100 Slaves 100 Enemies

Kos responds to a fund raising email from the DNC & Obama.

Really? All we have to do is send the DNC $5 and we get ponies?

…

This is so freakin’ obnoxious I can hardly stand it. We are about to get a turd of a “reform” package, potentially worse than the status quo. We have the insurance industry declaring victory, Republicans cackling with glee, and the administration is using that piece of shit to raise money?

via Daily Kos: State of the Nation.

found via Michael Moore on Twitter: http://twitter.com/MMFlint

Researchers at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst asked in a new study: What if the government took some of the money going toward the military and spent it instead on jobs in other sectors?

Commissioned by the Institute for Policy Studies and Women’s Action for New Directions, the report shows that the federal government could generate thousands more jobs, both directly and indirectly, by focusing spending on health care, education, or clean energy rather than on defense.

via Foreign Policy In Focus | The Secret About Jobs Military Contractors Don’t Want You to Know.

A RWJF survey summarized in the September 14, 2009 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine shows that 62.9 percent of physicians nationwide support proposals to expand health care coverage that include both public and private insurance options—where people under the age of 65 would have the choice of enrolling in a new public health insurance plan (like Medicare) or in private plans. The survey shows that just 27.3 percent of physicians support a new program that does not include a public option and instead provides subsidies for low-income people to purchase private insurance. Only 9.6 percent of doctors nationwide support a system where a Medicare-like public program is created in lieu of any private insurance. A majority of physicians (58%) also support expanding Medicare eligibility to those between the ages of 55 and 64.

via Physician Views on the Public Health Insurance Option and Medicare Expansions – RWJF.

Joe Wilson called the president a liar on national television. Come on, that’s pretty cool. Even though Wilson is the liar, it probably doesn’t hurt to throw out that accusation now and again. “All governments lie,” said I.F. Stone.

And, after he spoke out donations poured into his campaign and his Democratic opponent’s. I think the lesson here is that so little happens on Capitol Hill that anyone can relate to that people are starving for something/someone they can get behind. Politicians could become extremely popular — the whole Democratic Party could become extremely popular, if they all got behind a meaningful change in health care — why? because the majority of people want it.

It seems that a public option would get the ball rolling, wouldn’t it? The for-profit health insurance companies that kick people out of their plans for being sick or having pre-existing conditions wouldn’t stand a chance against a non-profit government plan that aims to provide a service with no strings attached. Sooner or later the insurance companies wouldn’t be making the type of profits they want to make and they’d either get out of business or they’d start to shrink down in size which would probably slowly transform them into humane companies.

Anyway, the reason to hate Joe Wilson is not that he spoke up. The reason to hate him is that he is a political hack for weapons manufacturers and the health care industry:

Wilson was first elected to Congress in 2001, and over the course of his career, his committees have received about $455,800 from political action committees and individual employees within the health sector. The majority of this sum (about $267,900) comes from health professionals, which are Wilson’s No. 1 top industry backer. Individual employees and PACs associated with pharmaceutical manufacturers have contributed $100,650 to his committees over his career.

- Rep. Joe Wilson’s Comments and Connections Still in the Spotlight, OpenSecrets.org, September 14, 2009

Rising healthcare costs are killing wage increases. From 1980 to 2007 the average cash income for the vast majority of Americans (the bottom 90 percent) increased only $2,697, to $33,321. Healthcare spending per household rose more than three times as much, increasing $8,797, to $15,369, according to the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services. Household healthcare spending now equals almost half of the average income of the vast majority of Americans.

- David Cay Johnston, The Nation, September 2, 2009

46 Million Art Auction for Health Care Reform | ARTHUR MAGAZINE – WE FOUND THE OTHERS]

I like seeing the quotes from some of the artists talking about how they can’t get health insurance. That is cool — cool that artists are talking about it, not that they can’t or couldn’t or don’t have insurance.

I wish artists would also band together to support things such as a living wage campaign. Wouldn’t it be great to be an artist who only has to work half as much to pay the rent at the shitty day job because you banded together to double the minimum wage? Wouldn’t it be great to have everyone making more money so that people could afford to buy your art and then perhaps you could quit the shitty day job?

Or what about making the the full-time work week 30 hours per week so that you either get that other 10+ hours at time and a half or just have 10 more hours to create?

Call me a dreamer. But I think artists would be a lot better at these campaigns than typical activists. The campaigns would be imaginative and fun.

The New York Times reports that your information is getting collected when you go to the pharmacy, and while there are some measures to protect your privacy there are leaks. The pharmacies turn around and sell your information to marketers for millions of dollars. The Obama administration enacted some protections of this information in the federal stimulus package, but it won’t matter unless someone enforces them.

The Washington Post reports that more information might be collected about you through cookies when you visit government web sites. (via @allisonkilkenny) This is important because there has been a long standing ban on cookies on federal web sites. Not that this ban has prevented the use of cookies on federal web sites. A CBS news article from 2002 called CIA Caught Sneaking Cookies concludes, “Congress issued a study last summer that found 300 cookies still on the Web sites of 23 agencies despite the government ban.”

For a lengthier explanation on privacy and cookies you can visit the page How Internet Cookies Work from the HowStuffWorks web site. For the concise version, Kilkenny sums it up in a tweet:

The article says it would track cookies, which usually record preferences,name,interests, whatever “auto fill” info you’ve used in the past.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration continues to block “the release of photos showing the abuse of prisoners held in overseas facilities.” Privacy OK for the government, for you it’s a crap shoot. Good luck.

Apparently, it is not Clifford’s alter-ego, but in fact a Democrat who receives almost, but not quite, as much money from special corporate interest groups such as the health insurance and financial industries as Republicans.

From today’s front page of the Washington Post, Blue Dogs Receive More Health Industry Backing Than Other Democrats (found via Beat the Press):

[The Blue Dog Coalition] has set a record pace for fundraising this year through its political action committee, surpassing other congressional leadership PACs in collecting more than $1.1 million through June. More than half the money came from the health-care, insurance and financial services industries, marking a notable surge in donations from those sectors compared with earlier years, according to an analysis by the Center for Public Integrity.

A look at career contribution patterns also shows that typical Blue Dogs receive significantly more money — about 25 percent — from the health-care and insurance sectors than other Democrats, putting them closer to Republicans in attracting industry support.

A little later in the article we get this:

“I know there were some that thought we were trying to stop health-care reform,” Ross said in an interview this week for The Washington Post’s “Voices of Power” series. “Nothing could be further from the truth. We simply wanted to slow the process down and ensure that we were working toward the kind of health-care reform that the American people need and want.“

According to these poll results, the American people want universal government-run health care. The Physicians for a National Health Program blog tells us that we could have this with the passage of one of three bills: “The House already has Rep. John Conyers’ H.R.676 and Rep. Jim McDermott’s H.R.1200, and now the Senate has Sen. Bernie Sanders’ S.703“.

OK, so that seems simple enough. So, why won’t Ross do what the majority of people want him to? Oh, right…

Ross has received nearly $1 million in contributions from the health-care sector and insurance industry during his five terms in Congress, according to an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks campaign contributions.

At the end of the article, Charles W. Stenholm, a former congressman from Texas who was part of the original Blue Dog group in the mid-1990s and who is now a agriculture and health care lobbyist answers criticism that money in politics is corrupting the political system by saying that the Blue Dogs “have played a tremendously important role in keeping the process from getting out of control.”

Indeed. Real health care reform would take health care out of the control of the health insurance corporations. And we can’t have that. As Noam Chomsky points out, universal health care “has no political support; only the majority of the public.”

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link: The Center for Responsive Politics’ health care reform section