California Free Press

Congress Forces Pork Down Pentagon's Throat

House Seems To Be Set on Pork-Padded Defense Bill

 By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 30, 2009

The Democratic-controlled House is poised to give the Pentagon dozens of new ships, planes, helicopters and armored vehicles that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates says the military does not need to fund next year, acting in many cases in response to defense industry pressures and campaign contributions under an approach he has decried as "business as usual" and vowed to help end.

The unwanted equipment in a military spending bill expected to come to a vote on the House floor Thursday or Friday has a price tag of at least $6.9 billion.

The White House has said that some but not all of the extra expenditures could draw a presidential veto of the Defense Department's entire $636 billion budget for 2010, and it sent a message to House lawmakers Tuesday urging them to cut expenditures for items that "duplicate existing programs, or that have outlived their usefulness."

While the administration won a big victory when the Senate voted July 21 to end the F-22 fighter-jet program, the House's imminent action demonstrates its continued rebellion on many other Obama administration military spending priorities. Gates continues to struggle with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle who are loyal to existing military programs benefiting contractors that provide jobs and large campaign donations.

House appropriators want to buy, for example, extra C-17 transport planes and F-18 jets, as well as four extra military jets used by lawmakers and Pentagon VIPs. And they want to keep alive a troubled missile-defense interceptor program and continue the troubled VH-71 presidential helicopter program.

Gates vowed in April to fundamentally overhaul the military's "approach to procurement, acquisition and contracting" and urged Congress to support the termination of many traditional weapons programs in favor of more spending on counterinsurgency efforts and operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. In this round, those Democratic and Republican lawmakers who support maintaining or expanding programs that Gates proposed to eliminate or trim appear likely to prevail, because an unusually restrictive rule for floor debate agreed upon Wednesday will allow only amendments that could strip less than half of the spending the administration did not request.

Roughly $2.75 billion of the extra funds -- all of which were unanimously approved in an 18-minute markup Monday by the House Appropriations Committee -- would finance "earmarks," or projects demanded by individual lawmakers that the Pentagon did not request. About half of that amount reflects spending requested by private firms, including 95 companies or related political action committees that donated a total of $789,190 in the past 2 1/2 years to members of the appropriations subcommittee on defense, according to an analysis by Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonprofit watchdog group.

Rep.  Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), a government-spending critic who has long campaigned against such earmarks, has said he will try again Thursday to strike all such spending. But his prior earmark-stripping efforts have succeeded only once in dozens of attempts, and never on defense spending.

"Simply put, Members of Congress should not have the ability to award no-bid contracts" to private firms, Flake said in a statement explaining the 540 proposed amendments he plans to bring up. "The practice has created an ethical cloud over Congress, and it needs to end." He noted that at least 70 of the earmarks are for former clients of the PMA Group, a lobbying firm close to appropriations subcommittee head  John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) that is now being probed by the Justice Department and the House ethics committee.

Although President Obama has repeatedly criticized earmarks, the White House statement of policy on the House bill obliquely criticized only "programs that fund narrowly focused activities." No mention was made of items such as a proposed $8 million Defense Department grant Murtha inserted for Argon ST, a Pennsylvania military contractor that has contributed $35,200 to him in the past four years, or of a $5 million grant Rep.  C.W. Bill Young (R-Fla.) inserted for DRS Technologies, a Florida contractor that has contributed $46,350 to Young during that period, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense.

The White House criticized the addition of $80 million for the Kinetic Energy Interceptor program, which Gates and other Pentagon officials have said is technically troubled, behind schedule, and billions of dollars over budget. But Northrop Grumman, the principal contractor, is building a technology center in Murtha's district that would bring 150 related jobs, and Murtha's subcommittee sought its continuation as a way "to recoup the technology," according to an appropriations staff member, who was not authorized to speak on the record.

A spokesman for Murtha did not reply to a request for comment.

In its letter to the House, the White House also specifically targeted the committee's addition of $400 million to finish five VH-71 presidential helicopters. Obama has said he does not want them, and Gates ridiculed them in a July 16 speech in Chicago as helicopters that "cost nearly half a billion dollars each" and would enable the president to "cook dinner while in flight under nuclear attack."

Murtha countered a week later that he was upset at the idea that the Pentagon would spend $3.2 billion on such a program and "get nothing out of it," adding: "That's unacceptable." He also suggested in a session with defense reporters that the Pentagon really did not want to kill the VH-1: "It's not the Defense Department. The Defense Department is speaking for the White House," he said.

Many lawmakers have similarly argued that despite what Gates and his top appointees have been saying, the military services have repeatedly let them know they want to continue programs formally stricken from the Pentagon's budget request. Gates tried to restrict such behind-the-scenes lobbying for weeks after his April announcement, but he eventually relented under sharp criticism from lawmakers and contractors.

Regarding the disputed C-17 transport aircraft, for example, senior defense officials have formally testified that those purchased in previous years, in combination with upgraded C-5 aircraft, will be sufficient to meet any conceivable military needs. But the committee added $674 million for three unwanted planes because "the Air Force will say on the record that they don't support it, but if you ask them off the record if they will actually use the planes, they will say, 'Absolutely,' " said a House staff member who also was not allowed to speak on the record.

Political action committees affiliated with Boeing, the C-17's principal manufacturer, donated $161,500 to House defense appropriations subcommittee members since the beginning of 2007, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense.

Wendell Potter, Health Insurance Corporation Whistleblower

Whistleblower tells of America's hidden nightmare for its sick poor

When an insurance firm boss saw a field hospital for the poor in Virginia, he knew he had to speak out. Here, he tells Paul Harris of his fears for Obama's bid to bring about radical change

Paul Harris The Observer, Sunday 26 July 2009

 

Patients without health insurance get dental care at a free clinic in Wise, Virginia, held every July for the past three years. More than 25,000 were treated in a weekend.

Wendell Potter can remember exactly when he took the first steps on his journey to becoming a whistleblower and turning against one of the most powerful industries in America.

It was July 2007 and Potter, a senior executive at giant US healthcare firm Cigna, was visiting relatives in the poverty-ridden mountain districts of northeast Tennessee. He saw an advert in a local paper for a touring free medical clinic at a fairground just across the state border in Wise County, Virginia.

Potter, who had worked at Cigna for 15 years, decided to check it out. What he saw appalled him. Hundreds of desperate people, most without any medical insurance, descended on the clinic from out of the hills. People queued in long lines to have the most basic medical procedures carried out free of charge. Some had driven more than 200 miles from Georgia. Many were treated in the open air. Potter took pictures of patients lying on trolleys on rain-soaked pavements.

For Potter it was a dreadful realisation that healthcare in America had failed millions of poor, sick people and that he, and the industry he worked for, did not care about the human cost of their relentless search for profits. "It was over-powering. It was just more than I could possibly have imagined could be happening in America," he told the Observer

Potter resigned shortly afterwards. Last month he testified in Congress, becoming one of the few industry executives to admit that what its critics say is true: healthcare insurance firms push up costs, buy politicians and refuse to pay out when many patients actually get sick. In chilling words he told a Senate committee: "I worked as a senior executive at health insurance companies and I saw how they confuse their customers and dump the sick: all so they can satisfy their Wall Street investors."

Potter's claims are at the centre of the biggest political crisis of Barack Obama's young presidency. Obama, faced with 47 million Americans without health insurance, has put reforming the system at the top of his agenda. If he succeeds, he will have pushed through one of the greatest changes to domestic policy of any president. If he fails, his presidency could be broken before it is even a year old. Last week, in a sign of how high the stakes are, he addressed the nation in a live TV news conference. It is the sort of event usually reserved for a moment of deep national crisis, such as a terrorist attack. But Obama wanted to talk about healthcare. "This is about every family, every business and every taxpayer who continues to shoulder the burden of a problem that Washington has failed to solve for decades," he told the nation.

Obama's plans are now mired and the opponents of reform are winning. The Republican attack machine has cranked into gear, labelling reform as "socialist" and warning ordinary Americans that government bureaucrats, not doctors, will choose their medicines. The bill's opponents say the huge cost can only be paid by massive tax increases on ordinary Americans and that others will have their current healthcare plans taken away. Many centrist Democratic congressmen, wary of their conservative voters, are wavering. The legislation has failed to meet Obama's August deadline and is now delayed until after the summer recess. Many fear that this loss of momentum could kill it altogether.

To Potter that is no surprise. He has seen all this before. In his long years with Cigna he rose to be the company's top PR executive. He had an eagle-eye view of the industry's tactics of scuppering political efforts to get it to reform. "This is a very wealthy industry and they use PR very effectively. They manipulate public opinion and the news media and they have built up these relationships with all these politicians through campaign contributions," Potter said.

Potter was witness to the campaign against Michael Moore's healthcare documentary Sicko. The industry slammed the film as one-sided and politically motivated. Secret documents leaked from the American Health Insurance Plans, the industry's lobby group, detailed the plan to paint Moore as a fringe radical. Potter now says the film "hit the nail on the head". "The Michael Moore movie that I saw was full of truth," he admits.

Potter was also working for Cigna when it became embroiled in the case of Nataline Sarkisyan, whose family went public after Cigna refused to pay for a liver transplant that it considered "experimental" and therefore not covered by their policy. Cigna reversed this decision only hours before the Californian teenager died. "I wish I could have done more in that case," Potter said.

Such sentiments are rare in an industry that has given America a healthcare system that can be cripplingly expensive for patients, but that does not produce a healthier population. The industry is often accused of wriggling out of claims. Firms comb medical records for any technicality that will allow them to refuse to pay. In one recently publicised example, a retired nurse from Texas discovered she had breast cancer. Yet her policy was cancelled because her insurers found she had previously had treatment for acne, which the dermatologist had mistakenly noted as pre-cancerous. They decreed she had misinformed them about her medical history and her double mastectomy was cancelled just three days before the operation.

Last month three healthcare executives were grilled about such "rescinding" tactics by a congressional subcommittee. When asked if they would abandon them except in cases of deliberately proven fraud, each executive replied simply: "No."

To Potter that attitude has a sad logic. The healthcare industry generates enormous profits and its top executives have a lavish corporate lifestyle that he once shared. Treating patients for their expensive conditions is bad for business as it reduces the bottom line. Kicking out patients who pursue claims makes perfect economic sense. "It is a system that is rigged against the policyholder," Potter said. The congressional probe found that just three firms had rescinded more than 20,000 policyholders between 2003 and 2007, saving hundreds of millions. "That's a lot of money that will now go towards their profits," Potter said.

A lot of that money also goes into contributions to politicians of both parties - $372m in the past nine years - and in lobbying groups to run TV ads slamming Obama's plans. Many of these ads deploy naked scare tactics. One report said that the industry was spending $1.4m a day on its campaign. In the face of that, it is perhaps no wonder that the Senate has delayed its vote, dealing a massive blow to Obama. "I have seen how the opponents of healthcare reform go to work... they are trying to delay action. They know that if they keep the process going for months, and turn it into a big mess, then the political impetus behind it will lessen," Potter said.

Potter, who now works at the Centre for Media and Democracy in Wisconsin, says the industry is afraid of Obama's reforms and that is why it is fighting so hard. It wants to deal him the same blow as it did Bill Clinton when it scuppered his attempt at reform in the 1990s. Potter admits that he is worried the industry might win again. "I have seen their tactics work. I have been a part of it," he said. He knows he has no chance of ever working again for a major firm. "I am a whistleblower and corporate America does not tend to like that," he said. But there is one thing Potter is not sorry about: leaving the healthcare industry and speaking out. "I have absolutely no regrets. I am doing the right thing," he said.

Comprehensive healthcare reform in the US has been an ambition of many presidents since the early part of the 20th century. None has succeeded in creating a system that gives all Americans the right to coverage. Barack Obama, below, is desperate to avoid the same fate.

 

 

 

Making Sense of the Health Care Debate

Published on Monday, July 27, 2009 by The New York Times

An Incoherent Truth

by Paul Krugman

Right now the fate of health care reform seems to rest in the hands of relatively conservative Democrats — mainly members of the Blue Dog Coalition, created in 1995. And you might be tempted to say that President Obama needs to give those Democrats what they want.

But he can’t — because the Blue Dogs aren’t making sense.

To grasp the problem, you need to understand the outline of the proposed reform (all of the Democratic plans on the table agree on the essentials.)

Reform, if it happens, will rest on four main pillars: regulation, mandates, subsidies and competition.

By regulation I mean the nationwide imposition of rules that would prevent insurance companies from denying coverage based on your medical history, or dropping your coverage when you get sick. This would stop insurers from gaming the system by covering only healthy people.

On the other side, individuals would also be prevented from gaming the system: Americans would be required to buy insurance even if they’re currently healthy, rather than signing up only when they need care. And all but the smallest businesses would be required either to provide their employees with insurance, or to pay fees that help cover the cost of subsidies — subsidies that would make insurance affordable for lower-income American families.

Finally, there would be a public option: a government-run insurance plan competing with private insurers, which would help hold down costs.

The subsidy portion of health reform would cost around a trillion dollars over the next decade. In all the plans currently on the table, this expense would be offset with a combination of cost savings elsewhere and additional taxes, so that there would be no overall effect on the federal deficit.

So what are the objections of the Blue Dogs?

Well, they talk a lot about fiscal responsibility, which basically boils down to worrying about the cost of those subsidies. And it’s tempting to stop right there, and cry foul. After all, where were those concerns about fiscal responsibility back in 2001, when most conservative Democrats voted enthusiastically for that year’s big Bush tax cut — a tax cut that added $1.35 trillion to the deficit?

But it’s actually much worse than that — because even as they complain about the plan’s cost, the Blue Dogs are making demands that would greatly increase that cost.

There has been a lot of publicity about Blue Dog opposition to the public option, and rightly so: a plan without a public option to hold down insurance premiums would cost taxpayers more than a plan with such an option.

But Blue Dogs have also been complaining about the employer mandate, which is even more at odds with their supposed concern about spending. The Congressional Budget Office has already weighed in on this issue: without an employer mandate, health care reform would be undermined as many companies dropped their existing insurance plans, forcing workers to seek federal aid — and causing the cost of subsidies to balloon. It makes no sense at all to complain about the cost of subsidies and at the same time oppose an employer mandate.

So what do the Blue Dogs want?

Maybe they’re just being complete hypocrites. It’s worth remembering the history of one of the Blue Dog Coalition’s founders: former Representative Billy Tauzin of Louisiana. Mr. Tauzin switched to the Republicans soon after the group’s creation; eight years later he pushed through the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act, a deeply irresponsible bill that included huge giveaways to drug and insurance companies. And then he left Congress to become, yes, the lavishly paid president of PhRMA, the pharmaceutical industry lobby.

One interpretation, then, is that the Blue Dogs are basically following in Mr. Tauzin’s footsteps: if their position is incoherent, it’s because they’re nothing but corporate tools, defending special interests. And as the Center for Responsive Politics pointed out in a recent report, drug and insurance companies have lately been pouring money into Blue Dog coffers.

But I guess I’m not quite that cynical. After all, today’s Blue Dogs are politicians who didn’t go the Tauzin route — they didn’t switch parties even when the G.O.P. seemed to hold all the cards and pundits were declaring the Republican majority permanent. So these are Democrats who, despite their relative conservatism, have shown some commitment to their party and its values.

Now, however, they face their moment of truth. For they can’t extract major concessions on the shape of health care reform without dooming the whole project: knock away any of the four main pillars of reform, and the whole thing will collapse — and probably take the Obama presidency down with it.

Is that what the Blue Dogs really want to see happen? We’ll soon find out.

© 2009 The New York Times

Paul Krugman is professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University and a regular columnist for The New York Times. Krugman was the 2008 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics. He is the author of numerous books, including The Conscience of A Liberal, and his most recent, The Return of Depression Economics. 

Americans Are Guinea Pigs For Genetically Modified Foods

In the US companies can foist genetically modified (GM) foods on the public with no government oversight or control. Only if they cause a proven problem will some sort of action be taken. In Europe the opposite is true; GM foods must first be proven harmless before they are allowed on the market. In the US GM foods are innocent till proven guilty; in Europe they are guilty till proven innocent.

 

This was published on Monday, July 27, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

Guess Who’s Controlling Our Food Supply

by Rob Smart

I have a difficult time accepting genetically modified (GM) foods at face value. My primary concerns have to do with what we know, and, more importantly don’t know about how this “promising” technology may or may not be impacting human health and our environment.

For those who prefer to avoid serving as human lab rats, myself included, our non-GM food options, according to advocates of GM food, boil down to eating USDA Certified Organic, which do not allow any genetically modified seed or crops to be used on such labeled food products. Their idea of severely limiting consumer choice, since they are adamantly opposed to “GMO Inside” labeling, goes against their own argument of freedom to choose, which also goes against the very fabric of what makes America’s version of capitalism work so well.

I couldn’t imagine the situation getting much worse, but it just did.

The latest issue of Scientific American Magazine includes the chilling article “Do Seed Companies Control GM Crop Research?” The magazine’s editors take readers beyond initial “government” approval of GM food, which reportedly utilized industry-sponsored research rather than independent government research, to the current state of independent research on genetically modified seeds and crops:

Unfortunately, it is impossible to verify that genetically modified crops perform as advertised. That is because agritech companies have given themselves veto power over the work of independent researchers.

It would be chilling enough if any other type of company were able to prevent independent researchers from testing its wares and reporting what they find—imagine car companies trying to quash head-to-head model comparisons done by Consumer Reports, for example. But when scientists are prevented from examining the raw ingredients in our nation’s food supply or from testing the plant material that covers a large portion of the country’s agricultural land, the restrictions on free inquiry become dangerous.

It is hard to understand how a handful of companies have amassed so much control over food ingredients found in an estimated 75 percent of processed foods in America’s supermarkets. Making matters worse, and as the Scientific American editors point out, we are talking about a basic physiological need – food, which joins water, shelter and a handful of other needs defined by Abraham Maslow in his hierarchy of needs.

Without extensive independent research on GM foods on how they impact human health and the environment, the distinct possibility exists that we’re setting ourselves up for significant and potentially irreversible problems down the line.

To keep the mainstream in check, we get slick multimillion dollar advertising campaigns from company’s like Monsanto claiming they have the solution to feed the estimated 9 billion people expected on the planet in the not to distant future, among other claims. Who cares if these claims have not been independently verified. Who cares if the Union of Concerned Scientists have released a report on GM crop yields debunking industry claims of significant yield improvements.

Despite 20 years of research and 13 years of commercialization, genetic engineering has failed to significantly increase U.S. crop yields.

The ongoing debate is not about stopping public relations (PR) efforts by these companies. Companies market products and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Nor is it about whether I or anyone else thinks GM foods are good or bad. Making such claims today are mostly opinion, since independent research is not available to properly inform discussions.

The debate needs to be about how our regulatory structure has sold out to industry, which is represented by a highly concentrated, centralized  power structure that controls our conventional food system. It needs to be about holding the food system and our government accountable. Most important, it needs to demand companies and the government do what is right, just and fair.

We are a long way from that, it would seem, which is why initiatives like Pro Food and Slow Money are gaining steam. These efforts actively engage everyday citizens in developing and supporting transparent sustainable food systems, building on unique competitive advantages in comparison with today’s industrial food system players.

Let’s just hope that a sustainable food economy is not far behind.

Rob Smart is a food entrepreneur focusing on regional food systems and consumer retail experiences. He blogs on alternative food systems at Every Kitchen Table and micro-blogs on Twitter as Jambutter.

Are CEOs Sociopaths?

Published on Monday, July 27, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

Profiling CEOs and Their Sociopathic Paychecks

by Thom Hartmann

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that "Executives and other highly compensated employees now receive more than one-third of all pay in the US...  Highly paid employees received nearly $2.1 trillion of the $6.4 trillion in total US pay in 2007, the latest figures available."

One of the questions often asked when the subject of CEO pay comes up is, "What could a person such as William McGuire or Lee Raymond (the former CEOs of UnitedHealth and ExxonMobil, respectively) possibly do to justify a $1.7 billion paycheck or a $400 million retirement bonus?"

It's an interesting question. If there is a "free market" of labor for CEOs, then you'd think there would be a lot of competition for the jobs. And a lot of people competing for the positions would drive down the pay. All UnitedHealth's stockholders would have to do to avoid paying more than $1 billion to McGuire is find somebody to do the same CEO job for half a billion. And all they'd have to do to save even more is find somebody to do the job for a mere $100 million. Or maybe even somebody who'd work the necessary sixty-hour weeks for only $1 million.

So why is executive pay so high?

I've examined this with both my psychotherapist hat on and my amateur economist hat on, and only one rational answer presents itself: CEOs in America make as much money as they do because there really is a shortage of people with their skill set. And it's such a serious shortage that some companies have to pay as much as $1 million a day to have somebody successfully do the job.

But what part of being a CEO could be so difficult-so impossible for mere mortals-that it would mean that there are only a few hundred individuals in the United States capable of performing it?

In my humble opinion, it's the sociopath part.

CEOs of community-based businesses are typically responsive to their communities and decent people. But the CEOs of most of the world's largest corporations daily make decisions that destroy the lives of many other human beings.

Only about 1 to 3 percent of us are sociopaths-people who don't have normal human feelings and can easily go to sleep at night after having done horrific things. And of that 1 percent of sociopaths, there's probably only a fraction of a percent with a college education. And of that tiny fraction, there's an even tinier fraction that understands how business works, particularly within any specific industry.

Thus there is such a shortage of people who can run modern monopolistic, destructive corporations that stockholders have to pay millions to get them to work. And being sociopaths, they gladly take the money without any thought to its social consequences.

Today's modern transnational corporate CEOs-who live in a private-jet-and-limousine world entirely apart from the rest of us-are remnants from the times of kings, queens, and lords. They reflect the dysfunctional cultural (and Calvinist/Darwinian) belief that wealth is proof of goodness, and that that goodness then justifies taking more of the wealth.

Democracy in the workplace is known as a union. The most democratic workplaces are the least exploitative, because labor has a power to balance capital and management. And looking around the world, we can clearly see that those cultures that most embrace the largest number of their people in an egalitarian and democratic way (in and out of the workplace) are the ones that have the highest quality of life. Those that are the most despotic, from the workplace to the government, are those with the poorest quality of life.

Over time, balance and democratic oversight will always produce the best results.  An "unregulated" marketplace is like an "unregulated" football game - chaos.  And chaos is a state perfectly exploited by sociopaths, be they serial killers, warlords, or CEOs.

By changing the rules of the game of business so that sociopathic business behavior is no longer rewarded (and, indeed, is punished - as Teddy Roosevelt famously did as the "trustbuster" and FDR did when he threatened to send "war profiteers" to jail), we can create a less dysfunctional and more egalitarian society.  And that's an important first step back from the thresholds to environmental and economic disaster we're now facing.

This article is largely excerpted from Thom Hartmann's new book "Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture." 

Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning New York Times best-selling author, and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk program The Thom Hartmann Show. www.thomhartmann.com His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," "We The People: A Call To Take Back America," "What Would Jefferson Do?," "Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class and What We Can Do About It," and "Cracking The Code: The Art and Science of Political Persuasion." His newest book is Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture.

The Profit Motive: Is That All There Is?

Bill Maher talks about how "being in it for the money" has gone from being a bad thing to being the only thing:

 

How about this for a New Rule: Not everything in America has to make a profit. It used to be that there were some services and institutions so vital to our nation that they were exempt from market pressures. Some things we just didn't do for money. The United States always defined capitalism, but it didn't used to define us. But now it's becoming all that we are.

Did you know, for example, that there was a time when being called a "war profiteer" was a bad thing? But now our war zones are dominated by private contractors and mercenaries who work for corporations. There are more private contractors in Iraq than American troops, and we pay them generous salaries to do jobs the troops used to do for themselves �-- like laundry. War is not supposed to turn a profit, but our wars have become boondoggles for weapons manufacturers and connected civilian contractors.

Prisons used to be a non-profit business, too. And for good reason --� who the hell wants to own a prison? By definition you're going to have trouble with the tenants. But now prisons are big business. A company called the Corrections Corporation of America is on the New York Stock Exchange, which is convenient since that's where all the real crime is happening anyway. The CCA and similar corporations actually lobby Congress for stiffer sentencing laws so they can lock more people up and make more money. That's why America has the world;s largest prison population �-- because actually rehabilitating people would have a negative impact on the bottom line.

Television news is another area that used to be roped off from the profit motive. When Walter Cronkite died last week, it was odd to see news anchor after news anchor talking about how much better the news coverage was back in Cronkite's day. I thought, "Gee, if only you were in a position to do something about it."

But maybe they aren't. Because unlike in Cronkite's day, today's news has to make a profit like all the other divisions in a media conglomerate. That's why it wasn't surprising to see the CBS Evening News broadcast live from the Staples Center for two nights this month, just in case Michael Jackson came back to life and sold Iran nuclear weapons. In Uncle Walter's time, the news division was a loss leader. Making money was the job of The Beverly Hillbillies. And now that we have reporters moving to Alaska to hang out with the Palin family, the news is The Beverly Hillbillies.

And finally, there's health care. It wasn't that long ago that when a kid broke his leg playing stickball, his parents took him to the local Catholic hospital, the nun put a thermometer in his mouth, the doctor slapped some plaster on his ankle and you were done. The bill was $1.50, plus you got to keep the thermometer.

But like everything else that's good and noble in life, some Wall Street wizard decided that hospitals could be big business, so now they're run by some bean counters in a corporate plaza in Charlotte. In the U.S. today, three giant for-profit conglomerates own close to 600 hospitals and other health care facilities. They're not hospitals anymore; they're Jiffy Lubes with bedpans. America's largest hospital chain, HCA, was founded by the family of Bill Frist, who perfectly represents the Republican attitude toward health care: it's not a right, it's a racket. The more people who get sick and need medicine, the higher their profit margins. Which is why they're always pushing the Jell-O.

Because medicine is now for-profit we have things like "recision," where insurance companies hire people to figure out ways to deny you coverage when you get sick, even though you've been paying into your plan for years.

When did the profit motive become the only reason to do anything? When did that become the new patriotism? Ask not what you could do for your country, ask what's in it for Blue Cross/Blue Shield.

If conservatives get to call universal health care "socialized medicine," I get to call private health care "soulless vampires making money off human pain." The problem with President Obama's health care plan isn't socialism, it's capitalism.

And if medicine is for profit, and war, and the news, and the penal system, my question is: what's wrong with firemen? Why don't they charge? They must be commies. Oh my God! That explains the red trucks!

Bill Maher, host of HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher airs live tonight at 10pm

Republicans Declare War On US President

Some Republicans have been saying things that amount to a declaration of war on a sitting US President. They want to defeat him at all costs. They could care less about the constructive role of making the US a better place for the American people. Senator Jim DeMint said that "if the Republicans can stop Obama on health care, it will be his Waterloo, it will break him." Yeah, we must defeat the US President when he is trying to make the US a better place for most non-billionaires. The language of warfare and battle is replacing the language of civil discussion. Talk about defeating Obama, breaking Obama, driving a stake through the heart of Obama's health care - this is the most vitriolic and uncivil use of metaphors in US history. It's suggestive of killing Obama.

In fact Bill Kristol has used precisely that word: "kill."

With Obamacare on the ropes, there will be a temptation for opponents to let up on their criticism, and to try to appear constructive, or at least responsible. There will be a tendency to want to let the Democrats' plans sink of their own weight, to emphasize that the critics have been pushing sound reform ideas all along and suggest it's not too late for a bipartisan compromise over the next couple of weeks or months. My advice, for what it's worth: Resist the temptation. This is no time to pull punches. Go for the kill. The Obama White House and the Democratic congressional leadership shouldn't be underestimated. They're tough. They'll cut deals and twist arms to try to keep their priority legislation alive. They'll certainly attack their opponents, whether their opponents' tone is conciliatory or confrontational. So this is not the time to let them off the ropes. This is the week to highlight every problem, every terrible provision, in the Democratic bills: from taxes and spending to government control and rationing to federal funding for abortion and government-required death-with-dignity counseling sessions for the elderly. Throw the kitchen sink at the legislation now on the table, drive a stake through its heart (I apologize for the mixed metaphors), and kill it.

Drive a stake through "its" heart. "Kill it." Nothing about constructive criticism. Only the language of warfare. It's all about defeating, even killing, Obama; nothing about making the US a better place for its citizens. OK, it's about making the US a better place for billionaires and corporations although they won't come out and actually say that. Talk about not discussing the merits of the health care bill. It wouldn't matter what health care bill Congress came up with. It could be the best thing that ever happened to America. The Republicans would still want to "kill it." Why? Because they want to defeat Obama at all costs.Why? Because they lust after political power. That's all they're concerned about. Make the US a better place for the average American? They could care less.

If the Democrats openly declared war on a sitting US President, the Republicans would be yelling "treason." Treason is in the eyes of the beholder. To paraphrase Nixon, when the Republicans do it, it's OK. When the Democrats do it, it's not. The Democrats should be under no illusions about Republican motives. If they think the Republians are interested in anything other than taking political power by any means necessary, they're crazy. I hope Obama is under no illusions either. I hope his talk of bipartisanship is meant to burnish his image as a nice guy rather than as a realistic approach to passing any legislation. The Republicans will seek to defeat anything Obama attempts to do, and the Democrats hopefully know that and will proceed accordingly. They have the votes and the power. They should use them and it to get the job done with repect to health care or anything else.

NO PUSSYFOOTING!

Defense Secretary Doesn't Want F-22 But Lobbyists Do and They Are Winning

From About.com:

Tuesday July 21, 2009

When it comes to next-generation of U.S. fighter jets, Defense Sec. Robert Gates is no fan of the beleaguered F-22 Raptor. In fact, Gates last week told the Economic Club of Chicago that for Congress to approve funds to continue development of the F-22 would be “risking the future of U.S. air supremacy.” For his, actually your $1 trillion, Gates prefers the F-35 Lighting.

Despite a recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report placing the cost of building and operating the proposed fleet of 2,456 F-35 Lightning IIs for the Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps for the next 25 years at over $1 trillion, Gates said the F-35 “is 10- to 15 years newer, less than half the cost, carries a much larger suite of weapons, and is technologically superior.”

Referring to the plane as “a niche silver-bullet solution for one or two potential scenarios,” Gates declared the F-22 too little bang for too many bucks. “The grim reality is that with regard to the budget, we have entered a zero-sum game," he said. “Every defense dollar diverted to fund excess or unneeded capacity is a dollar that will be unavailable to take care of our people, to win the wars we are in, to deter political adversaries and to improve capabilities in areas where America is underinvested and potentially vulnerable.”

Gates said that was a risk he was unwilling to take. “If the Department of Defense can't figure out a way to defend the United States on a budget of more than half a trillion dollars a year, then our problems are much bigger than anything that can be cured by a few more ships and planes.”

Despite program cuts like eliminating the F-22, Gates noted that the current proposed FY 2010 defense budget of $534 billion still represented a modest increase over the previous proposal of $524 billion. “Only in the parallel universe that is Washington, D.C., would that be considered 'gutting' defense,” he said.

The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010 (S. 1390) is currently debated by the Senate, where some Senators have vowed to save the F-22. A Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report on the bill places the total estimated costs for military functions of the Department of Defense for FY 2010 at $681 billion.

Also See:
F-22 Cut Draws Cheers and Jeers
Congress Members Vow to Save the F-22
The Federal Budget Process

Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Make Profits While Real Economy Continues to Erode

The American economy is predicated on bubbles. As expounded in Monopoly Capital by Baran and Sweezy, former bubbles such as railroads, automobiles and TV have been technology related. They have resulted in a huge upswing in economic activity followed by a gradual tailing off. The financial and real estate bubbles of recent years have had a rapid upswing followed by an even more rapid tailing off or crash. Whereas the technology related bubbles have had soft landings, the financial bubbles by their very nature have had very hard landings.

Now Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan are back at it again with hardly a moment to catch our collective breaths. Far from being chastened by recent experience, they are emboldened by it. They are even bigger and have fewer competitors. Their program trading department skims the stock market if not by front running, then by microsecond back running which accomplishes the same purpose. Their prescence in the stock market making hundreds of millions of dollars a day makes investing for retrirement in 401ks a joke. The granting of huge bonuses to employees and executives has continued apace without even a respectful hiatus. Geithner has presided over not only a resurgent Goldman Sachs but the creation and encouragement of a Goldman Sachs on steroids. In short he has created a monster of an even more predatory nature than was the status quo ante.

And Geithner will not even state categorically that derivatives issued by Goldman and JP Morgan today will not be bailed out by the taxpayers at some future date. Obama has misplaced his trust in Geithner and Bernanke. When what was needed was a rolling back of casino finance, Geithner and Bernanke have been the handmaidens for accelerating it. When what was called for was the reinstatement of Glass-Steagle, Geithner and Bernanke have taken us even farther down the road of unregulated laissez faire finance. The financialization of the American economy continues apace and intensifies.

Meanwhile, the real pain of American citizens continues and intensifies. Foreclosures continue to happen. Foreclosure relief is a will 'o the wisp. People continue to lose jobs. Unemployment statistics continue to go up. The real economy continues to go down even as Goldman and JP Morgan post record profits. That was a very speedy recovery for the banking sector accompanied by a real economy that continues to deteriorate. The stimulus package has produced a recovery that so far has turned out to be a non-event.

From the Wall Street Jourval, "The Economy Is Even Worse Than You Think," by Mortimer Zuckermen:

Here are 10 reasons we are in even more trouble than the 9.5% unemployment rate indicates:   - June's total assumed 185,000 people at work who probably were not. The government could not identify them; it made an assumption about trends. But many of the mythical jobs are in industries that have absolutely no job creation, e.g., finance. When the official numbers are adjusted over the next several months, June will look worse. - More companies are asking employees to take unpaid leave. These people don't count on the unemployment roll. - No fewer than 1.4 million people wanted or were available for work in the last 12 months but were not counted. Why? Because they hadn't searched for work in the four weeks preceding the survey. - The number of workers taking part-time jobs due to the slack economy, a kind of stealth underemployment, has doubled in this recession to about nine million, or 5.8% of the work force. Add those whose hours have been cut to those who cannot find a full-time job and the total unemployed rises to 16.5%, putting the number of involuntarily idle in the range of 25 million. - The average work week for rank-and-file employees in the private sector, roughly 80% of the work force, slipped to 33 hours. That's 48 minutes a week less than before the recession began, the lowest level since the government began tracking such data 45 years ago. Full-time workers are being downgraded to part time as businesses slash labor costs to remain above water, and factories are operating at only 65% of capacity. If Americans were still clocking those extra 48 minutes a week now, the same aggregate amount of work would get done with 3.3 million fewer employees, which means that if it were not for the shorter work week the jobless rate would be 11.7%, not 9.5% (which far exceeds the 8% rate projected by the Obama administration). - The average length of official unemployment increased to 24.5 weeks, the longest since government began tracking this data in 1948. The number of long-term unemployed (i.e., for 27 weeks or more) has now jumped to 4.4 million, an all-time high. - The average worker saw no wage gains in June, with average compensation running flat at $18.53 an hour. - The goods producing sector is losing the most jobs -- 223,000 in the last report alone. - The prospects for job creation are equally distressing. The likelihood is that when economic activity picks up, employers will first choose to increase hours for existing workers and bring part-time workers back to full time. Many unemployed workers looking for jobs once the recovery begins will discover that jobs as good as the ones they lost are almost impossible to find because many layoffs have been permanent. Instead of shrinking operations, companies have shut down whole business units or made sweeping structural changes in the way they conduct business. General Motors and Chrysler, closed hundreds of dealerships and reduced brands. Citigroup and Bank of America cut tens of thousands of positions and exited many parts of the world of finance.

The only certainty is that additional huge deficits and debts have been created. China and other creditors are exchanging paper dollars for hard assets like real estate wherever possible buying up huge tracts in third world countries which use the dollars to pay off their national debts. Thus dollars are transmitted back to the likes of Goldman which owns vast quantities of Third World debt. Dollars are thereby repatriated without China having to dump them on the world currency markets - a clever choice since they won't be blamed for the dollar's pending loss in value.

All in all Obama has blown it by placing his trust in Geithner and Bernanke, giving primary consideration to bailing out the banks instead of the real economy and creating the resultant outcome that, instead of being restrained, the banks are dealing more than ever in risky financial instruments secure in the knowledge that the government will bail them out if anything goes awry since they are too big to fail. This is not precisely the outcome that Obama anticipated which was that once the banks were profitable again, the health of the real economy - meaning increased job creation and diminished foreclosures - was sure to follow. If present trends continue and the US continues to lose jobs, what is Plan B?

In short there isn't one. Another stimulus package seems out of the question as Obama has shot his wad on the second stimulus package and all the bank bailouts. The likely outcome is further deterioration and erosion as the Republicans fight every attempt to get the real economy back on track. The likely result is a Republican takeover in 2010 and 2012 with even more disastrous results for the economy. At least Obama tried to put a brake on the downward spiral. The Republicans will accelerate it. Then instead of a recession, the US will have a full blown depression combined with a loss in confidence in the dollar, and the US will lose its privileged position by virtue of the fact that the dollar is the world's reserve currency. When the dollar is no longer the world's reserve currency, the US will not be able to continue to go into debt by continuing to borrow more money and will have to start paying back its debt instead. This wake up call may actually have a positive result as it forces the US to start to put its financial life on a sounder footing. It may have the positive result of forcing the US to curtail its military empire. On the other hand, it may have the negative result of accelerating the creation of a full blown fascist state as the US trys to hold hold onto its empire and continues to flex its military muscle backed by a huge nuclear arsenal.

Also posted on Robert Reich's blog.

‘Government Sachs’ Strikes Gold ... Again

Published on Wednesday, July 15, 2009 by TruthDig.com

 

by Robert Scheer

Connect the dots: Goldman Sachs made $3.44 billion in profit this past quarter, while the U.S deficit topped $1 trillion for the first time in the nation's history and appeared to be headed toward doubling that figure before the budget year is out. Since most of the increase in the federal deficit is due to bailing out the banks and salvaging the greater economy they helped destroy, why is the top investment bank doing so well?

Well, because that was the plan, as devised by Bush Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, a former CEO of Goldman Sachs. Remember that Lehman Brothers, Goldman's competitor, was allowed to go bankrupt. The Paulson crowd wouldn't let Lehman change its status to that of a bank holding company and thus qualify for federal funds; soon afterward, Goldman was granted just such a deal, worth a quick $10 billion. Much is now made of Goldman paying back part of its bailout money, but forgotten is the $12.9 billion that Goldman got as its cut of the $180 billion AIG payoff. That is money that will not be paid back.

Goldman is considered a very smart bank because it was early in reducing its exposure to the mortgage derivatives that in large part caused the meltdown. However, it had done much to expand the market and continued to sell suspect derivatives to unwary buyers as sound investments, even as Goldman divested. The firm still holds $1.85 billion in real estate and lost $499 million in the previous quarter on bad loans, but made up for it by playing the vulture role and issuing high-interest debt to governments and companies made desperate by the recession that the financial gimmicks of the banks brought on in the first place.

And Goldman was not just another bank. Before Paulson ran the Treasury Department, another former Goldman head, Robert Rubin, pushed through the repeal of the Glass-Steagall controls on banking activity. While some now play down the significance of this radical deregulation, not so Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd C. Blankfein--at least not back in June 2007, when the markets were still doing well. "If you take an historical perspective," Blankfein told The New York Times by way of explaining his company's spectacular success at the time, "we've come full circle, because that is exactly what the Rothschilds or J.P. Morgan the banker were doing in their heyday. What caused an aberration was the Glass-Steagall Act."

That 1933 act was repealed in a law signed by President Bill Clinton at Rubin's urging, and in the following eight years Goldman Sachs recorded a 265 percent growth in its balance sheet. "Back then," The Wall Street Journal reports, "Goldman was churning out profits by trading credit derivatives, speculating on currencies and oil and placing big bets [on] the roaring stock market."

Big bets made in a casino designed by Goldman, which now makes money off loans to the victims. High on the list of victims are state governments that have to turn to Goldman for money because the federal government that saved the banks won't do the same for the states, which have watched their tax bases shrink because of the banking meltdown. As the WSJ noted, "issuing debt to ailing governments" is now a growth industry for Goldman.

Why didn't the federal government just lend the money to the states? Why was all the money thrown at Wall Street instead of needy homeowners or struggling school systems? Because the federal government works for Goldman and not for us. Indeed, when it comes to the banking bailout, Goldman Sachs is the government.

So much so that last fall The New York Times ran a story, headlined "The Guys From `Government Sachs,' " that stated: "Goldman's presence in the [Treasury] department and around the federal response to the financial bailout is so ubiquitous that other bankers and competitors have given the star-studded firm a new nickname: Government Sachs."

One of those stars was Stephen Friedman, another former head of Goldman. Friedman was both a director of the company and chairman of the New York Federal Reserve Bank when he helped work out the details of the Wall Street bailout. The president of the N.Y. Fed at the time, Timothy Geithner, now secretary of the treasury, requested a conflict-of-interest waiver that allowed Friedman to buy more Goldman Sachs stock, and Friedman ended up with 98,600 shares. At market close on Tuesday that was worth $14,756,476. That's nothing -- three years ago, the 50 top Goldman execs made $20 million each, and this year could be better.

They're not hurting.

Los Angeles Accused of Criminalizing Homelessness

Published on Wednesday, July 15, 2009 by Reuters

by Steve Gorman

LOS ANGELES  - Two major advocacy groups for the homeless on Tuesday ranked Los Angeles as the "meanest" city in the United States, citing a Skid Row police crackdown they say has criminalized poverty and homelessness there.

A homeless activist visits "tent city", a terminus for the homeless in Ontario, a suburb outside Los Angeles, California December 19, 2007. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

L.A.'s so-called Safer City Initiative was singled out in the groups' report as the most egregious example of policies and practices nationwide that essentially punish people for failing to have a roof over their heads.

Others include making it illegal to sleep, sit or store personal belongings on sidewalks and other public spaces; prohibitions against panhandling or begging; and selective enforcement of petty offenses like jaywalking and loitering.

Such measures are widespread in the face of a deep economic recession and foreclosure crisis that have increased homelessness over the past two years, according to the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty and the National Coalition for the Homeless.

Their report examined laws and practices in 273 cities across the country, with Los Angeles topping the list of the 10 "meanest cities" for what the study called inhumane treatment of homeless. A previous report, issued in early 2006 before the crackdown began, ranked L.A. as the 18th meanest.

Under the Safer City effort, thousands of L.A.'s most destitute residents have been targeted for harsh police enforcement, routinely receiving tickets for minor infractions such as the failure to obey crossing signals.

As a result, the study says, many are jailed and end up with a criminal record that makes it more difficult for them to find a job or gain access to housing.

A spokesman for Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa issued a statement dismissing the report as "short-sighted and misleading."

Los Angeles officials have touted their Safer City effort for sharply curbing serious crime in Skid Row, a 50-block downtown area inhabited by the biggest concentration of homeless people in the country. "The city's first priority is to protect our most vulnerable residents from violent crime," the mayor's statement said.

But homeless advocates say a promised strategy to ease homelessness there, including new housing and services to go with the Skid Row cleanup, have largely failed to materialize.

An estimated 40,000 people live on the streets, in abandoned buildings or in temporary shelters throughout Los Angeles, more than 5,000 of them in Skid Row. Another 8,000 make their home in that area's short-term residential hotels, or flop houses as they were once called.

Becky Dennison, co-director of the Los Angeles Community Action Network, said the homeless population in Los Angeles has ballooned due to a lack of affordable housing, a high poverty rate and "long-standing lack of local resources."

Tuesday's report cited a 2007 University of California study that found L.A. was spending $6 million a year to pay for the 50 extra police officers who patrol Skid Row while budgeting just $5.7 million for homeless services.

By comparison, Dennison said, New York City has a "right to shelter" policy and invests about $200 million a year in housing and other services for the needy, resulting in a homeless population half that of Los Angeles.

Plastic Bags and Bottled Water - OUT!

From the New Zealand Herald:

Bottled water ban makes a big splash

4:00AM Friday Jul 10, 2009
By Greg Ansley

CANBERRA - Australia is discovering hamlet power. First it was the tiny Tasmanian township of Coles Bay, population 200, which nine years ago led a burgeoning national movement to ban plastic shopping bags.

Now it is the 2500 people of Bundanoon, in the Southern Highlands southwest of Sydney.

On Wednesday night the town voted to outlaw bottled water, shaking the A$460 million-a-year ($572 million) Australian industry like the mouse that roared.

Yesterday, New South Wales Premier Nathan Rees responded by announcing an immediate ban on state government purchases of bottled water, including refills for the thousands of water coolers that act as office networking hubs.

If plastic shopping bags are any indicator, worse may be in store for bottled water.

In 2003 Coles Bay baker Ben Kearney led a revolt in the main street of a hamlet whose shopping centre of bakery, pub, supermarket and post office attracts up to 200,000 visitors a year.

Kearney and fellow shopkeepers enlisted the aid of environmental group Planet Ark to replace the town's annual distribution of 350,000 plastic shopping bags with locally designed cloth and paper alternatives.

They gave locals five free bags each and declared Coles Bay the nation's first plastic bag-free town.

In 2005 Kearney was named Tasmanian of the Year and won the Local Hero Award in that year's Australia Day awards.

Across Bass Strait, Coles Bay inspired South Australia's Labor Government - headed by expatriate New Zealander Mike Rann - to follow suit with a statewide ban on plastic checkout bags.

A new law introducing on-the-spot fines for shops handing out the bags came into force in May, adding pressure on Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to make good his election promise to introduce a national ban.

Rudd's enthusiasm cooled after federal and state environment ministers failed to reach agreement. Undeterred, retail giant Target stopped offering its customers plastic bags last month, replacing them with reusable and compostable alternatives costing between A10c and A$3.

Within a month of the announcement in May, Target sold more than 80,000 reusable bags, raising more than A$100,000 for charity.

Now it's the turn of bottled water, the subject of criticism for their contribution to landfills and claims of an excessive carbon footprint. This year, the nation will drink more than 240 megalitres of water contained in plastic bottles that government figures say each consume about 200 millilitres of oil in production, transport and refrigeration.

The bottled water industry disputes this, claiming that the real figure is smaller by a factor of three, that its bottles comprise less than 0.3 per cent of the nation's landfills, and that they are completely recyclable.

Bundanoon was having none of it.

Irked by a proposal to draw water from a local aquifer to supply the bottling industry, the town rallied to ban the sale of bottled water and to replace them with filtered drinking fountains.

Rees leapt on to the bandwagon, following an instruction to state ministerial offices in downtown Sydney to use only tap water.

"After all, our tap water is among the best in the world and tastes even better," Rees said.

Public support is a little less certain. A poll on www.news.com.au yesterday showed almost 60 per cent of respondents disagreed with Rees.

Said Sherlock of Sydney: "This is nothing but the nanny state in action again."

The Recovery That Didn't Happen

Robert Reich has a new post: "When Will the Recovery Begin? Never."

Obama went with the conventional thinking which was that, if you save the banks and get them working again, the rest of the economy (meaning jobs) would soon recover and people would start consuming again. But WHA HOPPENED! They must be scratching their heads and thinking they made a big mistake. If they did A, then B was sure to follow - at least that was the conventional thinking as espoused by Summers and Geithner who convinced Obama.

It is finally starting to sink in that they've made a big mistake. Their theory didn't work out. And to think - THEY'VE WASTED TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS ON THE BANKS!

What to do now? The money is gone. They don't have money for another stimulus. Stimulus, schmimulus. What's needed is not another stimulus but A COMPLETE RESTRUCTURING OF THE WHOLE FRIGGIN ECONOMY!

The Federal government is broke; the states are broke. The whole nation has pauperized itself with military adventurism and job outsourcing. Instead of spending trillions on the banks, they should have taken them over and restructured them. Instead they let banks take money and use it to lobby government not to impose regulations on them which is exactly what is needed to restructure the economy. They let the banks take money from the taxpayers and use it for obscene bonuses! How stupid can these guys be. But they're middle of the road, remember. Can't outlaw lobbyists even if they use bailout money for lobbying and bonuses.

Meanwhile there is no mortgage relief, no job growth, unemployment benefits running out, welfare benefits stopped. This is nuts! The Democrats and their stupid half-measures in the name of bi-partisanship have screwed things up even more, but this is nothing to the screw job that would have happened if the Republicans had their way.

Obama is a centrist when what is needed is someone at least as radical as FDR. Obama doesn't want to offend anyone and he is ever conscious of his legacy as the first black President. So he takes a middle of the road approach.

But Geithner and Summers are increasingly looking like fools as their approach of funneling money to the banks at any cost is looking like all it accomplished was, well, funneling money to the banks. Nothing else happened. B didn't follow A as it was supposed to. They've spilled too much red ink. Now there's no ink left. Well, they could stop two wars and close down 800 military bases and use that money. But they'd never do that. That's unthinkable. Not middle of the road enough.

Pig Shit Threatens Environment

The following is from an article called "Boss Hog" by Jeff Tietz:

America's top pork producer churns out a sea of waste that has destroyed rivers, killed millions of fish and generated one of the largest fines in EPA history. Welcome to the dark side of the other white meat.

Smithfield Foods, the largest and most profitable pork processor in the world, killed 27 million hogs last year. That's a number worth considering. A slaughter-weight hog is fifty percent heavier than a person. The logistical challenge of processing that many pigs each year is roughly equivalent to butchering and boxing the entire human populations of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, San Jose, Detroit, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, San Francisco, Columbus, Austin, Memphis, Baltimore, Fort Worth, Charlotte, El Paso, Milwaukee, Seattle, Boston, Denver, Louisville, Washington, D.C., Nashville, Las Vegas, Portland, Oklahoma City and Tucson.

Smithfield Foods actually faces a more difficult task than transmogrifying the populations of America's thirty-two largest cities into edible packages of meat. Hogs produce three times more excrement than human beings do. The 500,000 pigs at a single Smithfield subsidiary in Utah generate more fecal matter each year than the 1.5 million inhabitants of Manhattan. The best estimates put Smithfield's total waste discharge at 26 million tons a year. That would fill four Yankee Stadiums. Even when divided among the many small pig production units that surround the company's slaughterhouses, that is not a containable amount. Smithfield estimates that its total sales will reach $11.4 billion this year. So prodigious is its fecal waste, however, that if the company treated its effluvia as big-city governments do -- even if it came marginally close to that standard -- it would lose money. So many of its contractors allow great volumes of waste to run out of their slope-floored barns and sit blithely in the open, untreated, where the elements break it down and gravity pulls it into groundwater and river systems.

Although the company proclaims a culture of environmental responsibility, ostentatious pollution is a linchpin of Smithfield's business model. A lot of pig shit is one thing; a lot of highly toxic pig shit is another. The excrement of Smithfield hogs is hardly even pig shit: On a continuum of pollutants, it is probably closer to radioactive waste than to organic manure. The reason it is so toxic is Smithfield's efficiency. The company produces 6 billion pounds of packaged pork each year. That's a remarkable achievement, a prolificacy unimagined only two decades ago, and the only way to do it is to raise pigs in astonishing, unprecedented concentrations. Smithfield's pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in warehouse-like barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so small they cannot turn around. Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth. The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs -- anything small enough to fit through the foot-wide pipes that drain the pits. The pipes remain closed until enough sewage accumulates in the pits to create good expulsion pressure; then the pipes are opened and everything bursts out into a large holding pond.

The temperature inside hog houses is often hotter than ninety degrees. The air, saturated almost to the point of precipitation with gases from shit and chemicals, can be lethal to the pigs. Enormous exhaust fans run twenty-four hours a day. The ventilation systems function like the ventilators of terminal patients: If they break down for any length of time, pigs start dying. From Smithfield's point of view, the problem with this lifestyle is immunological. Taken together, the immobility, poisonous air and terror of confinement badly damage the pigs' immune systems. They become susceptible to infection, and in such dense quarters microbes or parasites or fungi, once established in one pig, will rush spritelike through the whole population. Accordingly, factory pigs are infused with a huge range of antibiotics and vaccines, and are doused with insecticides. Without these compounds -- oxytetracycline, draxxin, ceftiofur, tiamulin -- diseases would likely kill them. Thus factory-farm pigs remain in a state of dying until they're slaughtered. When a pig nearly ready to be slaughtered grows ill, workers sometimes shoot it up with as many drugs as necessary to get it to the slaughterhouse under its own power. As long as the pig remains ambulatory, it can be legally killed and sold as meat.

The drugs Smithfield administers to its pigs, of course, exit its hog houses in pig shit. Industrial pig waste also contains a host of other toxic substances: ammonia, methane, hydrogen sulfide, carbon monoxide, cyanide, phosphorous, nitrates and heavy metals. In addition, the waste nurses more than 100 microbial pathogens that can cause illness in humans, including salmonella, cryptosporidium, streptocolli and girardia. Each gram of hog shit can contain as much as 100 million fecal coliform bacteria. Smithfield's holding ponds -- the company calls them lagoons -- cover as much as 120,000 square feet. The area around a single slaughterhouse can contain hundreds of lagoons, some of which run thirty feet deep. The liquid in them is not brown. The interactions between the bacteria and blood and afterbirths and stillborn piglets and urine and excrement and chemicals and drugs turn the lagoons pink. Even light rains can cause lagoons to overflow; major floods have transformed entire counties into pig-shit bayous. To alleviate swelling lagoons, workers sometimes pump the shit out of them and spray the waste on surrounding fields, which results in what the industry daintily refers to as "overapplication." This can turn hundreds of acres -- thousands of football fields -- into shallow mud puddles of pig shit. Tree branches drip with pig shit. Some pig-farm lagoons have polyethylene liners, which can be punctured by rocks in the ground, allowing shit to seep beneath the liners and spread and ferment. Gases from the fermentation can inflate the liner like a hot-air balloon and rise in an expanding, accelerating bubble, forcing thousands of tons of feces out of the lagoon in all directions.

continues here...

A Dialog on Health Care

These comments were posted on Robert Reich's blog post, "What Can I Do?":

John Lawrence said...

Angry,

Thanks for your reference to Food, Inc. It is playing locally. I'll try to see it.

Here's a novel idea. Why not tie rates for health insurance (whether public or private) to an individual's willingness to stay healthy? In other words incentivize healthy lifestyles by giving rate cuts on health insurance. Right now some employers are incentivizing employees to exercize. This could be increased by incentivizing healthy lifestyles. With all kinds of devices being computerized and wirelessly networked, I can imagine a teadmill, for instance, wirelessly connected to a doctor's office or a database which clocked the hours spent by a specific individual. Also scales and blood pressure measurements at home can wirelessly transmit crucial health statistics to a central database or doctor's office. Classes in nutrition could count as well as a willingness to consume healthy foods and vitamins. Food purchases could be tracked. Technology is there. This might sound a little Big Brotherish, but the gains in human health, happiness and productivity not to mention cost containment of the health care system would justify encouragement of healthy lifestyles in my opinion.

There are many ways a person's willingness to lead a healthy lifestyle regarding diet and excercise could be tracked, measured and evaluated and that data could be used to determine the rate a person should pay for health insurance. Those not willing to lead a healthy lifestyle should pay more because they will be a greater burden on the overall health care system. Obese people especially are more in danger of heart and kidney problems from Type 2 diabetes, heart attacks etc.

I think this emphasis on healthy lifestyles and incentivizing it by lowering individual rates for health insurance would do a lot for cost containment of the overall health care system and encourage individual responsibility for taking care of one's self and family.

Saturday, 04 July, 2009

Art A Layman said...

John:

This might sound a little Big Brotherish, but the gains in human health, happiness and productivity not to mention cost containment of the health care system would justify encouragement of healthy lifestyles in my opinion.

Jesus! A little?! Maybe we could expand your program to not only charging higher premiums to those not following - whose definition? - a healthy lifestyle but refusing them medical care altogether. This would save scads! The double whammy would be great too. They pay higher premiums but can't get needed care. Priceless!

I guess you're scrapping your "we're all in this together" position.

You present good ideas, from time to time, but going off the deep end might not bode well for your veracity.

P.S. Does that mean that each doctors visit will now require a breathalyzer test to see if I'm smoking?

Sunday, 05 July, 2009

Anonymous said...

Art Layman,

Excuse me. You are the one going off the deep end with a hyped up reaction to John Lawrence's well-meant reminder of the benefits of a healthful lifestyle. Even we who finished high school understand John is merely highlighting the good health positives of nutricious non-fat foods, routine exercise and less pills for every occasion. And that this will also help reduce national health care costs too. Jesus would be pleased if he saw this simple message accepted by more folks like perhaps, who knows, yourself. We can't be too serious about following healthy living habits. It'll save most of us a lot of money and discomfort in our older days.

Sunday, 05 July, 2009

John Lawrence said...

Angry, Art & Others,

I just saw the movie Food Inc. and is it an eye opener. Th number of incidences of e coli are directly related to the factory production of farm animals for slaughter in feed lots or chicken houses. First they feed the cows corn instead of hay which they evolved to eat. Corn produces bacteria in their gut including e coli whereas, if they were fed grass or hay this would not happen. Animals who eat hay produce manure which can be spread on fields as fertilizer, but animals fed corn including cows and hogs produce a toxic sludge. A hog waste pond recently threatened to pollute a major river.

My Grandfather was a farmer, and he grew the hay in his own fields which he fed to his cattle and then spread the manure back on the fields with a manure spreader. They all did this in the 1940s and 50s.

Cows in feed lots have to stand around all day in their own waste products and this translates into more e coli in the slaughterhouse. No wonder there are so many recalls of beef products! Also birds pick up the e coli and transmit it to adjacent crops like spinach.

If you saw this movie you would never eat another piece of beef or chicken from the super market and especially from a fast food place.

Industrialized meat production by just a small number of corporate giants like Smithfield and Tyson is literally killing us because it's laced with growth hormones and the FDA is staffed by former lobbyists from the industries they're supposed to regulate. Poor people can pay less for a fast food meal than if they bought vegetables at the super market, and 1 out of 3 people born since 2000 will have early onset Type 2 diabetes. If you are a minority, it will be 1 out of 2. High fructose corn syrup and industrialized meat production are major contributors to obesity especially from fast foods.

The other interesting thing is that Monsanto has added a patented gene to soybeans that lets the field be sprayed with pesticide without affecting the soybean production. Since it is a patented gene, the farmer can't save seeds for next year's crop because they legally belong to Monsanto. Monsanto sends out investigators to make sure no farmer saves seeds or else they are prosecuted. Even farmers who don't buy Monsanto's genetically modified soybean seeds can be prosecuted by Monsanto if some of the genetically modified seeds happen to cross pollinate in a non-Monsanto farmer's field.

Also posted on Will Blog For Food.

Sunday, 05 July, 2009

notsofast said...

john lawrence: what's next obesity camps in the desert? lol your authoritarian inclination is pretty typical for dems and well-meaning but completely unacceptable. personal, social and economic freedom and justice only exist when coercive power and authority are decentralized and eliminated; genuine socialism.

Monday, 06 July, 2009


Art A Layman said...

John:

If you're going to attempt to enlighten us could you be more specific? E-Coli, in and of itself, is not the problem, we all walk around with E-Coli bacteria in our intestines. It's a particular strain that is the problem, an acid-resistant strain.

The vast majority of UTIs that women get are caused by E-Coli bacteria entering the urethra.

You are tending toward paranoia

Monday, 06 July, 2009

Angry Citizen said...

John,

Glad to hear that you got out to see Food Inc. I've still got to see it; some family thing came up the other night so I couldn't go.

Re: Monsanto, yes, they've become quite a thorn in the side of farmers globally. In Mexico, they train their young to be able to spot genetically modified corn so that the plants can be removed asap. Our genetically-modified imports have been mixing with their generations-in-the-making heirloom corn and they're not so much worried about getting slapped with a lawsuit for having our garbage seeds cross-pollinate as they are having their crops infiltrated with our inferior corn and ruined for posterity. (If you've never watched "The World According to Monsanto," it's worth a watch. Many versions of it are online on both You Tube and Google video.)

People were very worried for a while about Monsanto's development of what folks called "terminator seeds." I don't know if they've stopped R & D on the seeds or not, but basically what they were meant to do was, well, self-destruct so that nobody could save the seeds and harvest them.

@Art, From what I understand, the problem with e-coli, virus strains like swine and avian flu, and factory farming is that when you've got hundreds of animals piled up on top of each other in a factory--standing in their own waste, in the waste of stillborn animals, and all of their other nasty stuff that's supposedly laying in the sludge of factory floors--and in such close-quarters and stench that the quality of air flow is atrocious, strains of all kinds of illness become much more virulent because they have the ability to spread so fast throughout the factories. With a small farm where animals are free to forage, you might still have sick animals infecting others, but the number of carriers for the illness would be much smaller, and presumably, because the animals wouldn't be constantly pumped with antibiotics and other drugs (just to stave off death!)--and their immune systems wouldn't be so incredibly weak due to factory conditions--the strains would not spread so fast or have the same kind of ability, as is true in the case of factory farming, to gain in strength as it spread through hundreds of additional animals.

I posted this article once before, but it's worth re-posting:

Boss Hog.

It's a very-well researched article about Smithfield Foods (there has been a more recent article about Smithfield... I'll have to track it down later if anyone is interested), and explains in much better detail than I can provide the answer to your question about e-coli as well as a bunch of other facts you'd probably rather not know!

@ Anon,

I choose B .

Monday, 06 July, 2009

Art A Layman said...

Angry:

Far as I know all of what you said is true but the E. coli culprit is primarily just one strain which does not affect the animals but can be bad for humans: E. coli O157:H7.

E. coli is a normal bacterium in the gastrointestinal tract of animals and humans, and most types are not harmful (See "E. coli and Cattle" fact sheet, attached). However, disease-causing strains such as E. coli O157:H7 produce toxins that cause bloody diarrhea or even kidney failure in humans. Mature cattle are unaffected by E. coli O157:H7. Only a small number of cattle (estimated at 1 to 2 percent at any one time) shed E. coli O157:H7 in their feces, a rate that is not fully explained.

When beef carcasses are accidentally contaminated by feces at slaughter, the pathogens can enter the human food supply. E. coli O157:H7 can be killed by cooking or irradiation, but the bacterium continues to pose a food-safety risk.

Cattle are fed starch-containing grains to increase growth rate and produce tender meat. Because the bovine gastrointestinal tract digests starch poorly, Russell explains, some undigested grain reaches the colon, where it is fermented. When the grain ferments -- and acetic, propionic and butyric acids accumulate in the animal's colon -- a large fraction of E. coli produced are the acid-resistant type.

"Grain does not specifically promote the growth of E. coli O157:H7, but it increases the chance that at least some E. coli could pass through the gastric stomach of humans," Russell says. "The carbohydrates of hay are not so easily fermented, and hay does not promote either the growth or acid resistance of E. coli. When we switched cattle from grain-based diets to hay for only five days, acid-resistant E. coli could no longer be detected."

In studies performed at Cornell, beef cattle fed grain-based rations typical of commercial feedlots had 1 million acid-resistant E. coli, per gram of feces, and dairy cattle fed only 60 percent grain also had high numbers of acid-resistant bacteria. In each case, the high counts could be explained by grain fermentation in the intestines.

By comparison, cattle fed hay or grass had only acid-sensitive E. coli, and these bacteria were destroyed by an "acid shock" that mimicked the human stomach, the microbiologists report in Science.

My point was that the strain is the problem not just any E. coli.

At that cooking meat thoroughly and following good hygiene practices eliminates most of the risk. Though a serious concern if we look at reported cases versus all who eat pink meat and/or fast food meat John's reaction seems slightly paranoid.

Monday, 06 July, 2009

Anonymous said...

Art Layman and Notsovast,

As I've said, Mr. Lawrence's message about preventive care is not so difficult to understand. Accusing him of paranoia is an easy excuse for not hearing the message. John is only saying, as an example, we don't have to walk around with over-exposure to E-coli bacteria for a lifetime by feeding cows corn instead of hay. The rest of the world doesn't follow this stupid practice, but we in the US are the exception. As science shows, an excess of most things clearly healthwise contradictory comes with very negative risk results. This has been proven with planting corn for ethanol and feeding corn to cows. On the other hand, Monsanto has their own inspectors to enforce by fear of lawsuits their regimen of protecting really questionably unhealthful products. This occurs routinely under heavy-lobbyist influences while John Lawrence gets personally critisized for merely revealing how US health is being endangered by feeding cows corn instead of hay. In addition to the obvious exaggerations of Mr. Lawrence's intentions, he is not calling for an 'authoritarian' response to the shams and abridgement of better-informed choices for healthful living. How cleverly we can manipulate a simple, honest viewpoint. John, is acting out of paronoia? Gibberish! Please look to yourselves, gentlemen. You get upset without any counterarguments when someone speaks common sence and cites scientific evidence about unhealthful livestyle practices. You, innocently perhaps, are blind to realization you are participating in typical Republican
fear mongering. This you do by suggesting Mr. Lawrence is calling for some high authority to enforce his pet good health practices? Get realistic, gentlemen! The Disney fantasy world can't possibly match this silliness. It's the old habits of Democrats at work again in great form, and party men in particular, of undermining each other's best intentions. Republicans just love it.

Monday, 06 July, 2009


Art A Layman said...

Anonymous:

The obscurity of your name does not allow one to know how long you've been reading John's tripe, ooops, common sense. Sorry John.

Speaking of commmon sense, I love the current definition of it. In today's world Common Sense is defined as, if you disagree with me you don't have any.

One could herald the thought that we Dems think for ourselves. Are you suggesting that we all fall in line behind the party line thoughts of the day? If I'm going to do that I might as well be a Republican.

Before you go jumping on the latest healthful news of the day you might want to review history. We have been fed so much bullshit at one time or another just to have it reversed a few years hence. Coffee was bad, now it's good. Overweight is bad, thin is good. Now we find that somewhat overweight is better and offers a better chance for longer life. Vitamin C and E, in large quantities will improve your chances of avoiding heart attacks and cancer. Well, upon review, no it won't. Saturated fats are bad. Well maybe not so much.

Notsofast is right. What John proposed is that we all be monitored - daily? hourly? - to make sure we're eating right, exercising right, doing all the "right" things. That my friend is not freedom.

At that, got any idea the problems we'll create if we all start to live to be 150? Best you follow you're healthful life and life forever and be thankful for we waywards who died sooner rather than later. And Jesus, supposedly, will love us all anyway.

Oh! And I missed the part in the warranty that said if we all do nothing but healthful things we're guaranteed a long life and a quick painless death. Have to pull that damn thing out again.

Monday, 06 July, 2009

Blurtman said...

If you give up smoking, drinking, eating fatty foods and sweets, you will not live longer. It will just seem that way.

Monday, 06 July, 2009

Anonymous said ...

blurtman : If you give up smoking, drinking, eating fatty foods and sweets, you will not live longer. It will just seem that way.

Unfortunately, my own family history conclusively proves that statement false.

Monday, 06 July, 2009

John Lawrence said ...

Art said:

My point was that the strain is the problem not just any E. coli.

At that cooking meat thoroughly and following good hygiene practices eliminates most of the risk. Though a serious concern if we look at reported cases versus all who eat pink meat and/or fast food meat John's reaction seems slightly paranoid.

Art, you just don't get it, my friend. Tell that to the woman who lost her 2 year old son in 12 days after he ate a fast food hamburger. The problem is (and you should have figured this out from reading your own posting) that cows evolved to eat hay not corn! It's the government subsidization of corn that's the primary cause of e coli in the food supply. Free range grass grazing or hay fed beef cows do not introduce e coli into the food supply.The feed lot factory farms find it more convenient and less costly to feed cows corn rather than hay and then they stand around in their own manure which gets into the slaughterhouse and hence into the food supply. The continuing incidences of e coli breakouts testify to the fact that this is a continuing problem. And you're going to solve it by getting Jack in the Box to cook their meat more thoroughly?!?!

You'd be paranoid too if you lost a 2 year old son from eating a Jack in the Box hamburger.

Tuesday, 07 July, 2009


John Lawrence said...

Art and notsofast:

Many people are already wirelessly hooked up to their doctor's office so he can monitor their blood pressure and/or other vital signs on a daily basis. This in fact might save these patients' lives without their having to come into the doctor's office on a daily basis. Many companies are encouraging their employees' to excercise and have better diets in order to cut down health care costs. Some even install gyms at the place of work. Is this authoritarian or simply good sense? You know, you can make these kind of practices out to be whatever you want them to be. What's good sense and voluntary participation to some is seen to be government intervention into our private lives by others. FYI, my suggestions are meant to be on a voluntary rather than coercive basis. Art and notsofast, please eat all the fat, sugar and salt you want, smoke all the cigarettes you want and please be as sedentary as you want. My ideal health care system would still pick up the bill for all your degenerative diseases, but it would require you to pay a little more for health insurance as compared to someone who excercised and ate healthy foods.

And thank you, Anonymous, for putting Art's and notsofast's paranoia in proper perspective.

Tuesday, 07 July, 2009


Art A Layman said...

John:

Good buddy, no I'm afraid that you just don't get it. Life is not fair. Why do things happen to some and not others? Who the hell knows? The loss of any, child especially, is heinous and who can fault the feelings of any parent who has experienced it. I'm against the death penalty but were my daughter ever raped, if left to me, the perpetrator would be pleading for death.

It's the government subsidization of corn that's the primary cause of e coli in the food supply. Free range grass grazing or hay fed beef cows do not introduce e coli into the food supply.The feed lot factory farms find it more convenient and less costly to feed cows corn rather than hay and then they stand around in their own manure which gets into the slaughterhouse and hence into the food supply. The continuing incidences of e coli breakouts testify to the fact that this is a continuing problem. And you're going to solve it by getting Jack in the Box to cook their meat more thoroughly?!?!

The subsidization of corn no doubt is a contributor but my understanding is that corn fed beef also produces less fat per pound than hay fed. That can reduce profits when the fat has to be trimmed off. Another contributing factor?

Now the rest of your comment, if not paranoia, is bullshit. Standing around in their own manure is certainly inhumane. I'm all in favor of treating animals, whatever their eventual plight, humanely. But if that's the cause of E. coli entering the food chain why do we not find E. coli infections coming from eating steak or ribs or rump roasts or even beef tongue (yuck!)?

The problem is in ground beef, more specifically hamburger. Why is that? Because it is made from the garbage residue from the cattle including intestine meat. Do you think that when a cow is slaughtered the E. coli or other bacteria die as well? In the process the intestines get ground up along with other garbage and the E. coli lives on. That's how it gets in the food chain!

The article I posted does say that the E. coli O157:H7 strain does come from the digestive, fermentation, process of the cow from eating corn rather than hay. It also goes on to say that feeding the cow hay for four or five days before slaughter eliminates that particular strain. Even hay fed cattle have E. coli in their intestines and thus, chances are, in the hamburger we eat, but our stomach acids kill all other strains so no infection ever sets in.

I have eaten fast food cheeseburgers since they've been around and never had an E. coli infection. At better restaurants and at home I prefer my cheeseburgers medium rare and have most of my life with no consequences other than getting fatter. In Raleigh, a number of years ago, a law was passed that all ground beef had to be cooked to x degrees in the center, yielding, at best, a medium well patty. If cooking thoroughly was not a solution we would have a plethora of E. coli infections here and everywhere.

Another simple solution would be irradiation in slaughter houses or restaurants but likely that's more expensive than thorough cooking.

People, men, women and children die in car accidents but we don't outlaw cars. Folks get electrocuted but we don't outlaw electricity. People die from choking to death on home garden grown vegetables but we don't outlaw food.

Get a grip John! Enlighten us if you will but give us facts not emotional rants. You saw a movie and thus you feel a need to spread fear and horror to the populace. You didn't learn that in the fine schools you attended. Sounds more like lessons from Sunday school.

Tuesday, 07 July, 2009


Art A Layman said...

John:

An addendum.

You'd be paranoid too if you lost a 2 year old son from eating a Jack in nthe Box hamburger.

I wouldn't be paranoid but I'd be damned angry.

On the other hand I wouldn't be wild about a mother who would feed her 2 y/o fast food in the first place.

Tuesday, 07 July, 2009


Art A Layman said...

John:

FYI, my suggestions are meant to be on a voluntary rather than coercive basis. Art and notsofast, please eat all the fat, sugar and salt you want, smoke all the cigarettes you want and please be as sedentary as you want. My ideal health care system would still pick up the bill for all your degenerative diseases, but it would require you to pay a little more for health insurance as compared to someone who excercised and ate healthy foods.

You presentation smacked more of coercive than voluntary. Have no problem with voluntary but if I volunteer I don't want it used to punish me.

The trade off to your valued hard earned funds is in doing all those dastardly things, notsofast and I will die sooner, perhaps yielding you a refund?

I'm on Medicare. I can live the Epicurean life to the hilt and it won't cost me a dime more than all you health food, exercise addicts.

Tuesday, 07 July, 2009

Anonymous said...

Art :I'm on Medicare. I can live the Epicurean life to the hilt and it won't cost me a dime more than all you health food, exercise addicts.

Your medicare provided lipitor is 100% free?

Tuesday, 07 July, 2009

Anonymous said...

Art Layman,

You apparently enjoy distorting other people's simple statements like, for example, about the obvious benefits of healthful living habits starting young, recognizing also it is never too late. Can one still possibly be struck by a serious illness or breakdown? Of course. Are the chances reduced? Also, of course. Can more healthful lifestyles in long term reduce health care costs? Also, of course. This is all that John Lawrence is saying. You sound like you are in not in an optimum state of physical health yourself, Mr. Layman? If true, have you thought about how you might have also contributed to your disability compared to taking refuge in the forces of bad luck, the wrong time, family genetics, or the unlucky smoker? Your amusing but exaggerated, self-convincing analysis of John Lawrence's remarks seems married to the latter cop-out excuses. Fine for you. But is this wise counsel for all the younger generations? I really don't believe John Lawrence is promoting health warranties or big brother controls or dictums of healthful lifestyles as your 'Artfully' imply. He is simply highlighting a greater awareness in our society of incentivizing and promoting (as do other advanced nations) the obvious quality of life benefits possible from focusing on delicious nutricious foods, being alert to dangerous food processing methods, routinely exercising and avoiding over-reliance on pills and drugs as automatic answers to all our physical, emotional discomforts and pains. You self-rightously appear to suggest this is all nonsense or disguised authoritorian preaching! But your comments are equally indirectly, if not directly, cocky and ironically inflexible. They amount to what I would call Mr. Art Layman's concept of healthful living nihilism. Doctors, of course, profit from people who are in stupendous denial of simple ways to improve chances for good health and longevity on this delicate environmental paradise called earth. By the way, it's a paradise also in a stage of escalating climatic diseases in major part caused by human lifestyles. I hope you are not in denial or pooh-poohing of this reality also?

Mr. Lawrence's preventive care ideas we can disagree with as to how they are formulated. But they are an extremely important part of Obama's real health care reforms which I pray will come.

Tuesday, 07 July, 2009

SMV said...

Art,

Just a couple of comments on food.

1. “The subsidization of corn no doubt is a contributor but my understanding is that corn fed beef also produces less fat per pound than hay fed. That can reduce profits when the fat has to be trimmed off. Another contributing factor?”

I believe that feeding cows corn increases the growth rate. It also increases marbling and fat % in general.

Grass and hay fed beef is leaner. Personally I do not like the taste of grass fed beef as well as grain fed beef, but that is my taste buds.

2. “Standing around in their own manure is certainly inhumane. I'm all in favor of treating animals, whatever their eventual plight, humanely. But if that's the cause of E. coli entering the food chain why do we not find E. coli infections coming from eating steak or ribs or rump roasts or even beef tongue (yuck!)?”

Manure on the outside of the cow makes contact with the meat as the hide is cleaned & removed. Cutting the meat contaminates the outside edges of the meat. High heat on the outside edge of a steak kills the E. coli. The inside of the steak remains uncontaminated.

Grinding meat mixes the E.coli into the center of the burger requiring the entire burger be heated to “X” degrees for “Y” period of time to kill the E. coli.

3. The other issue is using the infected Manure as fertilizer. If you eat vegetables raw that have been fertilized with infected manure and are not sufficiently cleaned you can get sick. (Salad anyone?)

4. Requiring irradiation in slaughter houses may be an acceptable solution, but it does give large processors an advantage over small processors. To me a better solution would be to test the meat as it leaves the processing plant. If it has high contamination them shut them down until the source of the contamination is addressed. This would allow different operations to use different methods to meet the health requirements. If cows raised on grass do not have the contamination issue then they could use lower cost methods for avoiding contamination.

I also support eliminating subsides for corn and soybeans.

Tuesday, 07 July, 2009

Art A Layman said...

Anonymous:

Gracious! I didn't realize he was that JOHN!

But is it my soul he wants to save? Or my waistline?

John doesn't say things. John preaches to us. He gives us the light, ours is but to follow it.

Optimum state of health? Besides the fact that that is relative, I don't know that I have ever known anyone who was in an "optimum state of health". Many thought so only to die of a heart attack a day later. Chances are that whatever the opposite of "optimum state of health" is, that is where you'll find me. So what? I'm alive and still kicking. Not quite as high as I used to but still kicking.

If true, have you thought about how you might have also contributed to your disability compared to taking refuge in the forces of bad luck, the wrong time, family genetics, or the unlucky smoker?

Now most here who know me will tell you that I take personal responsibility for everything that has happened to me in my life. It's nobody else's fault but my own. I need no lame excuses and I make no apologies. I will live until I die. That's it! That's all there is! In the meantime, I have loved and enjoyed my life. Heart attacks, aneurysms, broken bones, flus, acid reflux are minor blips in the grand scheme of things. I have much less a desire in living forever than enjoying what living I get to do. If the options were immortality versus mortality perhaps I'd have a different view. Alas.

If I practice x, as opposed to y, are there guarantees? If I practice y am I guaranteed poor health, a meandering painful death? No! Hence, I'll take my chances. What the hell is life without risks? Humans don't come with cocoons.

But is this wise counsel for all the younger generations?

Fine! Let him find that venue where "young" people aggregate to ponder the wisdom of their elders (good luck finding that one). Ain't a lot of "young" people here. Granted John and I are at an age where many appear as "young" people but in the vernacular most of the folks here ain't "young" people.

I really don't believe John Lawrence is promoting health warranties or big brother controls or dictums of healthful lifestyles as your 'Artfully' imply.

Now you have no idea just how comforting your beliefs are to me. As we speak I'm running them to the bank to see if I can deposit them. On the other hand, "you say either and I say neither". Whose views, beliefs, are the better informed? Even more; do I care what you believe? Does anyone, beyond John, of course, care? Authors always appreciate validation.

He is simply highlighting a greater awareness in our society of incentivizing and promoting (as do other advanced nations) the obvious quality of life benefits possible from focusing on delicious nutricious foods, being alert to dangerous food processing methods, routinely exercising and avoiding over-reliance on pills and drugs as automatic answers to all our physical, emotional discomforts and pains.

Whew! What a sentence! And this is new news? Doctors and every manner of health professional has been telling us this for most of my life, and that's a lot of years. I need John to preach to me more of conventional wisdom? Puhleese!

Continued

Tuesday, 07 July, 2009

Art A Layman said...

Anonymous:

Continuing the enlightenment...

You self-rightously appear to suggest this is all nonsense or disguised authoritorian preaching! But your comments are equally indirectly, if not directly, cocky and ironically inflexible. They amount to what I would call Mr. Art Layman's concept of healthful living nihilism. Doctors, of course, profit from people who are in stupendous denial of simple ways to improve chances for good health and longevity on this delicate environmental paradise called earth.

Wow! Are you a poet in another life? One could posit that your writing seems similar to another regular poster here. He, who shall not be named, but, no doubt should be obeyed. I self-righteously assert most of what I write here. I am a self-righteous person. However, one could make a strong argument that my self-righteousness doesn't hold a candle to John's or perhaps yours.

Actually I have not disputed John's principle concepts, rather his emphasis in subjecting us all to them and once doing so charging us for the privilege. I have also disputed his "facts" which in political parlance would be labelled spin, at best, and half-truths, at worst.

Preachers make their living by selling salvation or doom. Salvation or Hell and Damnation, take your choice. From laymen I expect a higher standard. If you want to pontificate get your facts correct and don't shortchange me. I want the whole truth! I can handle it!

One more similarity between you and the unnamed one, you both, at times, fail to read or comprehend that to which you take great exception

Tuesday, 07 July, 2009

Art A Layman said...

Anonymous:

It was good though. Took me awhile to figure it out

Tuesday, 07 July, 2009

Art A Layman said...

SMV:

I believe that feeding cows corn increases the growth rate. It also increases marbling and fat % in general.

I stand corrected. Might be I misread what I was reading. Farming is near the bottom of my knowledge base. However improving the growth rate would be an economic reason for corn feeding, which was my main point. It's not all done because the government subsidizes corn.

Manure on the outside of the cow makes contact with the meat as the hide is cleaned & removed. Cutting the meat contaminates the outside edges of the meat. High heat on the outside edge of a steak kills the E. coli. The inside of the steak remains uncontaminated.

Grinding meat mixes the E.coli into the center of the burger requiring the entire burger be heated to “X” degrees for “Y” period of time to kill the E. coli.

Thanks for the "DUH!" moment. What was the point of my assertion?

3. The other issue is using the infected Manure as fertilizer. If you eat vegetables raw that have been fertilized with infected manure and are not sufficiently cleaned you can get sick. (Salad anyone?)

Valid point. Might not tighter restrictions on manure for fetilizer be called for?

4. Requiring irradiation in slaughter houses may be an acceptable solution, but it does give large processors an advantage over small processors. To me a better solution would be to test the meat as it leaves the processing plant. If it has high contamination them shut them down until the source of the contamination is addressed. This would allow different operations to use different methods to meet the health requirements. If cows raised on grass do not have the contamination issue then they could use lower cost methods for avoiding contamination.

Is not, supposedly, the testing taking place now? Could it be that some processors ignore the test results? Surely not in a "free market" laissez-faire economy, we know that all the players follow the regs to a T.

Shut them down? And this offers no advantage to large versus small processors?

How many processors limit the cattle they buy based on feedlots? If they don't, in for a dime, in for a dollar.

Is anyone to be shocked that you would favor eliminating subsidies

Tuesday, 07 July, 2009

Art A Layman said...

SMV:

Would you care to explain or did all the lectures on healthy living make you decide to take pot shots?

Taking pot shots is new from me? Damn! All this time I've been failing.

Think a little bit and maybe you'll begin to understand, even agree

Tuesday, 07 July, 2009

SMV said...

Art,
“Is not, supposedly, the testing taking place now? Could it be that some processors ignore the test results? Surely not in a "free market" laissez-faire economy, we know that all the players follow the regs to a T.”

“Shut them down? And this offers no advantage to large versus small processors?”

One of the complaints in the literature I have read is that the regulations specify equipment and facilities rather than specifying the outcome (i.e. levels of E. coli). If you don’t set limits you cannot shut them down when the limits are exceeded.

The requirements favor the large producers verses the small processors. One requirement often noted is a separate bathroom used only by the inspector. Structuring the requirements this way limits competition and drives up profits.

Tuesday, 07 July, 2009

John Lawrence said...

Art said:

I'm on Medicare. I can live the Epicurean life to the hilt and it won't cost me a dime more than all you health food, exercise addicts.

Yes, but it will drive up the cost of Medicare. But if you don't care about systemic problems, ...

Wednesday, 08 July, 2009

John Lawrence said...

In addition to irradiation, hamburger, or processed meat that passes for hamburger, is being washed with chlorine at some meat packing plants to get rid of e coli. Before long food will bear no resemblance to what nature provided but will be an assemblage of chemicals with the proper components of salt, fat and sugar along with the appropriate "mouth feel" to satisfy consumers. It doesn't take a PhD to figure out that such artificial products loaded with preservatives and bovine growth hormone and vegetables sprayed with pesticides might not be conducive to good health in the long run. But if you're like Art and take the attitude that in the long run we're all dead so what the heck live for the moment and enjoy life while you can, you won't give a dip shit about healthy living. Bring on the cigars and brandy! Hell, bring on the dancing girls too!

Buying food locally from farmers with good farming practices might be an alternative well worth the extra money. But, alas, poor people will still find it cheaper to eat at fast food restaurants which is where most of the homeless eat

Wednesday, 08 July, 2009

Art A Layman said...

John:

Yes, but it will drive up the cost of Medicare. But if you don't care about systemic problems ...

Not if I'm the only one who doesn't follow your advice. I'll just be a drop in the bucket.

And remember I'll die sooner and Medicare costs will go back down.

Wednesday, 08 July, 2009

Art A Layman said...

John:

Bring on the cigars and brandy! Hell, bring on the dancing girls too!

Whoopee!!!! If you gotta go down, why not in flames?

My kinda guy!!!!

Wednesday, 08 July, 2009

Homeless in New York

From the New York Times:

Many New Yorkers view summer as a time for vacations, camp and lazy days at the beach. But city officials have been preparing for quite a different summer ritual: the swelling of the population of homeless families.

They call it the summer surge, and say that this year could be the worst yet.

Because the homeless population this spring was up more than 20 percent over last spring, possibly because of higher unemployment, officials are girding for an all-time high in the number of families in shelters at once, expecting close to 10,000. Already, the number has reached 9,420.

Other cities are noticing a similar trend. In Toledo, Ohio, one overcrowded shelter has been turning away dozens of people each night. In Charlotte, N.C., a shelter that is typically open only in winter has stayed open for the summer to meet demand, which is 20 percent higher than last summer. Across town, a Salvation Army shelter is so full, it has set up mats on the floors.

The reasons are varied but simple. Landlords who are reluctant to evict during winter are less hesitant when it is warmer. Parents like the Maldonados, who have endured poor housing conditions to spare their children agitation and humiliation at school, finally pack up and leave. And relatives who have taken in families in cramped apartments lose patience when children are suddenly underfoot all day long.

“When school’s open, families tend to stay where they are,” said Deronda Metz, the director of social services for the Salvation Army in Charlotte. “And when school’s out, they’re told it’s time to go.”

In New York, the number of homeless families applying for shelter in the summer has been 28 percent higher than the rest of the year the last three years. Their first stop is the intake center, a 24-hour, sprawling 66,000-square-foot brick building in the Bronx. They must walk through metal detectors, must submit to questioning from social workers and, after hours of waiting for their names to be called, are bused to a temporary hotel room or apartment.

Workers have begun to make room for the hundreds of extra families that are expected at the center this summer. On the second floor, all of the cubicles in one room were dismantled, replaced by rows of plastic chairs to make a waiting room for up to 114 people. Rows of boxy light gray metal lockers — each large enough to hold several suitcases — were installed. Employees at the intake center are being limited to one week of vacation during July and August.

The Movie - "Food Inc." - Is an Eye Opener!

I just saw the movie Food Inc. and is it an eye opener. The number of incidences of e coli are directly related to the factory production of farm animals for slaughter in feed lots or chicken houses. First they feed the cows corn instead of hay which they evolved to eat. Corn produces bacteria in their gut including e coli whereas, if they were fed grass or hay this would not happen. Animals who eat hay produce manure which can be spread on fields as fertilizer, but animals fed corn including cows and hogs produce a toxic sludge. A hog waste pond recently threatened to pollute a major river. Corn is subsidized by the government  so the unhealthy production of meat and low prices for fast food are actually subsidized by the government!

My Grandfather was a farmer, and he grew the hay in his own fields which he fed to his cattle and then spread the manure back on the fields with a manure spreader. They all did this in the 1940s and 50s.

Cows in feed lots have to stand around all day in their own waste products and this translates into more e coli in the slaughterhouse. No wonder there are so many recalls of beef products! Also birds pick up the e coli and transmit it to adjacent crops like spinach.

If you saw this movie you would never eat another piece of beef or chicken from the super market and especially from a fast food place.

Industrialized meat production by just a small number of corporate giants like Smithfield and Tyson is literally killing us because it's laced with growth hormones and the FDA is staffed by former lobbyists from the industries they're supposed to regulate. Poor people can pay less for a fast food meal than if they bought vegetables at the super market, and 1 out of 3 people born since 2000 will have early onset Type 2 diabetes. If you are a minority, it will be 1 out of 2. High fructose corn syrup and industrialized meat production are major contributors to obesity especially from fast foods.

The other interesting thing is that Monsanto has added a patented gene to soybeans that lets the field be sprayed with pesticide without affecting the soybean production. Since it is a patented gene, the farmer can't save seeds for next year's crop because they legally belong to Monsanto. Monsanto sends out investigators to make sure no farmer saves seeds or else they are prosecuted. Even farmers who don't buy Monsanto's genetically modified soybean seeds can be prosecuted by Monsanto if some of the genetically modified seeds happen to cross pollinate in a non-Monsanto farmer's field.

A Modest Proposal for Cost Containment of the Health Care System and Encouraging Human Health and Happiness

Here's a novel idea. Why not tie rates for health insurance (whether public or private) to an individual's willingness to stay healthy? In other words incentivize healthy lifestyles by giving rate cuts on health insurance. Right now some employers are incentivizing employees to exercize. This could be increased by incentivizing healthy lifestyles. With all kinds of devices being computerized and wirelessly networked, I can imagine a teadmill, for instance, wirelessly connected to a doctor's office or a database which clocked the hours spent by a specific individual. Also scales and blood pressure measurements at home can wirelessly transmit crucial health statistics to a central database or doctor's office. Classes in nutrition could count as well as a willingness to consume healthy foods and vitamins. Food purchases could be tracked. Technology is there. This might sound a little Big Brotherish, but the gains in human health, happiness and productivity not to mention cost containment of the health care system would justify encouragement of healthy lifestyles in my opinion.

There are many ways a person's willingness to lead a healthy lifestyle regarding diet and excercise could be tracked, measured and evaluated and that data could be used to determine the rate a person should pay for health insurance. Those not willing to lead a healthy lifestyle should pay more because they will be a greater burden on the overall health care system. Obese people especially are more in danger of heart and kidney problems from Type 2 diabetes, heart attacks etc.

I think this emphasis on healthy lifestyles and incentivizing it by lowering individual rates for health insurance would do a lot for cost containment of the overall health care system and encourage individual responsibility for taking care of one's self and family.

Tylenol Can Destroy Your Liver

This is a continuation of an ongoing stream of articles on our health care system and the causes of out of control costs part of which are due to an over reliance on prescription and non-prescription drugs and part of which are the product of the consumption of highly advertised, great tasting but nutritionally deprived foods. The following comment was left by Frank Thomas on Robert Reich's blog.

Frank Thomas said:

In this regard, America seems to be a casual, quick slicking pill of all kinds and a welcoming over-prescribed medicines obsessed society. This compulsive cultural behavior in combination with nutritional bad habits, in excess of course, contributes to reducing or neutralizing the body´s natural immunity system´s development during our 30s, 40s and 50s ... just when a strengthened immunity system is most needed when it naturaly starts to decline in our 65s, 70s
and 80s.

I left the following comments here and here:

One of the aspects of increased health care costs is the veritable barrage of TV and magazine advertising for prescription drugs. This not only raises the cost of those drugs, but creates a culture where every problem seemingly can be solved by taking a pill. America is a culture of prescription and non-prescription drug addicts. Every malady or discomfort, we are told, can be cured by taking a pill.

The dirty little secret is that for every pill taken there are side effects. It has just come to light that the painkiller acetamenophen found in Tylenol and other medicines can cause liver damage even deaths in otherwise healthy individuals because of its destructive effects on the liver. So does it not stand to reason that, even in moderate doses, this drug is not doing any good for the liver? The cumulative effects over time can cause the type of problems in old age that Frank suggests.

With Mother Nature you don't get something for nothing. The cumulative effects of ingesting drugs and food laced with preservatives and other toxic substances leads to failure of various organs if not catastophically when young, then gradually as we age. The liver's function is to get rid of toxic substances. Obviously, as far as the liver is concerned, acetaminophen is a toxic substance. So while Tylenol relieves pain, it overloads the liver which has enough to do to get rid of toxic substances without the added burden of getting rid of acetaminophen. This is what Frank is talking about as far as "compromising the immune system." Compromising the various organs whose task is to eliminate toxic substances is the price paid by pain relief as well as the price to be paid for various other drugs and pharmaceuticals which serve no other purpose than pain relief or lifestyle enhancement. I include Viagra, Levitra and Cialis in this category. Short term enhancement is paid for by eventual breakdown of organs which have to deal with the elimination of toxic substances. This leads to an increased burden and cost on the health care system for people in the last stages of life.

The subsidization of corn products by the government leads directly to the subsidization of fast foods in terms of corn fed beef and high fructose corn syrup which are directly responsible for obesity. The proper combination of sugar, fat and salt in order to get people hooked on processed food products is something that is calculated in food giant chemical labs and even put in place in baby food products. Hooking people on fat, salt and sugar is something that food processors and in particular fast food giants pursue with a vengeance. This in combination with advertising encourages people to not consider the nutritional value of what they're consuming but only the taste value. To jack up the taste content of food products a whole host of unnatural substances are added. Read the contents on any label. This consumption of highly advertised, great tasting foods is largely responsible for much of the added burden to our health care system due to the results it engenders in terms of obesity and health problems related to obesity.

These additional health problems from consuming great tasting but nutritionally impoverished foods, we are told, can be alleviated by consuming prescription and over the counter drugs. So the health care industry and the food industry (particularly fast foods) are essentially in cahoots in producing a country of over medicated and nutritionally deprived people and overly emburdening the health care system which drives up costs.

The educational system is a total farce as it has produced a people who are financially and nutritionally illiterate among other forms of illiteracy. They are taught American history which is a fantasy, and they are not taught anything which might be critical of the large corporations and their hold on the power structure of Washington. We are just pawns of the large corporations whose goal is to turn the middle class into a nation of debtors, docile and complacent consumers of fast food and prescription drug garbage and health care system dependents.

Mark Sanford Redux

Referring to Maria as his "soul mate" doesn't auger well for South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford if he ever intends to patch up his relationship with wife Jenny. Maintaining that he is still in love with his mistress doesn't auger well either. How many wives would put up with that? Oh yes, I want to keep my job as governor and patch things up with my wife, but I'm still in love with my South American soul mate.

And then Sanford admits that he "crossed the line" with a handful of other women during his marriage, but he didn't cross the " ultimate line." What's that claptrap supposed to mean? If he didn't cross the "ultimate line," why even mention it? Does he mean he made out with some other women, felt them up, French kissed? Maybe had oral sex like Clinton did, but remember in southern terms oral sex is not crossing the "ultimate line." At least Clinton didn't think it was.

From Huffington Post:

COLUMBIA, S.C. — South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, already struggling to salvage his family and his political career after admitting a scandalous affair, added explosive details Tuesday, including more visits with the mistress he calls his "soul mate" and additional women in his past. The once-promising presidential prospect said he is committed to reconciling with his wife, but professed to The Associated Press his continued love for the Argentine woman at the center of the firestorm that gutted his political future. In emotional interviews with the AP over two days, he said he would die "knowing that I had met my soul mate." Sanford also said that he "crossed the lines" with a handful of other women during 20 years of marriage, but not as far as he did with his mistress. "There were a handful of instances wherein I crossed the lines I shouldn't have crossed as a married man, but never crossed the ultimate line," he said. Sanford insisted his relationship with Maria Belen Chapur, whom he met at an open air dance spot in Uruguay eight years ago, was more than just sex. "This was a whole lot more than a simple affair, this was a love story," Sanford said. "A forbidden one, a tragic one, but a love story at the end of the day." Even with the latest revelations, Sanford maintains he is fit to govern and has no plans to resign.

Sanford has no plans to resign because he thinks God wants him to stay on the job. How self-serving! People use God to justify their actions as if God was merely their hand maiden. Can we just say that Sanford's attitude exposes how vacuous, bankrupt and self-serving southern religiousity really is? He exposes the bullshit that passes for religion that most of these so-called evangelicals really embrace. Talk about twisting words to make God responsible for everything instead of making Mark Sanford responsible for his actions. He is giving God and the tax payers of South Carolina a chance to let Mark Sanford improve himself by staying in office! While he apologized to the "Tom Davises of the world" whatever that means, his friend Tom Davis seemed to say that Sanford's remaining in office was dependent on his reconciliation with his wife Jenny. Good luck on that while admitting he's still in love with his South American soul mate! Oh, and by the way, Sanford also apologized to the Cubby Culbertsons of the world. Did I hear him apologize to the Jenny Sanfords of the world? I don't think so. How pathetic that he wants to be "of service" to the people of South Carolina by denying extended unemployment benefits to poor people. Yeah, God wants you to be of service by helping the wealthy and leaving the poor to starve. I think you'd be of more service if you took all your personal wealth and gave it to the poor as Jesus told the rich man in the Bible and then maybe we'd believe you about how you were following Him.

From God is My Doorman:

One thing Mark Sanford isn't doing is resigning. Why? Because God Himself wants Mark Sanford to stay on as Governor of South Carolina. Just ask Mark Sanford: "Immediately after all this unfolded last week I had thought I would resign - as I believe in the military model of leadership and when trust of any form is broken one lays down the sword. A long list of close friends have suggested otherwise - that for God to really work in my life I shouldn't be getting off so lightly." And if anyone knows about getting off, it's Mark Sanford. But more importantly, the Almighty insists that Mark Sanford stay in office. South Carolina is his punishment. Like when Job got boils. And the citizens get to help God help Mark Sanford be a better man. Which I think we can all agree is what public service is all about. "While it would be personally easier to exit stage left, their point has been that my larger sin was the sin of pride." That and years and years of adultery. But mostly pride. Here's what I always thought I kind of missed out on as a Catholic, instead of whatever horseshit Mark Sanford practices: Self-diagnosis. When it came to sin, we didn't get to call our own balls and strikes like that. "If I walked in with a real spirit of humility then this last legislative term could well be our most productive one - and that outside this term, I would ultimately be a better person and of more service in whatever doors God opened next in life if I stuck around to learn lessons rather than running and hiding down at the farm." Again, what else can we do for you, Gov. Sanford? I'm glad the taxpayers have this chance to let you improve yourself, but is that enough? Next time you're boning someone in South America, can we hold your dick? Okay, now clearly Mark Sanford is just a twitching loon who should be locked up before he hurts someone. What's cool is that he isn't even out of office yet, and he's already talking about God opening doors.

Has America Changed Its Role of Supporting Military Coups in South America?

Published on Tuesday, June 30, 2009 by The Guardian/UK

An End to Backyard Imperialism?

by Grace Livingstone

Early on Sunday morning, troops stormed the presidential palace of Honduras and kidnapped the president. Immediately eyes turned to the United States, which for more than a century has backed friendly dictators and cooked-up coups in Central America. The Honduran coup provides a vital test for Barack Obama, to prove that the US is no longer the "yankee imperialist" pulling the strings of despots in Latin America, an image that has resonated in the region since the 19th-century.

Since independence, the military has been the most powerful force in Honduras and if the coup goes unchallenged, it will show that it still has a veto on democratically elected presidents. Historically, that military has been supported unfailingly by the US. As US under-secretary of state Robert Olds wrote in 1927: "We do control the destinies of Central America and we do so for the simple reason that the national interest absolutely dictates such a course … governments which we recognise and support stay in power, while those we do not recognise and support fail."

US marines were sent to Central America over 30 times, and to Honduras seven times, between 1900 and 1934 to maintain order and quell any threat to the ruling oligarchies. With the introduction of Roosevelt's "Good Neighbour policy" in the 1930s, military intervention became less common; instead the US backed or installed "friendly dictators". In Honduras, the US smiled upon the brutal Tiburcio Carías Andino who ruled absolutely between 1931 and 1948, and a further series of military despots from 1951 to 1981.

Although democracy then returned to Honduras, the Reagan government poured in military aid, turning the fragile democracy into a militarised state. Using it as a base to pursue the war against the Nicaraguan revolutionary government, the US installed garrisons, supply dumps and air bases, as well as mercenary (Contra) training camps along the borders.

The US ambassador to Honduras at that time was John Negroponte, an ardent defender of the Honduran military, which was responsible for the "disappearance" of at least 184 people between 1980-92. He was one of a number of figures involved in the Iran-Contra affair who re-emerged in the George Bush administration. These old cold war warriors eyed with suspicion the new "radical populists" in Latin America, a term they used for the leftwing presidents of Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua. They were disturbed by the leftist tendencies of Honduras's Zelaya and his friendship with the Venezuela's Hugo Chávez. It is not surprising that Chávez has called for an investigation into whether the CIA played a role in this weekend's coup.

Although it looks unlikely, given the history, these calls cannot be dismissed out of hand. The US military has a longstanding relationship with its counterparts in Honduras and the US maintains an airbase in Soto Cano today. Elements in the Pentagon have been concerned about the growing leftist trend in Latin America: a US Army War College publication in 2006, entitled US Military Priorities for Latin America, included in its list of security concerns "Implications of the rising threat of populism in the region" and "Implications of the return of the Latin American left". The government development arm, USAID, spends about $50m a year in Honduras on "promoting democracy", funding pro-US non-governmental groups and political parties.

But it is notable that Hillary Clinton and other state department officials have clearly condemned the coup. This is in stark contrast to the Bush administration's public support for the coup against Chávez in Venezuela in 2002. President Obama has said he is "deeply concerned". Obama needs to act urgently, with his Latin American neighbours and the Organization of American States (OAS), to ensure that the elected president is reinstated, and prove his country is no longer a friend of despots in its own backyard.