Lamar W. Hankins : Politicians Refuse to Protect the Public

Explosion at fertilizer plant in West, Texas, April 17, 2013. Photo by Andy Bartee / KVUE.com.

Texas explosion, guns, and fracking:
Politicians refuse to protect the public

Only a dramatic revolution of values focused on respect for people, creatures great and small, and the natural world can make life worth living for our descendants.

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / April 22, 2013

While the safety and welfare of the public should be the minimal standard to judge the actions of politicians, recent events and public debates demonstrate the inadequacies of our political system and the failure of our politicians to assure public safety.

People throughout the U.S. learned in their local newspapers and on television of the April 18 explosion of a fertilizer plant in West, Texas, that killed and maimed over a hundred people, and destroyed homes and businesses located in a five-block radius of the plant. Inadequate regulation of such inherently dangerous operations put the people and buildings of the town of just over 2,800 residents in grave danger. The explosion destroyed 50 homes and an apartment building, and it damaged a middle school and a nursing home.

After so many lives are lost, it is not enough merely to declare a state of emergency, as did Gov. Rick Perry, who opposes most government regulation for the safety of citizens. With adequate regulation, most of those lives would have been spared. But saving lives requires a “state of care” before emergencies happen. And most politicians don’t care enough to fix the problem.

A second event, which will cost many more lives, occurred in the United States Senate this past week on the same day as the West explosion. An ineffective bill to address gun violence failed to get enough support to expand background checks for gun buyers (much less ban assault weapons, and ban high-capacity gun magazines). The National Rifle Association (NRA) incited its members to badger senators to oppose the measure through phone calls, e-mails, and letters. The NRA spent $500,000 on the day of the vote alone on an advertising campaign against the pitifully inadequate legislation.

The public safety cannot be adequately protected from gun violence with anything short of total gun registration and severe penalties for possessing an unregistered gun. Registration, reports of all transfers of guns, universal background checks, and mandatory reporting of stolen guns would enable law enforcement agencies to track guns used in criminal activities, arrest and prosecute offenders, and gradually reduce gun possession by criminals and the mentally unstable. None of these measures are unconstitutional under Supreme Court decisions, and they do not violate the Second Amendment.

As Robert Parry explained recently citing (research by Steven Krulick), “the key point about the Second Amendment is that it was never about an individual’s right to possess guns without restrictions. It was framed mostly out of concern that a standing army could become excessively powerful and that the states should maintain their own citizen militias.” Certainly, it had nothing to do with the modern libertarian claim that it is about the right to possess guns so that we can occasionally revolt anew and kill elected representatives.

Nevertheless, four Senate Democrats voted against the weak gun control bill introduced in the Senate: Max Baucus of Montana, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Mark Begich of Alaska, and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota. As Joe Nocera, a New York Times columnist explained it, “The four Democrats -- along with many Republicans -- quake in fear of the National Rifle Association.”

With overwhelming public support for gun control, even among members of the NRA, only the money in politics, focused on selected members of Congress by groups like the NRA, can explain the unwillingness of so many public officials to protect the public from gun violence like that at Sandy Hook Elementary School last year or the persistent gun violence that results in nearly 1,000 intentional deaths each month in the U.S. (over 30 per day).

As reported by journalist Ezra Klein, the Harvard Injury Control Research Center has found “substantial evidence that indicates more guns means more murders. This holds true whether you’re looking at different countries or different states.”

Klein also reports a clear correlation between states with stricter gun control laws and fewer deaths from gun-related violence:

Last year, economist Richard Florida dove deep into the correlations between gun deaths and other kinds of social indicators. Some of what he found was, perhaps, unexpected: Higher populations, more stress, more immigrants, and more mental illness were not correlated with more deaths from gun violence. But one thing he found was, perhaps, perfectly predictable: States with tighter gun control laws appear to have fewer gun-related deaths. The disclaimer here is that correlation is not causation. But correlations can be suggestive.

Florida explains that states which have one of three gun control restrictions in place -- assault weapons bans, trigger locks, or safe storage requirements -- have firearm death rates that are significantly lower than in states without the stricter gun control.

A third failure to protect the public safety involves the unregulated practice of fracking in the search for oil and gas in the U.S. The recent appearance of biologist, mother, and environmental activist Sandra Steingraber on Moyers & Company was a reminder that we don’t know much about the safety of the many chemicals used in fracking. Many of us have seen the images of water so contaminated with methane as a result of fracking that it can be lit on fire as it comes out of a home’s water faucet.

But Steingraber is concerned, as well, about other toxins she says are threatening our health by contaminating our air, water, and food. She calls these substances “toxic trespassers.” These substances are leading to earlier sexual maturation in girls. They are contaminating breast milk and affecting our children’s bodies at the molecular level. As Steingraber explains, breast milk “now has more dioxins, more toilet deodorizers, more mothproofing agents, dry cleaning fluid, pesticides, and P.C.B.'s than any other human food. And they didn't get there on purpose. They were carried to us by ecological forces outside of our individual control. They represent a form of toxic trespass.”

Toxic trespass occurs because our laws do not require that before a new substance is introduced into our environment (and into our bodies) it be proven safe. Our regulatory system benefits the economic interests of the corporations that produce the toxic trespassers rather than the health of the American people.

All of these matters concern the liberty interests of Americans to be free from human-made threats to our right to life and the pursuit of happiness. Public policy should be decided on the basis of what will protect the liberty of most of us, balanced against the liberty interests of the few. The right to be safe in our homes and neighborhoods can be protected by a government that serves the public interest.

The founders never intended gun ownership to be a personal right, no matter what five right-wingers on the Supreme Court now claim. The right to be free from contaminates in our water and air that may be carcinogenic should not even be a debate -- it should be as self-evident as Euclid’s first common notion.

But our real liberties -- as opposed to those imagined by some people -- are under greater threat today than they were in 1776. These threats are pushing the United States closer to becoming a failed state largely because our politicians have sold their souls to the wealthy who fund their political campaigns or threaten their re-election. This is no less true of Democrats than of Republicans, and involves most of the politicians in Congress and our state legislatures.

The American people don’t know what to do to take back their government from those who serve the wealthy special interests rather than the health, safety, and welfare of the vast majority of people -- the 99% who have insufficient money to buy influence and are not organized to take control of their government.

Perhaps we will become another in a long line of dead empires from Eastern dynasties to the Ottoman, the Roman, the Mongol, and the British empires, to name a few. We will continue to exist in some form, but there will be no luster. We will continue to tell ourselves that we are great and wonderful, but this will be self-delusion.

The so-called “world’s greatest democracy” will be a shell of democratic promise. The peoples of this planet will remember us as having been built first on the exploitation of the indigenous inhabitants of North America and Africa, then on the exploitation of the entire world’s natural resources, and finally on the degradation of human beings everywhere.

Our disrespect for people and nature will exhaust us morally and physically. Neither religion nor science will save us from such a fate. Only a dramatic revolution of values focused on respect for people, creatures great and small, and the natural world can make life worth living for our descendants. I wish I had more hope that such a revolution will occur.

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins. Read more articles by Lamar W. Hankins on The Rag Blog.]

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Dr. Stephen R. Keister : Poverty and Public Health in America

The picture of poverty in America. Image from Bay View.
Poverty and public health:
The social causes of death in America

By Dr. Stephen R. Keister / The Rag Blog / June 29, 2011

"[The] incredible absolute size and commanding market positions [of a few immense corporations] make them the most exceptional manmade creatures of the twentieth century... In terms of the size of their constituency, volume of receipts and expenditures, effective power, and prestige, they are more akin to nation-states than business enterprises of the classic variety." -- Richard Barber, from the book Friendly Fascism by Bertrand Gross.

These days we are always on the lookout for a bit of encouraging news. But the final analysis of the Vermont health care plan comes as a bitter disappointment. The online organization Single Payer Action on June 21 provided us with the sad news: the much-touted Vermont plan is not single payer, not even close.

It seems that the phrase "single payer" was stripped out during the final negotiations, and the implementation of the legislation is dependent on federal approval. It also appears that agencies in Washington will not grant needed waivers. The bill permits the private insurers to operate in Vermont indefinitely.

ScienceDaily reports on a study done at the Columbia University School of Public Health that brings home once again the great failings of the healthcare system in the United States. The study “found that poverty, low levels of education, poor social support and other social factors contribute about as many deaths in the U.S. as such familiar causes as heart attacks, strokes, and lung cancer.”

The investigators found that approximately 245,000 deaths in the year 2000 could be attributed to low levels of education, 176,000 to racial segregation, 162,000 to low social support, 133,000 to individual poverty, 119,000 to income inequality, and 39,000 to area-level poverty.

Overall, 4.5% of U.S. deaths were found to be attributable to poverty -- midway between previous estimates of 6% and 2.3%. However, the risks associated with both poverty and low education were higher for individuals ages 25-64 than for those of 65 or older. The authors’ findings for a broader public health conceptualization of the causes of mortality and an expansive policy approach that considers how social factors can be addressed to improve the health of populations.

Meanwhile, our elected representatives continue their budget negotiations in Washington with an eye on further cutting an already inadequate Medicaid program and "revising" Medicare benefits, continuing the downward spiral of health care for the poor, the disabled, our returning servicemen/women, and the emotionally ill.

Happily, there is some galvanizing opposition, as witnessed by a massive protest by National Nurses United in Lafayette Square demanding a tax revenue increase from corporations in order to prevent such cuts in Medicaid and Medicare.

I am encouraged by the rare occasions that a group of dedicated Americans will gather in public to speak up against injustice. But I also wonder about the lack of public militancy against injustice here that we see demonstrated by the citizens in our fellow democracies in Europe, especially in Greece, Spain, France, and the United Kingdom.

It would seem that there is an answer, a disturbing answer, contained in an article by Harriet Fraad, published in Tikkun and distributed by AlterNet. The title: "Why Are Americans Passive as Millions Lose Their Homes, Jobs, Families, and the American Dream?" While Dr. Fraad offers some suggestions, one hopes that they do not come too late.

Noam Chomsky peripherally addressed this matter in a 1995 essay when he wrote:

A final point, something I've written about elsewhere (e.g., in a discussion in Z papers and in the last chapter of Year 501). There has been a striking change in the behavior of the intellectual class in recent years. The left intellectuals who... years ago would have been teaching in working-class schools, writing books like Mathematics for the Million, participating in and speaking for popular organizations, etc., are now largely disengaged from such activities, and although quick to tell us that they are far more radical than thou, they are not to be found, it seems, when there is an obvious and growing need and even explicit request for the work they could do out there in the world of people with live problems and concerns. That's not a small problem. This country right now is in a very strange and ominous state.

People are frightened, angry, disillusioned, skeptical, confused. That's an organizer’s dream... It’s also fertile ground for demagogues and fanatics who can (and, in fact, already do) rally substantial popular support with messages that are not unfamiliar from their predecessors in somewhat similar circumstances. We know where it has led in the past; it could again. There's a huge gap that once was at least partially filled by left intellectuals willing to engage with the general public and their problems. It has ominous implications, in my opinion.

A few bright lights in the darkness: Senator Bernie Sanders is facing down the pharmaceutical industry. He has introduced a bill in the Senate authorizing government expenditures of some $80 billion per year to buy up the patents that were awarded to the drug companies for "carrying out research."

These patents, in essence, provide government-granted patent monopolies, thus providing the pharmaceutical companies the right to price drugs at hundreds of dollars per prescription and sometimes several thousand dollars per prescription in the United States.

The money would come from a tax on public and private insurers. The savings from lower-cost drugs would immediately repay more than 100 per cent of the tax.

The country is projected to spend almost $300 billion on prescription drugs this year. Prices would fall to roughly one-tenth the amount in the absence of patent monopolies, leading to a savings of more than $250,000 billion. The savings on lower drug prices should easily exceed the size of the tax, leaving a substantial net reduction in costs to the government and private insurers. For more details about the legislation, see "The Drug Market Scam" by Dean Baker on AlterNet.

The other side of the coin involves a decision by the Supreme Court on June 23, 2011, freeing the generic drug makers from providing consumers with the specific dangers of using a drug. The court, at the same time, gave the pharmaceutical industry access to prescriptions written by physicians for their patients. So much for “patient-physician confidentiality”!

The other bit of good news came in a June 16 New York Times op-ed by President Jimmy Carter, when he joined the chorus of those asking the government to call off the Global War on Drugs. Thus he added his voice to those of Richard Branson, George Shultz, and Paul Volker. President Carter pointed out that this legislation has increased our prison population from 500,000 people in 1980 to 2.3 million in 2009. The increase mostly is for crimes that are non-violent and related to drug possession. There are 743 people in prison for every 100,000 Americans, a higher proportion than in any other country and seven times as great as in Europe. Some 7.2 million people are either in prison, on probation, or on parole -- more than 3% of all American adults.

The cost? California in 1980 spent 10% of the state's budget on higher education and 3% on prisons. In 2010, almost 11% went to prisons and only 7.5% to higher education.

Of course, the fight for enlightened drug policy, as seen in most European nations, will be fought tooth and nail by those who are financially rewarded by the so-called war on drugs — the crime cartels and those receiving baksheesh from the criminal enterprises (corrupt law enforcement officers, politicians, judges, and the operators of our uniquely American private prisons).

One final personal thought: The Republicans keep repeating the mantra that if we increase the taxes on the wealthy, they will not have the funds to create jobs. Of course, this is pure and simple poppycock. Their wealth is not used to produce employment. In the autumn of 2008 at the time of the financial crash, I was talking to a Swiss banker who works for a typical big Swiss bank. In the autumn of 2008, he said, the bank’s below-street-level gold vault, encased in concrete, cracked open under the weight of the gold bullion being shipped in from the U.S.A.

Create jobs!?! Maybe for Swiss concrete workers...

[Dr. Stephen R. Keister lives in Erie, Pennsylvania. He is a retired physician who is active in health care reform and is a regular contributor to The Rag Blog. Read more articles by Dr. Stephen R. Keister on The Rag Blog]

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Lamar W. Hankins : Medicare and the Corporatist Agenda

The assault of corporatism. Image from The Nation blogs.
Medicare’s backstory:
How corporatism controls the agenda

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / June 7, 2011

Ever since President Lyndon Johnson succeeded in getting Medicare enacted in 1965, corporatist politicians have done their best to make sure that the program would benefit America’s health insurance and pharmaceutical corporations, at the expense of the people. This was true when President George W. Bush proposed a Medicare drug benefit to enhance his reelection bid before the 2004 election, but no one anticipated that the Republicans’ political calculations would backfire as they have in 2011.

This turn of events is due in part to the reasons Republicans voted for a drug benefit for Medicare (Part D), a benefit that was provided with deficit spending. Some supported it because they thought Part D would be so expensive that it would lead to the death of Medicare. And they made sure that it would benefit the pharmaceutical corporations by letting them design the drug coverage that could be offered.

As David Cay Johnston -- a journalist who writes about economics -- explains in his book Free Lunch, the Republicans were dishonest about the expected cost of Part D. Publicly, they said that it would cost $400 billion over 10 years. But the insiders were told that the cost would be close to double that amount. Some Republicans thought that the actual cost, once it became known, would cause Part D to drag down Medicare as an unsustainable program, a desire high on Republican wish lists for 40 years.

By the time Congress approved Part D, the Bush administration was pumping trillions of dollars into two wars paid for by borrowing. The U.S. deficit was soaring, contributing to further pressures to cut all programs intended to benefit people rather than corporations. Many politicians who do not like people programs thought that in a few years it would be possible to eliminate such programs out of a perceived necessity to control government spending.

Of course, the tax cuts on America’s wealthiest 2-3% created even greater deficits, furthering the same goal. The financial collapse late in Bush’s presidency further encouraged the corporatists to spend money we did not have to bail out the financial sector, putting even more pressure on people programs.

This year, after the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in the 2010 elections, Paul Ryan (and all but four House Republicans) believed that the time to kill Medicare was at hand.

Ryan proposed a budget that would turn Medicare into a voucher program that would force seniors to purchase their own health insurance in the private market with the help of a so-called Medicare voucher that would come nowhere close to making it affordable for most seniors -- paying for perhaps one-third of the cost of health insurance in the corporate marketplace. Their justification for this so-called “reform” was that Medicare costs were out of control.

Ryan’s budget proposed to change the basic character of Medicare -- from an inexpensively administered, single-payer health care insurance program -- into a way to reward the giant health insurance corporations that have been a mainstay of political funding for the corporatists of both political parties. Ryan wanted to continue to use the name Medicare while altering its basic structure and purpose, leaving only the skeletal remains of what has been an effective public health insurance program.

Political corporatists like Ryan support government schemes that enhance the profits of corporations at the expense of the people. This is what happened with Part D. Instead of following marketplace concepts in which businesses sell their products for the lowest profitable price, the Part D law prohibited Medicare administrators to negotiate drug prices. Instead, Part D drugs would be bought at prices several times higher than the market required.

For example, Lipitor, the golden-goose cholesterol drug owned by Pfizer, is sold in the U.S. for over three times what it sells for in Canada, earning Pfizer $12.4 billion in 2008 in the U.S. alone. A 10 MG tablet of Lipitor sells retail for about $1.33 per day in Canada; in the U.S., for over $4 per day. Competition in the Part D benefit would have yielded lower profits for the pharmaceutical corporations, so the corporatists in Congress and the White House made sure the law would not permit capitalist markets to operate as Adam Smith envisioned them.

When Obama pressed for health insurance reform early in his administration, the corporatists in Congress and in the executive branch held sway and designed a program that assured huge new profits for the giant corporations.

Some of the same people who worked for the corporations when Part D was passed played a similar role in the passage of health care reform in 2010, both inside and outside of government.

One of those people was the Senate Democrat from Montana, Max Baucus; another was Republican representative Billy Tauzin from Louisiana, who left Congress after 2004 to lobby for the pharmaceutical industry and become a part of the health insurance sector; another is former Louisiana Senator John Breaux, a Democrat, who left the Senate after 2004 to become a health industry lobbyist; and another is Republican Representative Bill Thomas of California, who left the Congress in 2007 to work on health care policy for the American Enterprise Institute (a right-wing supporter of corporatism) and become a lobbyist for the health care industry.

The Republicans, including Paul Ryan, are correct about one aspect of Medicare -- something must be done to make Medicare sustainable for the future. The passage of Medicare reform last year as part of the health care reform package made a start by limiting payments to corporations that offer Medicare Advantage plans, by gradually providing fuller coverage for prescription drugs, and by implementing quality controls (to avoid duplication of services and better coordination of care) that are expected to lead to cost savings. But more must be done.

Medicare’s hospital insurance trust fund will approach zero in about 10 years, according to most prognostications. But, until Congress and the administration have the fiscal discipline to stop throwing away trillions of dollars on unnecessary wars, tax loopholes for the wealthy, lower taxes for the wealthy, special tax breaks for corporations, and extending corporate welfare at every opportunity, very little can be done to improve Medicare’s solvency without destroying its purpose and its benefit.

Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks has made some suggestions that are worth considering, beginning with “a bipartisan commitment to reduce the growth of Medicare spending.” Such a commitment will require eliminating Medicare as a golden goose for the health insurance and pharmaceutical corporations, an action agreeable to few politicians now in office.

Brooks also suggests, “Republicans should offer to raise tax revenues on the rich. They should get rid of the interest deductions on mortgages over $500,000 and on second homes. They should close corporate loopholes and cap the health insurance deduction.”

Brooks’s ideas would be a start to solving the long-term fiscal needs of Medicare, but they would be a meager start. We must do much more. First, without universal health insurance for all Americans, significant curbs on the costs of Medicare are unlikely. Further, Congress should increase funding of FBI efforts to detect health care fraud in both Medicare and Medicaid (the program for low-income people) and make the FBI accountable for its fraud investigations, something the corporatists oppose because such actions would harm their favored constituents -- the health care and pharmaceutical corporations.

Republicans have opposed Medicare since Harry Truman first proposed a Medicare-type program in 1945. When the program was proposed anew in the 1960s, the opposition was simplistic at best:

Ronald Reagan in 1961: “[I]f you don’t [stop Medicare] and I don’t do it, one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.”

George H.W. Bush in 1964: Medicare is “socialized medicine.”

Barry Goldwater in 1964: “Having given our pensioners their medical care in kind, why not food baskets, why not public housing accommodations, why not vacation resorts, why not a ration of cigarettes for those who smoke and of beer for those who drink.”

Bob Dole in 1996, while running for the presidency, openly bragged that he was one of 12 House members who voted against creating Medicare: “I was there, fighting the fight, voting against Medicare... because we knew it wouldn’t work in 1965.”

These politicians, along with other corporate Republicans and corporate Democrats, don’t believe in programs that benefit people. They believe the purpose of government is to serve the direct interests of the corporations that make it possible for them to continue being elected. Only a massive political uprising by the people can prevent the mutilation and destruction of Medicare.

The tentative evidence is that the people now understand what is at stake in the next election cycle. While we will always have the political corporatists, we may be able to achieve enough balance in the Congress so that people are put first for a change.

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins. Read more articles by Lamar W. Hankins on The Rag Blog.]

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Dr. Stephen R. Keister : Political Idiots and Economic Dementia

Aldous Huxley: the "dogmatism and proselytizing zeal... of religious or political idiots."
Huxley's 'political idiots' and
public health in America

By Dr. Stephen R. Keister / The Rag Blog / April 13, 2011

"At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idiots." -- Aldous Huxley

I begin writing this on a Friday morning, feeling depressed and disillusioned, as the Congress considers a "government shutdown," noting the absurd and idiotic reasons that the Republicans would use to justify such a bizarre act, proposing it in the name of demented economic theory and with the underlying motive of destroying programs currently in place designed to enhance the lives of our elderly and the disadvantaged of this country.

In his Hightower Lowdown column, Jim Hightower recently wrote about a novel called Alpaca,

a remarkably portentous piece of political writing by one of America's first billionaires, Dallas oilman H. L. Hunt. Self-published in 1960, the 191-page book laid out his vision of a libertarian, plutocratic utopia.

Hunt's ideal society was one in which the wealthiest would have a disproportionate say in government. He saw them as the achievers and, as proven by their riches, the most meritorious of citizens. They should get not one vote, he believed, but three, for they could be trusted to protect the volatile masses from the rise of populists.

Hightower sees Hunt’s vision given new life in the current Republican efforts to create a two-class society, a vision financed to the tune of millions of dollars by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the American Action Network, Crossroads GPS, and the various enterprises of the Koch Brothers.

This brings me to a point of playing the swami and looking ahead at the future of health care in the United States and the complicity of various physicians in accelerating this crisis.

First let me note a recent CNN poll showing that 75% of Americans want funding levels for Medicare to stay the same or go up. For Social Security, 87% of Americans want funding levels to stay the same or go up. Yet, these same folks have their fate resting in the hands of a Republican Party that exhibits the ideological zeal of the Spanish Inquisition and a Democratic Party and President who look at "compromise" in the same frame as Neville Chamberlain did at Munich.

Currently we who are on Medicare have 75% of our expenses paid for through the Medicare Trust Fund... monies we invested in the fund through our payroll taxes during our working days. These were not payments into the U.S. Treasury, but into a government sponsored "pension fund,” supposedly to be used for no other purposes than paying Social Security and Medicare benefits. Of course this trust was undermined by the Bush administration when the actual funds were used to subsidize warfare throughout the world, and were replaced with government bonds.

Some of us are fortunate enough, having the initial 75% of our medical costs paid by Medicare, to purchase Medicare Supplemental Insurance to cover the 25% not paid by Medicare. Supplements are not to be confused with "Medicare Advantage Plans" which were intended by the Bush administration to be the first step in privatizing Medicare and at the same time hurry the depletion of the Trust Fund. The Republicans have always opposed Medicare as well as Social Security.

The current Republican proposal calls for Medicare -- by the year 2030 -- to pay 32% of medical costs while the individual will pay 68% out of pocket. The GOP plan will gradually increase the eligibility age and give the states more control over the plan. The 32% distributed by the government will be given as "vouchers" in set amounts to purchase private insurance plans.

Of course these plans will cost much more because of the need to pay excessive executive salaries, stockholders, and higher administrative costs. Furthermore, the "doughnut hole" in the Medicare prescription drug benefit will continue at 100% under the Republican suggestions. An excellent review of the thinking behind the Republican plan is addressed by Wendell Potter in CommonDreams.

The Conservative Party, which currently controls the Parliament in the United Kingdom, in the interest of reducing the budget, is attempting to reduce payments to the national health system. This has created a major crisis in British politics -- mass demonstrations in the city streets, strong denunciation of the planned cuts by the British Medical Association ("we do not want quasi-privitization, with a mountain of paperwork, we want time to spend with our patients as we have now"), defections by coalition members in the Parliament, public cries and newspaper editorials regarding decreased help to the disadvantaged, the elderly, undernourished children.

Of course, the British, like most Europeans, are of a different culture than we have in the United States; theirs is a culture of community while ours is based on Ayn Rand's premise of "what is there in it for me?” But let us leave the UK and move on to our state of Vermont where the possibility of a single payer health care system is playing out. This I alluded to in my last Rag Blog submission.

As evolution of single payer care develops in Vermont there is a degree of division among the physicians: the primary care physicians approve of the plan while "certain other" physicians say they will leave the state.

We are at a point that we must take a look at the economics of the practice of medicine. First, I would note that, since I entered medical school in 1942, I have seen an attitude that says we should not increase our medical school graduation rate to a point where we have an excess of doctors in the country.

This is illustrated in recent years by the increased number of foreign graduates practicing in this country, the development of nurse practitioners and physician assistants, and the recent development of non-university affiliated osteopathic physician trade schools.

How are our domestic graduate physicians trained? Just who are these folks? All doctors start out by taking a four-year pre-med course in an undergraduate field of study. Then for the more fortunate we have four years in a university-affiliated medical school. This is followed by three years of residency training for those who wish to be family physicians, while for others, a year of general internship is required, followed by three years of specialty residency in an accredited hospital. Thereafter, one is required to take another year of fellowship in a sub-speciality.

So we see that those in the primary care specialties, internal medicine and its sub-specialities (allergy, endocrinology, rheumatology, neurology for example) have had six years training after medical school. Then we have those in the surgical sub-specialities (cardiac surgery, orthopedics, urology, for example), who have also has six years post-medical school training.

Why then the great income disparity among physicians? Those who work with their hands make some 7-10 times more than the physician who works with his mind. Why does the cardiac surgeon deserve a fee per hour 10 times that of the pediatric endocrinologist who cares for a child in a diabetic coma? Both may be life-saving procedures; the pediatrician is surely saving a life. What is it in the culture of the United States that has created this discrepancy?

Guess which physicians are considering leaving Vermont if single-payer health care passes and becomes law? One would envision in Vermont a physician payment system akin to that of the Mayo Clinic or Cleveland Clinic where the participating physicians are paid a negotiated salary rather than a procedure-based payment. This would explain, as well, why Vermont would be a magnet for the physician who wishes to be an independent contractor again, a professional, free of the dictates of the insurance industry, but by and large a primary care doctor.

There is an excellent new book called "The Hippocratic Myth" by M. Gregg Bloche, M.D. -- who is an attorney as well as a physician. Bloche was involved in the investigation of torture by physicians and psychologists at Guantanamo, and he reviews all violations of the Hippocratic Oath, in medical practice, the insurance industry, government, and the courts.

About reward systems, Bloche says:

More important are the reward systems that today favor technological wizardry over biological breakthroughs -- or time spent with speaking to patients or thinking through their problems. I recall doing some simple math, while a medical student on surgical rotation, and figuring out that my attending made more money per minute for time spent in the operating room than the actress Debra Winger made during her steamy scenes in that year’s hit film, An Officer and A Gentleman.

He took in $7,000 a case from Medicare for coronary bypass surgery, and on some mornings he'd have two cases going at once, in adjacent rooms. He could pull this off because his eager residents and fellows, counting on the same payoffs someday, did almost all of each case, from "cracking" the chest (to open it) to closing up ribs and muscle when work was done.

He put in about 20 minutes on each case, sewing in some of the little leg veins used to bypass blocked arteries. Had he spent this time talking with patients, he'd have taken home perhaps a few hundred dollars.

I fear that we face a broken medical system, as well as a broken political system. I call your attention to two recent publications. One is an extensive book review published in the Scientific American, titled Health Care Myth Busters: Is there a High Degree of Scientific Certainty in Modern Medicine?” The other is from The New York Review of Books: "Drug Companies and Doctors: A Story of Corruption,” by Dr. Marcia Angell.

In the meanwhile the negotiations, the compromises, continue in Washington bring to my mind a statement by Margaret Mead: "It may be necessary temporarily to accept a lesser evil, but one must never label a necessary evil as good."

[Dr. Stephen R. Keister lives in Erie, Pennsylvania. He is a retired physician who is active in health care reform and is a regular contributor to The Rag Blog.]

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Big Brother : Still Coming to Animal Farm?

Pig Brother? Cartoon by neophron / toonpool.
National animal identification system:
Is Big Brother still coming to Animal Farm?

By Steve Rossignol / The Rag Blog / April 17, 2010

In February of this year, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced that the Agriculture Department would no longer try to implement the National Animal Identification System (NAIS). The announcement immediately set the meat industry up in arms.

If you have never heard of the NAIS, don't feel alone. While the meat industry has for years clamored for some sort of nationwide tagging and tracking system to ostensibly monitor livestock from farm to feedlot to food store, it wasn't until the tragedy of September 11, 2001, that the industry saw its opening, using as its rationale the perceived threat of terrorists striking American agriculture.

The effort for a national tagging system was in place right after September 11 under the auspices of the National Institute for Animal Agriculture, composed of agricultural industry giants and manufacturers of identification technology systems, which immediately began lobbying for the implementation of the Animal Health Protection Act.

In the climate of anti-terrorist hysteria, the AHPA was very quietly passed by Congress in the middle part of 2002, and Congress instructed the Agriculture Department to implement the act. In May of 2005 the AHPA was further strengthened by Congress to specifically mandate electronic tagging and certain exemptions from the Freedom of Information Act.

The original intentions of the bill may certainly have been well-meaning. Fears of terrorist activity, occasional cases of Mad Cow and other diseases, and the consolidation of a variety of agricultural laws dating back to the 19th century prompted the initial writing of the bill.

But the Act also contained with it frightening germs of government control that slowly came to light, especially the right to inspect and seize livestock without a warrant and to enter any suspected premise with a warrant. The additional notion of a constant electronic surveillance of livestock also led to Big Brother fears.

The Act commissioned the Agriculture Department with implementation, and corporate consultants within the USDA developed a series of administrative suggestions which soon led to the National Animal Identification System.

Among the provisions of this developed NAIS were the three-stage requirements that every livestock premise and location in the nation be registered with the Department of Agriculture; that all individual swine, sheep, goats, cattle, horses, poultry (yes, every chicken), pigeons, and exotics (your pet llama, for instance) be tagged and identified to make known its location at all times (electronic tagging with a microchip was the suggested method); and that the Department of Agriculture be notified whenever any livestock was transferred to another location, including moving livestock to a a different pasture or taking a horse on a trail ride.

These requirements were even to include the single animal premises, the family pet goat, and animals not used for food. And Congress even entertained the idea of extending the computerized radio-frequency tagging to include household pets like Fido and FiFi.

From the start, the major supporters of NAIS have been the large agricultural conglomerates and lobbies: Monsanto, Cargill Meat Solutions, the National Pork Producers Council, Schering-Plough; electronic tagging companies like Allflex USA, Farnam, Temple Tag Company, and Y-Tex; and such professional associations as the Texas Veterinary Medical Association and the conservative Farm Bureau. In May of 2005, then Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns announced that "we are moving forward to a mandatory system."

Perhaps the biggest insult in the mandatory implementation of NAIS was having the costs of electronic tagging borne by the producers of the livestock. At an estimated cost of $13 a head in 2005 for herds less than 125, the cost could prove to be very expensive for a small goat producer, for instance, especially when goat prices at auction could bring much less than that.

After much negative feedback, the Agriculture Department decided that it would only pay one-third of the cost of implementing NAIS, with the balance coming from the producers and the state governments. The cost for implementing NAIS has been estimated at $550 million for the first five years.

From the start, perhaps intentionally, there was never much fanfare or media coverage of the NAIS. Opposition in response to the NAIS slowly developed as corporate lobbyists began the process of pushing forth the legislation in various state legislatures. Many Congressional representatives, when asked about the Act, simply had no inkling as to what the legislation was. In Texas, for instance, the bill passed unanimously in the Legislature in the closing weeks of the 2005 legislative session, and later many legislators responded that they were unaware of the provisions of the bill.

Specifically looking at Texas, it is interesting to trace the paper trail. In one example selected for this study, one of the sponsors of HB 1361, the Texas legislation to make Texas consistent with the NAIS, Republican Representative Rick Hardcastle of Vernon, chair of the House Committee on Agriculture and Livestock, received campaign contributions from Monsanto and the Texas Veterinary Medical Association. (As a footnote, Hardcastle certainly does not appear to be any friend of small farmers, as he also sponsored a failed bill allowing agricultural suppliers to place a lien on a producers second year crop if proceeds from the original crop were insufficient to pay off the entire amount owed). One can only guess the depth that financial contributions have played in the passage of the legislation.

As word about NAIS slowly reached the public and the livestock producers, grassroots opposition arose from all parts of the country. From Idaho to Virginia, New Mexico to Tennessee, and points in between, small livestock producers, organic beef producers, animal hobbyists, pet owners, and civil libertarians began reacting negatively to NAIS. Resolutions were passed at the county level, demonstrations were held nationwide. Ranchers in Bandera County, Texas, even threatened revolution.

Faced with the opposition, and given that compliance with NAIS was only at about 37%, the Department of Agriculture backed down in December 2005 and declared that compliance with NAIS was no longer mandatory, but was now "voluntary." In March 2006, Texas public officials postponed taking action on any proposed NAIS guidelines and cancelled future public hearings on the measure. (Texas compliance was at 4% in March 2006.)

The major concerns were that NAIS would drive small producers out of business, that the measure was intrusive and a violation of personal liberties; that it would weaken attempts at organic cultivation of livestock or cultivation of livestock for personal consumption. One criticism that was leveled at NAIS was that it "would actually subject the owner of a chicken to more surveillance than an owner of a gun."

But the Ag Department continued to try and implement the NAIS through the back door. Under the guise of an agricultural "census" form sent out in 2006, requiring that the forms be returned "under penalty of law," the USDA essentially attempted to do what Stage One of the NAIS wanted to do -- premises registration.

And, in perhaps an attempt to use the carrot and not the stick, it appears that the Agriculture Department may have used the confidential information provided in the NAIS registry to selectively provide hay and forage to only NAIS registered cattle stranded during the 2008 blizzard in Colorado, the excuse being that they knew where those cattle were located because of the NAIS registration.

One of the ironic things about NAIS was that while it was touted to protect the nation's food supply, it also came at a time when the Bush Administration had cut back the number of USDA inspectors and inspections. It is also apparent that large producers like Cargill and the National Pork Producers Council wanted some sort of Federal insurance for their overseas markets, especially with such nations as Hong Kong and Japan rejecting U.S. beef because of Mad Cow fears.

There is no doubt that there needs to be a greater purview of the nation's packing and food services. Under the Bush Administration enforcement standards have dropped to practically nothing, with corresponding salmonella and e. coli outbreaks in a variety of foodstuffs, from peanut butter and hamburger meat to strawberries, cantaloupes, and spinach. Less expensive produce from overseas oftentimes does not have the same standards as in the United States, with resultant disasters.

It would appear that given the nature of the greed in the food industry, the first line of defense would be to reverse the neglect of the Bush years by enhancing inspection and enforcement. Additionally, we need to completely re-think our existing notions of food production.

Mad Cow Disease, for instance, can be eliminated if livestock is not fed ground bone meal from diseased animals, something the Agricultural Department finally wised up to in 2002. E. coli in cattle can be greatly reduced if mass feed lot production is eliminated and cattle are allowed to eat grass, which does not allow the development of e. coli. Chemical steroids which increase animal weight and production need to be eliminated. Production should return to a smaller, more environmentally friendly, organic, and hygienic scale.

So, will NAIS come back? Very possible. Secretary Vilsack stated that even while NAIS was currently abandoned, a "new strategy was needed." And even while NAIS is no longer in effect, its enabling legislation, the Animal Health Protection Act, is still on the books. It may just be a question of time.

[Steve Rossignol is a working member of IBEW Local 520 in Austin and is a long-time member of the Socialist Party. He lives in Blanco County, Texas.]

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Health Care : Social Darwinism and Stupak Obstructionism

Cartoon from caglecatoons.com.
Overcoming political agendas:
Will health care reform happen
And what will it look like?

By Dr. Stephen R. Keister / The Rag Blog / March 11, 2010

It appears that Congress will pass some kind of health care legislation, be it well conceived and useful or, more likely, bogus and politically driven. It is sad that in a seemingly advanced society such as ours there is such lack of direction and focus -- and commitment to human concerns.

And it is sad that our health care debate has been used by zealots like Rep. Bart Stupak to advance their political agendas. Those who would seem to believe that the only life worth preserving is that of a fertilized ovum (with total disregard for those children who are dying of disease, malnutrition, and poverty in the United States, as well as those thousands being killed abroad in needless wars).

The Republicans have clearly dug in and are content to say “no” to any meaningful health care reform. They have passed their slogans on to the misinformed, ill-informed, or purely misguided tea baggers who somehow equate a public health policy that addresses the obscene profits of the private insurance cartel with "socialism.”

The folks at the financial top of the social order are conning the populace into believing that social Darwinism is to their advantage and not solely structured to the benefit of the wealthiest 1% of Americans, leaving the table droppings for the rest of us. With the aid of Faux News and other outlets of corporate propaganda, these greedy few at the top are also convincing the naive among us that there is no such thing as global warming, while our children and grandchildren stand to inherit an environmental disaster.

The only way we can obtain decent health care in this country is through a government supervised system like Medicare. (Note that Medicare Advantage is not a government program.) Philadelphia based journalist, Dave Lindorff wrote about his experience with the health care system in Switzerland as he was treated for a head injury.

In Switzerland, everybody buys a basic health insurance plan, and the Swiss insurance companies are barred from making a profit. The insurance firms can offer highly profitable supplemental plans that cover amenities like private rooms, but they must offer the basic plans at competitive rates.

Patients can choose their own doctors and hospitals, and do not go through medical "gate-keepers" to get treatment. They do not have co-pays for treatment, but the total deductible outlay per person ranges from 300-2,500 Swiss Franks per year (about $275-$2,300), depending on the plan chosen by the enrollee.Nowhere in the present health care debate in the United States has such a concept been seriously discussed.

Uwe E. Reinhart, an economics professor at Princeton, provides an extensive review of how health insurance is delivered in other countries in a The New York Times article titled "How The World Balances Health Care Risk."

Congress must place the health care industry under the antitrust laws and enact a formula for controlling prices levied on the policy holder, as well as guaranteeing the insured that they will be free to purchase insurance at a reasonable price, with no exceptions for "pre-existing conditions," and that no one will not be capriciously dropped from coverage should they develop a severe or ongoing illness.

And we must remember that nonprofit companies such as Blue Cross/Blue Shield are “non-profit” by legal definition only. These are tax-exempt businesses that differ from the major for-profit companies only in that they do not have stockholders and "profit" is listed on their balance sheets as "surplus.” Their executives, as is the case with the regular insurance companies, can receive multimillion dollar salaries covered by the dividends that the public pays to receive health care and hospital benefits.

The other obstacle facing passage of a bill through reconciliation is Representative Stupak, whose background with "The Family" and the C Street connection has been discussed extensively by Rachel Maddow. It seems that Representative Stupak has been a C Street boarder, at a ridiculously low rent. Jeff Sharlet has addressed this in some detail in his book The Family.

Rachel Maddow pointed out that Mr. Stupak has recently moved out of the house on C Street, that he has never been accused of any amorous misconduct, and that he denies being a member of the quasi-Christian organization known as The Family. Mr. Stupak however vows to derail a health care bill if it doesn’t include his anti-abortion language; he apparently feels that the long standing Hyde Amendment, which forbids paying for abortion with any government funding is inadequate.

Jessica Arons writes in The Nation,

The amendment that Bart Stupak sponsored, which is currently part of the House bill, does bar so-called indirect funding. It forbids insurers from selling plans that include abortion coverage to people who receive help from the government in paying for premiums -- a restriction that would apply to approximately 85% of customers in the new health insurance exchange and thus virtually eliminate abortion from the exchange.

Money in Stupak's world is "fungible," meaning whatever money the government gives you frees up private money to use on something else. So every dollar the government pays toward your health insurance premiums allows you and your insurer to spend private funds in that plan that might not otherwise have had on abortion. To Stupak, that subsidization is the equivalent of a direct payment.”

Do we allow the religious beliefs of Mr. Stupak and his followers to stand in the way of decent health care in the United State? Where is their shame? Where is their concern for the human condition? Let them debate this issue in some other venue, where the lives of so many already living human beings are not at stake.

The executives from America's health care industry are gathering in Washington at The Ritz Carlton Hotel in a last ditch effort to stay Congress from acting in the interests pf the American people. They have been met with massive demonstrations organized by Health Care For America Now and allied group. We wish that the mainstream media would give this confrontation the exposure it deserves. The MSM seems to dote on the tea party types -- the crowd that is underwritten by Judson Phillips, Mark Skoda, Dick Armey , Steve Forbes, Tim Phillips, and the Koch family foundation.

Congress must come together in the interests of the people and act with courage and without delay -- just as it must with the Employee Free Choice Act, the bank regulation legislation, the student loan bill, and legislation to preserve our planet.

Health care in the United States need not rank 26th among Western nations. We must provide decent health care now -- and we must strengthen Medicare, provide funding for training and decent compensation for our primary care physicians, our internists (with special attention to the non-invasive subspecialists), our family doctors, our pediatricians, dermatologists, endocrinologists, rheumatologists, and neurologists.

The physicians and nurses must have more input in this health care debate; their role must not be ignored. Remember, your Congressman does not treat your children's measles or your father’s heart attack.

[Dr. Stephen R. Keister, a regular contributor to The Rag Blog, lives in Erie, PA. He is a retired physician who is active in health care reform.]

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Nuke Loan Guarantees : Obama's Atomic Blunder

Simpsons nuclear plant mogul Mr. Burns likes it!
8.3 billion in nuclear guarantees:
Obama throws good money after bad

By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / February 17, 2010

As Vermont seethes with radioactive contamination and the Democratic Party crumbles, Barack Obama has plunged into the atomic abyss.

In the face of fierce green opposition and withering scorn from both liberal and conservative budget hawks, Obama has done what George W. Bush could not -- pledge billions of taxpayer dollars for a relapse of the 20th Century’s most expensive technological failure.

Obama has announced some $8.3 billion in loan guarantees for two new reactors planned for Georgia. Their Westinghouse AP-1000 designs have been rejected by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as being unable to withstand natural cataclysms like hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes.

The Vogtle site originally was to host four reactors at a total cost of $600 million; it wound up with two at $9 billion.

The Southern Company which wants to build these two new reactors has cut at least one deal with Japanese financiers set to cash in on American taxpayer largess. The interest rate on the federal guarantees remains bitterly contested. The funding is being debated among at least five government agencies, and may well be tested in the courts. It's not clear whether union labor will be required and what impact that might have on construction costs.

The Congressional Budget Office and other analysts warn the likely failure rate for government-back reactor construction loans could be in excess of 50%. Energy Secretary Stephen Chu has admitted he was unaware of the CBO’s report when he signed on to the Georgia guarantees.

Over the past several years the estimated price tag for proposed new reactors has jumped from $2-3 billion each in some cases to more than $12 billion today. The Chair of the NRC currently estimates it at $10 billion, well before a single construction license has been issued, which will take at least a year.

Energy experts at the Rocky Mountain Institute and elsewhere estimate that a dollar invested in increased efficiency could save as much as seven times as much energy as one invested in nuclear plants, while producing 10 times as many permanent jobs.

Georgia has been targeted largely because its regulators have demanded ratepayers put up the cash for the reactors as they're being built. Florida and Georgia are among a handful of states taxing electric consumers for projects that cannot come on line for many years, and that may never deliver a single electron of electricity.

Two Florida Public Service Commissioners, recently appointed by Republican Governor Charlie Crist (now a candidate for the U.S. Senate), helped reject over a billion dollars in rate hikes demanded by Florida Power and Light and Progress Energy, both of which want to build double reactors at ratepayer expense. The utilities now say they'll postpone the projects proposed for Turkey Point and Levy County.

In 2005 the Bush Administration set aside some $18.5 billion for reactor loan guarantees, but the Department of Energy has been unable to administer them. Obama wants an additional $36 billion to bring the fund up to $54.5 billion. Proposed projects in South Carolina, Maryland, and Texas appear to be next in line.

But the NRC has raised serious questions about Toshiba-owned Westinghouse’s AP-1000 slated for Georgia’s Vogtle site, as well as for South Carolina and Turkey Point. The French-made EPR design proposed for Maryland has been challenged by regulators in Finland, France, and Great Britain. In Texas, a $4 billion price jump has sparked a political upheaval in San Antonio and elsewhere, throwing the future of that project in doubt.

Taxpayers are also on the hook for potential future accidents from these new reactors. In 1957, the industry promised Congress and the country that nuclear technology would quickly advance to the point that private insurers would take on the liability for any future disaster, which could by all serious estimates run into the hundreds of billions of dollars.

Only $11 billion has been set aside the cover the cost of such a catastrophe. But now the industry says it will not build even this next generation of plants without taxpayers underwriting liability for future accidents. Thus the “temporary” program could ultimately stretch out to a full century or more.

In the interim, Obama has all but killed Nevada’s proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump. He has appointed a commission of nuclear advocates to “investigate” the future of high-level reactor waste. But after 53 years, the industry is further from a solution than ever.

Meanwhile, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has reported that at least 27 of America’s 104 licensed reactors are now leaking radioactive tritium. The worst case may be Entergy’s Vermont Yankee, near the state’s southeastern border with New Hampshire and Massachusetts. High levels of contamination have been found in test wells around the reactor, and experts believe the Connecticut River is at serious risk.

A furious statewide grassroots campaign aims to shut the plant, whose license expires in 2012. A binding agreement between Entergy and the state gives the legislature the power to deny an extension. U.S. Senator Bernie Saunders (D-VY) has demanded the plant close. The legislature may vote on it in a matter of days.

Obama has now driven a deep wedge between himself and the core of the environmental movement, which remains fiercely anti-nuclear. While reactor advocates paint the technology green, the opposition has been joined by fiscal conservatives like the National Taxpayer Institute, the Cato Institute, and the Heritage Foundation.

Reactor backers hailing a “renaissance” in atomic energy studiously ignore France’s catastrophic Olkiluoto project, now $3 billion over budget and three years behind schedule. Parallel problems have crippled another project at Flamanville, France, and are virtually certain to surface in the U.S.

The reactor industry has spent untold millions lobbying for this first round of loan guarantees. There's no doubt it will seek far more in the coming months. Having failed to secure private American financing, the question will be: in a tight economy, how much public money will Congress throw at this obsolete technology.

The potential flow of taxpayer guarantees to Georgia means nuclear opponents now have a tangible target. Also guaranteed is ferocious grassroots opposition to financing, licensing, and construction of this and all other new reactor proposals, as well as to continued operation of leaky rustbucket reactors like Vermont Yankee.

The “atomic renaissance” is still a very long way from going tangibly critical.

[Harvey Wasserman is Senior Advisor to Greenpeace USA and the Nuclear Information and Resource Service. His Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth is at www.solartopia.org.]

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Harvey Wasserman : Vermont's Radioactive Nightmare

Image from This Week in Nuclear.
Radioactive fallout:
Vermont Yankee one of 27 U.S. reactors
Known to leak carcinogenic tritium

By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / February 11, 2010

Like a decayed flotilla of rickety steamers, at least 27 of America's 104 aging atomic reactors are known to be leaking radioactive tritium, which is linked to cancer if inhaled or ingested through the throat or skin.

The fallout has been fiercest at Vermont Yankee, where a flood of cover-ups has infuriated and terrified near neighbors who say the reactor was never meant to operate more than 30 years, and must now shut.

In 2007 one of Yankee's 22 cooling towers simply collapsed due to rot.

Now the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has confirmed tritium levels in a monitoring well at Vernon to be 3.5 times the federal safety standard. The leaks apparently came from underground pipes whose very existence was recently denied by VY officials in under-oath testimony at a public hearing. Vermont's pro-nuclear Republican Governor Jim Douglas has termed the event "a breach of trust that cannot be tolerated."

Yankee is owned by Entergy, a Mississippi-based consortium that also owns New York's Indian Point reactor, which suffered an internal gusher of radioactive water in May, 2009. Another leak has just been found at Oconee in South Carolina. Illinois' Braidwood leaked so many millions of gallons of tritium-laced water that its owner, Exelon, was forced to buy a new municipal water system for a nearby town.

Entergy says none of Yankee's tritium has been found in local drinking water or in the Connecticut River, which supplies the plant's cooling water. Vernon sits near Vermont's southeast border with Massachusetts, across the river from New Hampshire. "The existence of tritium in such low levels does not present a risk to public health or safety whatsoever," says the company's Robert Williams.

But VY is just the latest of more than two dozen U.S. nuclear plants -- many built in the 1960s and '70s -- to be found with leaking tritium.

Last year at New Jersey's Oyster Creek, tritium was reported leaking a second time shortly after Exelon got it a 20-year license extension. Entergy's Pilgrim reactor, at Plymouth, Massachusetts, has recently leaked tritium into the ground.

The NRC's Neil Sheehan has confirmed leaks involving 27 of 104 licensed U.S. reactors, and says that probably doesn't account for all of them. At Yankee, Oyster Creek and elsewhere, rotting pipes are the likeliest culprit, but no one is 100% certain.

The epidemic has escalated public dismay. Vermont state Representative Tony Klein, chair of House Natural Resources and Energy Committee, says that "when you have public officials that the public depends on for their health and welfare making casual statements that a radioactive substance is not harmful to you, I think that's ludicrous."

For decades the Encylopedia Britannica, National Academy of Sciences and other primary scientific bodies have confirmed that no dose of radiation, no matter how small, can ever be deemed perfectly safe. "There is no threshold of exposure below which low levels of ionizing radiation can be demonstrated to be harmless or beneficial," says Richard R. Monson, associate dean for professional education and professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Thus far the NRC has granted a series of license renewals to aging reactors. But by virtue of a long-standing agreement with Entergy, the Vermont Legislature can deny Yankee's request for a 20-year extension. In the 1990s local groups like the Citizen's Awareness Network helped force down the Yankee Rowe plant on the Deerfield River in Massachusetts, about 25 miles southwest of Vernon. The root cause was concern over embrittlement of the elderly reactor's core, a key to the future of all other aging nukes.

In Vermont, angry debate has also arisen over Entergy's dwindling decommissioning fund, which has been slashed by a declining stock market. Entergy has proposed spinning off plant ownership to a shell corporation whose assets may be even more dubious. But area residents also fear Entergy may be pushing Yankee operations in an attempt to find the source of its leaks.

With VY operating under duress, Katz and others report an increasing wave of concern among local citizens starting to think seriously about how they might evacuate if Entergy keeps pushing. "This plant appears to be leaking from its reactor piping, but they don't really know where," she says. "They don't want to shut down because they're afraid they'll never get back up. Entergy is choosing to protect its bottom line rather than the health and safety of our community."

Indeed, a desperate national industry now pushing for massive federal subsidies to build new reactors may not survive a flood of elderly clunkers being forced to close by the weight of their own contamination. "This is an industry trying to build a new fleet of Titanics while the old ones are sinking," says Katz.

Amidst the gusher of tritium leaks, Governor Douglas wants to postpone the legislature's vote on VY's license extension. But his term expires in November, and all five Democratic gubernatorial candidates are pledged to a Yankee shutdown.

What happens next will be defined by fierce grassroots activism crashing into a flood of corporate money in support of a rickety old reactor being operated with increasing recklessness.

The highly hyped "reactor renaissance" -- and much more -- may hang in the balance. Stay tuned.

[Harvey Wasserman is Senior Advisor to Greenpeace USA and the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, and Senior Editor of www.freepress.org, where this article also appears. His Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth is at www.harveywasserman.com.]

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Cancer Survival : Reform Opponents Play the Numbers Game

Graphic from DragonArtz Design.
Cancer survival and health care reform:
Selective statistics paint distorted picture

By Barbara O’Brien / The Rag Blog / January 7, 2010

One argument you may hear against health care reform concerns cancer survival rates. The United States has higher cancer survivor rates than countries with national health care systems, we’re told. Doesn’t this mean we should keep what we’ve got and not change it?

Certainly cancer survival rates are a critical issue for people suffering from the deadly lung mesothelioma cancer. So let’s look at this claim and see if there is any substance to it.

First, it’s important to understand that “cancer survival rate” doesn’t mean the rate of people who are cured of a cancer. The cancer survival rate is the percentage of people who survive a certain type of cancer for a specific amount of time, usually five years after diagnosis.

For example, according to the Mayo Clinic, the survivor rate of prostate cancer in the United States is 98 percent. This means that 98 percent of men diagnosed with prostate cancer are still alive five years later. However, this statistic does not tell us whether the men who have survived for five years still have cancer or what number of them may die from it eventually.

Misunderstanding of the term “survivor rate” sometimes is exploited to make misleading claims. For example, in 2007 a pharmaceutical company promoting a drug used to treat colon cancer released statistics showing superior survival rates for its drug over other treatments.

Some journalists who used this data in their reporting assumed it meant that the people who survived were cured of cancer, and they wrote that the drug “saved lives.” The drug did extend the lives of of patients, on average by a few months. However, the mortality rate for people who used this drug -- meaning the rate of patients who died of the disease -- was not improved.

But bloggers and editorial writers who oppose health care reform seized these stories about “saving lives,” noting that this wondrous drug was available in the United States for at least a year before it was in use in Great Britain. Further, Britain has lower cancer survival rates than the U.S. This proved, they said, the superiority of U.S. health care over “socialist” countries.

This is one way propagandists use data to argue that health care in the United States is superior to countries with government-funded health care systems. They selectively compare the most favorable data from the United States with data from the nations least successful at treating cancer. A favorite “comparison” country is Great Britain, whose underfunded National Health Service is struggling.

It is true that the United States compares very well in the area of cancer survival rates, but other countries with national health care systems have similar results.

For example, in 2008 the British medical journal Lancet Oncology published a widely hailed study comparing cancer survival rates in 31 countries. Called the CONCORD study, the researchers found that the United States has the highest survival rates for breast and prostate cancer.

However, Japan has the highest survival for colon and rectal cancers in men, and France has the highest survival for colon and rectal cancers in women. Canada and Australia also ranked relatively high for most cancers. The differences in the survival data for these “best” countries is very small, and is possibly caused by discrepancies in reporting of data and not the treatment result itself.

And it should be noted that Japan, France, Canada and Australia all have government-funded national health care systems. So, there is no reason to assume that changing the way health care is funded in the U.S. would reduce the quality of cancer care.

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Health Care Blackjack : We Need an Ace from Obama

The Card Player by Pablo Picasso / MoMA Collection.
The stakes are high:
The President and health care reform

I have great concern about whether the President will take a principled stand in favor of a true and unfettered public option.

By Dr. Stephen R. Keister / The Rag Blog / September 5, 2009

In my younger days, in the days of the two dollar table, I would on rare occasion enter into a game of blackjack. In some odd way, these recollections entered my consciousness when I became aware that the President is going to address a joint session of Congress on the subject of health care.

I now am transported back to the table with two cards face up, both of them fives. The croupier awaits my decision to take a hit. If I get an ace, if the President unequivocally announces that he will fight for a decent public option, i.e. Medicare For All, I win. If I am dealt a six, the game is over, the President has conceded to the insurance cartel, the pharmaceutical companies, and the for profit nursing homes and hospitals.

The second option will force those of us who have stood by the nation, the welfare of the American people, the cause of reason, to fold our cards and depart, and hope that the progressive members of the House of Representatives will vote against a bill that is a farce and a concession to the corporations that appear to control both the President and the Congress.

Better the public, which in its lethargy and lack of inquisitiveness to find the truth, continues to suffer under the current system of health care rationed by the insurance industry, under a system where the insurance industry denies the physician his sacred duty to give appropriate care to the sick and injured, where a minimum of 18,000 Americans die each year for lack of health care.

It would seem overly optimistic to expect in the near future that the United States will rise from 26th place among nations of the world, and adopt a health care system approximating that of France, Germany, the Netherlands, or the Scandinavian countries. All these provide decent health care from cradle to grave, with free choice of physician, dentist and hospital and/or nursing home. Care is not rationed as the spokesmen for the corporations would have us believe. Indeed you may well have to wait 6-8 weeks for a total knee transplant for an arthritic knee that has been a burden for many years; however, for an acute illness, or an emergency, you receive immediate care without having to waste time to give a receptionist your insurance information.

Take the oft retold story of the Canadian woman who ostensibly was informed in Canada that she would have to wait a year and a half to have surgery for a brain tumor. She ended up at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville where the surgery was done shortly after arrival. The problem is that this lady did NOT have a brain tumor. Rather than a malignancy she had a small congenital cyst in the region of the pituitary gland which over a matter of years might impinge on the optic nerve and cause visual problems. Yet the American public was totally deceived and the media, save for rare instances, did not correct the distortions. Really! One wonders who indeed paid her bill at the Mayo Clinic.

I have great concern about whether the President will take a principled stand in favor of a true and unfettered public option. Thus far he has equivocated, dealt in secret with the pharmaceutical companies, and reportedly has arrived at a ten year arrangement with them. He has had extensive meetings with the health insurance industry, the AMA, AARP, and those who oppose a public option but are in favor of the nebulous bipartisan "health care reform.” By and large physicians groups, nurses organizations, labor unions, and medical academic organizations have been shut out of the discussions, save for a rare photo-op.

Physicians for A National Health Care Program has been developing a plan for a public insurance system -- not government managed, but managed by the physicians and representatives of their patients -- for the past 30 years. To date this group has been largely ignored, in spite of the fact that their plan would reduce national health care costs by 30-40%, and provide each and every person health care of their choice from cradle to grave. The reason this plan has been ignored? The insurance industry would suffer, thus depriving their executives of multimillion dollar incomes and bonuses, and reducing them to the level of normal profit making businesses. Still, they have had it quite good for the past 30 years.

President Obama has been compared on occasion to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Absurd... FDR came to the presidency with a long history of public service in the family. His uncle, Teddy Roosevelt, as a Republican had been a "trust buster,” taking on the monopolistic corporations of that era. He broke with the Republican Party to stand with the people as a candidate for president from the Bull Moose Party.

FDR followed in his footsteps, serving in the Department of the Navy in World War I, being elected a state senator and later governor of New York. When he was elected president in 1932 he did not waver, he did not bow in supplication to his political opponents, he did what he felt was in the national interest. Sometimes the President won, other times he lost; however, he unequivocally did what he felt was in the interest of the citizens of the country, and did not bow to corporate power. President Obama appears to feel insecure, and panders to those who obviously dislike him intensely, accomplishing nothing, and leaving those progressive, thoughtful folks who supported him hanging out to dry.

Health care has become the ultimate test for Obama -- and we can be legitimately concerned after his visit to Montana where Governor Schweitzer, in his introduction, spoke up for single payer/universal care, and obviously nettled Obama, according to a report by the state coordinator of the Progressive Democrats of America. It seems the President was unhappy with the governor’s allusion to excellent health care in neighboring Saskatchewan.

One wonders if the President is following a pattern of concession to special interests as occurred with the Wall Street bailout, the apparent lack of concern about who was behind the so called CIA torture scandal (remember the Nuremberg Trials of 1945), the concessions to the Dole and United Fruit interests in the Honduran coup, the approval of continued snooping on domestic communications, and most of all, the continued support for an increasingly unpopular war in Afghanistan which lacks a well defined rationale and/or exit strategy. Does he remember President Eisenhower’s advice regarding the industrial/military complex?

I would like to see Mr. Obama disavow the Christian extremists interjecting the end-of-times foolishness into the debate -- as exemplified by "Pastor" Rick Joiner, a South Carolina evangelical who bases his spiritual authority, according to his website, on being transported to Heaven for an extended conversation with Jesus. (The Washington Spectator, September 1, 2009) "Pastor" Joiner has informed his believers, through his Liberty Council, that national health care would lead to euthanizing senior citizens as took place in Nazi Germany under Adolph Hitler.

This charlatan also has continued to inject the abortion issue into the debate. No bill in either house has mentioned abortion, which is prohibited in any event by The Hyde Amendment, passed some years ago, forbidding government funds to be used for abortions. This abortion thing is a fraudulent issue designed to mobilize the wingnuts. I am conversant with the PNHP suggestions for national health care and the issue of abortion has never been mentioned and in probability never thought of in their plans.

Obama must disavow these extremist folks, whose foolishness is subsidized by the insurance industries, and be forthright with the American people. He should know that the teabaggers, Birchers, etc., will never follow him, since their dislike has nothing to do with policy but with a deep seated hatred of an educated man of mixed race achieving the presidency. They dislike walking down the street hearing foreign languages spoken; they dislike the fact that Obama believes in sexual equality; they believe that Obama caused the financial depression, when in reality the neo-liberal economics of George Bush was responsible.

Mr. Obama must forget this foolishness regarding "bipartisanship.” The followers of Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Glen Beck will never accept him nor believe him; however, the remaining 60-70% of the American public deserve a forthright discussion. It is time to face issues head on, as did FDR. Obama must show the courage to take on the Blue Dogs who in the last election cycle received $122,370 from their corporate contributors. He must face the fact that members of the Senate Finance Committee have received millions from the health care industries.

If President Obama cannot take up the mantel of leadership one can anticipate mass defections from his progressive base, and his being defined in advance as a one term president. (I have already removed my Obama bumper-sticker.) He must voice support for the House Progressive Caucus and back them in their goal of obtaining a true, undiluted, government option, as part of health care reform, We who desire single payer realize that no mere mortal can alone defeat the corporate interest.

Once again, it’s the special interests against the people. Thornstein Veblen addressed this in his "Theory of Business Enterprise" written in 1904, when he noted: "The big businessman, uninterested in anything but the amassing of money and the accumulation of power, was actually the enemy of his enterprise. He was concerned with earnings not with values, with prices rather than goods. Profit-hungry moguls sabotaged production and held the common man down by the harsh law of diminishing returns." Veblin as he continued, appealed for a new set of controls, for a society of engineers who recognize the social use of our machines.

Before signing off I would like to call the reader's attention to a piece in the summer 2009 Wilson Quarterly. There is a dichotomy in the thinking of the “religious” folks who oppose health care reform that has entranced me for some time. The Wilson Quarterly notes the following, in "Porn in the USA: Who subscribes to pornographic websites?”:

“Benjamin Edelman of Harvard Business School summarizes data from a major provider of online porn in The Journal of Economic Perspectives (Winter 2009). Per capita, Utah has the most subscriptions to porn sites, and West Virginia the fewest. Some religious attitudes correlate with subscription rates. Edelman reports: In states where more people agree that 'Even today miracles are performed by the power of God' and 'I never doubt the existence of God,’ there are more subscriptions. Residents of states with high rates of churchgoing prove to be about average in their appetites for porn -- the only difference is that fewer of them sign up on Sundays."

Think about it. The Religious Right rails against large government and "government interference,” yet continues to push for an anti-abortion amendment to the Constitution. These folks seem to have a continuing unnatural level of interest in human genitalia!

Our nation is indeed at a crossroads.

[Dr. Stephen R. Keister lives in Erie, Pennsylvania. He is a retired physician who is active in health care reform.]

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