NO PUBLIC OPTION = BILLION-DOLLAR TAXPAYER GIVEAWAY TO PRIVATE INSURERS

If we do not get a public option, we will pay billions of dollars in subsidies to private insurers only. 80% of people with no health insurance work, and rightfully, they will get subsidies.

Wrongfully, all that subsidy money paid with your taxes will go to private insurers, and pay for not only health care, but also for:

. Salaries of $20-$25 million for private insurance CEOs

. Perks like private jets, bonuses, and stock shares often worth over $100 million for those CEOs

No government employee gets millions of dollars a year, and perks and stock shares worth over $100 million.

. Your firefighter, police, highway patrol do not make $25 million a year.

. Your congressmen don’t make $25 million a year.

. Your President of the United States does not make $25 million/year.

. Your Medicare, VA and Medicaid bureaucrats do not make $25 million/year.

Your tax dollars pay the salaries of all those people. None of them demand millions of dollars in salary, but they’re there when you need them.

Fighting to kill a public option means you are fighting to give billions of dollars to the same private insurance industry that has:

- Bankrupted hundreds of thousands, if not millions of families throughout the country

- Denied care and let hundreds of thousands of Americans die of preventable or controllable diseases in the past decade alone

If we are going to give up the public option in the name of “compromise” – though we have already compromised and given up single-payer health insurance like Medicare for all – then we are giving our tax dollars away so that private insurance big-wigs can live like fattened hogs.

If you won’t fight for the public option, prepare for the private insurers to make billions from your tax dollars. Getting a piece of those insurance companies is the only chance you have of not ending up broke and retiring in poverty. Because as a taxpayer, you can do absolutely nothing to control the wages of private corporate CEOs.

Democratic representatives and senators think they can bargain away the public option and stay in office. Can they?

- Will you vote for them?

- Will you give them your free labor by making phone calls, registering voters, knocking on doors to get them elected?

- Will you donate a single dime to them?

If you won’t, you have to tell them so. They expect zero consequences for giving away the public option, and giving away billions in tax dollars to private insurers only.

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Obama addresses HillaryCare's forced mandates [VIDEO]

Barack Obama addresses an Iowa voter's healthcare question at length: "She [HRC] has a mandate. And John Edwards has a mandate. Where the only way to get 100% coverage is if you pass a law where government forces everybody to buy insurance." Barack shows why it's a "phony argument" to claim 15 million won't buy insurance because they are young and don't want to pay premiums. Obama shows his plan mandates insurance companies to cover youth until age 25 under their parents' health insurance, whether the youth are in college or not (right now, health insurance corporations drop youths 18-25 as soon as they graduate or drop/stop out of college!). As Obama says, and I agree, people don't refuse to buy health insurance because they are lazy or irresponsible and need to be forced to (with what penalties, Hillary and John?). People want health insurance, as good as the Senators get, only affordably and to get full coverage, pre-existing condition or not, job or not. Right now inflation is in the high-double digits on insurance premiums, you don't know what or if you'll be covered after you pay a fortune, and you can get dropped for using it - just like an auto insurance corporation manages claims! We are more than vehicles, I would hope we get better insurance prices and policies without the mandates put on vehicles. And, btw, have you bought Uninsured Motorist Liability Coverage for your vehicle lately, even with those mandatory laws and penalties? So, mandates with penalties don't guarantee 100% coverage either, do they?

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Why Paul Krugman is wrong about Barack Obama

A great 3-page article: While a respected figure in Democratic circles, Paul Krugman's recent attacks on Barack Obama are wrong on history, wrong on politics, and wrong on what the future holds for Obama's "big table" idea. Krugman, a John Edwards supporter, has been drawing historical parallels which are "facile and ahistorical" when scrutinized. (by ShemDaimwood). My note: I've got to say that yes, Krugman's wrong, Obama's right, and I'm glad a great rebuttal came out. But notice how different attacks from Edwards' supporters are from Clinton-supporters'. Edwards just isn't honest - his voting record in one senate term was more conservative than any other Dem candidates' - but Hillary's team is malicious in the extreme. I lost some respect for Krugman's honesty, but he certainly hasn't raised my ire and disgust like Clinton's surrogates, with their covert ethnic smears that remind me more of neo-con Willie Horton tactics than any Democrat I'd be associated with!

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Obama Deserves the Progressive Vote

The media, right, left and in-between, is distorting Barack Obama’s words and record so much that I cannot take it anymore. Please consider these corrections of unreported/misrepresented facts regarding Senator Barack Obama’s foreign and domestic policies:

Obama on the NSA Surveillance Act that makes US spying on US citizens legal and uncontestable for six months, and that just disgracefully passed with some Democrats’ support of the Republican bill: Obama votes Nay. What about DLC Dems like Lieberman (Independent when convenient) and Sen. Feinstein? Both voted "aye". My Dem Sen. Boxer? No vote. http://www.govtrack.us/congress/vote.xpd?vote=h2007-836

And what about Hillary? Whatever Obama does, she follows if the netroots is watching; otherwise she'd vote with her DLC Dems. John Edwards if he could vote? Look at his record
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/spectrum.xpd.
Edwards was a DLC member who voted closer to Repubs than almost all other Dems when he was Senator. Obama directly excluded himself from membership in the DLC when they saw he was a viable IL Senate candidate and courted him.

Obama on Foreign Policy: Obama spoke not only against the Iraq War Resolution in his speech at an anti-Iraq war rally in October 2002, but against nuclear proliferation, and against US arms merchants, and calling for true democratic reforms from our allies:
http://www.barackobama.com/2002/10/02/remarks_of_illinois_state_sen.php

"You want a fight, President Bush? Let's fight to make sure that the UN inspectors can do their work, and that we vigorously enforce a non-proliferation treaty, and that former enemies and current allies like Russia safeguard and ultimately eliminate their stores of nuclear material, and that nations like Pakistan and India never use the terrible weapons already in their possession, and that the arms merchants in our own country stop feeding the countless wars that rage across the globe. You want a fight, President Bush?

Let's fight to make sure our so-called allies in the Middle East, the Saudis and the Egyptians, stop oppressing their own people, and suppressing dissent, and tolerating corruption and inequality, and mismanaging their economies so that their youth grow up without education, without prospects, without hope, the ready recruits of terrorist cells. You want a fight, President Bush? Let's fight to wean ourselves off Middle East oil, through an energy policy that doesn't simply serve the interests of Exxon and Mobil. Those are the battles that we need to fight. Those are the battles that we willingly join. The battles against ignorance and intolerance. Corruption and greed. Poverty and despair."

Obama on folks hating us and diplomacy with “adversaries”: Obama has been for genuine diplomacy in support of genuine democracy for years before he decided to run for office (see 2002 speech above). After all the noise and rhetoric from both Dems and Repubs, a publication as mainstream as Bloomberg News can state unequivocally that Obama’s diplomacy stance is in total agreement with our own allies, and that US unilateralism has alienated most of the world on issues from the environment to trade to war.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a.5OI1geizwA

Obama on Pakistan’s infiltration by al Qaeda and the Taliban: The second foreign policy contrived firestorm:

Here’s the first part of Obama’s speech, the first of two paragraphs about Pakistan in a pages-long speech:

"I understand that President Musharraf has his own challenges. But let me make this clear. There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will.”

And here’s the second and last paragraph on Pakistan:

“And Pakistan needs more than F-16s to combat extremism [a reference to Bush announcement of F-16 sales to Israel, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan-v3]. As the Pakistani government increases investment in secular education to counter radical madrasas, my Administration will increase America's commitment. We must help Pakistan invest in the provinces along the Afghan border, so that the extremists' program of hate is met with one of hope. And we must not turn a blind eye to elections that are neither free nor fair -- our goal is not simply an ally in Pakistan, it is a democratic ally.”

http://www.barackobama.com/2007/08/01/remarks_of_senator_obama_the_w_1.php

So, Obama won't leave the Taliban, used up and spit-out by the CIA and Unocal Petroleum, to plot calmly in Pakistan where Musharraf couldn't even keep extremists from taking over part of a university in Islamabad, terrorizing the residents to not play music, watch TV, drink, smoke or let women be “uncovered”, until the extremists took alleged Chinese prostitutes hostage and China told Musharraf: send in your army, which he promptly did. http://lcbackerblog.blogspot.com/2007/07/pakistan-and-its-prostitutes-part-ii.html

Since then the fundamentalist resistance has spread far beyond the mountainous borders with Afghanistan, into the central Pakistan cities with the original demand that Musharraf make all government laws conform to fundamentalist Sharia Law. When you see “news reports” and photos/footage of Pakistanis burning American flags supposedly in response to Obama’s “hard line” with Musharraf, keep in mind it could easily be a demonstration against US-backed Pakistani "elected" Dictator Musharraf himself that’s shown in the footage/photos.

Obama would give Afghanistan $1 billion in non-military aid, and aid to Pakistan in exchange for real democratic reform and not another farcical "election". As he’s stated since 2002, he would bilaterally reduce nuclear arms, destroy outdated nukes and bring all nations into Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty compliance with UN inspections, including India and Pakistan. That's a lot more info than I got from the MSM and the blogosphere about this speech's actual content. Welcome to it. And more:

Obama on nuking civilians: “U.S. presidential hopeful Barack Obama said Thursday he would not use nuclear weapons «in any circumstance» to fight terrorism in Afghanistan and Pakistan, drawing criticism from Hillary Rodham Clinton and other Democratic rivals.”
http://www.pr-inside.com/print193423.htm

Hillary, Biden and Dodd keep saying they want all options on the table, including nuclear options against anyone from Iran to Pakistan, lovely declarations on the eve of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki remembrances around the world. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/02/AR2007080202288.html?hpid=topnews

The US has the conventional military capacity to obliterate most enemies, thousands of armed nukes for every one aimed at us or at our allies. Obama's the only one who promises defensive attacks with only conventional weapons (and going after bin Laden and the Taliban is not a first-strike, whether they did all they did with - or without, which seems more doubtful every day - the CIA's and Bush Crime Families' help!).

Obama's a pragmatist with principles, not the pacifist I fantasized about in the past, but from where we stand right now, pacifism isn't much of an option.

Obama on Public Campaign Financing (PCF): He tried to go into the primaries on PCF but Hillary had already made it a donor-race, so he shut out PACs (including AIPAC and USIPAC, Israel and India's lobbies respectively) and federal lobbyists instead, the two bundling sources that constitute millions of Hillary's fundraising. Obama still committed to PCF in the final race if his Republican opponent would also, and only McCain said he might agree to that. Note when you look up industry donor political donation watchdog websites that they cannot differentiate within industry donations between individuals vs. bundlers because there’s no transparency to draw the data from. E.g., if I were a janitor for Fox News and got my fellow janitors to donate $100 each to Obama, it would be part of the total of News Corp. total donations - no differentiation between small donors and big CEOs holding $1,000/plate fundraisers. Thus if Fox News janitors gather $10,000 among them for Obama, it looks like News Corp. gave him that money. Obama pushed the bill to put all donations, for legislator's campaigns but also charities, clubs, development projects, etc., on the web within 3 months, and Obama and Sen. Feingold pushed for and got bundling transparency in the [still too-lame] latest ethics bill.

Obama on Healthcare: Unlike Edwards or Hillary, Obama has more time as a legislator and passed more legislation, to expand healthcare coverage for children in IL and establish a commission to prepare an assessment for a universal healthcare plan for IL.

Obama on prisons, criminalization and real rehabilitation: An issue the others ignore but one that impacts people of color, the disabled and poor whites disproportionately: the two million prisoners and millions more parolees in our streets and towns. He helped pass a death penalty moratorium and got kids excluded from being tried as adults in some cases. He got a traffic-stop racial profiling study instituted so cops became more aware of their own behavior and became more cooperative in changing their practices (federal/state/local law enforcement and prison guard unions are human rights' activists biggest, most organized and best-funded opponents next to Republicans). Obama pushes his Second Chance Act to provide education, relevant job training, end legal employment and voting rights discrimination against ex-felons who comply with their parole, and he presses it as the only humane and logical solution to chronic crime, poverty and unemployment not only in black audience venues, but also in big business venues like the Detroit Economic Club.
http://www.barackobama.com/2007/05/07/remarks_of_senator_barack_obam_12.php

I’m not naïve; I don’t expect Obama to be my sainted revolutionary savior. I’ve got my old Che Guevara images for those nostalgic idealistic dreams (meaning his dreams to save everyone, down to the lowliest leper). In today’s miserably hostile environment, thanks to the Unitary Executive greedy insanity of the Bush-Cheney petroleum and war profiteering crime families, only pro-Constitution, pro-Bill of Rights, civil rights activist and grassroots-funded anti-nukes Obama can make a difference and should be elected.

--
Experience is like tail-lights on a boat which illuminate where we have been, when we should be focusing on where we should be going. John F. Kennedy
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Free E-Book Obama's Best Speeches

Go to this link and download PDF of the E-Book Edition, dedicated to Oprah Winfrey, available to all for free. The printed, bound edition is available with this link too, but of course that costs money.

http://www.freeobamabook.com/Best-Speeches-Of-Barack-Obama.pdf" Read more!

Suicide Epidemic Among Youth in Indian Reservations

In case you haven't been thinking of equality in the treatment of depression and mental health when it comes to the whole healthcare issue, think again. This story from the NYT illustrates the impact on a small community in extreme poverty when there are few or no mental health services available, especially the threat to the lives of adolescents:

ROSEBUD, S.D. — The two suicides struck the Rosebud Sioux Reservation like a random virus. No one saw them coming.
At the reservation, Luke and Gaylord Black Spotted Horse. Suicide has become the second-leading cause of death for Indian youths.
The young man, 19 years old, played varsity football and basketball at Todd County High School. He was admired across the reservation, in that way small towns follow and celebrate their teenage athletes. The girl, weeks shy of her 14th birthday, made straight A’s at Todd County Middle School, played volleyball and basketball and led a traditional Lakota drum corps.

They hanged themselves. This happened at the end of a particularly brutal two and a half months, from Jan. 1 to March 13, when tribal authorities were called to three suicides and scores of attempts. The next day, with the reservation (population 13,000) reeling, tribal officials declared a state of emergency.

Since then, a woman in her early 20s killed herself with pills, and scores more young people have tried to kill themselves — a total of 144 so far this year, at doctors’ best count; the computer used for recordkeeping was down for six weeks. In May, seven youths who tried hanging, poisoning or slashing themselves to death were admitted to the reservation hospital in one 24-hour period.

What is happening at Rosebud is all too common throughout Indian Country. American Indian and Alaska Native youth 15 to 24 years old are committing suicide at a rate more than three times the national average for their age group of 13 per 100,000 people, according to the surgeon general. Often, one suicide leads to another. For these youths, suicide has become the second-leading cause of death (after accidents). In the Great Plains, the suicide rate among Indian youth is the worst: 10 times the national average.

Here at Rosebud, when six high school girls were approached at the Boys and Girls Club one recent afternoon for their reactions to the suicides, four said they had tried suicide. The four compared notes on their methods — two slashed their wrists, two overdosed on pills — and their motives. “There are a lot of reasons,” said Areina Young, a 16-year-old cheerleader at Todd County High who overdosed on sleeping pills and codeine in February. “We have a lot of issues.”

Plains reservations are among the poorest places in the country, with all of poverty’s consequences. But the why of the suicide phenomenon — why American Indian youth, why the Great Plains — is complicated, experts say. The traumas Plains tribes have experienced over the last 175 years — massacres like the one at Wounded Knee, the decimation of their land and culture — are part of it.

“Very generally, adolescence is a time of trouble for all youths,” said Philip May, a professor of sociology at the University of New Mexico who has been studying suicide among American Indians for more than 35 years. “But in many American Indian communities, it’s compounded by limited opportunities, historical trauma and contemporary discrimination. The way the Lakota people and other Plains tribes have experienced history in the last 100 years has reduced the mental health factors that are available to them to cope.”

Tribal leaders at Rosebud took a survey of Todd County students in March. The students’ biggest complaint was that they did not feel safe for fear of gangs. They said that they had no refuge, that their parents were not present, and that they saw too much tragedy, alcoholism and hopelessness.

In response, tribal and community leaders have redoubled their efforts to stem the reservation’s gang problem. They have organized after-school programs, sponsored talks by motivational speakers and made school counselors widely available.

At the same time, schools and the community at large are not commemorating those that kill themselves, said Victoria Sherman, the principal at Todd County High School. She refused, she said, to allow an elaborate memorial during this year’s graduation for a student who killed himself last year on graduation day. “We don’t want to encourage desperate acts,” Ms. Sherman said.

Federal lawmakers are also beginning to address the problem. Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota and chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, recently introduced a bill to combat child abuse and Indian youth suicide. The legislation would provide increased resources for suicide prevention training and treatment.

With few places for students on this sprawling reservation to congregate — some commute as far as 40 miles each way to school — the Boys and Girls Club, a former bowling alley, opened before it was ready so students could have a place to gather after school.

Rosebud and the neighboring Pine Ridge reservation, using a $400,000 federal grant, have started training community members and school employees in suicide prevention and intervention.

But tribal leaders say they need more concrete help to turn the situation around. The reservation has only four full-time mental health professionals, and two are leaving soon, said the Rosebud tribal president, Rodney Bordeaux.

“We did the emergency declaration because we needed to get attention,” Mr. Bordeaux said. “We’re saying, we need more funding, more help, now.”

Health services are seriously underfinanced on reservations nationwide. For over a decade, Congress has failed to reauthorize a law that would increase aid.

Officially, three youths at Rosebud committed suicide last year and 193 tried. But not all suicides or attempts involve calls to the police, officials here said.

The group of girls who had attempted suicide said they all knew others who had tried several times.

“A lot of people are just trying to get attention,” Areina Young said.

One girl in the group, a 15-year-old, had swallowed a bottle of Tylenol on April 14 and spent two weeks in the hospital.

“Me, I had a really good explanation,” she said. She started into a horrific story of being raped by her half-brother for years before he was arrested two years ago; of her and her siblings being routinely abandoned for months at a time by their mother, an alcoholic; of her grandmother beating her.

“But now I know that suicide is the permanent solution to temporary problems,” she said. “Counseling really helped me a lot. Put down that we need more counseling. For me, right now, I need it every day.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/09/us/09suicide.html

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Making the Commitment to Obama

I just viewed Obama’s speech in Detroit, and now I know I want Obama to be President for sure. My former hesitation came from my radical roots and weariness with political rhetoric, but like many who’ve worked hard to change our political, economic, environmental and social downslide in the past, I’m tired of reacting with equal vehemence as my Neo-Con opponents. Truly I am finally sold on Obama’s incremental but steady change with more allies than opponents, and on his knowledge and ability to lead our country through that difficult but necessary transition. I even dare feel optimistic about it! (See http://www.barackobama.com/tv/ under “Obama Speeches” Address to the Detroit Economic Club.)

Obama’s address to the Detroit Economic Council was the most comprehensive I’ve seen and finally touched on almost every issue that so matters to me. Yes, there were the myriad, really well developed solutions for:
• Cleaner alternative and higher efficiency energy
• Increased modernized industry and jobs
• A cleaner safer environment and focus on averting global warming
• Ending our dependence on oil imports by 2020
• Helping the business bottom line and people by providing the same level of health care coverage for everyone as a Senator has
• Providing quality and preventative, efficient and safer health care affordably and with government subsidies to create group rates to cover every individual, but ending monopolies and restrictions that profiteer from providing medical access.

But finally, at the end when Detroit’s Mayor raised the questions about an urban agenda, I remembered, I am still urban, in the Bay Area now even if on an island literally, born and raised in the Bronx NY, having lived in San Diego, CA and Seattle, WA, near one of two opposite borders at one time or another. That said, it was Detroit – immigration wasn’t raised.

As Obama’s address concluded, Detroit’s Mayor raised the question of what to do about fixing our rustbelt and our generally dilapidated cities, and Obama said all I’ve scarcely heard discussed in this campaign, never mind so well thought out. When he sounded like he was promising to fund many programs, I remembered I read an article evaluating his first run for Illinois Senator that said Obama was tenacious about accountability for program outcomes when he was in charge of or on boards of programs in the South Side of Chicago. He’s not an amateur. He knows how to prevent waste and fraud from the start and throughout the process. Obama doesn’t want to just hand out dollars, he wants results! http://www.chicagoreader.com/features/stories/archive/barackobama/

I saw that Obama saw affordable housing for the crisis it is, pointing out something that creeps in the back of my mind still, but was right up there making me nervous day and night when disability almost made me homeless: There is not one city in all the US where a minimum wage worker (or for that matter someone living solely on any government program for retirement, disability, unemployment or general un-employability) can afford their own even modest apartment – all must either share or pay more than the recommended 25-30% of take-home income. Obama recognized there are lots of creative ideas for solving that without segregating low-income renters, and that it requires the federal government’s leadership and financial assistance to coordinate all the groups willing and able to help: non-profit construction companies, city and rural housing administrators, and faith-based organizations. Finally he supports reinvigorating the Block Grant program, much decimated by this Administration, to fund business and commercial development.

I heard him recognize the need to give people who made mistakes and broke laws but paid for their crimes a Second Chance – how bold in this punishment-centered era (even torture – we’ll see our Civil Rights expert-President Obama eliminate that disgrace fast!), how sensible and what a model of truly reasoned generosity instead of penalizing and wasting lives! He’s proposed Second Chance legislation in the Senate with bipartisan support to end legalized employment discrimination against people free but with a record, thus bringing a huge proportion of unemployed exploited urban youth and adults ready to turn their lives around, who are already in our communities, back into the workforce with training, jobs and guidance for transition.

Obama can rattle off the program for fixing education faster than I’ve ever heard, and I’m an Education doctorate-all-but-dissertation specialist! Increase funding for and modernize with proven-best-methods all public education, Early Childhood on; pay teachers more and train them better to replace one million retiring in the next decade; and for both education and urban businesses, wire the city for 100% access to broadband – a notion that left many in the audience a bit stunned, as if not expecting a high-tech recommendation. He didn’t mention he’d proposed and helped pass legislation to increase college grants and hopes to do much more to make higher education more affordable.

All of his plans take into account the twin realities of a history of opposition, and the need to move forward or get run over in the global environment we now live. All of it is to be done in increments, but inexorably forward to a safer cleaner environment, with increased industry and jobs, health care for all with a public and private foundation, and oil import independence and a new alternative energy industry that will help agricultural as well as industrial cities and towns within years of his taking office in 2008. At every stage every participant gets rewards, and penalties if they refuse to lead the country into an alternative energy and employment future.

There was one exception, and it was a big one, I'm the first to say it and write him about it: He called Venezuela's President Chavez a dictator, getting very little positive feedback on that comment, thankfully. We have to stop calling other countries' elected officials dictators just because this administration and corporate interests say so. That said, I hope and believe Obama will be much more open to reasonably discuss Chavez and a viable collaboration to help Venezuela benefit from and expand their economy beyond petroleum once he's out of this miserable campaign spotlight - certainly more so than Hillary, who is simply too indebted to lobbyists and corporations to be independent. And on his energy proposal, I'm not in favor of increased reliance on coal and nuclear power. I'll have lots of company pressuring him on that!

All in all, Obama’s rich background and experience were in full display, and his full grasp of the complexity and finesse needed to push through so much change convinced me. I went from “OK, he seems to be the best we’ve got who can win” to “We need him and only him right now. I will help others working for Obama to win, from now until 2008.” It's a relief that I can really like and have some confidence in the candidate I'll be volunteering for this year. The rest of the Democratic presidential candidate crew sure doesn't give me a thrill.

And we almost lost Detroit this time… from CD “Glory, The Best of Gil Scott-Heron” Read more!