

So to get it started, I’m going to send Congress a couple of bills.
One would immediately shift everyone eligible for Medicaid over to
Medicare. I’m calling this the States' Medical Cost Relief and Medicare
Expansion Act. It will not only begin the process of expanding
Medicare, but will provide badly needed financial relief to states that
are suffering from declining tax revenues and rising health care costs
because of the recession. (applause)

I will also send Congress a bill that will expand Medicare coverage to all Americans and to legal residents. (applause, some boos from Republicans)

I am sure that as financially sound as this change is, there will
be opposition from the medical industry, so let me add that this is,
for me, a moral imperative too. For too long, this great country has
allowed health care to be a matter of whether or not you had a job with
health benefits, or enough money to pay for insurance yourself. That is
unacceptable. We are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers, and just as we
believe that every child needs an education, we believe that everyone
deserves to have access to quality medical care. (loud applause)

So let me add this: If Congress does not pass these two bills by
the end of the current session, in time for the holiday recess in
December, I will declare a national emergency because of the recession
and the huge rise in the uninsured that it has caused, and will issue
executive orders implementing both these measures. It’s not the way I
would prefer to see things done, but if Congress cannot act, I promise
you and the American people, I will. (applause and boos)

Let me also say that this program is a priority for me and for all
Americans, and anyone—Republican or Democrat—who gets in the way can
expect to hear from me, and from the American people, in this coming
election year. (applause)

Thank you and good night. (applause)
_______________
DAVE LINDORFF is not a speechwriter for the president. He is,
however, the author of “Marketplace Medicine: The Rise of the
For-Profit Hospital Chains” (Bantam Books, 1992). His work is available
at www.thiscantbehappening.net

There Are Really Two Questions: 1) Which Side are the Democrats on? and 2) Which Side are the Labor Unions on?

dlindorff — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 16:03:30 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

It is refreshing to hear the new head of the AFL-CIO, former
mineworker and Mineworkers President Richard Trumka, get mad at
sell-out Democrats and make a threat not to “support” them next year.

As Trumka pointed out in a talk to the Center for American Progress
this week, for years, Democratic politicians, and the Democrats as a
Party, have counted on the labor movement to get out the vote of its
membership on Election Day, only to turn on workers after getting to
Washington, on the issues that really matter, like jobs-killing free
trade agreements, the gutting of bankruptcy law and credit law
protections, and, most recently, the undermining of needed labor law
reform.

Trumka, quoting from a famous Florence Reece mineworkers song popularized by Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger, said that going
forward, Democrats will have to make it clear to labor “Which side are
you on?”

But really, that’s only half the question. Reece, in her song,
was asking that question of workers themselves. And indeed, the reason
Democrats have become such traitors to working class interests in
recent decades is that the labor movement itself has not answered Reece’s musical question resolutely or honestly.

The hard reality is that, despite years of betrayal by Democratic
politicians and by the Democratic Party, labor unions have continued
year after year to answer the call to rally their ever diminishing
members during campaign seasons to go door to door doing the hard work
of rallying voters for ever more treacherous candidates, and to do
massive “get-out-the-vote” campaigns on Election Day, as they did this
past November to assure the election of solid Democratic majorities in
both houses of Congress and the election of President Barack Obama.
Labor has also donated princely sums collected from members to
Democratic candidates and to the Democratic National Committee.

And just as predictably, Congressional Democrats, and the new
president, have been betraying their labor base. After vowing to pass
the Employee Free Choice Act this year, which as written would have
ended years of weakening of labor’s right to organize unions by ending
the cumbersome requirement for “secret ballot” elections to establish
union representation, in favor of just obtaining signed cards
supporting a union from a majority of workers, Obama and the Democrats
in Congress caved in to pressure from the business lobby, and trashed
the bill. If it passes at all in its present form (which is pretty
iffy), it will leave secret ballot elections in place—a process which
managements have long ago figured out how to delay endlessly, and to
subvert, to the point that it is now next to impossible to unionize new
workplaces.

It’s fine to say, as Trumka is doing, that labor will no longer
support politicians who sell-out labor on its issues, but what good is
that really, if those politicians simply replace labor with more money
from business interests? It doesn’t help things that once the sell-outs
get elected, instead of attacking their betrayals, labor gets sucked
into compromises. Just look at health care “reform.” For decades, the
labor movement has advocated a single-payer approach, yet when
President Obama and the Democrats began putting together a health
“reform” package this spring, most of organized labor started backing
the pathetic “public option” plan, buying into Obama’s pre-emptive
compromise approach. Now health care reform appears to be pretty much a
dead letter. The same thing is happening to labor law reform, with
labor caving in and backing a weakened version of the EFCA.

The only way to really make Democrats stop these kinds of betrayals
is for labor to decide “which side it is on” and to actively oppose those who sell labor out.

Trumka, as head of the AFL-CIO, is in a position to make a
fundamental change in labor’s relationship with the Democratic Party.
He should announce plans to encourage the formation of a new labor
party, which would run its own candidates for office in key districts.
Labor, uniquely, is in a position to do this. It has the money and the
numbers to be able to easily get on the ballot in every state even by
as early as next year.

In some states, like New York, parties are able to cross list
candidates, so instead of just endorsing a Democratic candidate who
seemed to be supportive, a labor party could nominate that person as
its own candidate. Votes for the candidate could be made either on the
Democratic line, or the labor party line. But to get on the labor party
line, a candidate would have to be a genuine labor party candidate.
Failure to back labor once in office would mean no more labor party
line.

And in states where there is not such cross listing allowed,
running candidates on a labor party ticket would be a much bigger
threat to sell-out Democrats than just running candidates in the
Democratic Primary. And with good candidates, some labor party
candidates would certainly win their races, becoming a third force in
Congress.

The time is ripe for a labor party. Polls report that more and more
people are quitting the Republican and Democratic Parties in disgust.
They have no home at this point, and labor party would offer them that
home, which would accelerate the decline of the two major
parties—basically hollowed out husks that only manage to stand up
because they are stuffed with corporate swag.

So what’s the answer President Trumka? Which side are you on?
______________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and long-time
labor writer and activist. A founder of the National Writers Union, he
also organized a labor union of food service workers at Sarah Lawrence
College and worked on the United Farmworkers Union grape boycott in New
York City. He is author of “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s
Press, 2006) and his work can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net