Jay D. Jurie : Orlando Cops in 'Feeding Frenzy'

Image from Orlando Food Not Bombs.
Orlando's feeding frenzy:
Cops bust volunteers feeding the homeless

By Jay D. Jurie / The Rag Blog / June 8, 2011

ORLANDO, Florida -- On June 1, 2011, life in downtown Orlando's Lake Eola Park was pretty much the same as on any other Wednesday this time of year: in one corner of the park a group was set up to dish out food to all comers. What turned out different on this particular occasion was that the Orlando Police Department crashed the line and arrested three members of the anti-militarist and anti-poverty organization, Food Not Bombs (FNB), for the "crime" of providing free food to the homeless.

Arrested were Jessica Cross, formerly a student activist at the University of Central Florida; Ben Markeson, a long-time participant in Orlando FNB and a member of Orlando's short-lived chapter of Movement for a Democratic Society (MDS); and Keith McHenry, a co-founder of the national FNB organization.

On Monday morning, June 6, after serving doughnuts and pancakes, four more FNB members -- Noelle Bivens, Dylan Howeller, Brock Monroe, and Steve Willis -- were arrested by Orlando Police. FNB has vowed to continue defying Orlando's ban against feeding the homeless.

Ben Markeson, arrested along with Jessica Cross (left) and Keith McHenry for feeding the homeless, says that Orlando Food Not Bombs will continue to feed those in need at Lake Eola Park in Orlando. Photo from Orlando Sentinel / Mail Online (U.K).
Food Not Bombs began in 1980 as an offshoot of New England's anti-nuclear power Clamshell Alliance. For more than 30 years FNB has organized chapters worldwide with a two-fold mission: to graphically illustrate poverty in the face of bloated military spending, and to provide a direct service to those in need.

According to their Facebook page, "Food Not Bombs is a worldwide effort to feed anyone hungry and end violence."

FNB's website tells us that "Food Not Bombs shares free vegan and vegetarian meals with the hungry in over 1,000 cities around the world to protest war, poverty and the destruction of the environment." Then it asks, "With over a billion people going hungry each day how can we spend another dollar on war?"

Beginning in January 2005, Orlando FNB served people in Lake Eola Park without incident. In 2006, reacting to complaints from nearby merchants who wanted the homeless moved "out of sight, out of mind," the City passed an ordinance that prohibited feedings of more than 25 people at a time without a permit, and limited permits to a twice-yearly basis.

Orlando FNB continued the feedings and as a co-plaintiff with a church organization, filed suit in federal court, alleging violation of First Amendment rights. One member of the group was arrested in 2007, but acquitted at trial.

In 2008, federal judge Gregory Presnell partly ruled in favor of the plaintiffs. He did not find that the City's feeding ban violated freedom of religion, but found that the ordinance did violate free speech rights. Orlando decided to appeal, and a three-judge panel from the conservative 11th District Court of Appeals in Atlanta sided with the City.

However, in an unusual move, they forwarded their ruling for consideration by the full 10-member appellate panel. Some held out hope that this was a signal that the full court would deny the appeal. In April 2011, that hope was dashed as the Court voted unanimously to uphold the City's ordinance.

While Orlando FNB continued the feedings, on two separate dates after their court victory, May 18 and May 23, the City "paid" for permits that FNB had not requested and which they rejected. There was one additional "unpermitted" feeding on May 25 before the City apparently decided to move forward with arrests. It remains to be seen how all this will play out.

Meanwhile, the critique made by Food Not Bombs is worthy of serious consideration.

In fiscal year 2010, $9.7 billion was expended on school lunch programs nationwide. The Women, Infants, and Children program spent $6.7 billion on combined food and nutrition services. For fiscal year 2011, it was estimated $85.2 billion would be spent on food stamps. Aggregated, these expenditures aimed at meeting the food needs of the nation's neediest come to $101.6 billion.

These figures can be contrasted with the Pentagon's $671 billion budget request for fiscal year 2012, which shows that the totals for low-income food support are less than one-sixth that of the military budget. Taxpayers might wonder why they are not getting a better deal when 19 fanatics armed with box cutters did the most damage to this country since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, and all the trillions spent on "national security" or "defense" in the intervening decades provided no protection.

If looked at from the local perspective, most are not getting a better deal. While pressing for lower tax rates for business, Florida Governor Rick Scott recently signed legislation that will limit unemployment benefits for the laid-off. He also signed a bill, which he avidly promoted, that will require welfare recipients to be drug-tested.

Food Not Bombs members have been arrested several times over the past few years in Orlando, though all have been acquitted so far. Image from orlandofoodnotbombs.org / Mail Online (U.K.).
Orlando has spent hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to build three "venues" that will primarily serve the interests of the affluent at the expense of the middle class. Among these venues is the new arena demanded by billionaire Orlando Magic basketball owner Richard DeVos. His team put up about $60 million while taxpayers footed the remaining $420 million of the bill. Included in the arena are skyboxes the City has reserved for itself, so the same Mayor Dyer and the City Council who passed the anti-homeless feeding ordinance can view the Magic games in luxury.

Ironically, at Lake Eola Park, the locus of the feeding controversy, the fountain which is the park's central feature was recently repaired at a cost of $1.6 million. While most of the repair was funded by insurance pay-outs, it was yet another reflection of the City's problem-solving capabilities, at least when it comes to what is viewed as a priority.

As if to underscore the most fundamental point made by Food Not Bombs, according to Richard Reep in the June 2, 2011 issue of New Geography, Orlando has become the host to the nation's largest war simulation center, with an estimated 18,000 employed in this "growth industry." Some would argue, along the lines of "trickle down" theory, that all the tax dollars thrown at Orlando's tourism industry, attractions, venues, and military research are needed to support programs that help the homeless.

In 2009, the City of Orlando Housing and Community Development Department received and dispersed some $7.3 million in federal funds for low-income housing support. Note the emphasis on federal, not local funds. Other low-income housing services are funded and provided by nonprofits, not the City of Orlando. This is also the case with food banks, soup kitchens, and so on, which are provided by nonprofits and charitable organizations.

Any claims that the City is providing for the needs of its less fortunate residents rings hollow in the face of the evidence that the City marginalizes this population while spending hundreds of millions of middle class tax dollars to serve the interests of the most affluent.

Those in the middle class have far more to gain by insisting these priorities be reversed. Given the shape of the economy, far more in the middle class are in need of a social safety net, as the ladder of upward social mobility has been yanked out of grasp.

In upholding the City's ordinance, the 11th District Court of Appeals has further diminished the rights and liberties of all citizens, not just the homeless and their advocates. As an old labor slogan put it, "an injury to one is an injury to all." In its ruling, the Court proclaimed the "time, place, and manner" restriction of the ordinance was justified.

It used to be presumed that freedom meant persons were at liberty to act in accordance with First Amendment rights and government was constrained from interfering with the exercise of those rights. Current "time, place, and manner" restrictions have stood this assumption on its head. These days, the presumption is that persons are not at liberty to exercise such rights unless the government says so.

[Jay D. Jurie is a proud Rag Blogger who teaches public administration and urban planning and lives near Orlando, Florida. Read more articles by Jay D. Jurie on The Rag Blog.]

Sources: Orlando Food Not Bombs, Food Not Bombs, New Geography, UK Daily Mail, Orlando Sentinel, the City of Orlando Housing and Community Development Department, the Food Research and Action Project, U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the U.S. Department of Defense.

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Amanda Marcotte : Does Weinergate Mark an End to Sexual Privacy?

J'accuse! Right wing blogger Andrew Breitbart points the finger. Photo from AP.
The worst thing about Weinergate?
The total obliteration of sexual privacy
by ideologues like Andrew Breitbart

Prior to this scandal, the media and political operatives had to at least pretend that a politician's sex life had some bearing on the public interest before they picked up the pitchforks.

By Amanda Marcotte / AlterNet / June 7, 2011

Like most political junkies who tuned in to Anthony Weiner’s press conference confession of online flirtations, I went through a series of emotions: irritation at Weiner’s stupidity, anger at Andrew Breitbart’s sleaziness, frustration that this story gets coverage during an economic crisis, and embarrassment for the reporters who thought it appropriate to ask if he’s getting professional help or demand that Weiner’s wife stand around so that everyone can gawk at her.

But one concern rose above all others. This scandal may represent the end of the presumption of sexual privacy for politicians, and possibly even for journalists, activists, and bureaucrats -- anyone whose public humiliation could benefit the ideologues wed to the politics of personal destruction.

Prior to this scandal, the media and political operatives had to at least pretend that a politician's sex life had some bearing on the public interest before they picked up the pitchforks. Being an adulterer wasn’t, in and of itself, a matter of public interest. There had to be a hook.

If you were a social conservative who advocated for using the government to control the sexual behavior of consenting adults, for instance, then you were held to your own standard and your adulteries were considered public business. If you opposed gay rights, your own history of same-sex relations was fair game. If you broke an anti-prostitution law you vigorously enforced on others, like Eliot Spitzer, you had no reasonable expectation of privacy.

Arnold Schwarzenegger had a long past of being accused of sexual harassment, so the state of the marriage he used as a shield matters. Even at the height of the national panic over Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, Clinton’s detractors claimed that it wasn’t the sex that was the issue, but the perjury. No one believed them, of course, but the claim at least paid tribute to the idea that the private sexual choices of those who support sexual privacy are not the public’s business.

But with this Weiner scandal, there’s not even the veneer of an excuse in play. Weiner has an outstanding record supporting sexual rights of others, with 100% ratings from NARAL and Planned Parenthood, and has a strong record of support for gay rights. No laws seem to have been broken, no public trust compromised, no campaign irregularities indicated, and there’s been no suggestion that his flirtations interfered with his ability to do his job.

The entire rationale for the scandal is that Weiner isn’t living in accordance with strict social mores regarding monogamy, and that’s it. Even the whining about how he lied when initially confronted is hollow. In the past, lying when someone asks nosy questions that are none of their business was considered a socially acceptable white lie. (And really, who among us would be a paragon of transparency with Wolf Blitzer waving a penis picture in our face and saying, “Is this yours?”)

The pretense that it has to matter to the public in order for the public to get involved has been dropped.

This loss of privacy should worry people more than whether or not Weiner was right to lie or even how rude it was of Andrew Breitbart to hijack the press conference. The presumption of sexual privacy may have been stretched at times past the point of recognition, but this represents the first time it’s really snapped, at least in my memory.

If this Weiner scandal is more than a blip, and instead the beginning of a free-for-all of rooting through politicians’ trashcans to make sure their private sex lives adhere to someone else’s standards, where will it all end?

There are two main concerns when personal choices -- or even failings -- become a matter of public interest, even if it doesn’t affect the public. One is that it opens the door to real witch hunts where no one is truly safe, and the other is that it will degrade the quality of the actual work people are doing that actually does affect the public.

The problem with opening the door to conducting sex scandals where simply violating some sexual standard is all that’s needed is that the question arises: Who gets to set the standards? The answer is probably closer to “the religious right” than “Dan Savage," if only because the more sexually liberal out there don’t bother with feigning outrage at the private behavior of consenting adults.

You saw this problem erupting with the Weiner press conference, where reporters asked questions that implied that a standard of monogamy be applied across the board, regardless of the preferences of the people actually in the marriage, and that failure to comply with monogamy standards constitutes a grievous personality flaw that requires professional intervention. (One shouted question specifically asked if Weiner was seeking professional help.)

Once the standard for a sex scandal moves from “public interest” to “arbitrarily deciding this person’s behavior is gross/immature/offends Jesus," it’s open season. Today the crime is not following the standards of monogamy set by those outside your marriage (since we don’t know the details of Weiner’s relationship with his wife, these are the only standards really in play).

Tomorrow, it could be that your personal behavior offends people who don’t approve of premarital sex or who think it’s gross or silly for adults to play little private games with each other. Already, half the reason this is a scandal is that Weiner said things while flirting that sound silly in a more public context. Can any of us really say that 100 percent of our flirtations in life would pass the scrutiny of a hostile audience out to maximize our humiliation?

If these new standards come in to play, it will mean a drastic reduction in the number of people willing to risk running for office -- or be activists or writers or anyone that Andrew Breitbart deems interesting enough to start a harassment campaign against. Sensible people, realizing their sex lives will be an open book, will choose careers that don’t attract the attention of witch hunters.

Unfortunately, those sensible people are exactly the kind of people we need more of in politics, having already ceded so much ground to the Bible-thumpers and people who believe that Obama is starting secret campaigns to confiscate guns and kill old people. Weiner, for instance, was targeted because he’s willing to fight the good fight on major issues of interest to liberals.

Of course, running sensible people out of politics would suit the ends of Andrew Breitbart and his faux outrage machine just fine, which is all the more reason that he should be resisted.

[Amanda Marcotte co-writes the blog Pandagon. She is the author of It's a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments. This story was published at and distributed by AlterNet.]

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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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Ellen LaConte : A Really Scary Story for Stephen King

Time to be scared straight?
Dear Stephen King:
An open letter to one American who really
could scare the rest of us into action

By Ellen LaConte / The Rag Blog / June 6, 2011

I've been participating in an email discussion group that's tackling urgent issues like population, climate change, and peak oil. There's one particularly curmudgeonly member who persistently protests the doom and gloom vision members of the group generally share. Recently he suggested that we might as well just get Stephen King to write our posts because fear-mongering is his business and he'd take the doom and gloom up a notch. Which inspired me to write the following open letter to Stephen King.


Dear Stephen King,

Most of your books are too scary for me. They give me nightmares. Call me over-sensitive. But when my son was a teenager and I still lived in Maine (Stockton Springs, not far from you) he devoured your books. So I bought a batch of raffle tickets from the local library, partly to support a good cause but more than a little because a signed hardcover copy of your latest book (I think it was The Stand) was the drawing prize. When I won and gave him the book, for about a week he thought I was the best mom ever.

Well, he’s almost 35 now and along with a lot of other young Americans, he’s wondering what our generation was thinking all these years we didn’t notice we were spending down his only meaningful inheritances: a habitable planet, the company of congenial species and functioning ecosystems, and enough natural resources to get a living on in an economy that doesn’t devour its young.

Even though I edited a national small-farm magazine, wrote scads of articles about organic gardening, homesteaded, heated and cooked with wood, grew most of our veggies, raised some of our meat, put food by, composted, and recycled through the years of his childhood, I was still complicit in and beneficiary of the systems that thoughtful young people like my son now believe have robbed them blind and put their very lives at risk of being nasty, brutish, and short.

And despite my best intentions, I was complicit. We all are who have been fortunate enough to live the American Dream.

In my book, Life Rules (as in, “we don’t”) I write that “we’re stealing our present pleasures from tomorrow’s children.” It’s easier than taking candy from a baby. Like William Catton wrote in Overshoot back in 1982 -- which apparently didn’t shake enough folks up because we’re still overshooting the planet’s capacity to support us, living as far beyond Earth’s means as many of us are living beyond our own -- “Posterity doesn’t vote and doesn’t exert much influence in the market-place. So the living go on stealing from their descendants."

The problem is that most Americans don’t realize that’s what they’re doing. They think they’re trying to grab hold of a better future for themselves and their kids and grandkids. They don’t realize that all that grabbing has dramatically reduced what they and their grandkids are going to be able to get. They haven’t caught on to the finite planet thing, the idea that on a finite planet, every resource except sunshine and other forms of radiation from outer space is either a one-shot deal -- like fossil fuels, water, minerals and metals -- or a timed-release one -- like forests, fisheries, topsoil -- that we haven’t been giving Life enough time to re-release.

They don’t get it that we can’t keep treating species like pop-up critters in a state fair shooting gallery and ecosystems like toilets and all-you-can-eat buffets. They’ve got it in their heads that some-magic-how, our population can keep growing and so can “the” economy, as if we had a whole bunch more Earth’s we could import stuff from when we run low (like we have now of cheap-easy oil, water, food, minerals, metals, and money) or move to when this one’s used up or its weather is havocked.

Now I know, Mr. King, that you’re familiar with the predicament we’re in, which is scarier even than the hot-housed version of some of our present quandaries you offered up in Under the Dome, which is saying a lot.

And I suspect you’re not any more thrilled than I am or millions of other Americans are with the bickering and dithering of our present crop of leaders who, if they’ve seen the handwriting on the wall -- the pending end of Life as we know it if we keep trying to do business as usual -- are as clueless about its meaning for them and for us as Babylon’s King Belshazzar was in the book of Daniel when that dead hand, like something right out of one of your stories, wrote mene, mene, tekel u-Pharsin on his palace wall.

And given that you’ve never quit the kindly, off-the-beaten-track, small-town, good-neighbors environs you were born in for the bright lights of a big city, I suspect you also know that where surviving creeping chaos, a critical mass of crises, and pending systemic collapse are concerned, small is not only beautiful but sustainable. And local is a lot more manageable -- even when it comes to identifying and punishing the bad guys -- than global or even national, whether we’re talking economies or governments.

And it seems to me that, given your influence and the speed with which you can turn out a blockbuster, you might take my feeble attempt to point out the error of our ways, turn the truth of it into fiction and a few million Americans into Committees of Correspondence, planners of a new Declaration of Independence, this time from the global economy and the Powers that run it, and get the lion’s share of the benefit out of it.

So, here’s my contribution to your plot outline:

It’s 2011. The global economy, like any successful meme, has gone viral. It’s doing the same thing to the planet’s human and natural communities that HIV does to the human body. Really. Check this out. Point for point, the economy’s a dead ringer for the virus (pardon the pun).

• HIV is a tiny package of genetic information, an RNA code without any body attached to it. The global economy is a big package of socio-economic information, a set of ideas about a particular kind of economic system (without any body attached to it).


• HIV is held together by a protein wrapper like the sugar coating on a pill that makes it taste better. The wrapper acts like a camouflage, making it “taste better,” or at least not taste bad, to the bodies it hopes to infect so that they don’t reject it on first pass. The sugar coating that makes the viral economy taste good and camouflages its intent is a capitalist ideology of perpetual growth and progress and universal prosperity -- an easy sell to communities and nations lacking in material well-being


• Though it has some of the characteristics of living things, HIV is not a living thing. It’s a parasite, a taker. It lives off its hosts’ resources. In the process it weakens and sometimes kills them. Without workers, consumers, and believers, without Earth’s raw materials, other-than-human species and ecological services, the economy couldn’t feed itself, expand or grow. It’s a parasite -- a taker -- too.


• As a group, disease-causing agents like viruses are called “pathogens.” The directors, managers, promoters and primary beneficiaries of the global economy are traditionally called “the Powers That Be,” or simply “the Powers.”


• The secret of a virus’s success is mobility. Viruses need reliable methods of transportation to move them from host to host. Many viruses are airborne. HIV is liquid-borne. It gets around in bodily fluids like semen, blood, and breast milk, and through contact between mucous-lined -- moist -- tissues. Ditto the global economy. It spreads from community to community, nation to nation, by means of liquid assets and fluid exchanges of money, credit, loans, “floats,” entitlements, tax breaks and incentive, and through money-lined contacts between its participants, particularly the Powers.


• HIV targets and takes over -- it dominates -- the immune system, a system distributed throughout the body that protects, defends, heals, and restores health to the body. By means of this domination of the immune system it dominates the whole body. The viral global economy targets and takes over -- it dominates the Earth’s equivalent of an immune system -- the natural and human communities that in the past have been able to protect, defend, heal, and restore health to themselves, their ecosystems, and the biosphere, the whole body of Life on Earth.


• HIV invades immune system cells, disables their protective and healing capabilities, and reprograms them to make millions of copies of itself. After it has used up a cell’s resources, its copies disperse to other parts of the body and other hosts, destroying captured cells and whole organ systems in the process. The global economy persuades, buys, cajoles, coerces, or forces its way into human and natural communities. It undermines their ability to provide for and protect themselves, and reprograms them to support its growth and expansion. When it has depleted local resources, it moves on, leaving communities and nations in ruins.


• HIV makes the body vulnerable to all manner of infection and disease. The global economy makes every place on Earth vulnerable to the environmental, economic, social, and political symptoms that result from contracting Earth’s equivalent of AIDS.


• Left untreated, the human immunodeficiency virus morphs into AIDS and dies when the host does. Left untreated, the viral economy becomes too big not to fail. It consumes all it can of its host -- Life on Earth as we know it -- and dies when it's host does.

In your page-turner, you could turn the viral economy into a virus that attacks the human brain, affecting people according to their adrenalin levels, making some more aggressive and self-interested and others merely more attracted to comfort, convenience, and consumption.

Of course the virus would mutate as it evolved and spread, turning off parts of the brain given to reason and clear perception of reality. You get my drift. As the virus got stronger, humans would become less intelligent and more susceptible to it.

You’d have no end of crises, villains, causes of death, and scenes of mayhem to work with. Bankrupt state and local economies, millions living in the streets of un-TARP-covered cities, killer storms and broke emergency management agencies, the unemployed and homeless wandering zombie-like in the streets, kudzu and ivy growing over Main Street, species going belly up everywhere you look, suicides, murders, thievery, empty store shelves, cars, and trains and planes stalled for lack of fuel, no more plastic anything, people dropping like flies for lack of food and medicine, money worth the paper it’s printed on, governments closed down, their staffs, lobbyists and legislators walking home (like that guy in Cold Mountain who walked home after the Civil War before there were cars and planes), brownouts and power grid failures, invasive species, mutated bacteria and pandemic MRSAs, mass migrations...

The end of Life as we know it has got to be the scariest story you’ve attempted, despite the fact that it’s coming true. And while we non-fiction hacks try desperately, book after book, post after post, and page after page to persuade the not-yet-converted that Americans need to get together and work together to take our future back before there’s nothing left worth taking back, you could pull it off in a thousand pages or less before the 2012 elections.

And you could even give it an uncharacteristic happy ending, where a critical mass of little American cities like Bangor, Maine, and neighborhoods in big cities like Seattle figure out how to ward off and survive the infection. Their leaders and people could become sort of like antibodies -- that was Paul Hawken’s idea in Blessed Unrest -- dedicated to healing, protecting, and providing for themselves and their natural support systems. And they could discover the joys of resourcefulness, resilience, reciprocity, recycling -- and survival against the odds.

But, then, that wouldn’t be a very Stephen King ending, would it? You’ll come up with something better. And scarier. Feel free to take this plot line and run with it.

All best,

Ellen LaConte

[Ellen LaConte, an independent scholar, organic gardener, gregarious recluse, and freelance writer living in the Yadkin River watershed of the Piedmont bioregion of North Carolina, is a contributing editor to Green Horizon Magazine and The Ecozoic. Her most recent book, the controversial Life Rules: Why so much is going wrong everywhere at once and how Life teaches us to fix it (Green Horizon/iUniverse, 2010), is available on order from bookstores and online booksellers. You can learn more about the book, read her recent posts, or sign up for her bimonthly online newsletter, Starting Point, at www.ellenlaconte.com. Read more by Ellen LaConte on The Rag Blog.]

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Ted McLaughlin : The Death of Juvenile Justice in Texas

Photo by Robert Essel / Corbis.
It's a crime:
The death of juvenile justice in Texas

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / June 5, 2011

Juvenile Justice in the state of Texas has been on a wild ride for the last few years. It all started when some abuse was discovered in a West Texas state juvenile facility. The newspapers and other media jumped on it and made it sound as though abuse was rampant throughout the system administered by the Texas Youth Commission (TYC).

This was not true, but a good story is better than the truth for many.

Was there abuse at that facility? Yes. But what many failed to report was that several people at that facility reported the abuse and tried to get it stopped. The ball was dropped by the agency's leadership in Austin, who did not immediately deal with the situation. If they had dealt with it promptly (as previous administrations had done when abuse was uncovered), the current mess might have been avoided. But they didn't, and the story quickly spiraled out of control.

The Texas Youth Commission has never dealt with a large number of young people in the state. Only about one-half of 1% of juveniles in the state ever came in contact with TYC, and fewer than that were actually incarcerated by the state. At the time the scandal broke there were slightly more than 5,000 students incarcerated by the state (and a few thousand on parole). About half of these juveniles would eventually make their way into prison after becoming adults.

When you think about it that's a pretty remarkable success record for TYC -- considering these were the worst juveniles the state had (and churches, schools, probation, and drug and other treatment programs had not succeeded with them). But that was ignored in the rush to "fix" the system after the scandal broke.

In a way, the perfect storm was created by the convergence of several things -- a storm that would result in the virtual destruction of the juvenile justice system.

First was the West Texas scandal. The abuse was not widespread, but media accounts made it seem like it was. Second was the desire of some on the left to reform the system. This is not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself. All justice systems (both juvenile and adult) should be continually examined for ways to improve them.

But in portraying the juveniles as "helpless children," these reformers ignored the fact that all of them were criminals who had committed serious felonies and posed a danger to their communities.

The third element was the huge budget problems in Texas. While the Republicans (who control the state government) might not agree with the reformers on a philosophical level, they saw the opportunity to save a lot of money by gutting a state agency (in the guise of "reforming" it).

These elements resulted in cutting the number of juveniles incarcerated by half. This was done by cutting the amount of time a juvenile was incarcerated (ignoring whether they were ready to be released or not) and closing down some facilities.

Just last Friday it was announced that an additional three facilities would soon be closed (and many parole offices would be closed). The justification for this was two-fold. Legislators said that juvenile crime was dropping (therefore fewer facilities were needed), and more juveniles would be dealt with on a county level instead of referring them to TYC.

Both of these are bogus arguments.

While it is true that juvenile crime has been falling by a small amount (single-digit percentages), the amount of bed space in the agency has been reduced by a huge percentage (at least 70%). The assumption is that the counties will now deal with most of these juveniles. The problem with that is that the counties were given very little more money (and the money for drug and other treatment facilities was actually reduced). Also ignored was the fact that the counties had already done everything they had the capacity to do before referring the juveniles to TYC.

So the counties have done what they can, and the state has very little capacity for housing the juveniles the counties can no longer control (which is resulting in sentences as short as 90 days -- and 30 days for those referred by parole). It is ludicrous to think that a juvenile criminal can be rehabilitated in 90 days (after many local agencies failed to do it in a much longer period of time).

Now the legislators and reformers may think they have done something good by preventing the incarceration of these young criminals, but they haven't. The police and courts still have to deal with them, and many of them cannot be left in the community (because it would endanger the community).

What is going to be done with them? The answer is obvious and is already starting to take place all over the state -- they will be sent to an ADULT PRISON. They might not receive as much help there, but the community will be safer and they will be kept longer.

The truth is that the juvenile justice system in Texas has not been reformed -- it has been destroyed. And juvenile justice in the state has been thrown back to the time when most serious juvenile criminals would be sent to a prison rather than a juvenile facility. This means that more juveniles will be abused and placed in danger, not less. And the counties should not be blamed for doing this, since it has been forced on them by the state legislature.

There will be talk of wonderful reform in the coming days. Don't believe it. What we are really witnessing is the death of the juvenile justice system in Texas.

In the interest of full disclosure, I must tell you that I have spent most of my working life in various forms of law enforcement -- including 15 years in the Texas Youth Commission (eight years working in a correctional institution and seven years working in parole). I am currently retired.

[Ted McLaughlin also posts at jobsanger. Read more articles by Ted McLaughlin at The Rag Blog.]

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Robert Jensen : Toni Tipton-Martin and the Politics of the Kitchen

The many faces of Aunt Jemima. Image from The Jemima Code.
The Jemima Code:
Toni Tipton-Martin explores the
politics of the kitchen, past and present

By Robert Jensen / The Rag Blog / June 5, 2011

AUSTIN -- In the cafeteria-turned-classroom at UT Elementary School, Toni Tipton-Martin struggles to keep six restless boys focused on hot cocoa, the day’s nutrition lesson. She starts with a store-bought cocoa mix, guiding the students through the list of “all those crazy ingredients” -- the tongue-twisting list of scary-sounding additives and preservatives -- before explaining how they will use four simple ingredients to make their own.

The students are eager to measure and mix, but Tipton-Martin is also teaching critical thinking -- and patience -- in her SANDE mentoring and training program. She has them examine various kinds of chocolate, encouraging them to “taste with your sense of smell -- the cinnamon makes it Mexican chocolate,” trying to engage these youngsters of the digital age in a more embodied way of knowing.

When she is satisfied that they understand what they are doing, the boys go to work with their measuring cups and mixing bowls, producing their cocoa creations that will go home with them in a plastic bag.

When the lesson is over, Tipton-Martin walks the students back to their homeroom, past the vegetable-and-herb garden that is also part of SANDE (the acronym stands for “Spirit, Attitude, Nutrition, Deeds, and Emotions”). She isn’t just trying to teach young people to cook healthy food and understand nutrition, but to understand where food comes from and why it all matters.

Folks in the United States are coming to understand that all this does matter very much. Industrial agriculture and fast food still dominate, but more and more people are shopping at farmers markets, seeking out healthy food, and recognizing the social costs of reckless eating habits.

For Tipton-Martin -- an African-American chef teaching mostly black and brown kids -- it’s a particularly opportune moment to be working on these issues, as Michelle Obama is using the First Lady’s pulpit to focus attention on childhood obesity. Last June, Tipton-Martin was one of the chefs and nutritionists on the South Lawn of the White House to promote Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign, and this week she’s front and center at the annual conference of the International Association of Culinary Professionals being held in Austin (she’s chair of the host city committee).

So, all in all, it’s been a good year for Tipton-Martin, as her career takes a turn around another of several bends. Her resume includes newspaper journalism (a food writer/editor, first at The Los Angeles Times and then the Cleveland Plain Dealer), cookbook writing and editing, and non-profit work (a four-year stint at Southern Foodways Alliance , a center dedicated to documenting and celebrating the diverse food cultures of the American South, housed at the University of Mississippi).

Since moving to Austin in 1999, she’s created a niche for herself as a writer/activist/social entrepreneur, a status marked by the Community Leadership Award she received from the University of Texas in 2010.

Yet for all the success, the 52-year-old Tipton-Martin is a woman haunted, not by traumatic memories from her own life but by Aunt Jemima. Not just by the Aunt Jemima caricature -- the commercial persona for the “Mammy” figure from plantation life that has sold pancake mix and syrup -- but by the real African-American women in kitchens through the centuries, during and after slavery, whose work and wisdom has been ignored.

That’s why, no matter which of her current enterprises is consuming her time, Tipton-Martin is always working on cracking “The Jemima Code,” her phrase for getting past the caricature to the real lives of those women.

Drawing on varied sources -- oral and written histories from both slaves and slave-holding families, old cookbooks, and people’s stories -- Tipton-Martin has for the past two years been adding stories of those women to her website by that name, convinced that there’s a deep lesson in how white Americans, especially in the South, have dealt with these women.

In one of her blog entries, Tipton-Martin explains that “Aunt Jemima became the embodiment of our deepest antipathy for, and obsession with, the women who fed us with grace and skill.” Many white families depended on Jemima and despised her at the same time, leaving these women who cooked and cared for families on the lowest rung of the social ladder. Rather than merely pity such women as exploited laborers or romanticize them as the ultimate maternal figure, Tipton-Martin wants to tell the stories of their skill and creativity:

Why don’t we celebrate their contributions to American culture the way we venerate the imaginary Betty Crocker? Why wasn’t their true legacy preserved? Can we ever forget the images of ignorant, submissive, selfless, sassy, asexual despots? Is it possible to replace the mostly unflattering pictures of generous waistlines bent over cast iron skillets burned into our eyes? Will we ever believe that strong African women, who toted wood and built fires before even thinking about beating biscuit dough or mixing cakes, left us more than just their formulas for good pancakes?

Tipton-Martin’s interest is not merely historical; by telling the stories of these women, she hopes not only to remind the black community of their strength but also to give white people an opening for honest self-reflection.

When Tipton-Martin says she is haunted by those women, it is really the racism, sexism, and economic inequality they faced that haunt her. And it’s not really those historical forces, but the enduring presence of those inequalities in American life that Tipton-Martin can’t shake.

“These women create ways for me to interact with my own past,” she says, and struggle with the present.

Toni Tipton-Martin talks to UT Elementary students as they head to the garden. Image from UT Blogs.
Tipton-Martin grew up in the middle class in Los Angeles at a time when more opportunities were opening up for some blacks, especially those who were trained to fit into white society. Tipton-Martin was one of them, a good student who took to journalism and early on learned how to live “in costume,” offering a profile that wouldn’t scare white people.

That kind of bargain with the dominant culture can be soothing but is rarely satisfying, and Tipton-Martin’s own struggles run through “Jemima Code.” For example, she tells the story of Vera Beck, who was the test kitchen cook at the Cleveland newspaper. Tipton-Martin writes that Beck “forced me to circle back and confront [my] ‘contrary instincts’”:

I thought I was contented -- a thirty-something food editor living far away from home on the eastern shore of Lake Erie, enjoying amazing and exotic world cuisine -- the daughter of a health-conscious, fitness-crazed cook whose experiments with tofu, juicing and smoothies predated the fads. In the few short years we had together at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Vera taught me a few life lessons while showing me the way to light and flaky buttermilk biscuits.

Among those lessons was the recognition that Tipton-Martin’s upbringing in a more integrated world also had cut her off from a tradition based on observation and apprenticeship in the kitchen, which was about more than cooking. “It was entirely possible that I would stumble blindly through the rest of my life without ever discovering the Aunt Jemima spirit living in me, if it hadn’t been for Vera Beck,” she writes.

Tipton-Martin is blunt in describing the complexity of the race and gender politics of her life. Being light-skinned with naturally straight hair -- “I look like the Jezebel house servant mulatto girls of slavery” -- made it easier to enter the middle class, she says. But at the same time, her appearance meant she had to “overcome the stereotype that I’m Barbie, too.” She speaks about the advantages she’s had, but doesn’t ignore either the racism or sexism of the culture.

As time goes on, Tipton-Martin is less willing to don the costume, less interested in presenting herself and her work in ways that make it easy for others. Rather than cashing in on the moment by writing a breezy recipe book that exploits the women of the Jemima Code -- something along the lines of “Mammy’s sassy lessons for healthy cooking” -- she wants to write a book that confronts the social and political issues. “Everybody’s intrigued,” she says, when she takes the idea to agents and publishers, but wary.

Tipton-Martin knows well how the white world rewards people of color who fit in, rather than challenge, white norms. But she finds it more and more difficult to smile away the racist or ignorant comments.

An example: At the opening event for the new Foodways Texas project (she’s a board member), Tipton-Martin said a white woman told her that this work on food and nutrition is so important because “those people” come from cultures with bad diets. “I used to just smile” at such comments, she says, “but that day I told her the problem was not ‘their’ cultures but fast food and processed food, which is an American problem."

Tipton-Martin has increasingly less patience for what we might call “the ignorance of the privileged” -- the desire of people with status and wealth to explain away problems of inequality as simply the failure of “those people” rather than think about the injustice of the system, from which the privileged benefit.

But she also recognizes that people struggling in difficult circumstances -- especially the kids from poor neighborhoods, disproportionately black and brown -- need more than political analysis. She rejects the simplistic “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” prescription of conservatives but believes that young people need role models. That’s where the women of the Jemima Code come in:

For me, they are important role models. They’re the closest I can get to saying to this [younger] generation that there are women who had it harder than you. Even though you think your life is really hard -- and it is, and there are all these forces against you -- you can persevere. The women of the Jemima Code took control of their lives under circumstances in where they didn’t even have control of their own bodies, but they were able to claim their dignity.

For Tipton-Martin, those women are not just potential role models for young people but for herself as well. She writes, “I discover that the woman I am becoming is a mere shadow of the women they were: patient and loving; smart, talented, hard-working; strong physically and emotionally, compassionate; multi-tasking.”

Tipton-Martin has a habit of engaging in the critical self-reflection that she asks of others, which leads to a professional and personal restlessness. She was raised to assimilate, to fit in, to prove to the dominant culture that she could make it under the rules written by white people, by men, by the wealthy. She was fitted for “the costume,” but found it increasingly uncomfortable.

“As long as I could just keep popping from costume to costume, I didn’t have to reconcile any of this and find out what it is that I hoped to accomplish,” Tipton-Martin says.

Negotiating life without a costume means talking honestly about a history -- collective and personal -- that the dominant culture desperately wants to ignore. That means not only highlighting the skill and accomplishments of the women of the Jemima Code, but facing the pain, anger and shame that comes with living in a system that still values white people, men, and the wealthy over others.

For Tipton-Martin, that conversation can start at dinner by giving a voice to the women who for so long put food on the table.

LINKS:

• Tipton-Martin’s website
• The Jemima Code website
• Watch Tipton-Martin’s talk on the Jemima Code to the Culinary Historians of Southern California in November 2010.

[Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin. He is the author of All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice, (Soft Skull Press, 2009) and Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007); Jensen is also co-producer of the documentary film Abe Osheroff: One Foot in the Grave, the Other Still Dancing, which chronicles the life and philosophy of the longtime radical activist. Robert Jensen can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu. Read more articles by Robert Jensen on The Rag Blog.]

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David P. Hamilton : French Healthcare is the World's Best

Image from Yale Journal of Medicine and Law.

CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE.

Letters from France III:
The French healthcare system
is the best in the world

By David P. Hamilton / The Rag Blog / June 1, 2011

“There are no uninsured in France. That’s completely unheard of. There is no case of anybody going broke over their health costs.” -- Victor Rodwin, New York University

[This is the third in a series of dispatches from France by The Rag Blog's David P. Hamilton.]

PARIS -- President Obama dropped the healthcare “public option” like a hot potato at the very onset of last year’s debate in the U.S. over reforming healthcare. Despite polls of average citizens to the contrary, Obama asserted there wasn’t enough support for it, meaning that there wasn’t enough support among the economic elite, health insurance corporations, pharmaceutical manufacturers, doctors, and other medical capitalists, and hence, not enough support among members of Congress beholden to those interests. Let’s take a look at what they’re so afraid of.

The World Health Organization (WHO) ranks the French health care system as the best in the world. The U.S. system ranks 37th. The complex details of the procedures used to determine these rankings are available on the WHO website. The WHO has hundreds of rankings on health related topics as specific as beer consumption by country. The U.S. fails to distinguish itself favorably in any of them.

Of particular note is the ranking by total health care expenditures as a percentage of the GNP where the U.S. at 15.4% leads the world, only exceeded by the Marshall Islands and far ahead of any other major industrialized nation.

Hence, while the U.S. health care system produces mediocre results, it is the most expensive. For France, with a system rightists consider far too expensive to maintain, the corresponding figure is 11.4%. Different studies show this disparity even greater, at 16% and 10.7%. In the U.S., $6,400 is spent annually per capita on health care costs while the average French person spends barely over half that amount, $3,300.

Other health care assessments tell much the same story. Infant mortality is a principal indicator of the quality of health care. In France, it is 3.9 per 1,000 live births. In the U.S., the rate is nearly 80% higher at 7.0. Life expectancy is 79.4 years in France, two years more than in the U.S. Death from respiratory disease, often preventable, is 31.2 per 100,000 in France while in the US it is 61.5, despite the fact that nearly twice the percentage of French adults smoke tobacco compared to the U.S.

France also has many more hospital beds and doctors per capita than the U.S. A more recent study by researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine measured “amenable mortality,” a measure of deaths that could have been prevented with good health care, in 19 industrialized nations. France again came in first. The U.S. was last. Not surprisingly, French citizens’ satisfaction with their system is 65%, the highest level among all European countries, compared to 40% in the U.S.

The French pay for their healthcare primarily by paying taxes that cover medical services. These taxes are high. Americans don’t pay as much in taxes, but pay much more when one counts insurance costs and their expenses for medicines, doctors, and hospitals.

The French system offers universal coverage and everyone is required to participate. In the U.S, 15.4% (46.3 million people) have no coverage at all and about twice that many are underinsured. Hence, there are roughly twice as many Americans with inadequate coverage as there are people in France.

The French system doesn’t cover everything. Co-payments in France range from 10 to 40% for most medical services. Hence, 92% of the French have complementary private insurance. This private health insurance makes up 12.7% of French health care expenditures. All private health insurance in France is required to offer guaranteed renewability, so you cannot be dropped if you get sick.

Most private health insurance is provided by non-profit organizations and their “modest” premiums are usually paid by employers. Furthermore, the more sick one is, the higher percentage is paid by the insurance system, 100% for 30 serious and chronic illnesses such as cancer and diabetes.

This feature is known as “solidarity,” a consciousness of community almost altogether absent in the hyper-individualistic U.S. Victor Rodwin, a professor of health polity at New York University states, “There are no uninsured in France. That’s completely unheard of. There is no case of anybody going broke over their health costs.”

How are the French able to accomplish this? First, the insurance system is run by quasi-public, non-profit agencies that cover different sectors of French society. These agencies directly negotiate prices for medicines with manufacturers, homeopathic medicines included. They also negotiate compensation schedules with doctors. Doctors are free to charge whatever they want, but the amount the system will reimburse is fixed.

Another reason for the lower costs is that, in the words of Kerry Capell in Business Week, “France reimburses its doctors at a far lower rate than U.S physicians would accept.” French doctors earn about a third as much as their American counterparts who are the best-paid group of professionals in the world. But French doctors have no student loans to pay since their medical training was paid for by the state.

In addition, France is not tort-friendly, so malpractice insurance is negligible. The French government also pays two-thirds of relatively high social security taxes for doctors. In France, general practitioners are specifically mandated to be concerned with prevention, public health education, and epidemiology.

In France, unlike in the U.S., getting rich is not the principal motive for pursuing a career in medicine. (I have as much education as a typical doctor, but the most I ever earned as a public school teacher in the U.S. was less than $45,000 a year. Stupid me.)

The French health system is financed primarily by a 13.55% payroll tax on income, of which almost 95% is paid by employers. In addition, there is a 5.25% “general social contribution tax” on all forms of income that contributes to health care. This tax is reduced to 3.95% on pensions. Special taxes on alcohol and tobacco also support the health care system.

Most Americans assume that universal coverage means losing one’s choice of doctors. This is not the case in France where one can go to any doctor one chooses. A patient can even go directly to specialists without referral, although the level of government compensation is higher if one goes through a general practitioner to get a referral. Furthermore, there are no lengthy delays in getting an appointment.

Recent cost-cutting “reforms” in France now require mandatory co-pays; 1 euro ($1.42 at today’s exchange rate) for a doctor visit, .5 euro ($.71) for prescriptions, and 16-18 euros ($24) a day for hospital stays. I pay several times more than that at the VA.

According to Joseph Shapiro on NPR, “the French live longer and healthier lives... because good care starts at birth. There are months of paid job leave for mothers [and now fathers] who work. New mothers get a child allowance. There are neighborhood health clinics for new mothers and their babies, home visits from nurses, and subsidized day care.”

How did the French achieve the creation of this system? The simple answer is that they elected governments led by socialists and communists who advocated these programs.

In 1930 the CGT (Confederation Generale du Travail), the largest labor union confederation, began to press for a healthcare program for workers. The CGT was then controlled by the French Communist Party. In 1934, the Communist and Socialist Parties formed the “Popular Front” and two years later won the national elections leading to the presidency of Leon Blum, first socialist and first Jewish president of France.

The Popular Front government instituted a program of healthcare coverage similar to Medicare, but for workers, not the elderly. This system was abolished during the Nazi occupation, but the Free French in London developed plans for an expanded system in the postwar period. Those involved included many CGT leaders, principally communists.

(It is probably necessary to point out to the American reader that after its initial treasonous collaboration during the period of the Nazi/Soviet non-aggression pact, Communist Party members comprised the principal element in the French Resistance.)

In 1945, the provisional government established Securite Sociale, a program of health care and pension benefits. It was a compromise negotiated between Gaullist and Communist representatives in the new French National Assembly. The conservative Gaullists were opposed to a state-run healthcare system, while the communists favored a complete nationalization. The compromise laid the foundation for the current system. Subsequently, expansions in the system have principally occurred during Socialist Party-led governments.

In 1958, a survey of the French asked, “Should the healthy pay for the sick or should everyone get back only what they put into the system?” Eighty-six percent answered that the healthy should pay for the sick and 95% approved of the compulsory nature of health insurance.

This points to a central problem for the implementation of universal healthcare in the U.S. Americans lack social consciousness. Capitalist culture denigrates social solidarity and glorifies individualism. This, of course, favors the highly class conscious capitalists who are quite well organized and who exhibit admirable solidarity.

The “reforms” instituted by Obama represent what the healthcare industry was willing to accept in return for the mandate requiring everyone to buy their defective product. Those measures won’t budge the figures that clearly show the defects of the U.S. system where healthcare remains a commodity. In France, it is an inalienable right that no politician would dare to violate.

[David P. Hamilton has been a political activist in Austin since the late 1960s when he worked with SDS and wrote for The Rag, Austin's underground newspaper. Read more articles by David P. Hamilton on The Rag Blog.]

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Dr. Stephen R. Keister : Democrats, Medicare, and the 'Jaws of Victory'

Jaws: Leaving an opening for the Republicans.
From the jaws of victory...
The Democrats, Medicare and
the 'winning message'

By Dr. Stephen R. Keister / The Rag Blog / June 1, 2011

"In a country well governed poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed wealth is something to be ashamed of." -- Confucius, Analects VIII, c.500 B.C.

I share the great joy of the progressive community at the Democratic victory in the New York 26th District. All of the pundits appearing on TV news, amid the pharmaceutical commercials ad nauseam, inform us that the Democrats have a "winning message" relative to Medicare come 2012. Pause for a moment, please, and consider how in recent years the Democrats have shown an aptitude for grabbing defeat out of the jaws of victory.”

Yes, maintaining Medicare, and Social Security in their present forms is a very inspiring message. But we have some 17 months ahead for the message to be distorted and overwhelmed by the Republican smear machine. We must recall that we are not dealing with a terribly well informed, cognitively alert population.

I have worked in the area of educating the public about single payer health care for some years. At many a seminar I have been approached by a senior citizen who heatedly informs me, "I don't need government health insurance; I have Medicare! " A similar situation exists among many of the elderly who have Medicare Advantage plans and feel that they are on Medicare.

They do not realize that they were conned by slick salesmanship into giving up their Medicare and signing up for a private insurance plan underwritten by the government at 17% more per year cost to the Medicare Trust Fund.

They are unaware that their "benefits" are set by a profit-making insurance company (why have an insurance industry except to profit the owners and stockholders?) who have by slight-of-hand modified their "benefits" in a manner that appears on superficial examination to provide something better than Medicare per se.

They overlook the deductions, the exclusions, the co-pays, that are not inherent in regular Medicare. I wonder how many Medicare Advantage members will have their way paid to the Mayo Clinic or Johns Hopkins should they wish? My regular Medicare does not restrict my choices. Many Medicare Advantage plans do limit choice save within a specified area or to specified doctors or institutions.

In any event, the current health care legislation progressively reduces the payout from the Medicare Trust Fund to private insurance companies for underwriting the Medicare Advantage plans. Rest assured that the Republican spin machine will play on the naive Medicare Advantage customers with the slogan "the Democrats are going to cut your Medicare."

I would hope that the Democrats will immediately take up this discussion and explain in very simple terms that Medicare Advantage is not Medicare and, indeed, in the long run Medicare Advantage plans will worsen the fluidity of the Medicare Trust.

Granted Medicare expenses, when compared to income from the current wage tax, have become excessive, especially in view of the high unemployment. Medicare costs must be reduced. There are many factors involved, but let us begin with a paragraph from Maggie Mahar's book, Money Driven Medicine:

All too often, hospitals employ some of their most sophisticated tools crudely, even callously, in futile end-of-life care. While roughly 80 percent of Americans hope to die at home, 75 percent end their lives in hospitals or nursing homes. Of these, a third die after 10 days in an ICU. This helps explain why roughly one-quarter of all Medicare dollars are spent during the final year of a patient’s life, thanks in part to the cost of drugs and devices that prolong not just life but pain and suffering.

Perhaps this is a place that rational, fearless, public servants can begin cutting expenses. Here are some suggestions:

1. A presidential panel consisting of medical ethicists, perhaps from Georgetown, Princeton, and The New School, joined by specialists in geriatric medicine and internists or family doctors with university connections (pray not Liberty or Pat Roberts universities) to study a rational end of life program to be incorporated into the Medicare law. Of course the Republicans, who turn away from the 45,000 Americans who die each year sans health care insurance, will shout "death panels!" There are situations, however, where we must turn to rational planning and ignore the cries of the idiots.


2. The wage tax must be extended to all income levels and not be arbitrarily cut off for those with an income of $100,000 or thereabouts.


3. A reasonable additional fee must be enacted for Medicare coverage for those with a joint retirement income over $150,000.


4. There must be subsidized medical school tuition for those candidates who contract to do general practice, internal medicine, or pediatrics for a period of 10 years after graduation, while at the same time fees paid by Medicare for physicians in these specialities must be increased, and the disproportionate fees for those in the "invasive specialities" must be reduced to reasonable levels.


5. The payouts of billions in Medicare funds to the pharmaceutical and insurance industries under Medicare Part D must be curtailed.


6. Medicare fraud must be curtailed and we must take a close look at medical equipment companies that advertise extensively on TV. Are all these gadgets necessary?


7. A rational plan for prescription medicine costs, like they have in Canada and Europe, must be enacted as a part of the Medicare law.


8. The cost of procedures must be reviewed. For instance, a CT Scan in the United States costs more than twice what it would cost in most developed nations, and the same can be said for MRI scans. Of course the reason our scans cost more is that every hospital that possibly can has invested in the equipment in the hopes of increasing their profits.
   

In the meantime another player has appeared on the scene. The hospice industry is now being commercialized. Some 40 years ago the hospice movement began to provide humane end-of-life care to those facing death. This was a movement started by compassionate, dedicated volunteers. Happily, we in Erie, Pennsylvania, have one of the outstanding programs in the country.

Now big business has entered the scene and once again will profit from the dying and their grieving families. Read more about this at the Physicians for a National Health Program website. This article is based on a more detailed study in the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics. I felt for many years that the predatory burial industry had stretched the limits of decency in the United States but the advance of corporatism into the realm of dying is beyond my ethical comprehension.

Once again ProPublica is at the forefront in exposing the collusion between the pharmaceutical industry and sections of the medical establishment. We never see generic medications advertised on television -- only brand name products, many of which are remakes of older products. Some we see advertised have had limited clinical trials, like the anti-inflammatory medication that was widely marketed several years ago, but was -- after prolonged clinical testing -- found to be a cause of heart disease and is no longer on the market.

Again quoting Money Driven Medicine:

In 2002, when Families USA, a non-profit health care consumer advocacy group, reviewed the financial reports submitted to the SEC by nine of the largest U.S. based pharmaceutical companies, the group's analysis showed drugmakers investing only $19 billion in R & D, while shelling out some $45 billion for marketing, advertising, and administration. Meanwhile the industry pocketed $31 billion in profits.

Finally, our elderly population must be informed -- and then informed once again -- that the Ryan Plan will do away with Medicare as we know it, with its "vouchers" for buying health insurance from private companies. We must remember that no private insurance company is required to insure any specific individual, and that currently private insurance companies do all in their power not to insure the elderly.

So, if an older person is even able to obtain insurance, in all probability with a large deductible, the voucher will be sent directly to the insurance company. Some estimates suggest that, on the average, the individual will be required to spend $6,000 out-of-pocket to supplement the voucher.

I close with a sobering quote from Mahatma Gandhi: " You assist an evil system most effectively by obeying its orders and decrees." Let us encourage the average citizen not to fall for the blather of the politicians who are in the pay of the corporations.

[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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FILM / William Michael Hanks : Turk Pipkin's 'Building Hope'

Turk Pipkin's Building Hope:
A story of how little it takes
to make a big difference

By William Michael Hanks / The Rag Blog / June 1, 2011

Building Hope is the third of a trilogy of films by Austin-based filmmaker Turk Pipkin exploring the challenges facing the youth of the world today.

The first film, Nobelity, gathered together the ideas of a number of Nobel Laureates. The second, One Peace at a Time -- subtitled "a film about a messed up world... and how we could fix it" -- visited projects around the world that were making a difference for children's rights, and featured Muhammad Yunus, Steve Chu, Desmond Tutu, and Willie Nelson.

Pipkin's latest, Building Hope, is the most compelling of all. By following one single project through from concept to completion, the film illuminates the lives of the participants around the light of the event itself.

Beauty is the first emotion that the film evokes. Set in the mountains of Kenya, among some of the most dramatic scenery on Earth, the film reveals the land, the wildlife, and the people as the spectacular photography unfolds. Through good composition and editing, the viewer enters a place of wonder and brighter vision. The photography by Turk, his wife Christy, and his daughters, Katie and Lilly, reveals the love both given to and returned by this rural community.

The project began when Turk met Wangari Maathai while working on One Peace at a Time. She started the Green Belt movement in Africa and Turk went there to plant trees. But what he really wanted to do was plant trees at a school. That's how he met Joseph Mutongu and visited the Mahiga Primary School. It had mud floors and slat walls. Nevertheless the school's motto was -- and is -- "Hard Work Pays."

After planting his tree at the school, Turk returned home and, through the Nobelity Project -- Turk and Christy's Austin-based nonprofit -- raised some money to build a water system for the primary school. The kids and parents did the work.

Two years later Turk returned to Kenya and the Mahiga Primary School to see the finished water system. The electricity needed for the water purification also made it possible to have a computer lab. So he helped put that in place as well. He saw that there was no place for the students to go after they finished primary school so, with a call back home to Christy, they decided to help build a high school for the kids at Mahiga.

The financial requirements were daunting. Turk decided to combine the release of One Peace at a Time, a film about securing children's rights, with building the high school. He wanted it to be known as "the movie that built a high school." So he did fundraising for the school at showings of One Peace at a Time. He knew that a bigger school would require more clean water so he decided to build a basketball court to catch rainwater and purify it using solar power.

He recruited his friend, Willie Nelson, to help. Willie's response was: "That's a choir I want to sing in." The court would cost $100,000 so he called on the Nike Gamechangers Award who, together with Cameron Sinclair of Architecture for Humanity, began to design and build the school and basketball court, The whole Mahiga community enthusiastically participated with ideas and labor.

Greg Elsner, was selected to be the on-site architect. He would live in the community and see the project through. As Greg said, when he first came to Mahiga he didn't know anyone and the future location of the school was an open field. When he left he was part of the community and a two-story stone school house and full rainwater basketball court stood where the field had been.

The project was not without it's setbacks. Cost overruns, poor roads, and an AWOL contractor all had to be overcome. With the project a month behind schedule, Turk took the only sensible course -- a road trip. He wanted to see some of the partnership programs in other parts of Kenya.

One was Comfort the Children which works with special needs kids -- some of them going out in the community for the first time. In the Mukuru slum, Nairobi, Kenya, the SIDAREC Community Center will be a model for kids achieving freedom from poverty. And, while he was there, Turk visited with President Obama's sister, Youth Counselor Auma Obama. She works with the "Sport for Social Change and Youth Empowerment Initiative," concentrating on building community infrastructure.

On returning, Turk, who is six-foot-seven himself, undertook to teach the kids basketball -- a sport they had never played before. Fortunately, the first adult mentor at the school was Ester Diaga, who had toured Africa playing for the Kenyan women's basketball team. She had the moves, and with the kid's enthusiasm, Mahiga was well on it's way to being a serious contender.

One of the students, George Abrahams, was given a journalism scholarship. While Turk was away, Abrahams shot the sequences of raising the rainwater basketball court with a pocket-sized Flip video camera. They built a giant 30-foot-high scaffold from eucalyptus poles to winch the steel trusses in place for the rainwater court. After dropping a truss, a storm came through and shut the operation down. It was a good time to have a safety meeting. George's scenes cut well with the rest of the film and really show what can be done with very low-cost equipment and a hopeful attitude.

The climax of the film comes with the ribbon-cutting for the school and the first game is played on the new rainwater court. It hadn't rained in two months and as the game neared the finish it began to pour and the water tanks began to fill. It was like a cosmic alignment of community, time, and place.

Mahiga Hope High School, with capacity for 320 students, is now part of the Kieni West Education District. It will provide a healthy learning environment and pure water for the children of Mahiga for generations to come. Leave the world a little better place? I'll say. The music and photography alone make the film worth seeing. But seeing the miracle of positive change and feeling in some way a part of it is even better.

Building Hope opens Friday, June 3, 7 p.m., at the Violet Crown Cinema, located at 434 W. 2nd Street in Austin, and is scheduled to run through June 9. The Violet Crown is a lovely new downtown art house theater that features independent films. There are several showings a night, but it would be wise to get tickets early. This is one to see. It will restore your faith in people and in cinema, all for the price of a ticket -- not a bad deal all the way around.

Also on The Rag Blog:

• "A Simple Truth... or Two" by Turk Pipkin / Nov. 30, 2009
• "FILM / Turk Pipkin's Remarkable 'One Peace at a Time'" by William Michael Hanks / June 2, 2009
• "FILM / Turk Pipkin, and a Brief History of the Documentary Form" by William Michael Hanks / June 2, 2009

Links:

• Building Hope trailer
• Nobelity Project
• Turk's blog
• Willie Nelson Peace Research Institute

[William Michael Hanks has written, produced and directed film and television productions for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, The U. S. Information Agency, and for Public Broadcasting. His documentary film,The Apollo File, won a Gold Medal at the Festival of the Americas. Mike, who worked with the original Rag in Sixties Austin, lives in Nacagdoches, Texas. Read more articles by Mike Hanks on The Rag Blog.]

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