Foodie Friday : Bread, Puppets, and Boiled Veggies

Bread and Puppet Theater. Image from Akimbo.
Health care:
Bread and Puppet aioli

By Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / March 5, 2010

See "Boil those veggies!" by Janet Gilles, Below.

Anyone taking in the recent health care "debate" -- in whole or in part -- must surely need an antidote, and here it is: garlic! Garlic kills viruses and bacteria, supports the immune system, increases energy, lowers blood pressure, wards off vampires, and is the bane of schmoozing politicians.

You know that great yellow stuff you used to get smeared on your Bread & Puppet bread at performances* (now replaced for reasons unknown by garlic merely suspended in oil)? That stuff. What they make for the peasants in southern France and Italy: when they come in from the fields for lunch, they are handed a loaf of bread to rip apart and dip in a big, common bowl of God's gift to sweat, and a full afternoon of hard work.

Here's how you make it:
3 eggs
canola oil
1 head of garlic
salt

Separate yolks and place in large mixing bowl. Give the whites to high-cholesterol partners innocent of Lipitor.

Here's the tricky part: Pray to the aioli gods.

Add oil, A DROP AT A TIME, to the egg yolks. I'm not kidding -- a drop at a time, at least at the beginning. Bread and Puppet macho would have you whip the oil and eggs together with a fork. I cheat and use an electric mixer on low speed. Don't tell Peter Schumann.*

As the volume of oil builds up, you will be able to add it more quickly, a couple of drops, then a few, then a very thin, intermittent stream. But WARNING: if you add the oil too quickly, the aioli will not "catch," and you'll end up with an oily mess. Patience, patience. Franz Kafka wrote:

There are two main human sins from which all the others derive: impatience and indolence. It was because of impatience that we were expelled from Paradise, it is because of indolence that we cannot return. Yet perhaps there is only one major sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were expelled, because of impatience we cannot return.

He must have been a very good aioli maker.


How much oil? Reasonable question. I'll defer the answer.

The mixing bowl should now be filled with something that looks and feels very like mayonnaise. In fact, it IS mayonnaise. This is how you make mayonnaise. The funny thing is, once you get to a certain point, you can add oil much more quickly (but not too quickly), and make as much as you like. The yellow will become more diluted, but aside from that, you can plan to feed the multitudes if you have enough oil. Add loaves and fishes if desired. That's how much oil.

Chop garlic into tiny, tiny pieces. Bread & Puppet macho insists you chop with a broad blade very sharp knife, then squoosh the pieces with the flat of the blade to squeeze out the final juice. When puppeteers aren't watching, I use a garlic press.

How much garlic? Use the whole head, or just part of it? That depends on how big the garlic is, how much aioli you are making, and how strong you want it. I've never made enough to use more than one entire head -- about half a large mixing bowl's worth.

Mix the garlic mash into the waiting bowl, and stir in thoroughly. Add salt to taste.

Eating: Although you can eat it immediately, it's best to let it stand, refrigerated for a couple of days. It mellows out into something strong and smooth, but not nastily fierce. Folks either love it or they hate it. Some stomachs can't stand too much garlic without refluxing. You can give out Rolaids with the aioli to those folks. Best on fresh-baked hearty bread.

*[Author, activist, and Rag Blog contributor Marc Estrin has been involved with the radical Vermont-based Bread & Puppet Theater -- founded by director Peter Schumann -- since 1970.]

Boil those veggies!
(Then think Aztec: add cocoa and honey...)

By Janet Gilles / The Rag Blog / March 5, 2010

The more vegetables the better is becoming settled wisdom. And my acupuncturist encourages me to boil them. The Chinese are not as dumb as everyone thinks, modern science just chooses not to investigate their methods.

So I buy whatever greens that look good at the farmers market, trim the best parts for salad, and boil the rest just until they wilt. You can bring the water or broth to a boil, turn off the fire and add the veggies. I like the bright green color the poached veggies will turn and try to catch that. Or boil them awhile if they are tough, adding some ginger if you have any.

Put hot broth and greens into a blender with some nut butter to make it milky and miso to give it body and salt; about a teaspoon of cashew, almond, or hemp butter, and a half teaspoon of miso per cup will make it really creamy, rich, and delicious.

Variations:

To make a fine soup, add some lemon juice, garlic, and parmesan and serve hot or cold, with a dash of sour cream or croutons if you like. Also good with a few shavings of nutmeg. This soup makes an excellent beginning to any meal.

For breakfast, add honey and chocolate to taste. Yes, really!!! Think Aztec. About a teaspoon of cocoa powder and a teaspoon of honey per cup make a hearty breakfast drink. Having a lot of green vegetables on hand, and recalling that the Aztecs made chocolate drinks of their food, I have begun flavoring vegetable drinks with chocolate!! Delicious.

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Foodie Friday: Janet Gilles on Changing Diets

Evolutionary Diets and the Value of Traditional Herbs and Spices
By Janet Gilles / The Rag Blog / June 19, 2009

As our food supply gets further and further away from traditional origins, new diseases crop up in the landscape. Peanuts, wheat and other common foods can no longer be digested by bodies without the means at their disposal to do so.

A study of some of the few ancient diets remaining on the planet, remote peoples who have not changed their ways in centuries, reveals the amazing truth that entirely different diets evolved, all with exactly the same nutritional content. Entirely animal, entirely vegetable, shepherds, villagers, the vitamin A content is the same. Should not be shocking as the vitamins hold their position by virtue of being essential to human health, but how do they do that??

The hunter gatherer diet was rich in vitamins and minerals, because the wild plants have dozens of times the nutrients of domestic plants. Don Davis at UT botanical science says it has been known since the forties that the bigger the fruit, the less nutrient by weight. The plant produces the nutrients for its seeds, and so when the apple is bigger, the nutrient value remains the same. Two small apples have twice the nutrients of one big one.

So we have to eat today many times the calories of olden days to get the nutrients from our oversized produce. And it gets worse if the produce was picked green before the plant sent many of the nutrients into the fruit. This is why vine ripened fruit is so delicious.

When we changed from hunting and gathering to agriculture, the life expectancy plummeted. Aborigines expect to live a hundred years, and many peoples today on the earth still reach that age, but it is not going to happen with the supermarket diet.

Traditional diets all use herbs of one kind or another , which modern science has been discovering, have tremendous healing powers. These herbs and spices are the food supplements making up for the nutritional deficits of the various ancient diets. Those who prepared the food learned from their elders, and passed it on. This is the knowledge missing from our modern world, and has lead to the tragedy of chronic disease.

Stories appear weekly in the news of the wonderful healing power of ancient spices. For example, here are some benefits of cinnamon:

Cinnamon May Improve Type 2 Diabetes and Insulin Resistance

This is the news that is most exciting for people who respond to low-carb diets, since most (or at least a substantial percentage) of us are probably insulin resistant or diabetic. Several studies have shown improved insulin sensitivity and blood glucose control by taking as little as ½ teaspoon of cinnamon per day. Improving insulin resistance can help in weight control as well as decreasing the risk for heart disease, so this has a lot of people interested. Although the results of preliminary studies are somewhat mixed, the majority of the research seems to be pointing in the direction of cinnamon being beneficial. Along with the improvement in blood sugar, these studies have documented improvements in triglycerides, blood pressure, and LDL cholesterol.

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The Insurance Crisis : A Rag Blogger discussion

Discussion Updated June 14, 2008

The following provocative article about our health insurance crisis was brought to our attention by Roger Baker. It has stimulated a spirited discussion among Rag Bloggers whose comments and personal experiences follow this article.

Please add yours using the "Comments" feature at the end of the post.

Thorne Dreyer

Ranks of underinsured U.S. adults increase 60 per cent
By Victoria Colliver / June 10, 2008

The number of adults nationwide who have health insurance but face financial risk due to high out-of-pocket expenses - known as the underinsured - increased 60 percent between 2003 and 2007 to more than 25 million, a study released today found.

Middle- and higher-income families, those with annual incomes of at least $40,000, experienced the sharpest increase among the uninsured, nearly tripling from 4 percent in 2003 to 11 percent in 2007, according to the study by the Commonwealth Fund, which was published online in the journal Health Affairs.

While an estimated 47 million Americans have no insurance at all, health experts say people who are required to pay high deductibles and co-payments for limited benefits often go without care due to costs.

"Lack of insurance is only one part of the problem as even the insured have serious gaps in coverage," said Karen Davis, president of the Commonwealth Fund, a private fund that supports independent health research. "Insurance coverage is the ticket into the health care system but, for too many, that ticket does not provide genuine access to care."

The study based its data on a survey of about 3,500 adults conducted from June to October 2007. About three quarters of the respondents were between the ages of 19 and 64 years old, meaning most were working adults who were not yet eligible for the federal Medicare program.

Those defined as underinsured had health insurance all year but had out-of-pocket medical expenses of at least 10 percent of their income, or 5 percent for those with low incomes.

The report's authors said people with individual or small-group coverage, typically those who worked for a small business or were self-employed, were more likely to have insurance that required substantial cost sharing than those with coverage through large employers.

Forty-five percent of the underinsured reported difficulties paying their medical bills, being contacted by collection agencies for unpaid bills or changing their way of life to cover their health expenses.

"Here in the United States, you can have health insurance all year long and still go into medical debt or face bankruptcy," said Cathy Schoen, senior vice president of the Commonwealth Fund and lead author of the report.

A 61-year-old San Mateo County woman, who declined to be identified out of fear that she could lose her policy, said she's incurred $35,000 in out-of-pocket medical expenses in the last six years despite never having a gap in health insurance.

"I've put stuff on credit cards up to my elbow," she said. She and her husband changed their lifestyle to afford their share of medical costs, but have not had to file for bankruptcy.

Some of her uncovered expenses include $5,000 for her share of three MRIs conducted in January 2007 for a back injury and a recent $1,750 bill for three injections that were not covered by her Anthem Blue Cross small-group business policy. The policy costs $1,000 a month for her and her husband along with a $5,000 annual deductible.

"The rates keep going up, but they keep cutting services," she said, noting that she still feels fortunate to have health insurance.

To read the report, go to commonwealthfund.org or healthaffairs.org.

Insured, but vulnerable

A study released today by the Commonwealth Fund found that people who had health insurance all year but were required to pay high out-of-pocket expenses experienced some of the same problems as those with no health insurance at all. According to the study:

*About 68 percent of the uninsured and 53 percent of the underinsured said they went without needed care because of cost, compared with 31 percent of those with adequate insurance.

*Nearly half - 45 percent - of the underinsured reported financial stress due to medical bills. About 51 percent of the uninsured and 21 percent of those with better coverage said they experienced similar financial difficulties.

Source: Commonwealth Fund

Source. / SF Gate


Comments from Rag Bloggers:

So, 47 million + 25 million = 72 million
divided by about 266 million who are under 65, and we get 27% of Americans under 65 are either uninsured or underinsured.

Scott Trimble

...and I'm one of them. I have asthma, it's considered life-threatening enough to get insurance denied on my behalf. The only "offer" I have had as an adult was from a company that was willing to insure me as long as asthma and other respiratory illnesses were not covered.

My former landlady had breast cancer, and she too has been denied insurance--unless she signs a form allowing them to exclude any related cancer (and what all would those be? Anything?) from her policy.

This is obviously all upside down. It would be like an auto insurance firm saying they would cover you, as long as you didn't have an accident. Why have we allowed the insurance companies in this country to operate in this way?

Alyssa Burgin

We have been among those underinsured. Here's the greatly shortened version of our personal story (with a built in cautionary tale):

My wife Annie and I have had health insurance on and off ever since we grew up (some time in our 30s). In 1990, I had cancer. I had insurance at the time and it wasn't an awful policy. Nevertheless, I had to fight them over most of the bills I was getting. They tried to deny benefits at every turn.

Fortunately, despite being sick and tired most of the time from chemo, surgery, etc., I was able to muster up the energy to do battle with the benefit deniers, sometimes having to escalate the battle to the company's supervisory level. I fought and, for the most part won. Being young and basically strong helped, but being a tenacious, pushy NY Jew didn't hurt either. I wondered at the time (and still wonder) what happens to people who are old or weak or just too sick to engage in arguments over every bill. I suspect that they just give up and get screwed out of the benefits that are their due.

After that, the insurance company started jacking up my rates every six months. There was nothing I could do because no other insurance company would take me having had cancer recently. So I paid the rates and paid and paid until my nose hurt. See, here in Texas they cannot raise one person's rates. They can only raise the rates of all members of a "class". So they raise the rates and those who can switch to a new policy or a new company to get a better rate do switch. They did that until the only members of my "class" left were those too sick or uninsurable to switch. Five years later, I was considered thoroughly in remission and I was able to get a policy with another company at better rates. I went with that company until their rates got too high and then I switched again, this time to Unicare (I call them un-care). Their rates were ok at first but then they started to soar at every renewal. To keep the rates manageable I kept raising the deductible until it got to $5,000 (the highest they went).

So, a couple of years ago I started shopping around again. I would find what seemed like a decent policy at a decent rate, send in my application with my $25 (or so) application fee, and later (often much later) find out that I had been denied. Seems that old cancer had become a problem for these companies even though I was now over 15 years in remission. I tried four different companies and was denied by all. Annie also had a few things in her medical history that made her less than the most desirable candidate for insurance.

Meanwhile, since Unicare didn't cover much (they covered no prevention) and we had that $5,000 deductible anyway and we were shooting our wad on the insurance itself (about $11,000 a year for the 2 of us), we held back on going to the doctor. Annie, partially out of fear of becoming even more uninsurable, put off her mammogram for 3 years. ACC, where Annie teaches, started allowing adjunct professors to pay their own way and get into their group insurance so last year we finally left Unicare and switched to he ACC group policy. It took a while because we had to wait for the right time of year to sign up and then weren't actually covered until some months later but we are now on that BC/BS plan.

Some time after we were covered, Annie got a mammogram and found out that she had stage 2 breast cancer. She is now in treatment and we feel like part idiot, part victim for having put off that exam. If done sooner, the lump would have no doubt been detected when it was a lot smaller and more easily treatable.

Again, what do the uninsured do? I guess they skip things like mammograms altogether. And the same might go for the underinsured like us. Anyway,the cautionary part of all this is, whatever the price, get it together and get those exams every year. Do it cursing the system all the way but do it. Then get out and raise your voices in support of a real, egalitarian, comprehensive single-payer system. It's the least a civilized society should provide its citizens.

Ric Sternberg

I think, if the federal government doesn't come through with universal single-payer care soon, we should form a nationwide healthcare co-op, a nonprofit group to insure everyone. According to Conyers' numbers (from his website on HR 676), it would cost us about 15% of our paychecks, but my current policy costs almost that much now, and I still have to cover co-pays and deductibles. Personally, I wouldn't even begin to know how to organize such a beast, but it must be possible, and we can't wait forever.

Scott Trimble

Single payer will go a long ways, but we ought to pay a bit of attention to our public health officials as well.

Drugs are not the answer to health. Or certainly not the only one.

Public health officials say that as long as we have the enormous subsidies for junk food, and no subsidies for real food, that it will be impossible to achieve adequate health care for our people.

Real food keeps getting more expensive, junk food is cheap.

Back in the seventies, grass fed beef was cheaper than corn fed!! But thanks to the enormous subsidies for feed corn and soy, pastures are getting converted to corn.

Please check out Public Health Action on the farm bill.

Janet Gilles

I don't think we're just talking about "drugs"--I don't take any drugs at all for asthma or for anything else. I'm talking about what Ric was talking about--putting off necessary care, exams, etc., to prevent catastrophic illness or at least catch it when it is in the nascent stages. I don't get mammograms because there's really no point to it. If they did find something, I would just have to die of it, because there's no way I could afford to treat it. I can't be the only person out there who is doing this, there are legions.

No amount of eating grass-fed beef is going to help me or anyone like me. In fact, I don't eat beef and haven't done so in 28 years. People need the ability to get routine medical care--not drugs, necessarily---routine medical care, in the hopes that they don't come down with catastrophic, fatal illnesses.

Alyssa Burgin

Yes, but okay,

What if ninety percent of catastrophic illness could be prevented by eating a healthy diet in the first place?

Prevention is preventing something, not diagnosing it early after you get it.

Does it make sense to subsidize an unhealthy diet?

That is what we do, the farm subsidies only go to junk food, none to real food.

The public health authorities say we can never solve the problem of health as long as we subsidize junk food, so that people on a budget are forced to buy unhealthy food because good food is too expensive.

Janet Gilles

No beef, regardless of what it was fed before being ruthlessly slaughtered, is food. It's not good food. It's not junk food. It is poison, full of the death that brought it to the plate.

And I would like to reiterate Alyssa's point: none of us were talking about drugs, although it is true that the modern medical industry has come to be heavily reliant upon them. But moving to a universal single-payer system should begin to counter that, as the drug companies will no longer have the ability to influence doctors that they now do.

However, Janet's point is also valid, even if the example is not. A large part of our declining health can be attributed to the SAD (Standard American Diet) which is composed far too much of animal proteins from meats and dairy, along with all the saturated fats that go along with them, as well as white flour, white sugar, high fructose corn syrup, and other processed foods. A vegan diet high in whole grains, fiber, vegetable proteins, and low in unsaturated fats, but with some care taken to assure a proper balance of omega-3 to omega-6 fatty acids...is key to good health.

Nevertheless, things like broken bones and other injuries have considerably less to do with diet, and do require medical care. And preventative and diagnostic measures are also quite important to long term health, but as Alyssa points out we need to be able to have confidence that we will be able to address a problem if it is discovered. Again, for many, if not most of us, that will require universal single-payer....

Scott Trimble

The problem is progressives are always demanding medical care, but ignoring the reason for our poor health.

Half the calories or more in the American diet are white bread, high fructose corn syrup, deep fat fried (corn and soy oil) and other completely empty calories, all government subsidized by the Farm Bill.

We would have been demanding medical care for all the sailors with scurvy, when what they needed was limes or cabbages.

The government pays huge sums of money to provide junk food, (commodities in government speak). Driving the farmers who actually grow real food off the land.

Doctors don’t study nutrition, public health officials do. And that is the problem, empty nutrients provided at government expense.

Janet Gilles

This is not an either/or situation. As the MDS founding principles state:

". . . we advocate: the restoration and preservation of the earth's robust ecological health; the extension of human rights to include universal healthcare, decent housing, lifelong education, fortifying nutrition, reproductive freedom, meaningful work and the right to organize, bargain, and petition collectively to impartial arbitrators; Universal healthcare and fortifying nutrition and the restoration of the earth’s robust ecological health."

That pretty much cuts out vast herds of cattle raised to be eaten after being fattened with corn. They are also the worst sources of methane gas which is damaging the ozone layer.

David Hamilton

For example, many problems are caused by lack of bone density, considered inevitable with the aging process, yet scientific studies consistently show that bone density will increase with aging, giving sufficient nutrients in the diet.

You cannot get this information from your doctor, as they do not study nutrition.

A system that simply pays for drugs and doctors and hospitals is doomed to failure.

Janet Gilles

Right! Several issues: Improve nutrition, protect the earth, provide health care! Where's the argument? And for those who would blame the patient for somehow doing something wrong nutritionally, causing or contributing to their illness, I say HUH?

When I got cancer I was a vegetarian and ate organic food as much as possible (even grew some myself). I exercised regularly and, except for working too hard lived a healthy lifestyle. I had large cell, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (a 22cm tumor). That was the same type of cancer that was so prevalent among Iowa corn farmers (a 30% higher incidence than the general population at that time). Their cancer was very likely caused by a certain herbicide which happens to be a kissin' cousin of paraquat. I never came into contact with an Iowa corn field but I sure as hell came into intimate contact with a certain Mexican crop. In my earlier days I was poor and could not bring myself to throw out anything, particularly my favorite substance, tainted and off-smelling though it might have been. That's what I think caused my cancer - the US government and their misguided (lunatic) eradication program combined with my own youthful feeling of immortality which led me to take chances.

Bottom line though, was when I got sick I was willing to do anything to get well. Who cared what the cause was? The lousy, greedy, ill-informed, pill-pushing medical establishment was one place I turned. I also did nutritional, herbal, homeopathic, stinky Chinese teas, affirmations, etc. In the end, who knows what worked. But I would not have wanted to forgo the chemo. And that's where we began this discussion - we need good insurance so everyone can have all possible cures available to them.

Ric Sternberg

Yeah, I get a little sick of the blame-the-victim mentality that I often see when health care is discussed. That has no place in this discussion or any other, frankly, and when one starts talking about nutrition, or pollution, or any of these things, it starts to look like we're saying that if you get sick, you deserve it. Well, all I did to get asthma was CHOOSE THE WRONG PARENTS.

Of course we all want organic foods and a halt to deadly pesticides, healthy diets, and great nutrition. But that is not what I'm talking about right now. I'm talking about health care. Is it a right or is it not? Why do other industrialized nations have it and we don't? And why the hell do our pharmaceutical companies and our mega-monolithic-over-merged healthcare companies bulge at the seams of their profits, stuffing cash in their pants as they go--?

We need good insurance, as Ric says, so that we can all take preventative measures, we can all have prophylactic health care, and we can all live our lives as we intend them.

Alyssa Burgin

Paul Krugman spoke on the UT campus awhile back, and said that France has the best health care system in the industrialized world.

Coincidentally, they subsidize their small farmers and their local agriculture.
You can’t have one without…

…The other.

Janet Gilles

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Dr. Stephen R. Keister : John Ruskin, Big PhARMA and the Big Lie

"The essence of lying is deception..." John Ruskin -- British socioligist, author, artist and art critic -- in old age, 1894. Photo by Frederick Hollyer / public domain.

PhARMA and the insurance industry do not want to see a government-sponsored health plan such as HR 676, or the Obama plan, for that would do away with their obscene profits and provide the citizens of the United States with care comparable to other industrialized nations.

By Dr. Stephen R. Keister / The Rag Blog / January 16, 2009

In 1872 John Ruskin wrote: "The essence of lying is deception, not in words; a lie may be told by silence, by equivocation, by the accent of a syllable, by a glance of the eyes attaching a peculiar significance to a sentence; and by all these kinds of lies are worse and baser by many degrees than a lie plainly worded.”

Campaign for America’s Future has called it to our attention that the drug industry is gearing up to fight health care reform again. Its lobbying arm PhARMA has launched a multimillion dollar PR campaign to protect their excessive profits; hence, keep John Ruskin's words in mind as you watch TV and the approaching inauguration. The propaganda will be with you day after day, and as with good propaganda much will appear credible. Already TV is running and re-running an ad regarding "Quality Affordable Healthcare." Among the sponsors are PhARMA and the American Medical Association, which for many years has been subservient to the pharmaceutical and insurance industries. Of course, the pharmaceutical industry wishes to maintain its profits as those in the U.S. pay twice as much for 30 commonly prescribed medications as they would pay in any other industrialized nation.

Drug companies are the third most profitable industry in the United States. In 2007 the top 12 drug makers had combined profits of $78.6 billion. In 2004 the drug companies spent, on average, 32% of their income on marketing and 14% on research. Remember, PhARMA tells you that drugs cost so much because of research costs, while that research is done largely by the NIH, the National Cancer Institute and academic researchers. Remember as well, as you see an endless number of ads for pharmaceuticals on TV, that these ads are costing billions a year, which you pay for when you get your prescriptions filled. Only five out of the 21 most influential drugs produced between 1965 and 1992 were developed entirely by the pharmaceutical companies.

PhARMA and the insurance industry do not want to see a government-sponsored health plan such as HR 676, or the Obama plan, for that would do away with their obscene profits and provide the citizens of the United States with care comparable to other industrialized nations. Further, as in Europe, Canada and Australia, you will have free choice of doctor, specialist and hospital. The propaganda will tell you otherwise but it will be an out and out falsehood: a lie that these folks have been peddling since the Carter administration when they tried to defeat the enactment of Medicare. You will be told that price control of pharmaceuticals will diminish research, but do not believe it. You will be told that it is hazardous to take medications from Canada, the UK, etc, but once again that is trash talk, since most all of the pharmaceutical companies are multinationals that produce drugs all over the world at the present time. Very likely your migraine medication comes from Switzerland, your insulin from Sweden, and your flu vaccine from France.

Why is it necessary to have the endless TV commercials for prescription drugs, when we are only one of two nations in the world that permits such cupidity? The other nation is New Zealand. I assume that the drug companies anticipate that the naive TV watchers will see their physicians and ask for that drug and that the physician will accede to their requests. My advice should this occur is to change physicians since your current one has not been keeping up with reading his journals and attending seminars to receive first hand information as to what medication to use in a specific situation.

Again, in watching TV, which I assure the reader that I do as little as possible save for the evening MSNBC news and The Steeler football games, I am dumbfounded by the amount of advertising done by hospitals. After all, when we are hospitalized we go into the hospital where our attending physician is on staff; hence, what is the point of spending thousands of dollars espousing this or that hospital and merely running up patient costs to pay for TV advertising? And many of these hospitals are "non-profit" institutions.

The Progress Report of Jan. 12 reports that, in a series of memos to The Heritage Foundation, a right wing think tank, Karen Ignani, the CEO of American Health Insurance Plans, has charged that a public plan would drive up health care costs and increase premiums for those already with health insurance. Poppycock! The health insurance industry also makes the claim that deregulation of the industry would reduce costs. More marketplace economics such as those that produced the present worldwide economic collapse. And these idiots want the American public to believe this. Remember the old rhyme, "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me".

One hopes that, under the auspices of ex-Senator Tom Daschle, the Obama administration will be off and running either with HR 676 or the Obama "Medicare For All” plan I note that Focus on The Family and such folks are unhappy with Daschle; that is surely a high recommendation for him and the likelihood of his producing a good program for the nation.

After my retirement in 1990 after 40 years of practice I worked part time at the outpatient clinic of the local V.A. hospital. This was prior to the Bush years, the decreased funding, and the neglect of the V.A. system. I found the hospital well run, the personnel first rate, and the pricing of the pharmaceuticals quite within reason due to negotiated buying by the V.A. system. Our veterans have been short changed by the Republican administration and the Republicans in the Senate; hence, as part of a workable national health care program, the V.A. must be reorganized, made more efficient, and the endless paper work eliminated so our returning servicemen can get care pronto rather than weeks or months later. According to the McClatchy Washington bureau, Jan. 9, 2009, Congress passed almost every bill to benefit the V.A. over President Bush's vetoes. We currently have 84,000 veterans suffering from PTSD and only 42,000 have managed to have their claims approved by the V.A.

In dealing with the overall subject of health care we must do something about child poverty. I am grateful to The House of Representatives for passing the CHIP Act with the assurance that the Senate will follow suit and that President Obama will sign the bill.

However, Education Week on Jan. 7, 2009, published an article linking the diminished cognition of poor children to poverty per se. The United States ranks among the worst nations regarding child poverty, exceeded only by Mexico. We must do something about this for the sake of the children and for the sake of the nation.

Happily the chorus grows. Progressives for Obama has announced a second national call-in day to support HR 676 on Thursday, January 15. This is sponsored by Leadership Conference for Guaranteed Health Care (LCGHC) which includes Physicians For A National Health Program , Progressive Democrats of America and The California Nurses Association. The Nation magazine finally has, in a Dec. 14, 2009 article by John Nichols, come down in support of HR 676, noting that if passed in could create 2,613,459 new jobs, boost the economy by $317 billion, add $100 billion to employee compensation, and infuse public budgets with $44 billion in new tax revenues.

Finally I am in possession of an article by Janet Gilles, forwarded to me by Dorinda Moreno, appearing in The Rag Blog on Jan. 14, 2009,entitled Low Hanging Fruit for the Progressive Movement, which is worthy of all our readers attention. I wish to thank Ms, Moreno for her undying concern for passage of single payer, universal health care.

I have grown a tad more optimistic that this fight can be won, and at the age of 87, I need quick action! Please, before you get in touch with your elected representative, check Open Secrets.org and check out his/her contributions from PhARMA or the insurance companies, and do not be fearful of letting him/her know that this information is available to all. Our adversaries who would deny our citizens decent health care in order to maintain their executive and stockholder profits, are not adverse to twisting a few arms. It is time to fight fire with fire.

Hopefully, with concerted, dedicated effort, the time is at hand.

Let us try like Hell.

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Fencing the Southern Border

Kudos to Janet Gilles for a terrific letter in today's Austin American-Statesman about the proposed border fence, the reasons behind the largest mass migration in human history, US farm subsidies and the fallacy of "free trade" -- awesome, woman; really deserves a wide readership -- since letters are not available on the Statesman website, hope you will post it to the Raglist also. Well done!

Mariann Wizard


You are too kind, Mariann. Here’s the letter printed in today’s paper.

About the effort at Texas A & M to find a strong yet sensitive border fence to “protect the US from one of the Largest human migrations in history”, perhaps it might be wise to look at the cause of the migration.

Mexico was a largely rural land, with farmers growing 25 types of corn on their five acre tracts. While we like to think of our agriculture as efficient, in truth, the Farm Bill now stalled in the Senate subsidizes our corn farms with tens of billions of dollars, driving our small farmers, as well as small farmers around the world off their land.

Meanwhile, we are becoming well known as the biggest hypocrites in the world as we go on and on about free trade.

Let’s quit destroying the economies of weaker nations, and their immigrants will quit overwhelming our borders. Remember, we can’t keep drugs out of prisons, so it is unrealistic to think we can seal our borders.

Janet Gilles


Good work, Janet.

Sealing the borders, my ass!

Look at East Germany. Tiny borders, compared to ours. Guards empowered to shoot to kill, a step we have never been willing to take. And their borders leaked a steady stream. Keeping people in or keeping people out has never worked well except by providing the means to get everything they need where they are -- money, democracy, whatever ....

Steve Russell


Amen to Janet's letter and all. I found on my recent travels that small farmers, rural people in general, are being driven off their land from Honduras to Columbia to Brazil. 17 million people in Sao Paulo is several million people too many for one city. Any "economy of scale" was passed long ago. There are huge slums around Bogota,
Columbia because of a coalition of government officials, drug lords, and large land owners who profit from driving the small farmers off their land. The Garifina, African-Native South American people with their own language, are being driven off their coastal land in Honduras to make way for tourist hotels. Honduras has the second largest concentration of U.S. military after Iraq. Columbia is the recipient of many millions of dollars a year of our "anti-drug" money that props up the military dictatorship. I don't know how "we" are messing with Brazil. Maybe their own ruling class doesn't need help driving people off their land. Panama uses U.S. money, might as well be a State. Gambling, prostitution and pornography are legal in Panama. Very huge high rises are displacing the people in Panama City. I was distressed to find that in these wholly owned subsidiaries of the U.S. one cannot buy Cuban rum. It is definitely "we" who have crossed their borders in search of blunder.

Alan Pogue


Thanks, Alan.

According to his secretary of state, the number one foreign policy goal of the Reagan Administration was to make mj illegal in every country that wanted to trade with the US, and they did. Making wars in every country south of us.

Remember this past few years, both Canada and Mexico tried to legalize, but with the full weight of the US against it, they could not.

Such a tragedy this has led to.

And then with his zero tolerance, incarcerations went from 278 people in Travis county in 1978 to over 20,000 ten years later.

The wars keep us too busy to do what’s decent.

The rural people driven off their land as you say from Honduras to Brazil has led to the biggest migration in human history, and the machines cannot work the land efficiently enough to feed everyone. Only locally raised food can do that, the price of quarter million dollar tractors and genetically engineered seeds and chemical fertilizers is too high for the poor, and then you throw in shipping and storage and cooling.

Only the rich will be able to eat when formerly food was grown everywhere.

Janet Gilles


I found the same scenario when I was out there on the trail. The only land that the poor can have is the land that no one wants. The Monsanto and Cargil plan is in full swing. Their manifesto is to control all the food on the planet and they are moving that direction and could possibly actually do it unless something happens to change things. Rebellion seems to be impossible to me since the powers that are in control also have the media in their pocket.

Charlie Loving


And on that note, Bill Meacham says, "This is scary":

Spy Official Calling Anonymity Dead Simply Summarizing Government Spying Powers
By Ryan Singel

Donald Kerr, the second in command at the Director of National Intelligence office, gave a public speech in October saying that anonymity is gone and that privacy is best understood as what rules and oversight restrict what the government can do with information about you, as the AP reported this weekend.

Essentially, he's arguing that if you are willing to go online - thus sharing some information with at least your ISP, you should be fine with the intelligence community watching what you do, because the government has privacy boards and ISPs do not.

The AP story on that statement (.pdf) has created a media stir, given that Kerr is the number two official in the intelligence community-- which is supposed to spy on foreigners, not Americans. But this is a post-9/11 spy bureaucracy that willingly targeted Americans for surveillance without getting court approval as the law requires.

It's also a pretty clear statement of how the administration and the heads of the intelligence community think government surveillance of Americans should work.

[I]n our interconnected and wireless world, anonymity – or the appearance of anonymity – is quickly becoming a thing of the past.

Anonymity results from a lack of identifying features. Nowadays, when so much correlated data is collected and available – and I'm just talking about profiles on MySpace, Facebook, YouTube here – the set of identifiable features has grown beyond where most of us can comprehend. We need to move beyond the construct that equates anonymity with privacy and focus more on how we can protect essential privacy in this interconnected environment.

Protecting anonymity isn't a fight that can be won. Anyone that's typed in their name on Google understands that. Instead, privacy, I would offer, is a system of laws, rules, and customs with an infrastructure of Inspectors General, oversight committees, and privacy boards on which our intelligence community commitment is based and measured.

When Congress passed the so-called Protect America Act this summer, it gave the government the power to order all ISPs, email providers, VOIP phone companies and instant messaging services to turn over all communications that involve at least one person thought to be outside the United States to the government.

The intelligence community also seems to think that it can look at Americans' phone records and the To and From lines in emails to mine for terrorists, without implicating privacy rights.

In the Q&A after his Oct 23, 2007 speech at the GOE-INT Symposium, Kerr questions why it is that individuals are okay with having their emails handled by an ISP - with the threat of an insider looking at the e-mails, with having the federal government - with strong privacy rules

I was taken by a thing that happened to me at the FBI, where I also had electronic surveillance as part of my responsibility. And people were very concerned that the ability to intercept emails was coming into play. And they were saying, well, we just can’t have federal employees able to touch our message traffic. And the fact that, for that federal employee, it was a felony to misuse the data – it was punishable by five years in jail and a $100,000 fine, which I don’t believe has ever happened – but they were perfectly willing for a green-card holder at an ISP who may or may have not have been an illegal entrant to the United States to handle their data. It struck me as an anomalous situation.

Hmm. Suppose there was a rogue employee at your ISP who got access to your internet traffic. The worst case scenario I can think of for most people is that that person might try to blackmail you. As for stealing your credit card, its far more likely this would happen at a restaurant or a retail store.

What can't your ISP do that an intelligence service can?

* Arrange to have you sent to a country like Syria to have you tortured like the government did to Maher Arar. Though the Canadians have since apologized and paid him $10 million for being tortured for almost a year, the U.S. government hides its culpability using the "state secrets privilege"

* Put you on a government watch list

* Find a tenuous connection between you and suspected bad guys in order to justify further surveillance

* Find a way to nail you for material support to terrorism

* Build secret files on Americans' First Amendment-protected political activities

* Use those files to round up dissidents in the event of an "emergency"

In other words, this Administration - of which Kerr is only a small player - believes that the nation's spooks microphones and data-mining robots should be inserted deep into the nation's telephone and internet infrastructure. They don't want court oversight, they don't want Congress asking questions, they don't want inspectors general crawling through their program logs. They think that they should have this power because they promise not to abuse it and there are laws prohibiting some of the things on that list.

They believe that they, unlike the Nixon Administration, won't be tempted to create an domestic enemies list. That they won't start adding groups like Food, Not Bombs and Quakers to terror data bases (only the Pentagon could be so stupid). That they won't make mistakes and transpose phone digits when doing phone surveillance (only the FBI could be so careless.) That they won't confuse Tuttle for Buttle, or Senator Ted Stevens' wife Catherine for notorious terrorist Cat Stevens.

I'm not saying that the Administration is creating an enemies list. Or that they are using their extraordinary surveillance powers for anything other than good-faith anti-terrorism work.

But they have been given the power to build an extraordinary surveillance architecture -- one that any dictator would love to have at his disposal. And they want -- and Congress looks to be set -- to make it permanent in the coming months.

Source

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Avoiding Ecological Collapse in the Gulf Dead Zone

Satellite image of the Gulf of Mexico dead zone, October 2005.
Scientists: act now on Gulf of Mexico's dead zone
By Cain Burdeau / December 12, 2008

NEW ORLEANS — Scientists have issued a report urging immediate government action to reduce urban and Midwest farmland runoff blamed for feeding an 8,000-square-mile dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, an oxygen-deprived pool of water that has grown alarmingly off the mouth of the Mississippi River.

A report on Thursday by the National Research Council, a scientific and technology non-profit institution created by Congress, exhorted the federal government to take quick steps to avoid a tipping point and avert an ecosystem collapse similar to what has happened in the Chesapeake Bay and Denmark's coastal waters.

"Action and progress ... have been stalled for years," the report said in calling for "decisive, immediate actions" to curtail polluting runoff from several Midwestern states that feed the Mississippi River and are blamed as factors in the dead zone's growth.

The report called for the Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Department of Agriculture to join in creating a Mississippi River Basin Water Quality Center to coordinate efforts. Pilot projects should be directed at reducing nitrogen and phosphorous runoffs seen as one culprit.

Scientists say the low-oxygen zone — created by massive algae blooms that consume oxygen in waters off Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas — makes it harder for organisms to survive, robbing them of reproductive energy needed to continue life in those waters. The low-oxygen condition is called hypoxia by scientists.

"The existence of gulf hypoxia is a national-level water quality problem that has been persistent, has become larger over time, and will require decisive actions to remedy," the report warned.

Recent studies, funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and others, have found the dead zone is tampering with the Gulf food chain. The term scientists use to describe changes in the food chain is a "regime shift" in the oxygen-deprived waters

The dead zone was first studied in the 1970s. Since then, the zone has grown and scientists warn it could threaten Gulf fisheries, where the largest fleet of fishermen in the Lower 48 states works.

Studies show the health of copepods, small crustaceans grazed on by larger species, and shrimp have been affected by the dead zone.

"What we're finding is that we see these regime shifts sometimes where instead of producing a normal food chain we wind up with just jellyfish," said Paul Montagna, a biologist at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi.

He said the problem is "very complex" and "very real."

In recent years, the dead zone has gotten so big that it has stretched from the Texas coast to Mississippi. The low-oxygen area dissipates in the winter months and returns in the spring and summer.

Federal agencies besides NOAA are beginning to acknowledge the phenomenon.

Last year, a report by the Environmental Protection Agency said a "regime shift" in the Gulf caused by the annual flushing of nitrogen and phosphorous from the Midwest through the Mississippi had taken place, the NRC report noted.

The NRC report, requested by EPA, was a follow-up to a 2007 document outlining the dead zone problem.

Thursday's report comes as President George W. Bush prepares to end his term, leaving the dead zone to President-elect Barack Obama's administration.

Earlier this week, Obama picked Lisa Jackson to head EPA. To advocates in Louisiana, that's good news because Jackson's family is from New Orleans.

Len Bahr, retired director of applied science at Louisiana's governor's office who now runs a blog, wrote Friday that NRC's recommendations "obviously target the Obama transition team" and "reflect long-standing frustration over a decade of failure" to deal with runoff pollution.

"If you put her up against the current EPA administrator, Stephen Johnson, she's a breath of fresh air," said Monique Harden, co-director of the New Orleans-based Advocates for Environmental Human Rights.

Jackson did not return telephone calls seeking comment.

She is the chief of staff of New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine and was a member of Obama's energy and natural resources transition team. Previously, she worked 16 years at EPA.

She was born in Philadelphia and raised by adopted parents in the Lower 9th Ward, where her family was living when Hurricane Katrina destroyed the neighborhood in August 2005.

On Friday, EPA said it planned to send $3.7 million to 10 groups and organizations in the upper Mississippi River basin to restore wetlands and riverbanks, clean watersheds and document water quality.

"This seed money will grow innovative, cost-effective solutions to speed up the cleanup of impaired watersheds in the Mississippi River Watershed and cut the size of the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico," said Benjamin Grumbles, EPA assistant administrator for water.

Source / Houston Chronicle

Thanks to Janet Gilles / The Rag Blog

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Health Care Reform : Our Christmas Eve Present

Congress' health care reform
Promises huge returns for all

'Their principal job is to reinforce the great ideas of yesterday while suppressing the great ideas of tomorrow.' -- Deepak Chopra on skeptics.

By Janet Gilles / The Rag Blog / December 29, 2009

[The Rag Blog has run numerous articles critical of Congress' attempt at health care reform. Contributor Janet Gilles has a very different perspective.]

Few politicians have dared to question the health care system itself in this country. Yet, there are 99,000 easily preventable deaths a year from infections acquired in the hospital, according to the Center for Disease Control. The passage of health reform, the Christmas Eve gift to the American public, promises huge returns for everyone, even those with excellent health insurance. Because what good is good insurance when more people die from infections acquired in the hospital than from breast cancer and AIDS combined??

In most states, hospitals are not required to report these rates of infections, which is how they get away with it. New regulations in the health bill which require reporting of hospital acquired infections, will almost entirely eliminate this deadly threat.Other examples of how cost controls are going to result in a betterSystem of health care abound.

For the last decade or two, the costs of health care have skyrocketed. The Mayo Clinic has led the way, and numerous commissions have made simple recommendations to change the rules of the game, by comparing treatments to determine which are most effective. Due to their great promise of cutting costs, most of these measures have made it into the current law now so close to our grasp.

What has been needed has been a restructuring of incentives, a consistent theme in Obama’s health care reform agenda, and we are that close. Because of the power of the right, the new bill does not cover everyone, but Paul Krugman says it best. “Guys, this is a major program to aid lower and lower-middle-income families. How is that not a big progressive victory?”

Jonathan Chait explains why this legislation is the greatest social achievement of our time. Our health care system has been focused on finding the most expensive remedies; this new legislation will require an apples to apples comparison of treatments and end up changing the nature of health care. Change we can depend on.

The Rag Blog

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Steven Chu : Energy Chief Says Family Farms an Endangered Species

"I don't think the American public has gripped in its gut what could happen," says Nobel winner Steven Chu." Photo by Jose Luis Magana / AP.
Agricultural diversity can soften the blow of global warming.

By Janet Gilles / The Rag Blog / February 5, 2009

See 'California farms, vineyards in peril from warming' by Jim Tankersley, Below.

Now looks like the time to reconsider our agriculture subsidy, which funds Midwestern crops to make high calorie zero nutrient foods (corn oil, soy oil, high fructose corn syrup, white flour) and drives health costs up and the family farmers who actually grow food off the land. If we take the $50 billion annual subsidy and divide it up, cities of a million would be getting $100 million a year to subsidize local wholesome foods!

Diversity can soften the blow as major agricultural areas disappear with climate change.

California farms, vineyards in peril from warming, U.S. energy secretary warns:

'We're looking at a scenario where there's no more agriculture in California,' Steven Chu says. He sees education as a means to combat threat.

By Jim Tankersley / February 4, 2009

WASHINGTON -- California's farms and vineyards could vanish by the end of the century, and its major cities could be in jeopardy, if Americans do not act to slow the advance of global warming, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu said Tuesday.

In his first interview since taking office last month, the Nobel-prize-winning physicist offered some of the starkest comments yet on how seriously President Obama's cabinet views the threat of climate change, along with a detailed assessment of the administration's plans to combat it.

Chu warned of water shortages plaguing the West and Upper Midwest and particularly dire consequences for California, his home state, the nation's leading agricultural producer.

In a worst case, Chu said, up to 90% of the Sierra snowpack could disappear, all but eliminating a natural storage system for water vital to agriculture.

"I don't think the American public has gripped in its gut what could happen," he said. "We're looking at a scenario where there's no more agriculture in California." And, he added, "I don't actually see how they can keep their cities going" either.

A pair of recent studies raise similar warnings. One, published in January in the journal Science, raised the specter of worldwide crop shortages as temperatures rise. Another, penned by UC Berkeley researchers last year, estimated California has about $2.5 trillion in real estate assets -- including agriculture -- endangered by warming.

Chu is not a climate scientist. He won his Nobel for work trapping atoms with laser light. He taught at Stanford University and directed the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he reoriented researchers to pursue "clean energy" technologies to help reduce the use of greenhouse-gas-emitting fossil fuels in the U.S., before Obama tapped him to head the Energy Department.

He stressed the threat of climate change in his Senate confirmation hearings and in a video clip posted on Obama's transition website, but not as bluntly, nor in as dire terms, as he did Tuesday.

In the course of a half-hour interview, Chu made clear that he sees public education as a key part of the administration's strategy to fight global warming -- along with billions of dollars for alternative energy research and infrastructure, a national standard for electricity from renewable sources and cap-and-trade legislation to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

He said the threat of warming is keeping policymakers focused on alternatives to fossil fuel, even though gasoline prices have fallen over the last six months from historic highs. But he said public awareness needs to catch up. He compared the situation to a family buying an old house and being told by an inspector that it must pay a hefty sum to rewire it or risk an electrical fire that could burn everything down.

"I'm hoping that the American people will wake up," Chu said, and pay the cost of rewiring.

Environmentalists welcomed the comments as a sharp break from the Bush administration, which often minimized research about global warming.

"To say the least, it's a breath of fresh air," said Bernadette Del Chiaro, who directs the clean air and global warming program for Environment California. "We've been worried about the impacts of global warming for years, even decades. He's absolutely right -- California stands to lose so much in our way of life."

Global warming skeptics were not swayed. "I am hopeful Secretary Chu will take note of the real-world data, new studies and the growing chorus of international scientists that question his climate claims," Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the top Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee, said in a statement. "Computer model predictions of the year 2100 are simply not evidence of a looming climate catastrophe."

Source / The Los Angeles Times

The Rag Blog

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Medical Mistakes Kill 100,000 Per Year in the US

See related John Rockefeller Op-ed below.

Health Care in America
By Janet Gilles / The Rag Blog / January 31, 2009

In this video, Tom Daschle analyzes our health care system, not the best in the world. In the US, medical mistakes kill the equivalent of a 747 crashing every other day, but no agency is looking into this. One-hundred thousand die annually from medical mistakes, yet we don’t have a board looking into why.

All the other countries start at the bottom of the health pyramid, maintaining wellness, and then work their way up to the top, expensive interventions, until the money runs out.

In the US, we spend the money at the top on expensive procedures and don’t do the cheap stuff that will get us a lot more bang for the buck.

"I would call it a myth that we have the best healthcare system in the world," says Daschle.

Source / FORA TV


And there's this related editorial:

Final piece in our economic collapse
By John Rockefeller / January 31, 2009

Letting the health care market segment wither by lack of public support will do no one any good.

Having campaigned on a broadly sketched platform of hope for those on the fringes of economic and physical viability, President Obama is watching the ticker line expand to the point where half of the U.S. population considers itself either underemployed or underserved.

An expanding percentage of this group – 43.6 million by the Centers for Disease Control's 2006 pre-recession count – are without health care.

This number has certainly burgeoned well beyond the 50 million mark given the fresh round of layoffs, financial failures and re-budgeting by the recently unemployed.

My concern, and the concern of many, surrounds the disappearance of Obama's commitment to health care provision for the uninsured and underserved members of our population.

We are about to ignore our single functional economic engine – that of the health care sector – by prioritizing long-dead sectors of finance and auto manufacturing.

FACING A FISCAL TROUGH

If we fail to rescue health care and public health itself as we move forward, we will be entering a fiscal trough that may take decades to rebuild.

Now would be the perfect time to pick the sector with most viability to fuel our recovery. Later will be far too late.

As we pour countless, and lightly accounted for, billions into bailouts and tax cuts for those having sufficient income to avail themselves of such stimulus measures, we are leaving an ever larger proportion of our country behind, and in the most dire state of need.

Health has been largely commoditized and subjected to profit-focused market efficiencies for the past quarter century, leaving more and more Americans behind in the eternal rush to the margin.

As this process unfolded, and despite the loss of millions on the health care coverage rolls, there were ample dollars to ensure the profitability of health as a commodity.

This will not be the case moving into the near and distant future. Health care is, like so much else, heading into its own meltdown, and it will make the financial collapse of 2008 look like a mere blip on the Bloomberg screen.

With the U.S. economy claiming more and more members of the middle class for transition toward the poverty line, we are about to enter a period in our history defined by a statistical majority in the U.S. population having little or no access to health care – at a time when health care is acting as one of the few profit-making sectors in our economy.

With a spiking unemployment rate in the health care sector and a dilapidated pharmaceutical industry that continues its merger mentality to control costs no longer borne by a viable financial sector, we are heading into an uncharted abyss of social disaster.

TURN THE TIDE AROUND

The only way to stem the tide on this decline – and its accompanying fiscal and public health consequences – is to fund health care as the fiscal engine it has recently become amidst the financial sector collapse.

Had the health care sector been given half of the recent financial and auto manufacturing bailout funding, we would have been able to expand and extend health care coverage.

We would thereby be capturing the remaining stability of this sector as an engine of economic and public health recovery.

It surprises me that the economists and health care consultants working in the Obama administration have not taken this opportunity to the bank.

They could have made a difference by diverting meaningless cash dumps from non-functional industries into the single most viable and necessary industry in the country.

I am sad to say that the crash of the health care economy will be heard in a very different way than the crashes that recently preceded it.

It will take our final breath economically, and literally with the disappearance of greatly diminished health care services to all economic classes in the United States.

Copyright 2009 by The Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram.

[John Rockefeller of Camden is CEO of a management consulting firm, Zero Consult Ltd., based in Boston.]

Source / Portland Press Herald

The Rag Blog

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Osteoporosis : Drugs and Your Heart

Have a Heart: Be Wary of toxic pharmaceuticals
By Janet Gilles / May 6, 2008 / The Rag Blog

Noting the lastest revelation about an osteoporosis treatment being linked to a heart condition (see article below), it’s looking to me more and more like nutrients ought to be attempted before committing to pharmaceuticals.

Since by definition, pharmaceuticals are toxic, it’s only a matter of time before the side effects become known.

It has long been known that certain toxic substances could “cure” certain diseases. Laws were passed requiring that these pharmaceuticals be proven effective before they could be used, and only with the supervision of a trained professional.

All well and good.

However, now we have a governmental authority saying certain toxic substances may be used by physicians as cures, and no claims may be made for other substances which also might cure the disease, only they are non- toxic.

Also, since by definition, pharmaceuticals are toxic, then they will, also by definition, have serious and harmful long term consequences.

We just don’t know in every case just what those consequences will be.

Just read this:

Osteoporosis drug linked to heart rhythm disturbance
Risks may outweigh benefits of treatment
By Sharon Kirkey

Women who take a popular drug for osteoporosis appear to be at increased risk of atrial fibrillation, the most common heart rhythm disturbance that increases the risk of stroke.

Researchers who compared more than 700 women with atrial fibrillation to women without the heart condition found those who had used alendronate--a generic medication that's also sold under the brand name Fosamax --had an 86% higher risk of atrial fibrillation.

"Women who had used it at any point in the past were at a nearly twofold higher risk," says Dr. Susan Heckbert, lead author of the study published this week in Archives of Internal Medicine.

It's the second drug in its class to be linked with unexpected effects on the hearts: A study last year reported a higher risk of atrial fibrillation (or AF) in women who received zoledronic acid, or Re-clast, another bisphosphonate.

About one in 100 people have atrial fibrillation, where the top two chambers of the heart, the atria, quiver and beat rapidly instead of rhythmically. Blood can accumulate in the atria, forming a clot.

"Occasionally, a small piece of clot will break off and travel to the brain which can result in a stroke," says Heckbert, professor of epidemiology and scientific investigator at the cardiovascular health research unit at the University of Washington in Seattle.

"The most devastating complication of atrial fibrillation is stroke."

It also causes symptoms such as rapid heart rate, palpitations in the chest and shortness of breath.

More than three million prescriptions for alendronate were dispensed from retail drug stores in Canada in the 12 months ending Nov. 30, 2007, according to pharmaceutical intelligence firm IMSHealth Canada.

For most women at high risk for bone fracture, the benefits of alendronate outweigh the possible risk of atrial fibrillation, Heckbert says.

Mahyar Etminan, a scientist with the Centre for Clinical Epidemiology and Evaluation at the University of British Columbia and Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute, says 12 to 15 high-risk women would need to be treated with a bisphosphonate for five years to prevent one fracture.

"But if you do the same thing to people with no previous fractures who may just have low bone mineral density, the number needed to treat would go to between 20 and 30. So if you treat 30 women, only one benefits, and we don't know who that is."

In January, American drug regulators warned of the possibility of "severe and sometimes incapacitating" bone, joint or muscle pain in patients taking bisphosphonates. The same month, Etminan's team published a study showing the drugs increase the risk of bone necrosis, a rare condition that results from loss of blood supply to the bone. Bone tissue dies and bone collapses.

Heckbert says women who have only a modestly increased risk of fracture, as well as women who have risk factors for atrial fibrillation, such as diabetes and heart failure, need to "carefully weigh the benefits against the possible risks" of AF.

Source. / Canwest News / National Post, Canada / April 29, 2008
Also see article on bone-building bisphosphonate medicines? by Anthony Komaroff, M.D., Harvard Medical School.

The Rag Blog

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Fixing Health Care : Rush Limbaugh and the Radical Right

Our health care system is a ticking time bomb and the right wing opposes every effort to fix it. Photo/illustration by Mark Hooper / Stanford Medicine Magazine

The science is already published, especially by Scripps Institute, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and many more, to reduce our bloated health care costs, and, praise President Obama, the new stimulus bill includes getting this information to doctors.

We spend way more than other countries, buying the most expensive -- but not the best -- treatments, but the right wants to keep it that way.

-- Janet Gilles / The Rag Blog / February 19, 2009

The Far Right's All Out Offensive Against Medical Research

Mr. Limbaugh and his cohorts would have you believe that this research will be used to deny needed care to your great Aunt May and be run by the politburo.

By Howard Dean / February 17, 2009

Opponents of fixing our broken health care system are at it again, attempting to use their same old scare tactics and falsehoods to kill a common-sense health care provision in the economic recovery package. Fortunately Congressional leaders have recognized these tactics for what they are and have wisely kept this provision in the legislation.

Under attack is a provision that is in the package that will help your doctor be better informed and more effective at the job they signed up to do in the first place - taking care of you and your family.

Comparative Effectiveness Research:

At issue is something called "Comparative Effectiveness Research" which basically means giving your doctor access to the latest research on what treatments and therapies work and which don't. This also helps doctors know which treatments are more expensive than others, and helps both patients and doctors decide if there is a cheaper treatment that is just as effective. As a doctor and the husband of a doctor, I know how important it is to have solid scientific research to make critical decisions for my patients.

This research will help doctors choose the best treatment for their patients' situation and help them make more informed choices rather than risk prescribing less effective or even potentially harmful treatments.

Essentially, in order to control costs and provide patients with better care as we reform health care, the Federal Government will fund and disseminate research that evaluates the effectiveness of different treatments and medicines. This research will give doctors and patients better choices, and most importantly better health care for their money.

This is a common sense idea that should have been put in place a long ago.

When I was practicing medicine, having greater access to scientific evidenced-based research would have been truly helpful in guiding me to make the best medical decisions for my patients.

If an inexpensive pill that has been around a long time works substantially better than a brand new, highly-advertised and thus far more expensive pill - doctors should have that information at hand when we prescribe medications to our patients. When I do something for a patient, I want the scientific research that tells me its the best course for my patient. But the far right, led by people like Rush Limabaugh, hopes to somehow convince Americans that more and better research is a bad thing.

Medicine is and should always be science based - not driven by ideology.

Mr. Limbaugh and his cohorts would have you believe that this research will be used to deny needed care to your great Aunt May and be run by the politburo. But the Bill passed by Congress states right up front that the Government can not make coverage decisions based on this research.

I was surprised to see Senator Coburn (R-Ok) who is also a doctor make a statement against medical research which in part stated "this bill lays the groundwork for a Soviet-style Federal Health Board that will put bureaucrats and politicians in charge of our nation's health care system." Sadly, it seems that Senator Coburn has his political hat on and not his white coat when he relies on Rush Limbaugh to "help" his patients.

This claptrap is really about the far right laying the ground work for a far greater and more sustained attack on the Democrats' attempt to fix our health care system. As we move forward with the American people to finally fulfill the promise of Harry Truman, who over sixty years ago suggested that every American ought to have a reasonable health care plan, we will rely on the voters to remind the right wing that change is what we promised, and change is what we will deliver.

Their opposition is about politics at its worst and their desire to make sure that the new administration and the Congress do not get a "win"

In these rough economic times, we have got to do better than the same old scare tactics and games for political gains. It's time to fix our health care system and it's time for common sense and honesty.

[Howard Dean, a physician, is the former Governor of Vermont and former chairman of the Democratic National Committee.]

Source / The Huffington Post

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Low Hanging Fruit for the Progressive Movement

Low Hanging Fruit / Copyright © 2008 Borderrose Images

We have here the potential for a coalition of health reform as demanded by our public health organizations, immigration reform (this is also the cause of Mexican farmers being driven off their land), water preservation in the rivers and the sea.

By Janet Gilles / The Rag Blog / January 14, 2008

Perhaps the most progressive movement in US history was the populist, made up of farmers who were quite sophisticated about economics. Self employed, they were on their own and they knew, but formed a movement. The Green Revolution, by taking advantage of Americans’ respect for and lack of grasp of science, has destroyed this independent voice for sanity by subsidizing mega agriculture and driving the independents off the land.

Yes, there is more corn per acre with giant tractors, special seeds, nitrates, and planting to the edge of the stream banks.

Yes we are at far greater risk for crop failure with a mono agriculture.

Nutrition per acre has collapsed, resulting in diseases rare a generation ago, heart disease, cancer (see also pesticides, herbicides) and autoimmune disorders, especially diabetes from the high sugar contents.

Water use has skyrocketed as soil without humus cannot absorb the water, letting most of it run off, causing the Death of the Oceans.

Those environmental groups concerned with the oceans now say that nitrate runoff kills more fish than over fishing, and is the most serious threat to the oceans.

Remember, all this is caused by taxpayer support to corporate agriculture, which would be entirely unviable without the $50 billion dollar A YEAR subsidy. Spread that around the country, and the poor would be buying local produce instead of junk food.

We have here the potential for a coalition of health reform as demanded by our public health organizations, immigration reform (this is also the cause of Mexican farmers being driven off their land, leading to the biggest immigration in history) water preservation in the rivers and the sea. And no cost, just stop supporting the junk food agriculture.

Here is an easy issue, the money is there, the support is there, but the groups are all separately working to stop the farm subsidy.

Can progressives get on board?

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Agriculture’s Ponzi Scheme

SUBSIDIZED "FOODS"

Cookies or Fish?
By Janet Gilles / The Rag Blog / March 29, 2009

After World War II, starvation was a real danger, and calories were in short supply. The United States Dept of Agriculture put in place subsidies to grow calories, which have evolved to this day to a system exactly contrary to what is needed.

SUBSIDIZED FOODS




UNSUBSIDIZED



The United States Department of Agriculture itself says that Americans consume only 11 % of the fruits and vegetables needed for good health, while consuming way too many calories in the form of fats and sugars.

Yet this same USDA gives massive subsidies to the calories, following its historic mandate back from WW II, while less than one percent goes to fruit and vegetable farmers.

Many people make their grocery choices based on price, and the subsidized empty calories, fried foods, processed foods are the best buy.

Most of these subsidies go to farmers in the Mississippi River basin, the source of seventy five percent of the nitrate pollution that is killing the Gulf of Mexico.



So to make MacDonalds burgers and fries and Cokes cheap, we are sacrificing our greatest fishery, the shrimp, oysters, crabs and fish of the Gulf of Mexico. The Dead Zone gets bigger and bigger every year, and soon we will cross the point of no return and the fish just won’t come back. Besides killing the Gulf of Mexico, this same process of Government subsidized nitrate, herbicide, pesticide cultivation is killing fisheries around the world. The United Nations Environmental Group says that nitrates are the biggest threat to our oceans, ahead even of over fishing. Millions of people in the United States drink water with unsafe levels of nitrates, herbicides, and pesticides, a major cause of our cancer epidemic.



Our agriculture is constantly touted as “efficient”, but the measure Big Ag likes to use is how many bushels are produced per acre, ignoring the lack of nutrients and corresponding epidemic rise in chronic disease of our population. This subsidized food is itself one cause of our cancer epidemic, according to the President’s Cancer Panel. With Lance Armstrong on the panel, their report states that “we heavily subsidize the growth of foods (e.g., corn, soy) that in their processed forms (e.g., high fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated corn and soybean oils, grain-fed cattle) are known contributors to obesity and associated chronic diseases, including cancer.”



The so called “efficiency” of our chemical agriculture also ignores the massive amount of water wasted (many cities along the Mississippi don’t have safe drinking water), as well as the sacrifice of our best fisheries. It ignores the green house gases caused by giant tractors plowing the earth and removing the mulch, which sequesters the CO2 in the ground. And it ignores the loss of our farmers and farming communities, as farmers who use sustainable methods such as crop rotation, or who grow food for the table rather than for the factories, do not get the subsidies and cannot compete against those who do.

This is the major cause of the unprecedented immigration from South America to the United States, and from Africa to Europe.

What is the alternative?

We could take the entire $50 Billion dollar subsidy that now goes to mega corporate junk food agriculture and divide it up locally.

Instead of depending on nitrates from the Middle East, we could use the sun. In a city of one million people, dividing the $50 billion dollars annually by 300 million people, that would be $166 a person, so $166 million dollars A YEAR to subsidize a local agriculture. Fresh fruits and vegetables that the government says we need to be eating to be healthy would suddenly be cheap and plentiful. Local agriculture would be cost effective. New Jersey could once again be the garden state. Pastures will lock the green house gases in the earth where they belong, and the fats from pastured animals are the ones we need for health, as opposed to the “bad” fats created by feeding corn to animals intended for lives led in the grassy fields.

By the simple matter of transferring the agricultural subsidy to a fruit, vegetable, pasture and orchard based agriculture, we can reverse the modern epidemics of diabetes and heart disease, reverse global warming, save our drinking water and our oceans, and stop the massive unprecedented immigration caused by driving small farmers off their land. This type of thinking is underway with new Obama appointee Vilsack at the USDA who proposes giving farmers carbon credits where deserved. This would bring us back around to a sustainable and wholesome agriculture.

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