Via GreenPartyWatch.org
On Monday October 24, Massachusetts medical doctor Jill Stein held a press conference in Boston announcing her candidacy for the Green Party’s 2012 presidential nomination. Here is a video of her announcement speech, followed by a transcript, courtesy of JillStein.org:
Video
We stand here today at a time of great crisis for our nation – and a time of incredible potential for change. We face unprecedented, converging problems in our economy, our environment, human rights and the quest for peace. The American people are ready to meet these challenges, but many of us have, for good reason, lost confidence in the political establishment and its leaders in Washington.
These leaders have given us massive bailouts for Wall Street, layoffs on Main Street, declining wages for workers, wars for oil abroad, and attacks on Medicare and Social Security. They’re privatizing education, rolling back civil liberties and racial justice, plundering the environment, and driving us towards the calamity of climate change.
In response, the American people are standing up like we haven’t seen in decades. And they are providing the leadership that’s not coming from the political elite. People are realizing that We the People have to take charge, because the political parties that are serving the top 1% are not going to solve the problems the rest of us are facing. And we need people in Washington who refuse to be bought by lobbyist money and for whom change is not just a slogan.
My name is Jill Stein. And all this is why I’m here today to announce my candidacy for President of the United States.
I’m running because America deserves a new deal – a Green New Deal that provides a secure future for We the People and the planet we depend on. Here are five key pieces to the Green New Deal that we must achieve and can achieve, with your support:
First we can end unemployment in America now. It’s not only a crisis that hurts families and communities. It’s also a drag on our economy. Like FDR’s New Deal that helped us out of the Great Depression – the Green New Deal will directly create jobs. It will put 25 million people back to work, end the Bush/Obama recession and jump start the Green economy of the 21st century. The jobs it creates will build the infrastructure for a stable, renewable energy economy. This will provide real national security by making wars for oil obsolete. It will ensure that our energy dollars create jobs right here in America. It will build public transportation, clean manufacturing and sustainable agriculture. Ending unemployment through the Green New Deal is a triple win for people, the economy and the environment.
Second, it’s time for the United States, the richest country in the world, to catch up with the rest of the developed nations and provide health care for everyone as a human right. We can do this through a Medicare for all system that will not only provide quality health care – it will save trillions by streamlining the massive health insurance bureaucracy and ending runaway medical inflation.
Third, we can forgive the crushing student debt burden and liberate an entire generation of young people who are being turned into indentured servants. And we can provide tuition-free education from pre-kindergarten through college - an investment in our future that will pay off enormously.
Fourth, we can establish an immediate moratorium on home foreclosures. We can stop predatory banks from throwing families out of their homes, and we can require these banks to adjust outstanding balances to reflect current market value. The banks – not just homeowners – need to share the impact of the banks’ own fraud and abuse that started the foreclosure crisis in the first place.
Fifth, we can bring the troops – including the private security contractors – safely home now from Iraq and Afghanistan. That allows us to redirect the trillions of dollars being spent on needless wars and the bloated military back into urgent human needs here at home.
By entering into the Presidential dialogue, we will force real issues into the debate, and build the movement for all the critical solutions that the Wall Street politicians are trying to keep off the table. We’ll give people a choice and a voice in this election and enable them to go to the polls and vote to take their government back – and get it working for We the People again.
I’d like to say a few words as a mother and a doctor, because it’s from that perspective that I first became involved in the political process about 20 years ago. And it’s that perspective that keeps me in it.
As a doctor, I saw that our broken health care system was desperately failing the people who need it. As a mother, I was especially concerned about the new disease epidemics descending on our children – the rising tide of obesity and diabetes, asthma, cancer, learning disabilities and autism. As a practicing physician, I became impatient with dispensing pills in the clinic and then sending people back out to the things that were making them sick – the air pollution, toxic chemicals, community violence, degraded nutrition, car-centered transportation and poverty. I thought if only our elected officials knew how many human tragedies could be averted by fixing these things, how much money we could save by preventing costly diseases – I thought surely they would do something.
So I spent years working to persuade elected officials to act. Slowly I realized that in order to persuade elected officials, you need to shower them not with information, not with heartfelt human concerns and cost saving solutions, but rather with bundles of big campaign checks. That was my wake up call that if we want to prevent needless harm to our children, if we want to get the health care we need, or the education or the jobs – we need to first fix the broken political system.
Twenty years later, as a mother and a doctor, I see that our kids are still struggling – not only with high rates of diseases they shouldn’t have. But in every aspect of life – struggling for decent schools, to stay safe on the streets, to afford a college education, to get a job and to get out of debt. And they’re losing the battle on every front.
People ask me why I keep fighting political battles in a rigged system. The answer is simple. I keep fighting because when it comes to our children, mothers don’t give up.
Young people today haven’t given up – and they’re the ones really carrying the burden of this rigged system. If they’re not giving up, we shouldn’t either.
In fact, young people are not only not giving up, they’re standing up like never before – – as we see so clearly in Zuccotti Square and Freedom Square and Grant Park and Dewey Square and hundreds of other Occupy encampments around the country. And just like in the civil rights movement, when the young people stand up, the nation changes forever. If more of us take a lesson from them, we’re going to be an unstoppable force. That’s why I’m here today asking you to be a part of our campaign. Because we need to bring the integrity and vision of everyday people into creating a future that works for all of us. Let’s open up the doors on Capital Hill get the big money out, and let the people back in to guide our way forward – the schoolteachers and nurses, truck drivers and electricians, students and secretaries, the postal workers and factory workers, scientists, farmers, musicians and pharmacists. The people who repair and teach and cook and heal, and do honest work.
When the people do the governing – not the lobbyists and Wall Street executives – then we’ll have a government we can trust. Please go to jillstein.org to find out more about our people-powered campaign. And while you’re there, join us to become part of it. It’s time for a Green New Deal for America. A job for every worker. Health care, education and housing for every American. A livable planet for our children. On November 6 next year, let’s take our democracy back and build the secure green future we all deserve. Thank you!
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Monday, October 24, 2011
A health crisis follows mortgage foreclosure crisis
latimes.com
The mortgage foreclosure tragedy is not only hurting Americans' wallets, it's affecting people's health, particularly older Americans who lose their homes, according to a study released Thursday.
Researchers led by the University of Maryland performed the first study to determine the health effect from the foreclosure crisis that began with subprime lending practices in 2003. As recently as 2009, the authors note, just over 2% of all U.S. homes were in foreclosure.
The study examined data from the 2006 and 2008 Health and Retirement Study, a poll of people ages 50 and older. In 2008, people were asked about their mortgage status and whether they had fallen behind on payments, were in foreclosure or had lost their homes. The analysis showed that people who had mortgage problems were much more likely to have mental health problems as well as other health-related disadvantages, such as not being able to afford prescription medications and adequate healthy food.
Nearly one-third of the people who were mortgage-delinquent reported fair or poor health compared to 19% who were not delinquent.
"The rise in mortgage defaults may have important public health implications that could ultimately prove costly to affected individuals, employers, the healthcare system, and society," the authors wrote.
The study was published in the American Journal of Public Health.
The mortgage foreclosure tragedy is not only hurting Americans' wallets, it's affecting people's health, particularly older Americans who lose their homes, according to a study released Thursday.
Researchers led by the University of Maryland performed the first study to determine the health effect from the foreclosure crisis that began with subprime lending practices in 2003. As recently as 2009, the authors note, just over 2% of all U.S. homes were in foreclosure.
The study examined data from the 2006 and 2008 Health and Retirement Study, a poll of people ages 50 and older. In 2008, people were asked about their mortgage status and whether they had fallen behind on payments, were in foreclosure or had lost their homes. The analysis showed that people who had mortgage problems were much more likely to have mental health problems as well as other health-related disadvantages, such as not being able to afford prescription medications and adequate healthy food.
Nearly one-third of the people who were mortgage-delinquent reported fair or poor health compared to 19% who were not delinquent.
"The rise in mortgage defaults may have important public health implications that could ultimately prove costly to affected individuals, employers, the healthcare system, and society," the authors wrote.
The study was published in the American Journal of Public Health.
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
President Obama raises more money from Wall Street than 2012 Republican presidential candidates
Washington Post
Despite frosty relations with the titans of Wall Street, President Obama has still managed to raise far more money this year from the financial and banking sector than Mitt Romney or any other Republican presidential candidate, according to new fundraising data.
Obama’s key advantage is his ability to collect bigger checks from fewer donors, because he raises money for both his own campaign committee and for the Democratic National Committee, which will aid in his reelection effort. As a result, Obama has brought in more money from employees of banks, hedge funds and other financial service companies than all the other GOP candidates combined, according to a Washington Post analysis of contribution data.
Consider the case of Bain Capital, the Boston-based private equity firm that was co-founded by Romney and where he made his fortune. Not surprisingly, Romney has strong support at the firm, raking in $34,000 from 18 Bain employees, according to the analysis of data from the Center for Responsive Politics.
But Obama has outdone Romney on his own turf, collecting $76,600 from Bain Capital employees through September — and he only needed three donors to do it.
This fundraising edge might seem counterintuitive in light of Obama’s thorny relations with business groups and Wall Street executives, who strongly opposed his financial reform law and have bristled at proposals to close corporate tax loopholes and raise income taxes on millionaires. In fact, he has raised just $3.9 million from the finance sector for his campaign committee itself, aside from the DNC, compared with Romney’s $7.5 million.
Still, Obama retains a persistent reservoir of support among a number of Democratic financiers who have backed him since he was an underdog presidential candidate. He also can draw upon the unique abilities of an incumbent president to raise money from avid supporters.
Obama’s ties to Wall Street donors could complicate Democratic plans to paint Republicans as puppets of the financial industry, particularly in light of the left-leaning “Occupy Wall Street” protests that have gone global over the past week. In response to the protests, the Obama campaign and other Democrats have stepped up their attacks on Romney and other Republicans for their opposition to Wall Street regulations.
One top banking executive who raises money for Obama, who requested anonymity to discuss fundraising efforts, said reports of disaffection with the president “are exaggerated and overblown.” He said a strong contingent of financiers in New York, Chicago and California remain supportive of Obama and his economic policies, even as some have turned on him.
But, this donor also acknowledged, “it probably helps from a political perspective if he’s not seen as a Wall Street guy.”
None of this means that Obama doesn’t face troubles with Wall Street donors, who have emerged in recent years as among the most important sources of campaign cash for major national politicians.
Obama’s campaign committee, without the DNC, has raised notably less money from major banking firms such as Goldman Sachs, whose employees gave him more than $1 million in the 2008 cycle. So far this year, about two dozen Goldman employees together have given Obama’s committee about $45,000, one-sixth of the amount Romney’s campaign has taken in.
But six Goldman employees also gave a total of $92,000 to the DNC side of Obama’s fundraising effort.
Unlike the Republican candidates, Obama can raise money for both his own campaign account, which can take donations up to $5,000 for the 2012 cycle, and for the DNC, which can accept $30,800 per individual each calendar year. The same donors will be able to give another $30,800 to the DNC next year as well.
The end result is more money from fewer donors: Obama has raised a total of $15.6 million from employees in the finance sector, according to the Post analysis. Nearly $12 million of that went to the DNC, the analysis shows.
Romney has raised less than half that much, or about $7.5 million, from the industry, and Texas Gov. Rick Perry brought in close to $2 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. No other Republican candidate has raised more than $400,000 from the finance sector, which also includes insurance and real-estate interests.
Romney is particularly reliant on money from the finance sector, which accounts for about a quarter of his total contributions, the data shows. By contrast, about 5 percent of the $90 million raised by Obama’s campaign committee this year came from the finance sector.
Obama retains a core group of supporters on Wall Street who are central to his fundraising efforts. About a third of Obama’s top 40 fundraisers, who have helped bundle together $500,000 or more in contributions, hail from the finance sector, including big names such as former New Jersey governor Jon Corzine of MF Global, hedge fund manager Orin Kramer and UBS chairman Robert Wolf.
Obama’s chief of staff, William M. Daley, was also vice chairman at J.P. Morgan Chase before coming to the White House this year.
Democrats have ratcheted up their attacks on Republicans for ties to Wall Street in recent weeks as Obama embarked on a nationwide push for his jobs bill, which includes a proposed tax hike for income above $1 million. In one memo on Tuesday, for example, DNC spokesman Brad Woodhouse said Romney’s campaign “seems quite proud of the fact that they are leading the money race for campaign cash from Wall Street” and said Romney “will allow them to write their own rules again.”
Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt said in a statement that the contributions from financial sector show that many corporate leaders agree with Obama on the need for “an economy that’s built to last, not on loopholes and outsourcing.”
“There are business leaders across industries who agree with the president that steps needed to be taken to ensure that the American people are never again held hostage by risky Wall Street deals that threaten our entire economy,” LaBolt said. “Mitt Romney and all the Republican candidates believe the opposite.”
The DNC and Romney campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment Wednesday.
Despite frosty relations with the titans of Wall Street, President Obama has still managed to raise far more money this year from the financial and banking sector than Mitt Romney or any other Republican presidential candidate, according to new fundraising data.
Obama’s key advantage is his ability to collect bigger checks from fewer donors, because he raises money for both his own campaign committee and for the Democratic National Committee, which will aid in his reelection effort. As a result, Obama has brought in more money from employees of banks, hedge funds and other financial service companies than all the other GOP candidates combined, according to a Washington Post analysis of contribution data.
Consider the case of Bain Capital, the Boston-based private equity firm that was co-founded by Romney and where he made his fortune. Not surprisingly, Romney has strong support at the firm, raking in $34,000 from 18 Bain employees, according to the analysis of data from the Center for Responsive Politics.
But Obama has outdone Romney on his own turf, collecting $76,600 from Bain Capital employees through September — and he only needed three donors to do it.
This fundraising edge might seem counterintuitive in light of Obama’s thorny relations with business groups and Wall Street executives, who strongly opposed his financial reform law and have bristled at proposals to close corporate tax loopholes and raise income taxes on millionaires. In fact, he has raised just $3.9 million from the finance sector for his campaign committee itself, aside from the DNC, compared with Romney’s $7.5 million.
Still, Obama retains a persistent reservoir of support among a number of Democratic financiers who have backed him since he was an underdog presidential candidate. He also can draw upon the unique abilities of an incumbent president to raise money from avid supporters.
Obama’s ties to Wall Street donors could complicate Democratic plans to paint Republicans as puppets of the financial industry, particularly in light of the left-leaning “Occupy Wall Street” protests that have gone global over the past week. In response to the protests, the Obama campaign and other Democrats have stepped up their attacks on Romney and other Republicans for their opposition to Wall Street regulations.
One top banking executive who raises money for Obama, who requested anonymity to discuss fundraising efforts, said reports of disaffection with the president “are exaggerated and overblown.” He said a strong contingent of financiers in New York, Chicago and California remain supportive of Obama and his economic policies, even as some have turned on him.
But, this donor also acknowledged, “it probably helps from a political perspective if he’s not seen as a Wall Street guy.”
None of this means that Obama doesn’t face troubles with Wall Street donors, who have emerged in recent years as among the most important sources of campaign cash for major national politicians.
Obama’s campaign committee, without the DNC, has raised notably less money from major banking firms such as Goldman Sachs, whose employees gave him more than $1 million in the 2008 cycle. So far this year, about two dozen Goldman employees together have given Obama’s committee about $45,000, one-sixth of the amount Romney’s campaign has taken in.
But six Goldman employees also gave a total of $92,000 to the DNC side of Obama’s fundraising effort.
Unlike the Republican candidates, Obama can raise money for both his own campaign account, which can take donations up to $5,000 for the 2012 cycle, and for the DNC, which can accept $30,800 per individual each calendar year. The same donors will be able to give another $30,800 to the DNC next year as well.
The end result is more money from fewer donors: Obama has raised a total of $15.6 million from employees in the finance sector, according to the Post analysis. Nearly $12 million of that went to the DNC, the analysis shows.
Romney has raised less than half that much, or about $7.5 million, from the industry, and Texas Gov. Rick Perry brought in close to $2 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. No other Republican candidate has raised more than $400,000 from the finance sector, which also includes insurance and real-estate interests.
Romney is particularly reliant on money from the finance sector, which accounts for about a quarter of his total contributions, the data shows. By contrast, about 5 percent of the $90 million raised by Obama’s campaign committee this year came from the finance sector.
Obama retains a core group of supporters on Wall Street who are central to his fundraising efforts. About a third of Obama’s top 40 fundraisers, who have helped bundle together $500,000 or more in contributions, hail from the finance sector, including big names such as former New Jersey governor Jon Corzine of MF Global, hedge fund manager Orin Kramer and UBS chairman Robert Wolf.
Obama’s chief of staff, William M. Daley, was also vice chairman at J.P. Morgan Chase before coming to the White House this year.
Democrats have ratcheted up their attacks on Republicans for ties to Wall Street in recent weeks as Obama embarked on a nationwide push for his jobs bill, which includes a proposed tax hike for income above $1 million. In one memo on Tuesday, for example, DNC spokesman Brad Woodhouse said Romney’s campaign “seems quite proud of the fact that they are leading the money race for campaign cash from Wall Street” and said Romney “will allow them to write their own rules again.”
Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt said in a statement that the contributions from financial sector show that many corporate leaders agree with Obama on the need for “an economy that’s built to last, not on loopholes and outsourcing.”
“There are business leaders across industries who agree with the president that steps needed to be taken to ensure that the American people are never again held hostage by risky Wall Street deals that threaten our entire economy,” LaBolt said. “Mitt Romney and all the Republican candidates believe the opposite.”
The DNC and Romney campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment Wednesday.
Wall Street Comes to D.C. to Profit from Health Care; 99% Say 'Wall Street Greed Kills Those in Need'
Dr. Margaret Flowers
The October2011.org Movement confronted Wall Street investors who came to Washington to figure out how they can make more money from health care. The Wall Street Comes to Washington Healthcare Conference underscores why people across the United States are occupying their cities to protest Wall Street greed.
The meeting was sponsored by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation which has spent decades trying to undermine our social insurances: Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Panelists included representatives from JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup.
According to Paul Ginsburg, current President of the deceivingly-named Center for Studying Health System Change, who moderated the panel, the purpose of the conference was to discuss market development and Wall Street health policy, to look at trends for an equity analysis of publicly traded health companies.
The panel started with a discussion of why people are currently using less health services. They blamed employers for clamping down on employee costs. They said this ‘trend’ may reflect the ‘new normal’ of people choosing the care that they think is the most important. There was no mention that people are self-rationing, delaying or avoiding necessary care, due to the high cost.
Then they addressed the large increase in health insurance premiums, stating that the Kaiser Family Foundation study which revealed a 9% increase in premiums was false. They stated their goal of having more people with private insurance and more people using health services. Of course, this is not because they want to make sure that people who need care can get it. For Wall Street, health corporations are businesses and they are out to maximize profit, usually by collecting premiums and then denying payment for care.
When the discussion turned to how far they could push their profit gimmicks before the public started to shame them, I stood up and walked to the microphone. I told the Wall Street bankers that they had no place in health care, that because of them people are dying of preventable causes or going bankrupt or homeless trying to pay for needed care. They are criminals masquerading as health policy experts.
For too long investors have put profit ahead of human needs. This is particularly clear in health care where more than 100,000 Americans die each year from preventable causes. The United States spends more per person than any other country, but gets very poor results. Countries that spend less provide health care to all and have better health outcomes. Countries that have universal health systems do not have people losing their homes because of health crisis while in the U.S. two-thirds of foreclosures are due to a health care crisis.
Marriott security officers took me out of the hotel and I sat in front of the entrance where I was joined by 2 more protesters, including Adara who shared the story of her father’s suicide which happened because of a health problem and the inability to afford care. Dozens of October2011.org people were outside the hotel protesting. They were chanting “Wall Street Greed Kills Those in Need,” “No More Wall Street Health Care” and “We Are the 99%.”
The protest lasted for several hours blocking the entrance to Marriott. Police did not make arrests. In fact, DC police have agreed to a 4 year wage freeze in order to maintain health benefits. That’s why we are the 99% and we are standing together to make the country and the world a better place for all of us.
The October2011.org continues to occupy Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC seeking to shift power to the people and end corporate rule.
The October2011.org Movement confronted Wall Street investors who came to Washington to figure out how they can make more money from health care. The Wall Street Comes to Washington Healthcare Conference underscores why people across the United States are occupying their cities to protest Wall Street greed.
The meeting was sponsored by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation which has spent decades trying to undermine our social insurances: Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Panelists included representatives from JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup.
According to Paul Ginsburg, current President of the deceivingly-named Center for Studying Health System Change, who moderated the panel, the purpose of the conference was to discuss market development and Wall Street health policy, to look at trends for an equity analysis of publicly traded health companies.
The panel started with a discussion of why people are currently using less health services. They blamed employers for clamping down on employee costs. They said this ‘trend’ may reflect the ‘new normal’ of people choosing the care that they think is the most important. There was no mention that people are self-rationing, delaying or avoiding necessary care, due to the high cost.
Then they addressed the large increase in health insurance premiums, stating that the Kaiser Family Foundation study which revealed a 9% increase in premiums was false. They stated their goal of having more people with private insurance and more people using health services. Of course, this is not because they want to make sure that people who need care can get it. For Wall Street, health corporations are businesses and they are out to maximize profit, usually by collecting premiums and then denying payment for care.
When the discussion turned to how far they could push their profit gimmicks before the public started to shame them, I stood up and walked to the microphone. I told the Wall Street bankers that they had no place in health care, that because of them people are dying of preventable causes or going bankrupt or homeless trying to pay for needed care. They are criminals masquerading as health policy experts.
For too long investors have put profit ahead of human needs. This is particularly clear in health care where more than 100,000 Americans die each year from preventable causes. The United States spends more per person than any other country, but gets very poor results. Countries that spend less provide health care to all and have better health outcomes. Countries that have universal health systems do not have people losing their homes because of health crisis while in the U.S. two-thirds of foreclosures are due to a health care crisis.
Marriott security officers took me out of the hotel and I sat in front of the entrance where I was joined by 2 more protesters, including Adara who shared the story of her father’s suicide which happened because of a health problem and the inability to afford care. Dozens of October2011.org people were outside the hotel protesting. They were chanting “Wall Street Greed Kills Those in Need,” “No More Wall Street Health Care” and “We Are the 99%.”
The protest lasted for several hours blocking the entrance to Marriott. Police did not make arrests. In fact, DC police have agreed to a 4 year wage freeze in order to maintain health benefits. That’s why we are the 99% and we are standing together to make the country and the world a better place for all of us.
The October2011.org continues to occupy Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC seeking to shift power to the people and end corporate rule.
Monday, October 17, 2011
URGENT: Sign letter of protest over IOM’s skimpy health plan prescription
FOR ACTION TODAY
A recent Quote of the Day message expressed alarm at the fact that the Institute of Medicine is recommending a grossly inadequate, skimpy, spartan standard for the package of benefits to be offered by health plans in the state insurance exchanges being established under the Affordable Care Act:
http://www.pnhp.org/news/2011/october/ioms-disturbing-report-on-essential-health-benefits
Following is a letter asking the Obama administration to reject this recommendation. Though only selected names will be used in publicizing this letter, we encourage everyone who concurs with the views expressed to sign it, using this link:
http://www.pnhp.org/iom-letter/index.php
President Obama: Reject the Institute of Medicine’s skimpy health plan prescription
We protest the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) recommendation that cost rather than medical need be the basis for defining the “essential benefits” that insurance policies must cover when the federal health reform law takes effect in 2014. If adopted by the Department of Health and Human Services, this recommendation will sacrifice many lives and cause much suffering. We call on Secretary Sebelius and President Obama to reject them.
The IOM proposal would base the required coverage on the benefits typical of plans currently offered by small businesses – enshrining these skimpy plans as the new standard. These bare-bones policies come with a long list of uncovered services and saddle enrollees with unaffordable co-payments and deductibles.
Already, millions of underinsured Americans forgo essential care: adults with heart attacks delay seeking emergency care; children forgo needed primary and specialty care; patients fail to fill prescriptions for lifesaving medications; and serious illness often leads to financial catastrophe.
The inadequate coverage the IOM recommends would shift costs from corporate and government payers onto families already burdened by illness. Yet this strategy will not lower costs. Delaying care frequently creates even higher costs. Steadily rising co-payments and deductibles over the past two decades have failed to stem skyrocketing medical inflation. And nations that assure comprehensive coverage – with out-of-pocket costs a fraction of those in the United States – have experienced both slower cost growth and greater health gains than our country.
Our patients urgently need what people in these other nations already enjoy: universal and comprehensive coverage in a nonprofit system that prioritizes human need over corporate profit.
The IOM committee was riddled with conflicts of interest, many members having amassed personal wealth and career success through their involvement with health insurers and other for-profit health care firms. Its recommendations were lauded by insurance industry leaders who have sought to undermine real health reform at every turn. As the Lancet noted on its Dec. 5, 2009, cover: “Corporate influence renders the U.S. government incapable of making policy on the basis of evidence and the public interest.”
Sadly, the committee’s damaging recommendations suggest that this corporate bug has also infected the IOM.
A recent Quote of the Day message expressed alarm at the fact that the Institute of Medicine is recommending a grossly inadequate, skimpy, spartan standard for the package of benefits to be offered by health plans in the state insurance exchanges being established under the Affordable Care Act:
http://www.pnhp.org/news/2011/october/ioms-disturbing-report-on-essential-health-benefits
Following is a letter asking the Obama administration to reject this recommendation. Though only selected names will be used in publicizing this letter, we encourage everyone who concurs with the views expressed to sign it, using this link:
http://www.pnhp.org/iom-letter/index.php
President Obama: Reject the Institute of Medicine’s skimpy health plan prescription
We protest the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) recommendation that cost rather than medical need be the basis for defining the “essential benefits” that insurance policies must cover when the federal health reform law takes effect in 2014. If adopted by the Department of Health and Human Services, this recommendation will sacrifice many lives and cause much suffering. We call on Secretary Sebelius and President Obama to reject them.
The IOM proposal would base the required coverage on the benefits typical of plans currently offered by small businesses – enshrining these skimpy plans as the new standard. These bare-bones policies come with a long list of uncovered services and saddle enrollees with unaffordable co-payments and deductibles.
Already, millions of underinsured Americans forgo essential care: adults with heart attacks delay seeking emergency care; children forgo needed primary and specialty care; patients fail to fill prescriptions for lifesaving medications; and serious illness often leads to financial catastrophe.
The inadequate coverage the IOM recommends would shift costs from corporate and government payers onto families already burdened by illness. Yet this strategy will not lower costs. Delaying care frequently creates even higher costs. Steadily rising co-payments and deductibles over the past two decades have failed to stem skyrocketing medical inflation. And nations that assure comprehensive coverage – with out-of-pocket costs a fraction of those in the United States – have experienced both slower cost growth and greater health gains than our country.
Our patients urgently need what people in these other nations already enjoy: universal and comprehensive coverage in a nonprofit system that prioritizes human need over corporate profit.
The IOM committee was riddled with conflicts of interest, many members having amassed personal wealth and career success through their involvement with health insurers and other for-profit health care firms. Its recommendations were lauded by insurance industry leaders who have sought to undermine real health reform at every turn. As the Lancet noted on its Dec. 5, 2009, cover: “Corporate influence renders the U.S. government incapable of making policy on the basis of evidence and the public interest.”
Sadly, the committee’s damaging recommendations suggest that this corporate bug has also infected the IOM.
Saturday, October 15, 2011
Beware the Democrats! An Insidious Threat to the Occupy Movement
by ISMAEL HOSSEIN-ZADEH,
CounterPunch
The threat I am referring to is not that of being pepper-sprayed, arrested, beaten or imprisoned. It is a different type of threat: a stealthy challenger that while pretending to advance the goals of the Occupy Movement tends to undermine it from within—more or less like the proverbial elephant in the room. I am referring to the threat of preemption, or cooptation, posed by the Democratic Party and union officials. In light of their unsavory record of undermining the revolutionary energy of social movements, projections of sympathy for the anti-Wall Street protesters by the White House, the Democratic Party officials and union leaders can be viewed only with suspicion.
Expressing sympathy for the protester, President Obama recently stated: “I think people are frustrated, and the protesters are giving voice to a more broad-based frustration about how our financial system works.” At the same time he also defended the decision to bail out banks and other Wall Street speculators, arguing that the decision was necessitated by the need to salvage our financial system. It is obvious that, as usual, the president is talking from both side of his mouth.
On the same day (October 6th) that the president projected sympathy for the protesters, Vice President Biden also expressed similar sentiments. Comparing the Wall Street protests with the Tea Party, he stated: “The Tea Party started, why? TARP. They thought it was unfair – we were bailing out the big guy.” The vice president’s reference to the Tea Party is by no means fortuitous; there are clear indications the Democrats are trying to utilize the Occupy movement the way the Republicans do the Tea Party. “The mushrooming protests could be the start of a populist movement on the left that counterbalances the surge of the Tea Party on the right, and closes what some Democrats fear is an ‘enthusiasm gap,’” reported the New York Times on Friday, October 7th.
Projections of sympathy for the Occupy movement have not been limited to the White House. Many officials of the Democratic Party have either personally appeared at the Zuccotti Park to express support or sent statements of support for the protesters. Likewise, a number of union leaders joined a large protest rally held in New York City’s Foley Square on October 5th to show sympathy for the protesters.
Then there are the liberal political pundits and media outlets such as the New York Times that are also trying the build bridges between the Democratic Party and the Occupy movement in an effort to channel the protesters’ energy to the party’s electoral machine. For example, the New York Times’ columnist Paul Krugman recently wrote: “And there are real political opportunities here. Not, of course, for today’s Republicans. . . . But Democrats are being given what amounts to a second chance. The Obama administration squandered a lot of potential good will early on by adopting banker-friendly policies. . . . Now, however, Mr. Obama’s party has a chance for a do-over.”
On the face of it there is nothing wrong with the Democratic Party officials or union leaders expressing support for the protesters. In light of their actual economic policies, however, that support can be characterized only as hypocritical. The Democrats are as much responsible for the economic problems that have triggered the protests as their Republican counterparts. The Obama administration has played an especially destructive role in pursuing a devastating neoliberal austerity agenda in term of bailing out the Wall Street gamblers, extending the Bush tax breaks for the wealthy, expanding the US wars of choice—and then cutting vital social spending to pay for the financial resources thus usurped.
Equally blameworthy are union bureaucrats who have enabled the White House and the Congress in the implementation of such brutal austerity programs. Hollow posturing aside, the AFL-CIO has opposed neither the neoliberal austerity policies at home nor the imperialist wars of aggression abroad. Well-paid union officials have not even seriously challenged factory closures; nor have they earnestly resisted brutal cuts in workers’ wages and benefits.
In projecting sympathy for the Occupy Movement, the Democrats are essentially trying to have their cake and eat it too! Their efforts to express support for the protests can be interpreted only as opportunistic and utilitarian: to identify themselves with the rapidly spreading popular protests against the status quo, to mask the Obama administration’s neoliberal devotion to Wall Street, and to harness the energy of the protesters in order to garner their vote in the 2012 elections.
If successful, this would not be the first time the Democratic Party would have derailed and dissipated social struggles for change; it has a long record of such policies of betrayal, going back all the way to the Populist Movement of the late 19th century. Barack Obama’s promise of change in the 2008 elections in pursuit of garnering the grassroots’ vote was only the latest of the Democrats’ strategy of playing the good cop in order to contain radical energy. Two years earlier they had managed to undermine a vigorous antiwar movement by voicing the protesters’ demands to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan if they won the majority seats in the Congress. Having thus gained the control of both houses of the Congress in the mid-term election of 2006, they shamelessly backed away from their promise to antiwar voters.
One can only hope that the Occupy Movement is armed with the knowledge of the Democratic Party’s record of cooptation and betrayal of radical movements; and will therefore chart a political movement of the working people and other grassroots independent of both parties of big business.
Ismael Hossein-Zadeh, author of The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism (Palgrave-Macmillan 2007), teaches economics at Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa.
CounterPunch
The threat I am referring to is not that of being pepper-sprayed, arrested, beaten or imprisoned. It is a different type of threat: a stealthy challenger that while pretending to advance the goals of the Occupy Movement tends to undermine it from within—more or less like the proverbial elephant in the room. I am referring to the threat of preemption, or cooptation, posed by the Democratic Party and union officials. In light of their unsavory record of undermining the revolutionary energy of social movements, projections of sympathy for the anti-Wall Street protesters by the White House, the Democratic Party officials and union leaders can be viewed only with suspicion.
Expressing sympathy for the protester, President Obama recently stated: “I think people are frustrated, and the protesters are giving voice to a more broad-based frustration about how our financial system works.” At the same time he also defended the decision to bail out banks and other Wall Street speculators, arguing that the decision was necessitated by the need to salvage our financial system. It is obvious that, as usual, the president is talking from both side of his mouth.
On the same day (October 6th) that the president projected sympathy for the protesters, Vice President Biden also expressed similar sentiments. Comparing the Wall Street protests with the Tea Party, he stated: “The Tea Party started, why? TARP. They thought it was unfair – we were bailing out the big guy.” The vice president’s reference to the Tea Party is by no means fortuitous; there are clear indications the Democrats are trying to utilize the Occupy movement the way the Republicans do the Tea Party. “The mushrooming protests could be the start of a populist movement on the left that counterbalances the surge of the Tea Party on the right, and closes what some Democrats fear is an ‘enthusiasm gap,’” reported the New York Times on Friday, October 7th.
Projections of sympathy for the Occupy movement have not been limited to the White House. Many officials of the Democratic Party have either personally appeared at the Zuccotti Park to express support or sent statements of support for the protesters. Likewise, a number of union leaders joined a large protest rally held in New York City’s Foley Square on October 5th to show sympathy for the protesters.
Then there are the liberal political pundits and media outlets such as the New York Times that are also trying the build bridges between the Democratic Party and the Occupy movement in an effort to channel the protesters’ energy to the party’s electoral machine. For example, the New York Times’ columnist Paul Krugman recently wrote: “And there are real political opportunities here. Not, of course, for today’s Republicans. . . . But Democrats are being given what amounts to a second chance. The Obama administration squandered a lot of potential good will early on by adopting banker-friendly policies. . . . Now, however, Mr. Obama’s party has a chance for a do-over.”
On the face of it there is nothing wrong with the Democratic Party officials or union leaders expressing support for the protesters. In light of their actual economic policies, however, that support can be characterized only as hypocritical. The Democrats are as much responsible for the economic problems that have triggered the protests as their Republican counterparts. The Obama administration has played an especially destructive role in pursuing a devastating neoliberal austerity agenda in term of bailing out the Wall Street gamblers, extending the Bush tax breaks for the wealthy, expanding the US wars of choice—and then cutting vital social spending to pay for the financial resources thus usurped.
Equally blameworthy are union bureaucrats who have enabled the White House and the Congress in the implementation of such brutal austerity programs. Hollow posturing aside, the AFL-CIO has opposed neither the neoliberal austerity policies at home nor the imperialist wars of aggression abroad. Well-paid union officials have not even seriously challenged factory closures; nor have they earnestly resisted brutal cuts in workers’ wages and benefits.
In projecting sympathy for the Occupy Movement, the Democrats are essentially trying to have their cake and eat it too! Their efforts to express support for the protests can be interpreted only as opportunistic and utilitarian: to identify themselves with the rapidly spreading popular protests against the status quo, to mask the Obama administration’s neoliberal devotion to Wall Street, and to harness the energy of the protesters in order to garner their vote in the 2012 elections.
If successful, this would not be the first time the Democratic Party would have derailed and dissipated social struggles for change; it has a long record of such policies of betrayal, going back all the way to the Populist Movement of the late 19th century. Barack Obama’s promise of change in the 2008 elections in pursuit of garnering the grassroots’ vote was only the latest of the Democrats’ strategy of playing the good cop in order to contain radical energy. Two years earlier they had managed to undermine a vigorous antiwar movement by voicing the protesters’ demands to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan if they won the majority seats in the Congress. Having thus gained the control of both houses of the Congress in the mid-term election of 2006, they shamelessly backed away from their promise to antiwar voters.
One can only hope that the Occupy Movement is armed with the knowledge of the Democratic Party’s record of cooptation and betrayal of radical movements; and will therefore chart a political movement of the working people and other grassroots independent of both parties of big business.
Ismael Hossein-Zadeh, author of The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism (Palgrave-Macmillan 2007), teaches economics at Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa.
Friday, October 14, 2011
White House eliminates insurance program for long-term care
Washington Post
The Obama administration ended a major benefit in the 2010 health-care law on Friday, announcing that a program to offer Americans insurance for long-term care was simply unworkable.
Although the program had been dogged from the start by doubts about its feasibility, its elimination marks the first time the administration has backed away from a key piece of what remains of President Obama’s signature legislative achievement.
Republican critics of the law immediately said the decision proved that the legislation is unsound and unsustainable.
Because the program had been projected to reduce the federal deficit by $86 billion over the next 10 years, terminating it complicates the nation’s budget picture. It is now estimated that the health-care law will cut the deficit by $124 billion from 2012 to 2021, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Known as the Community Living Assistance Services (CLASS) Act, the program was intended to be purely voluntary and open to all working Americans. It would have provided a basic lifetime benefit of a least $50 a day in the event of disability, to be used for coverage of even nonmedical needs such as making a home wheelchair accessible, or paying a caregiver.
The program was to be entirely self-financed by the premiums participants paid. Obama officials said this presented them with a problem: If they designed a benefits package generous enough to meet the law’s requirements, they would have had to set premiums so high that few healthy people would enroll. And without a large share of healthy people in the pool, the CLASS plan would have become even more expensive, forcing the government to raise premiums even higher to the point of the program’s collapse.
For the past 19 months, experts in the administration have searched for ways to get around this conundrum.
On a Friday call with reporters, Kathy Greenlee, assistant secretary for aging at the Department of Health and Human Services, announced their sobering conclusion: “At this point, we do not have a viable path forward to implement the CLASS Act.”
Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.) said the finding was long overdue. Gingrey, who sponsored a bill to repeal the legislation, observed that more than a a year ago the chief actuary for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid determined that the program was at significant risk of failure.
“I feel justified and vindicated,” Gingrey said. Like other Republicans, he predicted that this would be the first thread in the health-care law to unravel. “The bottom line is as people start to understand this bill, you are going to see more and more of a domino effect,” he said.
Sherry Glied, assistant secretary for planning and evaluation at HHS, countered that the CLASS program was an isolated case whose practicality was questionable from the beginning. “There is a very clear difference between that kind of uncertainty and the rest of the law,” she said.
The Obama administration ended a major benefit in the 2010 health-care law on Friday, announcing that a program to offer Americans insurance for long-term care was simply unworkable.
Although the program had been dogged from the start by doubts about its feasibility, its elimination marks the first time the administration has backed away from a key piece of what remains of President Obama’s signature legislative achievement.
Republican critics of the law immediately said the decision proved that the legislation is unsound and unsustainable.
Because the program had been projected to reduce the federal deficit by $86 billion over the next 10 years, terminating it complicates the nation’s budget picture. It is now estimated that the health-care law will cut the deficit by $124 billion from 2012 to 2021, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Known as the Community Living Assistance Services (CLASS) Act, the program was intended to be purely voluntary and open to all working Americans. It would have provided a basic lifetime benefit of a least $50 a day in the event of disability, to be used for coverage of even nonmedical needs such as making a home wheelchair accessible, or paying a caregiver.
The program was to be entirely self-financed by the premiums participants paid. Obama officials said this presented them with a problem: If they designed a benefits package generous enough to meet the law’s requirements, they would have had to set premiums so high that few healthy people would enroll. And without a large share of healthy people in the pool, the CLASS plan would have become even more expensive, forcing the government to raise premiums even higher to the point of the program’s collapse.
For the past 19 months, experts in the administration have searched for ways to get around this conundrum.
On a Friday call with reporters, Kathy Greenlee, assistant secretary for aging at the Department of Health and Human Services, announced their sobering conclusion: “At this point, we do not have a viable path forward to implement the CLASS Act.”
Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.) said the finding was long overdue. Gingrey, who sponsored a bill to repeal the legislation, observed that more than a a year ago the chief actuary for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid determined that the program was at significant risk of failure.
“I feel justified and vindicated,” Gingrey said. Like other Republicans, he predicted that this would be the first thread in the health-care law to unravel. “The bottom line is as people start to understand this bill, you are going to see more and more of a domino effect,” he said.
Sherry Glied, assistant secretary for planning and evaluation at HHS, countered that the CLASS program was an isolated case whose practicality was questionable from the beginning. “There is a very clear difference between that kind of uncertainty and the rest of the law,” she said.
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
How Obama Is Jeopardizing Medicaid
The New Republic
by Pema Levy
Pema Levy is an assistant editor at The American Prospect.
In one of its many attempts to get its budget deficit under control, in 2008 California decided to cut its reimbursement rates to medical providers for poor and disabled persons enrolled in the state's Medicaid program. The result was that providers began to cut back on services, and pharmacists stopped filling prescriptions because the reimbursements came to less than the cost of the drugs. California, for all intents and purposes, was no longer upholding the federal mandate to provide Medicaid patients with "meaningful access" to care. Numerous lawsuits were filed against the state to reverse the cuts, and they are now consolidated into Douglas v. Independent Living Center of Southern California, the first case the Supreme Court will hear today, on the first day of its new term.
As it stands, Douglas is no longer about Medicaid rates or "meaningful access," but whether Medicaid beneficiaries and providers have the right to sue the state to enforce federal Medicaid statutes - and, in a surprising move, the Obama administration has sided with California, with the Deputy Solicitor General arguing before the Court today that only the Department of Health and Human Services should be able to enforce compliance with Medicaid. "They want the prerogative of when and where to intervene in state conduct matters," says Sara Rosenbaum, a law professor and health care expert at George Washington University, venturing a guess as to the administration's motives. California's backers also worry about court-imposed payment schemes replacing state discretion, as well as a surge in litigation.
But the Obama administration's position is a big mistake. Not only would rolling back such private rights endanger patients and providers, it could also impede the administration's own agenda. Because the ability of the federal government to enforce its health care laws through HHS is limited, it often relies on private lawsuits to keep states in check. In fact, the success of the administration's signature policy achievement, the Affordable Care Act, could depend on exactly the kind of action it's trying to rule out.
OF THE 32 MILLION Americans the Obama administration's Affordable Care Act will eventually insure, almost half - 15 million - will gain insurance under a massive Medicaid expansion by January 2014. The impact of the ACA, in other words, depends on states complying with Medicaid requirements -the very laws Douglas could effectively end the ability of private citizens to enforce through legal action. Another scenario where you might see the ACA falter is if a state took over responsibility for running a health-care exchange, and then failed to comply with federal requirements in some way. A ruling against providers and beneficiaries in Douglas therefore "limits the options for enforcing the Affordable Care Act," says Timothy Jost, a law professor at Washington and Lee University School of Law. "At this point the assumption is that the states will implement it and that the federal government will enforce it. The possibility to enforce implementation [either through private actions or HHS] is a fall-back position. But in the future, particularly if Obama loses the 2012 election, it narrows options for making sure implementation goes through."
Even under a Democratic administration, however, leaving enforcement up to HHS is a disaster waiting to happen. That's because, historically, HHS has a middling record of enforcing Medicaid's rules. For instance, the California rate cuts that launched the lawsuit in question are still in effect, points out Rochelle Bobroff, Directing Attorney of the Federal Rights Project at the National Senior Citizens Law Center. "The federal government never goes to court over non-conforming state plans," says Bobroff. "They just don't do it." More importantly, HHS is largely limited to one, very poor enforcement mechanism: the ability to cut off all Medicaid funding to a noncompliant state. If the threat of a cutoff doesn't scare a state into compliance, following through would only end up hurting the Medicaid recipients HHS is trying to help.
Under a president Bachmann or Perry and their HHS Secretary, says Jost, "you'd have a situation where [the ACA] was basically unenforceable with regard to the Medicaid expansion."
Moreover, the ACA is just one piece of the possible collateral damage from ruling in favor of California. Under a broad ruling, a whole swath of federal requirements could be endangered. "Every state out there is waiting to see what happens in Douglas to cut access," says Rosenbaum. "The litany of what kind of bad state conduct could be unleashed is long because the only weapon against it is the risk of injunction. The theory that there's no right of action will carry over out of the Medicaid Act."
One area where states would likely begin to move in response to a victory for California is in cutting federal money - like Medicaid and Title X funding-that's currently directed to abortion clinics and Planned Parenthood. The ability of beneficiaries and providers to stop state laws seeking to defund clinics would likely be impeded, allowing backers of the proverbial "war" on abortion and contraception to score a major victory. And with an especially broad ruling, says Steven Shapiro, legal director for the ACLU, "there would be consequences for a wide-ranging variety for civil liberties and civil rights litigation [including] state and local immigration cases."
This all depends, of course, on if the state of California wins in Douglas, and then how broad the Court's ruling actually is. The poor tools at HHS's disposal are partly a result of the fact that the government has historically relied heavily on private actions to enforce federal laws. For this reason it seems unlikely that the Court will take away private citizens' cause of action altogether, as a broad ruling would overturn a large number of cases and go against decades of established jurisprudence. But on the other hand, a narrow ruling seems likely. "It's hard to be optimistic with 32 states and the federal government [on the other side]; this is going to be a difficult case to win," says Bobroff. "Given this Supreme Court and its hostility to plaintiffs," Jost notes, "it's depressing."
It's important to note that the Obama administration is taking a more moderate position and is asking the Court for a narrow ruling on the Medicaid Act alone. But its decision to back the state of California over private beneficiaries and providers is still baffling for heath care advocates and experts. Even a narrow ruling could impede the implementation of health care reform. "I have no idea what they were thinking, but it's a major disappointment," says Shapiro. "They went against their historic and the legally correct position." Indeed, when the Supreme Court was deciding whether to hear Douglas, the administration's position was that private actions were important to carrying out federal law. When the Court took up the case, however, the administration performed a remarkable about-face. "There's a huge amount riding on this case," says Rosenbaum, "and the
ironies here are phenomenal."
NATIONAL ADAPT MAILING LIST- Adapt Community Choice Act List http://www.adapt.org
by Pema Levy
Pema Levy is an assistant editor at The American Prospect.
In one of its many attempts to get its budget deficit under control, in 2008 California decided to cut its reimbursement rates to medical providers for poor and disabled persons enrolled in the state's Medicaid program. The result was that providers began to cut back on services, and pharmacists stopped filling prescriptions because the reimbursements came to less than the cost of the drugs. California, for all intents and purposes, was no longer upholding the federal mandate to provide Medicaid patients with "meaningful access" to care. Numerous lawsuits were filed against the state to reverse the cuts, and they are now consolidated into Douglas v. Independent Living Center of Southern California, the first case the Supreme Court will hear today, on the first day of its new term.
As it stands, Douglas is no longer about Medicaid rates or "meaningful access," but whether Medicaid beneficiaries and providers have the right to sue the state to enforce federal Medicaid statutes - and, in a surprising move, the Obama administration has sided with California, with the Deputy Solicitor General arguing before the Court today that only the Department of Health and Human Services should be able to enforce compliance with Medicaid. "They want the prerogative of when and where to intervene in state conduct matters," says Sara Rosenbaum, a law professor and health care expert at George Washington University, venturing a guess as to the administration's motives. California's backers also worry about court-imposed payment schemes replacing state discretion, as well as a surge in litigation.
But the Obama administration's position is a big mistake. Not only would rolling back such private rights endanger patients and providers, it could also impede the administration's own agenda. Because the ability of the federal government to enforce its health care laws through HHS is limited, it often relies on private lawsuits to keep states in check. In fact, the success of the administration's signature policy achievement, the Affordable Care Act, could depend on exactly the kind of action it's trying to rule out.
OF THE 32 MILLION Americans the Obama administration's Affordable Care Act will eventually insure, almost half - 15 million - will gain insurance under a massive Medicaid expansion by January 2014. The impact of the ACA, in other words, depends on states complying with Medicaid requirements -the very laws Douglas could effectively end the ability of private citizens to enforce through legal action. Another scenario where you might see the ACA falter is if a state took over responsibility for running a health-care exchange, and then failed to comply with federal requirements in some way. A ruling against providers and beneficiaries in Douglas therefore "limits the options for enforcing the Affordable Care Act," says Timothy Jost, a law professor at Washington and Lee University School of Law. "At this point the assumption is that the states will implement it and that the federal government will enforce it. The possibility to enforce implementation [either through private actions or HHS] is a fall-back position. But in the future, particularly if Obama loses the 2012 election, it narrows options for making sure implementation goes through."
Even under a Democratic administration, however, leaving enforcement up to HHS is a disaster waiting to happen. That's because, historically, HHS has a middling record of enforcing Medicaid's rules. For instance, the California rate cuts that launched the lawsuit in question are still in effect, points out Rochelle Bobroff, Directing Attorney of the Federal Rights Project at the National Senior Citizens Law Center. "The federal government never goes to court over non-conforming state plans," says Bobroff. "They just don't do it." More importantly, HHS is largely limited to one, very poor enforcement mechanism: the ability to cut off all Medicaid funding to a noncompliant state. If the threat of a cutoff doesn't scare a state into compliance, following through would only end up hurting the Medicaid recipients HHS is trying to help.
Under a president Bachmann or Perry and their HHS Secretary, says Jost, "you'd have a situation where [the ACA] was basically unenforceable with regard to the Medicaid expansion."
Moreover, the ACA is just one piece of the possible collateral damage from ruling in favor of California. Under a broad ruling, a whole swath of federal requirements could be endangered. "Every state out there is waiting to see what happens in Douglas to cut access," says Rosenbaum. "The litany of what kind of bad state conduct could be unleashed is long because the only weapon against it is the risk of injunction. The theory that there's no right of action will carry over out of the Medicaid Act."
One area where states would likely begin to move in response to a victory for California is in cutting federal money - like Medicaid and Title X funding-that's currently directed to abortion clinics and Planned Parenthood. The ability of beneficiaries and providers to stop state laws seeking to defund clinics would likely be impeded, allowing backers of the proverbial "war" on abortion and contraception to score a major victory. And with an especially broad ruling, says Steven Shapiro, legal director for the ACLU, "there would be consequences for a wide-ranging variety for civil liberties and civil rights litigation [including] state and local immigration cases."
This all depends, of course, on if the state of California wins in Douglas, and then how broad the Court's ruling actually is. The poor tools at HHS's disposal are partly a result of the fact that the government has historically relied heavily on private actions to enforce federal laws. For this reason it seems unlikely that the Court will take away private citizens' cause of action altogether, as a broad ruling would overturn a large number of cases and go against decades of established jurisprudence. But on the other hand, a narrow ruling seems likely. "It's hard to be optimistic with 32 states and the federal government [on the other side]; this is going to be a difficult case to win," says Bobroff. "Given this Supreme Court and its hostility to plaintiffs," Jost notes, "it's depressing."
It's important to note that the Obama administration is taking a more moderate position and is asking the Court for a narrow ruling on the Medicaid Act alone. But its decision to back the state of California over private beneficiaries and providers is still baffling for heath care advocates and experts. Even a narrow ruling could impede the implementation of health care reform. "I have no idea what they were thinking, but it's a major disappointment," says Shapiro. "They went against their historic and the legally correct position." Indeed, when the Supreme Court was deciding whether to hear Douglas, the administration's position was that private actions were important to carrying out federal law. When the Court took up the case, however, the administration performed a remarkable about-face. "There's a huge amount riding on this case," says Rosenbaum, "and the
ironies here are phenomenal."
NATIONAL ADAPT MAILING LIST- Adapt Community Choice Act List http://www.adapt.org
Sunday, October 9, 2011
Green Party to Democratic apologists: The message of the Wall Street protests is not 'Vote Democrat'
GREEN PARTY OF THE UNITED STATES
http://www.gp.org
For Immediate Release:
Sunday, October 9, 2011
Contacts:
Scott McLarty, Media Coordinator, 202-518-5624, cell 202-904-7614, mclarty@greens.org
Starlene Rankin, Media Coordinator, 916-995-3805, starlene@gp.org
Video and Livestreaming:
Green Party Occupy America
http://www.gp.org/campaigns/occupy-america/index.php
Cheri Honkala, Green candidate for Sheriff of Philadelphia, visits Occupy Wall Street  http://vimeo.com/29997382
Cheri Honkala speaks at Occupy DC Â http://www.vimeo.com/30200014
Interview with New York Green Mark Dunlea at Occupy Wall Street  http://www.gp.org/video/display.php?ID=59
Interview with Michael O'Neil, Secretary of the Green Party of New York State, Occupy Wall Street  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orcQYUyfUyY
WASHINGTON, DC -- Green Party leaders sharply criticized Democratic Party supporters online and in the media who have tried to turn the ongoing Occupy Wall Street, Occupy America, and October 2011 demonstrations across America into an appeal to vote Democrat and reelect President Obama in 2012.
Many of the protesters have expressed their disgust with two-party politics (http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/wall-street-protesters-disgusted-parties-14687840)and the influence of corporate money. Â Organizers have rejected attempts to shoehorn the movement into any party and assert that the protesters come from diverse political persuasions.
Greens, who are participating in the protests and among the organizers, have pointed to the Green Party's alternative vision for America, as expressed in the Green New Deal (http://www.greenpartywatch.org/2010/08/11/62-green-candidates-endorse-green-new-deal)
and on the party's web site (http://www.gp.org).
The Green Party offers a platform for peace, economic security for working people, millions of new green jobs in conservation and clean energy development, an end to fossil fuel addiction, real steps for curbing global climate change and restoring the health of the planet, universal health care (Medicare For All), and reforms that would limit the power of corporations and restore the promise of participatory democracy and fair elections. Â Green candidates do not accept corporate money.
Mark Dunlea, co-founder of the Green Party of New York State: "The Democratic Party does not speak for the Occupy Wall Street, Occupy America, and October 2011 protesters.  No political party speaks for the protesters, not even the Green Party.  The protesters speak for themselves.  The Green Party has endorsed and joined the demos because we share the same frustration and anger as the other protesters.  Greens are there because we bring alternative ideas like the Green New Deal.  And we're there because we encourage the 99 percent -- We The People -- to organize, end pro-corporate two-party rule, and replace the politicians in public office who enabled Wall Street's theft of America's future.  This can only happen through an independent alliance with the same diversity we're seeing at the protests: labor activists, Greens, progressives, anarchists, libertarians, nonvoters, disappointed Democrats and Republicans, and all others who want real change."
Sanda Everette, co-coordinator of the Coordinating Committee of the Green Party of California: "If pro-Democrat web sites and the media believe that the message of the protests is 'Vote Democrat' and 'Reelect Obama' in 2012, they've missed the point. Â The current demonstrations became necessary after Election Day 2008, when too many liberal, progressive, and antiwar Democrats declared 'Mission Accomplished' with Barack Obama's election victory. Â The Democratic Party has proved itself as dedicated to Wall Street as the GOP. Â We look forward to more protests and direct action as the election season unfolds, especially during the 2012 Democratic and Republican conventions."
Farheen Hakeem, Green candidate for the Minnesota State Senate in District 61 (http://www.farheenhakeem.org) and co-chair of the Green Party of the United States: "Say no to the parties of war and corporate money! Â That's our message to all Americans who are worried about the dangerous direction that the two Titanic Parties have steered our country. Â If the field of presidential candidates is limited to incumbent Obama and the Republican nominee after the primaries, then everything the Wall Street protesters are talking about will be erased from the election season debate and from the media. Â Hopes for a progressive challenge in the Democratic primaries are unrealistic. Â The challenger will inevitably be defeated by the Obama campaign juggernaut, which is already loaded with corporate campaign checks, and the challenger's supporters will find themselves muzzled, with the expectation that they'll vote Democrat."
Terry Baum, Green candidate for Mayor of San Francisco (http://terryjoanbaum.com): "Barack Obama received more Wall Street money than any other candidate in US history.  Instead of change, the Obama Administration gave us Phase 2 of the Bush-Cheney agenda: more Wall Street bailouts, more endless war, more offshore oil drilling and the dangerous Keystone XL pipeline, more mountaintop detonation mining.  Instead of financial security for Americans, we got plans to slash Social Security and Medicare.  We got minimal assistance for people facing home foreclosures and more crushing debt for college students.  We got silence about the racist death penalty and record-high mass incarceration of young black, brown, and poor people in a greedy private prison system.  We got a health care bill with mandates that are a direct public subsidy for the insurance industry (originally a Republican proposal), but no universal health care or controls for skyrocketing medical costs.  We got impunity for Bush officials who authorized torture and other war crimes -- and more extraordinary rendition, more warrantless surveillance of US citizens, more erosion of due process, more persecution of whistleblowers, and even a secret presidential hit list of Americans targeted for assassination."
Cheri Honkala, Green candidate for Sheriff of Philadelphia (http://www.cherihonkala.com) running on an anti-foreclosure platform, speaking at Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC on October 6: "What I'm doing is not symbolic. Â It's concrete and Bill and Aida and Glenn who's here with me today, like millions of people across this country are gonna lose their homes... unless you take this seriously and not just march about it, pray about it, and sing about it but help me fill every damn poll in Philadelphia where there's a birthplace of revolution and change... Â We can do this again in this country and take our country back!"
See also:
"Green Party of the US endorses, joins 'October 2011' protest against the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and 2012 austerity budget"
Green Party media advisory, September 27, 2011
http://www.gp.org/press/pr-national.php?ID=450
October 2011 http://october2011.org
Occupy Wall Street http://www.occupywallst.org
Occupy Together: events across the US and in other countries in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street http://www.occupytogether.org
Declaration of the Occupation of New York City
NYC General Assembly: The Official Website of the GA at #OccupyWallStreet
http://nycga.cc/2011/09/30/declaration-of-the-occupation-of-new-york-city
It's Our Economy http://itsoureconomy.us
MORE INFORMATION
Green Party of the United States http://www.gp.org 202-319-7191
Green candidate database and campaign information: http://www.gp.org/elections.shtml
News Center http://www.gp.org/newscenter.shtml
Speakers Bureau http://www.gp.org/speakers
Ballot Access Page http://www.gp.org/ballotstatus
Livestream Channel http://www.livestream.com/greenpartyus
Video Page http://www.gp.org/video/index.php
Press conferences, forums, and other events at the Green Party's 2011 Annual National Meeting in Alfred, NY, broadcast and archived on the Green Party's Livestream Channel http://www.livestream.com/greenpartyus
2011 Annual National Meeting http://nygreenfest.org
Green Pages: The official publication of record of the Green Party of the United States (Summer 2011 issue now online) http://gp.org/greenpages-blog
http://www.gp.org
For Immediate Release:
Sunday, October 9, 2011
Contacts:
Scott McLarty, Media Coordinator, 202-518-5624, cell 202-904-7614, mclarty@greens.org
Starlene Rankin, Media Coordinator, 916-995-3805, starlene@gp.org
Video and Livestreaming:
Green Party Occupy America
http://www.gp.org/campaigns/occupy-america/index.php
Cheri Honkala, Green candidate for Sheriff of Philadelphia, visits Occupy Wall Street  http://vimeo.com/29997382
Cheri Honkala speaks at Occupy DC Â http://www.vimeo.com/30200014
Interview with New York Green Mark Dunlea at Occupy Wall Street  http://www.gp.org/video/display.php?ID=59
Interview with Michael O'Neil, Secretary of the Green Party of New York State, Occupy Wall Street  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orcQYUyfUyY
WASHINGTON, DC -- Green Party leaders sharply criticized Democratic Party supporters online and in the media who have tried to turn the ongoing Occupy Wall Street, Occupy America, and October 2011 demonstrations across America into an appeal to vote Democrat and reelect President Obama in 2012.
Many of the protesters have expressed their disgust with two-party politics (http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/wall-street-protesters-disgusted-parties-14687840)and the influence of corporate money. Â Organizers have rejected attempts to shoehorn the movement into any party and assert that the protesters come from diverse political persuasions.
Greens, who are participating in the protests and among the organizers, have pointed to the Green Party's alternative vision for America, as expressed in the Green New Deal (http://www.greenpartywatch.org/2010/08/11/62-green-candidates-endorse-green-new-deal)
and on the party's web site (http://www.gp.org).
The Green Party offers a platform for peace, economic security for working people, millions of new green jobs in conservation and clean energy development, an end to fossil fuel addiction, real steps for curbing global climate change and restoring the health of the planet, universal health care (Medicare For All), and reforms that would limit the power of corporations and restore the promise of participatory democracy and fair elections. Â Green candidates do not accept corporate money.
Mark Dunlea, co-founder of the Green Party of New York State: "The Democratic Party does not speak for the Occupy Wall Street, Occupy America, and October 2011 protesters.  No political party speaks for the protesters, not even the Green Party.  The protesters speak for themselves.  The Green Party has endorsed and joined the demos because we share the same frustration and anger as the other protesters.  Greens are there because we bring alternative ideas like the Green New Deal.  And we're there because we encourage the 99 percent -- We The People -- to organize, end pro-corporate two-party rule, and replace the politicians in public office who enabled Wall Street's theft of America's future.  This can only happen through an independent alliance with the same diversity we're seeing at the protests: labor activists, Greens, progressives, anarchists, libertarians, nonvoters, disappointed Democrats and Republicans, and all others who want real change."
Sanda Everette, co-coordinator of the Coordinating Committee of the Green Party of California: "If pro-Democrat web sites and the media believe that the message of the protests is 'Vote Democrat' and 'Reelect Obama' in 2012, they've missed the point. Â The current demonstrations became necessary after Election Day 2008, when too many liberal, progressive, and antiwar Democrats declared 'Mission Accomplished' with Barack Obama's election victory. Â The Democratic Party has proved itself as dedicated to Wall Street as the GOP. Â We look forward to more protests and direct action as the election season unfolds, especially during the 2012 Democratic and Republican conventions."
Farheen Hakeem, Green candidate for the Minnesota State Senate in District 61 (http://www.farheenhakeem.org) and co-chair of the Green Party of the United States: "Say no to the parties of war and corporate money! Â That's our message to all Americans who are worried about the dangerous direction that the two Titanic Parties have steered our country. Â If the field of presidential candidates is limited to incumbent Obama and the Republican nominee after the primaries, then everything the Wall Street protesters are talking about will be erased from the election season debate and from the media. Â Hopes for a progressive challenge in the Democratic primaries are unrealistic. Â The challenger will inevitably be defeated by the Obama campaign juggernaut, which is already loaded with corporate campaign checks, and the challenger's supporters will find themselves muzzled, with the expectation that they'll vote Democrat."
Terry Baum, Green candidate for Mayor of San Francisco (http://terryjoanbaum.com): "Barack Obama received more Wall Street money than any other candidate in US history.  Instead of change, the Obama Administration gave us Phase 2 of the Bush-Cheney agenda: more Wall Street bailouts, more endless war, more offshore oil drilling and the dangerous Keystone XL pipeline, more mountaintop detonation mining.  Instead of financial security for Americans, we got plans to slash Social Security and Medicare.  We got minimal assistance for people facing home foreclosures and more crushing debt for college students.  We got silence about the racist death penalty and record-high mass incarceration of young black, brown, and poor people in a greedy private prison system.  We got a health care bill with mandates that are a direct public subsidy for the insurance industry (originally a Republican proposal), but no universal health care or controls for skyrocketing medical costs.  We got impunity for Bush officials who authorized torture and other war crimes -- and more extraordinary rendition, more warrantless surveillance of US citizens, more erosion of due process, more persecution of whistleblowers, and even a secret presidential hit list of Americans targeted for assassination."
Cheri Honkala, Green candidate for Sheriff of Philadelphia (http://www.cherihonkala.com) running on an anti-foreclosure platform, speaking at Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC on October 6: "What I'm doing is not symbolic. Â It's concrete and Bill and Aida and Glenn who's here with me today, like millions of people across this country are gonna lose their homes... unless you take this seriously and not just march about it, pray about it, and sing about it but help me fill every damn poll in Philadelphia where there's a birthplace of revolution and change... Â We can do this again in this country and take our country back!"
See also:
"Green Party of the US endorses, joins 'October 2011' protest against the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and 2012 austerity budget"
Green Party media advisory, September 27, 2011
http://www.gp.org/press/pr-national.php?ID=450
October 2011 http://october2011.org
Occupy Wall Street http://www.occupywallst.org
Occupy Together: events across the US and in other countries in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street http://www.occupytogether.org
Declaration of the Occupation of New York City
NYC General Assembly: The Official Website of the GA at #OccupyWallStreet
http://nycga.cc/2011/09/30/declaration-of-the-occupation-of-new-york-city
It's Our Economy http://itsoureconomy.us
MORE INFORMATION
Green Party of the United States http://www.gp.org 202-319-7191
Green candidate database and campaign information: http://www.gp.org/elections.shtml
News Center http://www.gp.org/newscenter.shtml
Speakers Bureau http://www.gp.org/speakers
Ballot Access Page http://www.gp.org/ballotstatus
Livestream Channel http://www.livestream.com/greenpartyus
Video Page http://www.gp.org/video/index.php
Press conferences, forums, and other events at the Green Party's 2011 Annual National Meeting in Alfred, NY, broadcast and archived on the Green Party's Livestream Channel http://www.livestream.com/greenpartyus
2011 Annual National Meeting http://nygreenfest.org
Green Pages: The official publication of record of the Green Party of the United States (Summer 2011 issue now online) http://gp.org/greenpages-blog
Saturday, October 8, 2011
After the Wall Street Protests: To change America’s political direction, we need a voters’ revolt and a permanent noncorporate alternative to the Titanic Parties
FDL
The protests against Wall Street’s criminal theft of America’s future, to be followed on October 6 by the ‘October 2011′ occupation of Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC, are cause for optimism. Maybe ‘Arab Spring’ is finally coming to the US. (‘American Autumn’?) The protests, now spreading to other cities, are continuing despite the troops of police ready to club, pepperspray, and corral peaceful protesters into nets for mass arrest.
The biggest impediment to the democracy movement is not Fox News and pundits who believe that the Occupy Wall Street demos are a demand for ‘big government’, as if their entire understanding comes from a GOP talking points memo. It’s not the dismissive tone of journalists from the New York Times and other mainstream papers. It’s not the cable news stations who misreport the goals of the demonstrations or ignore them altogether.
The greatest danger is that many Americans sympathetic to the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ grievances, and maybe a small number of the protesters themselves, will soon fall into a familiar habit. In a few months we can expect to hear some of them declare “We must vote to reelect President Obama in 2012, to prevent a Republican victory.”
The Republicans have already won, regardless of who takes the oath of office in January 2013. Endless wars, Wall Street pillage, and the trashing of the US Constitution are no longer the exclusive intellectual property of the GOP.
Barack Obama’s progressive supporters acknowledge that he didn’t quite fulfill their expectations as an agent of change and a bulwark against war and the predatory power of corporations. But the GOP is so much worse, they say, that we have to keep voting Democrat. This is nonsense.
The liberals, progressives, leftists, editors and columnists for The Nation and Daily Kos and other publications who insist we vote Dem in every election cycle are preaching self-defeat.
Apologists for the Democrats will say, “But there are some real differences between the two parties!” That’s true. “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” would not have been repealed by a Republican administration.
Overall, however, the differences between D and R have grown more and more insubstantial during the past few decades. In many cases, Democratic presidents used their power to fulfill the GOP agenda, often accomplishing what Republican couldn’t by themselves, for example, President Clinton’s passage of NAFTA with help from a Democratic Congress and President Obama’s willingness to carve up Social Security and Medicare.
On nearly every big issue from the wars to Wall Street’s looting of the economy to offshore drilling and oil pipelines, President Obama has shown a smooth continuity from the Bush-Cheney Administration. When he clashed with Republicans in the health care reform debate, the argument was really over which side could best accommodate for-profit insurance companies and other special interests, with Democrats offering mandates that require everyone to purchase private coverage, an idea they pilfered from Republican Congressmembers who introduced it in the 1990s. (See “Whose side are they on? An unexhaustive recent history of bipartisan convergence” below.)
The major newspapers, network and cable news shows, and other media inflate the small differences because they like to make the news as simple-minded as possible, and that means limiting the public debate to D versus R on any big issue. Other points of view, such as the one expressed by the Wall Street protesters, aren’t fit for serious coverage, or sometimes any coverage at all.
Progressives who believe that President Obama “is really one of us” are as deluded as conservatives who believe Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, and other phony populists and corporate royalists when they call President Obama a socialist, by which they mean he’s a few degrees less rabid in his devotion to corporate rule than they are.
Instead of Democrat versus Republican, we should look at US politics as D and R versus the rest of us. Elections have become a contest between Democrats ready to fulfill GOP agenda and the GOP itself. Whether we elect a Democrat or a Republican to the White House, whether Democrats or Republicans win control of Congress, the center of political gravity remains on the side of the GOP. As George Lakoff has observed in several books and numerous essays, Democrats play according to Republican rules. Even when they’re telling outright lies, Republicans deal in gut-level messages that Democrats find themselves parroting: Support our troops! End big government!
Both of the Titanic parties accept enormous sums of money from corporate PACs to do the bidding of corporate special interest lobbies, but the GOP is far more shameless about its service to corporate elites and its ideology of privatization, deregulation, and concentration of economic power.
Democrats, on the other hand, want to be perceived as the party of the people, but won’t wean themselves off corporate campaign checks. They retreat from their stated principles and traditional constituencies and ignore progressive voices within their own party on the assumption that voters on the left have “nowhere else to turn.”
The retreat of the Democrats, their confused allegiances, and embrace of so much of the GOP agenda have meant a license for Republicans to move to ever greater extremes. Now we have a ‘liberal’ party that has moved to the right of Eisenhower and Nixon and a rightwing party that has descended into irrationality. Every decade, the political paradigm drifts further and further to the right.
If we want to interrupt this drift, we have to think outside of the two-party power bloc. The Occupy Wall Street protesters and their supporters have no voice in the two-party mainstream of electoral politics. It’s assumed that –if they vote at all — they will line up behind President Obama and a Democratic machine that regards them with contempt.
Time for a Voters’ Revolt
Dropping out of the elections and refusing to vote are not an option. Until we take steps now to break down the rule of the Titanic Parties and replace them in public office, we face decades of more endless wars, more erosion of basic human rights and protections for working people, and dwindling chances of a solution to global climate change.
Activism should not be limited to electoral politics. But the movement for a change in America’s political direction must include a voters’ revolt and the emergence of a strong and permanent alternative party that rejects corporate money and influence.
Without such an insurgence in 2012, the following topics will be missing from the election season debate after April or May: the plundering of the US economy by the financial industry; multi-trillion-dollar bailouts for Wall Street; the assault on public sector unions; universal health care (Medicare For All); ending the endless wars; the death penalty (Troy Davis will be forgotten); the dangers of the Tar Sands pipeline, offshore drilling, nuclear power, mountaintop removal mining, warrantless spying on US citizens, torture, and other gross abuses of power. Neither incumbent Obama nor the GOP nominee will mention these things.
Despite the best intentions of progressives like Dennis Kucinich, John Conyers, and others, the Democratic Party will not be rehabilitated. A progressive challenge to President Obama in the primaries, as recently encouraged by Ralph Nader and others, will keep some of the complaints and ideals of the Wall Street protesters alive for a few months. By late spring, the challenger will be defeated by the Obama campaign juggernaut and the challenger’s supporters will find themselves muzzled, with the expectation that they’ll vote Dem anyway. That’s what happens in every presidential election.
The usual objection to voting third-party is that the candidate might ‘spoil’ by subtracting votes from a Democrat and enabling a Republican victory, with the role played by Green presidential nominee Ralph Nader in 2000 as the classical example. There are numerous problems with this accusation — it ignores manipulation and voter obstruction by GOP officials in Florida, a patently biased Supreme Court ruling that canceled vote recounts and delivered the White House to George W. Bush, and Al Gore’s own feeble campaign, which lost double-digit points in polls during the final months of the race (while Mr. Nader’s percentage never rose above a few percentage points) and failed to take even Tennessee, Mr. Gore’s home state. In Florida, the number of registered Dems who voted for Mr. Bush was four times the number who voted for Mr. Nader. Why don’t Democratic apologists ever apply the spoiler label to Republicans?
The assertion that Mr. Nader siphoned votes away from Mr. Gore assumes that Democratic candidates have some kind of prior claim to our votes. The subtext of the spoiler accusation, when leveled by pundits and politicians who’ve made no effort to promote reforms like Instant Runoff Voting that would eliminate the alleged spoiler effect, is that two-party rule must never face interference from alternative parties and independent candidates. It’s a notion of democracy only one step removed from single-party states like China and the Soviet Union.
The only fair and democratic elections are multi-party elections, in which every voter has the right to see more than a choice between Big Mac and Whopper on the ballot, the right to know which candidate best represents his or her own interests and ideals, and the right to vote for that candidate.
Imagine that multi-party democracy existed in the US. The election of a half-dozen noncorporate alternative-party candidates to Congress would alter the political landscape, with Ds and Rs no longer each others’ sole competition.
If such a candidate participated in the presidential debates, he or she would raise ideas that no Democratic or Republican nominee would ever touch, like Medicare For All and rapid withdrawal of all US forces from Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Commission on Presidential Debates is owned and run by the Democratic and Republican parties, who took control over it in order to bar other parties’ candidates. D and R politicians in many states have conspired to rig the ballot access rules of many states to block third-party and independent candidates from running for office. The two Titanic parties have been corrupted by their own exclusive power as much as by corporate money and clout.
These obstacles are all surmountable, but only through a concerted mass effort led by a broad alliance of those critical of the two-party status quo, the bureaucratic and political power of major corporations, and the expanding power of government. The Occupy Wall Street protests, which have drawn progressives, Greens, anarchists, libertarians, nonvoters, frustrated Democrats and Republicans, and many others, are a model for such an alliance.
Alternatives like the Green Party are waiting for their moment — the moment of mass epiphany when Americans recognize them as an imperative comparable to the anti-slavery Republican Party in the mid 19th century. The Occupy Wall Street protesters are the abolitionists of the 21st century, demanding an end to the predatory power of Wall Street and other corporate elites over our political system, our jobs, our homes, our savings, our health, nearly aspect of our lives.
Until we recognize that Democrats are as dangerous to America’s future as Republicans, until we spark a national voters’ revolt, we’ll continue to commit political suicide every Election Day.
The Occupy Wall Street participants want to push the country in a different direction, away from corporate oligarchy, military aggression, and environmental depredation. Protests and direct action must continue as the election season unfolds, especially during next year’s national Democratic and Republican conventions. We must find, build, and promote noncorporate ways to live our lives and expand participatory democracy (see Ben Manski’s essay “The Protest Wave: Why the Political Class Can’t Understand Our Demands”).
And if we want these things to have a lasting effect, the “99 percent” movement that inspired the current demonstrations must move to the next level, which must include independent electoral action in 2012 and beyond.
Sidebar: Whose side are they on? An unexhaustive recent history of bipartisan convergence
• Is President Obama a “warrior for the middle class”?
In 2008, Mr. Obama became the highest recipient of Wall Street campaign contributions in history. After he was elected, he followed in the footsteps of Republican presidents by stacking his staff with Wall Street insiders and operators — Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, economics advisor Larry Summers, Chief of Staff Bill Daley — whose deregulatory policies made the 2008 economic meltdown inevitable.
With bipartisan support in Congress, the Obama Administration bailed out the Wall Street firms that were responsible for the meltdown, while offering minimal aid to Americans facing unemployment and home foreclosures because of the Subprime Mortgage Crisis that these firms created. The White House and Congress have taken no steps to restore the Glass-Steagall Act or enact other reforms to curtail Wall Street power and prevent the next crisis.
The federal government plans to begin selling off the massive portfolio of foreclosed homes now owned by HUD, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac to private investment conglomerates (“vulture funds”), possibly the “largest transfer of wealth from the public to the private sector” in history.
Such actions were predictable by September 2008, before Mr. Obama’s election victory, when he undercut his pledge of “change we can believe in” with an endorsement of the first Wall Street bailout, in harmony with the Bush White House and his GOP competition, John McCain.
After promising to do so during his campaign, President Obama has refused to renegotiate NAFTA and other international trade pacts. These agreements, which tend to favor corporate power and profit over the rights and well-being of working people and the health of the environment, were authorized by President Clinton, who had initially opposed NAFTA while running for the White House in 1992.
Democrats have refused to repeal Taft-Hartley restrictions on union organizing. When Republican Gov. Walker want on the warpath against the organizing rights and benefits for public sector workers in Wisconsin in early 2011, Democratic Gov. Cuomo launched a similar assault against public sector workers in New York.
• Are Democrats the party of health care reform and Social Security?
The Democratic Party discarded its platform promise, since 1948, of a national health program while Bill Clinton was president. In 2009, Democratic leaders declared that universal health care (single-payer, also called Medicare For All) would be “off the table” — Senate Finance Committee chair Max Baucus’s words when he organized the health care reform round tables.
President Obama’s health care bill imposes mandates that function as a direct public subsidy to the health insurance cartel, an idea that Republicans proposed during the 1990s. Whether Democrats passed Obamacare in 2010 or the Republicans prevailed in blocking it, the insurance industry, Big Pharma, and other corporate lobbies would be the real winners.
Contrary to the current belief that the President recently compromised on Social Security and Medicare, he made his intention to slash them clear in 2010 when he appointed his National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (“Catfood Commission”) and stacked it with politicians, economists, and company heads hostile to both programs. Rather than alleviating the skyrocketing costs of health care, the highest cause of personal bankruptcies, Obama policies further threaten middle- and low-income Americans and burden retirees.
• Are Democrats the party of social justice?
President Obama has remained silent about record US incarceration rates — the world’s highest, surpassing repressive countries like China and Iran — and the fact that most of those behind bars are young, poor, and mostly black or brown. Since President Clinton, Democratic leaders have supported the growth of the private prison industry, which profits by filling up cells with more inmates.
Both Democrats and Republicans support the War on Drugs, which has ruined lives and caused endless devastation in poor neighborhoods, and the death penalty, despite racial disparities and a growing list of exonerations and errors. President Obama refused to comment on the fate of Troy Davis, who was executed by the state of Georgia despite significant doubts about his guilt (seven out of nine witnesses changed their testimony, some of them claiming police coercion).
• The environment and global warming?
President Obama has authorized more offshore oil drilling (despite the lessons of the disastrous BP spill in the Gulf); endorsed new nuclear power plants that will make money for energy companies while taxpayers assume the high cost and high liability (despite the example of Fukushima); allowed mountaintop removal mining to continue to obliterate and poison the West Virginia landscape; remained silent about the extremely dangerous technique called hydrofracking for natural gas in New York and Pennsylvania; endorsed the myth of clean coal; and is on the verge of approving the dangerous Keystone XL pipeline from the Canadian tar sands.
On September 2, 2011, President Obama killed proposed national air-quality standards for smog, overriding a plan by the Environmental Protection Agency to reduce air pollution. His administration, and Democrats in general, have supported greenhouse gas emissions trading schemes (“cap and trade”) that will allow polluting companies to trade and collect licenses to continue polluting. US obstruction remains the greatest impediment to the Kyoto Protocols.
• Peace?
Democrats pretended to be the antiwar party in recent elections, but in 2006 they boosted funding for the wars after gaining control of Congress. President Obama escalated the war on Afghanistan and expanded it into Pakistan, and launched a new invasion (Libya) without the consent of Congress. While ordering the withdrawal of some troops from Iraq, he is implementing Donald Rumsfeld’s plan to replace US armed forces, which are directly accountable to Congress, with private “mercenary” security firms, which aren’t.
In October 2002, the Democratic leadership voted for President Bush’s request for an extra-constitutional transfer of war power from Congress to the White House, effectively endorsing his plan to invade Iraq on fraudulent claims about Saddam Hussein’s WMDs, nuclear weapons acquisition, and collusion with al-Qaeda. Under the Obama Administration, Democrats have adopted the neocon doctrine of unilateral aggression and the use of military force against countries at peace with the US. There has been virtually no difference between the Bush and Obama policies on the Middle East. The Obama Administration, which continues to arm Israel, had no objection to the Israel’s invasion of Gaza and massacre of civilians and strenuously objected to Palestine’s bid for UN recognition.
• The US Constitution and international law?
The Obama Justice Department has refused to investigate Bush-Cheney officials for torture and other gross abuses of power, constitutional violations, and war crimes. The administration has continued many of the same policies: warrantless surveillance of US citizens, denial of habeas corpus, extraordinary rendition, maintenance of “black sites,” harassment and legal action against whistleblowers. President Obama has surpassed the last administration in his intention to assassinate US citizens suspected of terrorism without any semblance of due process, as in the recent case of Anwar al-Awlaki, the US-born cleric killed in Yemen, whose name was on a secret “hit list” of people the President has targeted for summary execution.
The protests against Wall Street’s criminal theft of America’s future, to be followed on October 6 by the ‘October 2011′ occupation of Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC, are cause for optimism. Maybe ‘Arab Spring’ is finally coming to the US. (‘American Autumn’?) The protests, now spreading to other cities, are continuing despite the troops of police ready to club, pepperspray, and corral peaceful protesters into nets for mass arrest.
The biggest impediment to the democracy movement is not Fox News and pundits who believe that the Occupy Wall Street demos are a demand for ‘big government’, as if their entire understanding comes from a GOP talking points memo. It’s not the dismissive tone of journalists from the New York Times and other mainstream papers. It’s not the cable news stations who misreport the goals of the demonstrations or ignore them altogether.
The greatest danger is that many Americans sympathetic to the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ grievances, and maybe a small number of the protesters themselves, will soon fall into a familiar habit. In a few months we can expect to hear some of them declare “We must vote to reelect President Obama in 2012, to prevent a Republican victory.”
The Republicans have already won, regardless of who takes the oath of office in January 2013. Endless wars, Wall Street pillage, and the trashing of the US Constitution are no longer the exclusive intellectual property of the GOP.
Barack Obama’s progressive supporters acknowledge that he didn’t quite fulfill their expectations as an agent of change and a bulwark against war and the predatory power of corporations. But the GOP is so much worse, they say, that we have to keep voting Democrat. This is nonsense.
The liberals, progressives, leftists, editors and columnists for The Nation and Daily Kos and other publications who insist we vote Dem in every election cycle are preaching self-defeat.
Apologists for the Democrats will say, “But there are some real differences between the two parties!” That’s true. “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” would not have been repealed by a Republican administration.
Overall, however, the differences between D and R have grown more and more insubstantial during the past few decades. In many cases, Democratic presidents used their power to fulfill the GOP agenda, often accomplishing what Republican couldn’t by themselves, for example, President Clinton’s passage of NAFTA with help from a Democratic Congress and President Obama’s willingness to carve up Social Security and Medicare.
On nearly every big issue from the wars to Wall Street’s looting of the economy to offshore drilling and oil pipelines, President Obama has shown a smooth continuity from the Bush-Cheney Administration. When he clashed with Republicans in the health care reform debate, the argument was really over which side could best accommodate for-profit insurance companies and other special interests, with Democrats offering mandates that require everyone to purchase private coverage, an idea they pilfered from Republican Congressmembers who introduced it in the 1990s. (See “Whose side are they on? An unexhaustive recent history of bipartisan convergence” below.)
The major newspapers, network and cable news shows, and other media inflate the small differences because they like to make the news as simple-minded as possible, and that means limiting the public debate to D versus R on any big issue. Other points of view, such as the one expressed by the Wall Street protesters, aren’t fit for serious coverage, or sometimes any coverage at all.
Progressives who believe that President Obama “is really one of us” are as deluded as conservatives who believe Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, and other phony populists and corporate royalists when they call President Obama a socialist, by which they mean he’s a few degrees less rabid in his devotion to corporate rule than they are.
Instead of Democrat versus Republican, we should look at US politics as D and R versus the rest of us. Elections have become a contest between Democrats ready to fulfill GOP agenda and the GOP itself. Whether we elect a Democrat or a Republican to the White House, whether Democrats or Republicans win control of Congress, the center of political gravity remains on the side of the GOP. As George Lakoff has observed in several books and numerous essays, Democrats play according to Republican rules. Even when they’re telling outright lies, Republicans deal in gut-level messages that Democrats find themselves parroting: Support our troops! End big government!
Both of the Titanic parties accept enormous sums of money from corporate PACs to do the bidding of corporate special interest lobbies, but the GOP is far more shameless about its service to corporate elites and its ideology of privatization, deregulation, and concentration of economic power.
Democrats, on the other hand, want to be perceived as the party of the people, but won’t wean themselves off corporate campaign checks. They retreat from their stated principles and traditional constituencies and ignore progressive voices within their own party on the assumption that voters on the left have “nowhere else to turn.”
The retreat of the Democrats, their confused allegiances, and embrace of so much of the GOP agenda have meant a license for Republicans to move to ever greater extremes. Now we have a ‘liberal’ party that has moved to the right of Eisenhower and Nixon and a rightwing party that has descended into irrationality. Every decade, the political paradigm drifts further and further to the right.
If we want to interrupt this drift, we have to think outside of the two-party power bloc. The Occupy Wall Street protesters and their supporters have no voice in the two-party mainstream of electoral politics. It’s assumed that –if they vote at all — they will line up behind President Obama and a Democratic machine that regards them with contempt.
Time for a Voters’ Revolt
Dropping out of the elections and refusing to vote are not an option. Until we take steps now to break down the rule of the Titanic Parties and replace them in public office, we face decades of more endless wars, more erosion of basic human rights and protections for working people, and dwindling chances of a solution to global climate change.
Activism should not be limited to electoral politics. But the movement for a change in America’s political direction must include a voters’ revolt and the emergence of a strong and permanent alternative party that rejects corporate money and influence.
Without such an insurgence in 2012, the following topics will be missing from the election season debate after April or May: the plundering of the US economy by the financial industry; multi-trillion-dollar bailouts for Wall Street; the assault on public sector unions; universal health care (Medicare For All); ending the endless wars; the death penalty (Troy Davis will be forgotten); the dangers of the Tar Sands pipeline, offshore drilling, nuclear power, mountaintop removal mining, warrantless spying on US citizens, torture, and other gross abuses of power. Neither incumbent Obama nor the GOP nominee will mention these things.
Despite the best intentions of progressives like Dennis Kucinich, John Conyers, and others, the Democratic Party will not be rehabilitated. A progressive challenge to President Obama in the primaries, as recently encouraged by Ralph Nader and others, will keep some of the complaints and ideals of the Wall Street protesters alive for a few months. By late spring, the challenger will be defeated by the Obama campaign juggernaut and the challenger’s supporters will find themselves muzzled, with the expectation that they’ll vote Dem anyway. That’s what happens in every presidential election.
The usual objection to voting third-party is that the candidate might ‘spoil’ by subtracting votes from a Democrat and enabling a Republican victory, with the role played by Green presidential nominee Ralph Nader in 2000 as the classical example. There are numerous problems with this accusation — it ignores manipulation and voter obstruction by GOP officials in Florida, a patently biased Supreme Court ruling that canceled vote recounts and delivered the White House to George W. Bush, and Al Gore’s own feeble campaign, which lost double-digit points in polls during the final months of the race (while Mr. Nader’s percentage never rose above a few percentage points) and failed to take even Tennessee, Mr. Gore’s home state. In Florida, the number of registered Dems who voted for Mr. Bush was four times the number who voted for Mr. Nader. Why don’t Democratic apologists ever apply the spoiler label to Republicans?
The assertion that Mr. Nader siphoned votes away from Mr. Gore assumes that Democratic candidates have some kind of prior claim to our votes. The subtext of the spoiler accusation, when leveled by pundits and politicians who’ve made no effort to promote reforms like Instant Runoff Voting that would eliminate the alleged spoiler effect, is that two-party rule must never face interference from alternative parties and independent candidates. It’s a notion of democracy only one step removed from single-party states like China and the Soviet Union.
The only fair and democratic elections are multi-party elections, in which every voter has the right to see more than a choice between Big Mac and Whopper on the ballot, the right to know which candidate best represents his or her own interests and ideals, and the right to vote for that candidate.
Imagine that multi-party democracy existed in the US. The election of a half-dozen noncorporate alternative-party candidates to Congress would alter the political landscape, with Ds and Rs no longer each others’ sole competition.
If such a candidate participated in the presidential debates, he or she would raise ideas that no Democratic or Republican nominee would ever touch, like Medicare For All and rapid withdrawal of all US forces from Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Commission on Presidential Debates is owned and run by the Democratic and Republican parties, who took control over it in order to bar other parties’ candidates. D and R politicians in many states have conspired to rig the ballot access rules of many states to block third-party and independent candidates from running for office. The two Titanic parties have been corrupted by their own exclusive power as much as by corporate money and clout.
These obstacles are all surmountable, but only through a concerted mass effort led by a broad alliance of those critical of the two-party status quo, the bureaucratic and political power of major corporations, and the expanding power of government. The Occupy Wall Street protests, which have drawn progressives, Greens, anarchists, libertarians, nonvoters, frustrated Democrats and Republicans, and many others, are a model for such an alliance.
Alternatives like the Green Party are waiting for their moment — the moment of mass epiphany when Americans recognize them as an imperative comparable to the anti-slavery Republican Party in the mid 19th century. The Occupy Wall Street protesters are the abolitionists of the 21st century, demanding an end to the predatory power of Wall Street and other corporate elites over our political system, our jobs, our homes, our savings, our health, nearly aspect of our lives.
Until we recognize that Democrats are as dangerous to America’s future as Republicans, until we spark a national voters’ revolt, we’ll continue to commit political suicide every Election Day.
The Occupy Wall Street participants want to push the country in a different direction, away from corporate oligarchy, military aggression, and environmental depredation. Protests and direct action must continue as the election season unfolds, especially during next year’s national Democratic and Republican conventions. We must find, build, and promote noncorporate ways to live our lives and expand participatory democracy (see Ben Manski’s essay “The Protest Wave: Why the Political Class Can’t Understand Our Demands”).
And if we want these things to have a lasting effect, the “99 percent” movement that inspired the current demonstrations must move to the next level, which must include independent electoral action in 2012 and beyond.
Sidebar: Whose side are they on? An unexhaustive recent history of bipartisan convergence
• Is President Obama a “warrior for the middle class”?
In 2008, Mr. Obama became the highest recipient of Wall Street campaign contributions in history. After he was elected, he followed in the footsteps of Republican presidents by stacking his staff with Wall Street insiders and operators — Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, economics advisor Larry Summers, Chief of Staff Bill Daley — whose deregulatory policies made the 2008 economic meltdown inevitable.
With bipartisan support in Congress, the Obama Administration bailed out the Wall Street firms that were responsible for the meltdown, while offering minimal aid to Americans facing unemployment and home foreclosures because of the Subprime Mortgage Crisis that these firms created. The White House and Congress have taken no steps to restore the Glass-Steagall Act or enact other reforms to curtail Wall Street power and prevent the next crisis.
The federal government plans to begin selling off the massive portfolio of foreclosed homes now owned by HUD, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac to private investment conglomerates (“vulture funds”), possibly the “largest transfer of wealth from the public to the private sector” in history.
Such actions were predictable by September 2008, before Mr. Obama’s election victory, when he undercut his pledge of “change we can believe in” with an endorsement of the first Wall Street bailout, in harmony with the Bush White House and his GOP competition, John McCain.
After promising to do so during his campaign, President Obama has refused to renegotiate NAFTA and other international trade pacts. These agreements, which tend to favor corporate power and profit over the rights and well-being of working people and the health of the environment, were authorized by President Clinton, who had initially opposed NAFTA while running for the White House in 1992.
Democrats have refused to repeal Taft-Hartley restrictions on union organizing. When Republican Gov. Walker want on the warpath against the organizing rights and benefits for public sector workers in Wisconsin in early 2011, Democratic Gov. Cuomo launched a similar assault against public sector workers in New York.
• Are Democrats the party of health care reform and Social Security?
The Democratic Party discarded its platform promise, since 1948, of a national health program while Bill Clinton was president. In 2009, Democratic leaders declared that universal health care (single-payer, also called Medicare For All) would be “off the table” — Senate Finance Committee chair Max Baucus’s words when he organized the health care reform round tables.
President Obama’s health care bill imposes mandates that function as a direct public subsidy to the health insurance cartel, an idea that Republicans proposed during the 1990s. Whether Democrats passed Obamacare in 2010 or the Republicans prevailed in blocking it, the insurance industry, Big Pharma, and other corporate lobbies would be the real winners.
Contrary to the current belief that the President recently compromised on Social Security and Medicare, he made his intention to slash them clear in 2010 when he appointed his National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (“Catfood Commission”) and stacked it with politicians, economists, and company heads hostile to both programs. Rather than alleviating the skyrocketing costs of health care, the highest cause of personal bankruptcies, Obama policies further threaten middle- and low-income Americans and burden retirees.
• Are Democrats the party of social justice?
President Obama has remained silent about record US incarceration rates — the world’s highest, surpassing repressive countries like China and Iran — and the fact that most of those behind bars are young, poor, and mostly black or brown. Since President Clinton, Democratic leaders have supported the growth of the private prison industry, which profits by filling up cells with more inmates.
Both Democrats and Republicans support the War on Drugs, which has ruined lives and caused endless devastation in poor neighborhoods, and the death penalty, despite racial disparities and a growing list of exonerations and errors. President Obama refused to comment on the fate of Troy Davis, who was executed by the state of Georgia despite significant doubts about his guilt (seven out of nine witnesses changed their testimony, some of them claiming police coercion).
• The environment and global warming?
President Obama has authorized more offshore oil drilling (despite the lessons of the disastrous BP spill in the Gulf); endorsed new nuclear power plants that will make money for energy companies while taxpayers assume the high cost and high liability (despite the example of Fukushima); allowed mountaintop removal mining to continue to obliterate and poison the West Virginia landscape; remained silent about the extremely dangerous technique called hydrofracking for natural gas in New York and Pennsylvania; endorsed the myth of clean coal; and is on the verge of approving the dangerous Keystone XL pipeline from the Canadian tar sands.
On September 2, 2011, President Obama killed proposed national air-quality standards for smog, overriding a plan by the Environmental Protection Agency to reduce air pollution. His administration, and Democrats in general, have supported greenhouse gas emissions trading schemes (“cap and trade”) that will allow polluting companies to trade and collect licenses to continue polluting. US obstruction remains the greatest impediment to the Kyoto Protocols.
• Peace?
Democrats pretended to be the antiwar party in recent elections, but in 2006 they boosted funding for the wars after gaining control of Congress. President Obama escalated the war on Afghanistan and expanded it into Pakistan, and launched a new invasion (Libya) without the consent of Congress. While ordering the withdrawal of some troops from Iraq, he is implementing Donald Rumsfeld’s plan to replace US armed forces, which are directly accountable to Congress, with private “mercenary” security firms, which aren’t.
In October 2002, the Democratic leadership voted for President Bush’s request for an extra-constitutional transfer of war power from Congress to the White House, effectively endorsing his plan to invade Iraq on fraudulent claims about Saddam Hussein’s WMDs, nuclear weapons acquisition, and collusion with al-Qaeda. Under the Obama Administration, Democrats have adopted the neocon doctrine of unilateral aggression and the use of military force against countries at peace with the US. There has been virtually no difference between the Bush and Obama policies on the Middle East. The Obama Administration, which continues to arm Israel, had no objection to the Israel’s invasion of Gaza and massacre of civilians and strenuously objected to Palestine’s bid for UN recognition.
• The US Constitution and international law?
The Obama Justice Department has refused to investigate Bush-Cheney officials for torture and other gross abuses of power, constitutional violations, and war crimes. The administration has continued many of the same policies: warrantless surveillance of US citizens, denial of habeas corpus, extraordinary rendition, maintenance of “black sites,” harassment and legal action against whistleblowers. President Obama has surpassed the last administration in his intention to assassinate US citizens suspected of terrorism without any semblance of due process, as in the recent case of Anwar al-Awlaki, the US-born cleric killed in Yemen, whose name was on a secret “hit list” of people the President has targeted for summary execution.
Friday, October 7, 2011
Consumer Advocate Ralph Nader Encourages “Occupy Wall Street” Protesters To Challenge Wall Street Abuses
NEWS RELEASE
For Immediate Release
via dcstatehoodgreen.org
Contact: Ralph Nader (202) 387-8034 or
Matthew Zawisky 716-479-2351
Ralph Nader to speak at Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC
On Pennsylvania Avenue NW between 13th and 14th Streets NW
Saturday, October 11, 2011 at 12:45 pm
Statement by consumer advocate, Ralph Nader
The frustration seen in the protests on Wall Street over the past few weeks demonstrates a widespread and growing citizen discontent with the two political parties in Washington, D.C. and with a political system that is dominated by corporate interests.
It is time for citizens to push their elected officials to break the corporate stranglehold on our economy. Congress should start by enacting a financial speculation tax that would help curb the wheeling and dealing on Wall Street and that could raise hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue to help with the our country's economic recovery.
Congress has done more to bail out Wall Street than Main Street. Wall Street crooks have avoided penalties and prosecution and continued to receive bonuses and excessive compensation while pensions and savings have been looted.
Wages have remained stagnant while the largest corporations and executives have seen record profits and bonuses year after year. Congress has done little in the face of a staggering – and growing – income inequality in this country, where the top 1 percent of the population has financial wealth equal to the combined financial wealth of the bottom 95 percent of the people.
And Congress has done nothing either to disclose or stem the flow of millions of corporate dollars into the electoral process. Corporate Political Action Committees are corrupting the electoral process and blocking the voices and concerns of millions of people.
These are not the signs of a healthy democracy. Those taking part in the “Occupy Wall Street” protests and in similar protests cropping up across the country are working hard to make their voices heard. It is way overdue for the President and Congress to listen.
For Immediate Release
via dcstatehoodgreen.org
Contact: Ralph Nader (202) 387-8034 or
Matthew Zawisky 716-479-2351
Ralph Nader to speak at Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC
On Pennsylvania Avenue NW between 13th and 14th Streets NW
Saturday, October 11, 2011 at 12:45 pm
Statement by consumer advocate, Ralph Nader
The frustration seen in the protests on Wall Street over the past few weeks demonstrates a widespread and growing citizen discontent with the two political parties in Washington, D.C. and with a political system that is dominated by corporate interests.
It is time for citizens to push their elected officials to break the corporate stranglehold on our economy. Congress should start by enacting a financial speculation tax that would help curb the wheeling and dealing on Wall Street and that could raise hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue to help with the our country's economic recovery.
Congress has done more to bail out Wall Street than Main Street. Wall Street crooks have avoided penalties and prosecution and continued to receive bonuses and excessive compensation while pensions and savings have been looted.
Wages have remained stagnant while the largest corporations and executives have seen record profits and bonuses year after year. Congress has done little in the face of a staggering – and growing – income inequality in this country, where the top 1 percent of the population has financial wealth equal to the combined financial wealth of the bottom 95 percent of the people.
And Congress has done nothing either to disclose or stem the flow of millions of corporate dollars into the electoral process. Corporate Political Action Committees are corrupting the electoral process and blocking the voices and concerns of millions of people.
These are not the signs of a healthy democracy. Those taking part in the “Occupy Wall Street” protests and in similar protests cropping up across the country are working hard to make their voices heard. It is way overdue for the President and Congress to listen.
Thursday, October 6, 2011
Pain, Protests and the People
gerryspence.wordpress.com
The protests on Wall Street have been overdue but will end too soon. Slaves cannot long maintain a war against the master. A money-made
U. S. Supreme Court has insured that the Moneyed Master can buy elections, and only the Master has such money. The democratic idea of government by the governed is a myth. One notes that the Republican party is so sensitive to its master’s power that it dare not suggest raising taxes on the Master –- not even an impoverished penny, much less plug the illegal loopholes through which the Master sucks the last of the life blood from the nation. All such slaves know that all power is vested in the Moneyed Master.
The current protests are curious news. But the media, both the printed and electronic, belong to the Moneyed Master. The people have no voice and their protesting voices on Wall Street and elsewhere are lost in the din of the growling, empty stomachs of children and the sounds of terror from a people who are crippled, not because their arms or legs have been severed, but because they can find no jobs. The Moneyed Master has closed its doors against the people and sits on its money like an old hen on rotten eggs.
The people will not prevail. No, not now. The gluttony of the Master must first run uncontained like maddened rats in a cheese factory until the sky grows dark and the light of hope fades, and there remains only the sound of the Master’s gnashing teeth greedily devouring all but the faintest dreams of the people.
With its endless propaganda the Moneyed Master has caused its slaves to believe they are free. But when that cruel hoax is ripped bare of its deceitful cloth and stands naked before the people, and when enough of the people sleep under the bridges and their children’s bellies swell from hunger then one day it will be too late for the Master. Suddenly, without warning, the people will rise up in explosive unison like a long sleeping volcano. Raging and turmoil will ring across the canyons of the streets and blood will flood the streets, and the people will at last prevail.
These are the times when the people cry out their pain to the deaf ears of the Moneyed Master. But such are only the beginning steps of the infant. The people will grow strong from their pain. Pain is the nourishment of growth. And in the end the people will prevail as they have though the eons against the tyrants of power. But not now.
The protests on Wall Street have been overdue but will end too soon. Slaves cannot long maintain a war against the master. A money-made
U. S. Supreme Court has insured that the Moneyed Master can buy elections, and only the Master has such money. The democratic idea of government by the governed is a myth. One notes that the Republican party is so sensitive to its master’s power that it dare not suggest raising taxes on the Master –- not even an impoverished penny, much less plug the illegal loopholes through which the Master sucks the last of the life blood from the nation. All such slaves know that all power is vested in the Moneyed Master.
The current protests are curious news. But the media, both the printed and electronic, belong to the Moneyed Master. The people have no voice and their protesting voices on Wall Street and elsewhere are lost in the din of the growling, empty stomachs of children and the sounds of terror from a people who are crippled, not because their arms or legs have been severed, but because they can find no jobs. The Moneyed Master has closed its doors against the people and sits on its money like an old hen on rotten eggs.
The people will not prevail. No, not now. The gluttony of the Master must first run uncontained like maddened rats in a cheese factory until the sky grows dark and the light of hope fades, and there remains only the sound of the Master’s gnashing teeth greedily devouring all but the faintest dreams of the people.
With its endless propaganda the Moneyed Master has caused its slaves to believe they are free. But when that cruel hoax is ripped bare of its deceitful cloth and stands naked before the people, and when enough of the people sleep under the bridges and their children’s bellies swell from hunger then one day it will be too late for the Master. Suddenly, without warning, the people will rise up in explosive unison like a long sleeping volcano. Raging and turmoil will ring across the canyons of the streets and blood will flood the streets, and the people will at last prevail.
These are the times when the people cry out their pain to the deaf ears of the Moneyed Master. But such are only the beginning steps of the infant. The people will grow strong from their pain. Pain is the nourishment of growth. And in the end the people will prevail as they have though the eons against the tyrants of power. But not now.
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