Dr. Stephen R. Keister : Approaching 90, I Despair for my Country

Posted on September 21, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

Image from Free Health Care News.

As I approach my 90th year:
I despair for the state of my country
(and its corrupted health care system)

I look at the Republican ‘debates’ and wonder, where did we — as a supposedly enlightened society — dig up this bunch of morons?

Dr. Stephen R.Keister / The Rag Blog / September 21, 2011

I have come a long way in this world as I anticipate my 90th birthday on October 9. In those many years I have experienced periods of contentment and periods of unhappiness. But never have I seen my country so fraught with danger and despair. Never have I seen such nihilism and cruelty expressed in public view.

The response of the audience to Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s pride in multiple executions confirms a nagging feeling I’ve had for many years that a great percentage of the American public would revel in public executions: public hangings, beheadings, or even hanging, drawing, and quartering. Sometimes it seems like we’re descending into the kind of society that would accept a leader along the lines of Vlad The Impaler or Ivan The Terrible.

Yet, paradoxically, it is many of these folks who adhere to “the right to life” concept, idealizing the fetus but not giving a tinker’s damn about the children we bomb in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Pakistan, or the infants in this nation who die due to lack of medical care or from malnutrition.

I entered the practice of medicine in 1950, an idealist, believing in the lesson of the Good Samaritan. I believed that all persons should be provided with medical care as was done at the great middle age hospitals in Europe, founded by orders of Sisters who turned away no one from their doors.

For some 30 years my idealism was validated, as no one in our area went without medical care. Those who could not pay were provided for at free clinics sponsored by the nonprofit hospitals, and each of us on the staff of those hospitals took care of, with help of an intern or resident, some 20-30 indigent inpatients. In our private offices money was never an issue until the patient was ready to leave and make a subsequent appointment, when our secretary would ask, “Do you want to pay now or shall we send you a bill?”

Somewhere in the 1980s medical care, with great planning and premeditation, was usurped by the health insurance cartel in collusion with the pharmaceutical industry. Medicine was changed from a proud profession to a business, and the physician degraded to a “health care provider.”

Now when one enters any medical facility the first question asked by the receptionist involves the patient’s manner of payment: “May I see your insurance card?” Instead of an initial hour-long interview with the physician, one is quizzed by a PA, followed by a cursory visit with the doctor. Multiple tests are frequently ordered when a detailed initial interview would have sufficed, and more often than not the patient leaves the office with many unanswered questions.

To add to the immorality of our system we have some 40 million citizens without medical care because they are unable to buy insurance. Yet, this is countenanced by those who claim allegiance to the Christian Right — a group that appears to be as oblivious to the Sermon on the Mount and the Beatitudes as to the Book of Matthew.

I watch the Tea Baggers docilely follow the propaganda of the billionaire Koch Brothers and propose elimination or substantial modification of Social Security and Medicare, under the illusion that these programs are undermining the national budget — when indeed these social safety nets are not paid out of the national budget (as are our ongoing wars which are never mentioned), but out of the Social Security trust and Medicare funds that we have all contributed to through wage taxes during our working years.

Now the Republicans would take advantage of a naive public and further drive us into the health care status of a third-world nation. We already rate 26th in the world in health care quality and delivery.

Never mind that the scions of the political Right lie to the people of the United States, with their claims that the Europeans and Canadians have “Socialized Medicine,” which is absolutely untrue. The only Western nation with something like socialized medicine is the U.K. and the present Tory Government is trying madly to privatize same in spite of united opposition from physicians, nurses, and other health care professionals. Both the public and health care providers have been generally happy with the health care system conceived and instituted by the conservative Winston Churchill.

I am at the stage of life where I hear the faint splash of old Charon’s oars as his barge moves up the Styx, so I have great interest in the hospice movement. Hospice was introduced to the Erie, Pennsylvania area, where I live, by Dr. David Dunn who had studied in depth the well-established British hospice system. The Great Lakes Hospice and V.N.A. Hospices are outstanding, caring, efficient, volunteer organizations.

Now, as with nearly everything, corporate for profit hospice movements have appeared on the scene to feed off of Medicare payments. Several of these organizations, not driven by humanitarian idealism but by corporate greed, have been cited by the Medicare watchdogs for their part in bleeding the Medicare trust fund.

We should all investigate hospice care well before the need arises, just as we should arrange advance directives, and make certain that we will be dealing with a local organization driven by compassion and caring and not by corporate profit. Ideally, we should consider a version of the Swiss Dignitas; however, this would be a pipe dream considering the influence the “religious” element has in the corporate-driven U.S. society.

The June 2011 issue of Forbes has a first-rate article by Rick Ungar entitled “The Coming Crash of the American Health Care System.” A few dedicated folks within the profession are still continuing the fight for a decent, affordable health care system in our country, groups like Physicians for a National Health Program and National Nurses United, but the average elected politician turns a blind eye to the situation.

If health care is a priority while you are still young, head for Canada where the health care system, founded by the late Tommy Douglas, is still appreciated by the vast majority of Canadians, or learn French and move to France, which has the top-rated health care system in the world.

Sidney Wolfe, M.D. points out in Public Citizen that our mental health treatment system has returned to a level of the 19th century. No longer are there decent mental hospitals available, but the mentally ill are confined to penal institutions as they were in Dickinsonian times. Over the past two decades, as state psychiatric hospitals have shut down, many with schizophrenia and bipolar disease have been left to wander the streets untreated.

The number with mental illness in our penal facilities has increased 20% since 2000. As early as 2006 the U.S. Department of Justice reported that 24% of inmates in county jails and 15% of inmates in state prisons were psychotic. Under these circumstances how do these folks get treatment? When have you last heard about this problem on a TV news program? Where are our values? Where is our moral backbone?

As the drumbeat of ill news and deception continues, why aren’t we told the truth about the cost to Medicare of Medicare Part D, or the fleecing of the trust fund by Medicare Advantage Plans? The American public gets less and less information about what really matters as the Republicans distract us from the everyday issues relevant to our lives and feed us drivel about the “national debt.”

Joseph Goebbels was a piker compared to the propagandists now feeding pure and simple bull to the uninformed, unsophisticated American people. I look at the Republican “debates” and wonder, where did we — as a supposedly enlightened society — dig up this bunch of morons?

I would urge all my readers to follow ProPublica’s ongoing investigation into the collusion between the drug manufacturers and many of the physicians in the current medical community — physicians who, in true American manner, place wealth and income above patient care, ethics, and duty.

A final word of advice. Disregard all pharmaceutical ads on TV — and there are hundreds — and just hope your physician is conscientious enough to prescribe what you need at the least cost rather than shill for the drug manufacturers.

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

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Rag Radio : Legendary Houston Folksinger Don Sanders

Posted on September 21, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

Don Sanders sings in front of the Sam Houston statue at Hermann Park in 70s Houston.

Legendary Houston folksinger Don Sanders on
Rag Radio with Thorne Dreyer. Listen to it here:


Don Sanders was a central figure in the early Houston folk scene, playing all the landmark venues — from Anderson Fair, Sand Mountain, the Old Quarter, and Liberty Hall to Austin’s Armadillo World Headquarters and the Kerrville Folk Festival.

He has shared the stage with Lyle Lovett (who considers him an important influence), Nanci Griffith, Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, Lightin’ Hopkins, Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, and Janis Joplin. He performed at countless peace rallies, benefits, progressive political events, and street concerts in Houston’s Montrose.

He was known for his unique vision and for his quirky and highly personal songs; among the best known are “Third Eye” (“Open my third eye, mama / Free me from my chains tonight”), “Coffee Song,” “Head Full of Reds,” “Southern Coast of France,” and “Heavy Word User,” where he admits to being a “greasy, sleazy information abuser.”

Some of Don’s later work was inspired by Spanish folk tales, by the nueva trova movement that originated in Cuba, and by Latin American social justice issues, and he has written and sung in both Spanish and English.

Don Sanders also worked with Pacifica Radio’s KPFT-FM (as “Donnie Jo DJ”) and in Houston theater, writing, producing, and performing in a one-man show called Peregrino at Houston’s Main Street and Chocolate Bayou theaters and at theaters in Austin and San Antonio. In recent years he has devoted much of his time to performing for school children, singing and spinning yarns as the “Sourdough Cowboy.”

Don was featured in For the Sake of the Song, the critically acclaimed documentary film about Anderson Fair, Houston’s venerable acoustic venue that served as an incubator for such talent as Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, Nanci Griffith, Lucinda Williams, Robert Earl Keen, Steven Fromholz, and Lyle Lovett.

Rolling Stone called Don Sanders Houston’s “spritely local folkie,” and Lyle Lovett, then a Texas A&M student writing in the school paper, The Batallion, tagged him the “grand old man of Houston folk music.” John Wilson wrote on The Rag Blog that, “Over a five year period from 1970 to 1975, Don wrote and performed a suite of songs that pretty much provided the soundtrack for that tumultuous and intensely musical period of Houston’s history.”

Many of those historic songs (some of which were mentioned above) have been released on a new CD titled Heavy Word User“> which came out during the Kerrville Folk Festival. It is available at YourTexasMusic and recently was accepted by Pandora into the Music Genome Project.

Don Sanders dicusses his career and sings several songs on this episode of Rag Radio.

Rag Radio — hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor Thorne Dreyer — is broadcast every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, and streamed live on the web. KOOP is a cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin.

Rag Radio, which has been aired since September 2009, features hour-long in-depth interviews and discussion about issues of progressive politics, culture, and history. After broadcast, all episodes are posted as podcasts and can be downloaded at the Internet Archive. Tracey Schulz is the show’s engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio is also rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (Eastern) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA.

Houston singer/songwriter and storyteller Don Sanders (right) with Rag Radio host Thorne Dreyer at the KOOP studios in Austin. Photo by Tracey Schulz / Rag Radio / The Rag Blog.

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Rag Radio : Legendary Houston Folksinger Don Sanders

Posted on September 20, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

Houston singer/songwriter and storyteller Don Sanders (right) with Rag Radio host Thorne Dreyer at the KOOP studios in Austin.

Legendary Houston folksinger Don Sanders on
Rag Radio with Thorne Dreyer. Listen to it here:


Don Sanders was a central figure in the early Houston folk scene, playing all the landmark venues — from Anderson Fair, Sand Mountain, the Old Quarter, and Liberty Hall to Austin’s Armadillo World Headquarters and the Kerrville Folk Festival. He has shared the stage with Lyle Lovett (who considers him an important influence), Nanci Griffith, Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, Lightin’ Hopkins, Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, and Janis Joplin. He performed at countless peace rallies, benefits, progressive political events, and street concerts in Houston’s Montrose.

Don also worked with Pacifica Radio’s KPFT-FM (he was Donnie Jo DJ) and in Houston theater, producing and performing El Peregrino a one-man show at Houston’s Main Street and Chocolate Bayou theaters. In recent years he has devoted much of his time to performing for school children as the “Sourdough Cowboy.” Don was featured in For the Sake of the Song, the documentary film about Houston’s venerable acoustic venue, Anderson Fair, that incubated such major talent as Townes Van Zandt, Nanci Griffith, Lucinda Williams, Guy Clark, and Lyle Lovett.

Don has always been known for his unique vision and his quirky, personal songwriting style. Among his best-known songs were “Third Eye,” the “Coffee Song,” and “Heavy Word User,” in which he describes himself as a “greasy, sleazy information abuser.”

Rolling Stone called Don Sanders Houston’s “spritely local folkie,” and Lyle Lovett, then a Texas A&M student writing in the school paper, The Batallion, tagged him the “grand old man of Houston folk music.” John Wilson wrote on The Rag Blog: “Over a five year period from 1970 to 1975, Don wrote and performed a suite of songs that pretty much provided the soundtrack for that tumultuous and intensely musical period of Houston’s history.”

Many of those historic songs have been released on a new CD titled Heavy Word User which came out during the Kerrville Folk Festival. It is available at YourTexasMusic and recently was accepted by Pandora into the Music Genome Project.

This show includes live performance by Don Sanders.

Rag Radio — hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor Thorne Dreyer — is broadcast every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, and streamed live on the web. KOOP is a cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin.

Rag Radio, which has been aired since September 2009, features hour-long in-depth interviews and discussion about issues of progressive politics, culture, and history. After broadcast, all episodes are posted as podcasts and can be downloaded at the Internet Archive. Tracey Schulz is the show’s engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio is also rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (Eastern) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA.

The Rag Blog

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Posted on September 20, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

From the end of World War II through 1979, the gains in productivity in the U.S. were shared between workers and owners, “and both benefited as wages rose along with company profits.” That was before Reagan and “trickle-down” economics. Ted McLaughlin shows us how unregulated capitalism has led to a “hoarding’ of productivity, resulting in a vast inequality in wealth and income, and has put us on the path to a second Great Depression.

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Carl Davidson : Who’s Waging ‘Class Warfare’?

Posted on September 20, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

Art from RepublicanDirtyTricks.com / Keep on Keepin’ On.

Talk about your ‘class warfare’:
Shameless opposition to jobs bill
reveals GOP hatred of working class

By Carl Davidson / The Rag Blog / September 20, 2011

If you want to have your class consciousness raised a few notches, all you have to do over the next few weeks is listen to the Republicans in Congress offer up their shameless commentary rejecting Presidents Obama’s jobs bill.

Last week’s doozy came from Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert, who was outraged that capitalists were being restricted from discriminating in hiring the unemployed, in favor of only hiring people who already had jobs elsewhere. I kid you not. Here’s the quote:

“We’re adding in this bill a new protected class called ‘unemployed,'” Gohmert declared in the House Sept. 13, 2011. “I think this will help trial lawyers who are not having enough work. We heard from our friends across the aisle, 14 million people out of work — that’s 14 million new clients.”

One hardly knows were to begin.

First, the Jobs Bill does no such thing as creating a “new protected class.” It only curbs a wrongly discriminatory practice.

Second, so what if it did? Americans who uphold the Constitution, the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause, and the expansion of democracy and the franchise generally, will see the creation of “protected classes” as hard-won progressive steps forward from the times of the Divine Right of Kings.

Third, if Gohmert had any first-hand knowledge of the unemployed, he’d know they usually can’t afford lawyers, especially when the courts are stacked against them.

Fourth, to create even more confusion, Gohmert raced to the House clerk to submit his own “Jobs Bill” before Obama’s, but with a similar name. Its content was a hastily scribbled two-page screed consisting of nothing but cuts in corporate taxes.

What’s really going on here is becoming clearer every day. The GOP cares about one thing: destroying Obama’s presidency regardless of the cost. They don’t even care if its hurts capitalism’s own interests briefly, not to mention damaging the well being of everyone else. Luckily, Obama is finally calling them out in public — although far too politely for my taste.

The irony will likely emerge if and when they ever do take Obama down. I’d bet good money that a good number of the GOP bigwigs would then turn on a dime and support many of the same measures they’re now opposing.

But most of them, especially on the far right, would still likely press on with their real aim, a full-throated neoliberal reactionary thrust that repeals the Great Society’s Medicaid and Medicare, the New Deal’s Social Security and Wagner Act, and every progressive measure in between.

Their idea of making the U.S. labor market “competitive” and U.S. business “confident” is to make the whole country more like Texas, with its record volume of minimum wage work and poverty, and then Texas more like Mexico — the race to the bottom. They’re not happy with 12% unionization; they want zero percent, where all of us are defenseless and completely under the thumbs of our “betters.”

In brief, prepare for more wars and greater austerity.

If you think I’m exaggerating, over the next months observe how the national GOP is trying to rig the 2012 elections in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and a few other big states. Our Electoral College system is bad enough, but they are going to “reform” it to make it worse by attaching electoral votes to congressional districts, rather than statewide popular majorities.

This would mean Obama could win the popular vote statewide, but the majority of electoral votes would still go to the GOP. Add that to their new “depress the vote” requirements involving picture IDs, which are aimed at the poor and the elderly, and you’ll see their fear and hatred of the working class.

We’ve always had government with undue advantages for the rich. But just watch them in this round as they go all out to make it even more so. We have to call it out for what it really is, and put their schemes where the sun doesn’t shine.

[Carl Davidson is a national co-chair of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, a national board member of Solidarity Economy Network, and a local Beaver County, PA member of Steelworkers Associates. In the 1960s, he was a national leader of SDS and a writer and editor for the Guardian newsweekly. He is also the co-author, with Jerry Harris, of CyberRadicalism: A New Left for a Global Age. He serves as webmaster for SolidarityEconomy.net and Beaver County Blue. This article was also published on Carl’s blog, Keep On Keepin’ On. Read more articles by Carl Davidson on The Rag Blog.]

  • Listen to Thorne Dreyer‘s Sept. 9, 2011, Rag Radio interview with Carl Davidson about the Mondragon Corporation and the workers’ cooperative movement, here:

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Lamar W. Hankins : Republican Health Care: ‘Let Him Die’

Posted on September 20, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

Thumbs down at Republican debate. Image from The Godless Liberal.

‘Just let him die’:
The Republicans and health care

The indisputable fact is that the U.S. is alone among the advanced societies in failing to assure that health care is available to all its citizens.

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / September 19, 2011

Now that the Republican nomination for president is in full swing, we once again return to the topic of health care, especially the role of government in assuring that all Americans have access to that life necessity.

Living adequately in a modern society requires many things — transportation, housing, food, income, security from crime, education, water, fire protection, fuel for home needs and vehicles, and information about what is going on in our community, state, and nation.

Few people disagree with this list, but when health care is added to it, some people become uncomfortable — some almost apoplectic.

The government at all levels helps provide everything on the list, as does the private sector. We have a mixed economy. Usually, government and the private sector cooperate in providing needed goods and services. Sometimes the government takes the lead role; sometimes it is the private sector leading. Few, if any, vital services are provided exclusively by the private sector.

I may buy natural gas from a private company, but the transmission of that natural gas to my home requires the assistance of government to assure that it is done with sufficient care that no one is put at risk. The public highways and streets are used by the gas company to provide the service. Public rights of way are used for the natural gas lines. The government inspects the company’s installation and maintenance of the company’s gas lines to insure that they are safe and citizens are protected. It is a cooperative endeavor that benefits all of us.

Neither the government nor the company is perfect, however. Mistakes are made by both on occasion, but the system works about as well as any human enterprise can be expected to work. When there is a failure, the causes are determined and actions are taken to correct the deficiencies in the system. If the failures are too great, changes in leadership occur in either the government, the private company, or both.

Few goods and services are provided in our society without this sort of cooperation, coordination, and connectedness between the private sector and government. In fact, I am unable to think of a single 100% private-sector activity; that is, an activity that does not use some resource of the government or the public to carry out its purpose. If you come up with one, please share it.

This system works, more or less, for all of the needs of modern life. But when we start discussing health care, people who believe strongly in self-sufficiency and rugged individualism posit the notion that health care needs must be entirely the responsibility of the individual. This happened at one of the recent Republican presidential nomination debates, as described by The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson:

The lowest point of the evening — and perhaps of the political season — came when moderator Wolf Blitzer asked Ron Paul a hypothetical question about a young man who elects not to purchase health insurance. The man has a medical crisis, goes into a coma and needs expensive care. “Who pays?” Blitzer asked. “That’s what freedom is all about, taking your own risks,” Paul answered. … Blitzer interrupted: “But Congressman, are you saying that society should just let him die?” There were enthusiastic shouts of “Yeah!” from the crowd.

Paul then mentioned that the churches would take care of such people. Most listeners and watchers to that debate probably missed the irony in this exchange between Paul and Blitzer. Jay Bookman, a columnist and blogger for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, explained in 2008 what Paul has ignored and Blitzer likely did not know:

Kent Snyder, 49, served as Paul’s 2008 campaign manager but died of complications from pneumonia two weeks after Paul withdrew from the ‘08 race. … However, Snyder did not have health insurance. According to his mother, he had a pre-existing condition that made it financially impossible to buy it on his own. (Interestingly, Snyder is credited with raising $19.5 million for the Paul campaign in the fourth quarter of 2007 alone, but none of that money was apparently used to buy insurance for campaign staffers.)

Because we treat health care as a de facto right in this country, Snyder did get at least some health care, racking up $400,000 in unpaid medical bills before he died. A fundraising effort after his death — the charity approach advocated by Paul — produced only $35,000 toward paying off those bills.

That’s not an unusual story. … [Patients such as Snyder don’t] come close to having the resources to pay off their bills. But somebody paid them. You did, and I did, and we paid Kent Snyder’s bill as well. It’s a convoluted, extremely irrational, unnecessarily expensive and inefficient system, and the only two approaches that show any promise of rationalizing it are the individual mandate or single-payer.

When Bookman writes that “we paid Kent Snyder’s bill,” what he means is that Snyder’s bill was absorbed into the rate structure that all of us who have health insurance support. We pay for all the Snyders by increased premiums and increased co-pays.

What such situations point out to me is that many people in our political system are driven by an ideology that ignores the reality of our lives. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the health care debate. The indisputable fact is that the U.S. is alone among the advanced societies in failing to assure that health care is available to all its citizens.

Access to health care is controlled mostly by health insurance corporations and pharmaceutical giants so that these companies can rake off large profits at the expense of 50 million Americans who do not have insurance, as well as at the expense of every policy-holder.

One of those Americans without health insurance is a friend of mine who has had to take out crushing loans that could leave him penniless to pay for two essential surgeries and other medical procedures as a result of accidental injuries he sustained doing a good deed for another person. He can’t afford health insurance in the present system. Where are the churches that Ron Paul touts as the solution? Where is the compassion?

For the same amount of money we spend in this country for health care and health insurance, we could cover those 50 million uninsured and an equal number of poorly insured with one simple reform — a single-payer system. What we would miss out on is paying millions of dollars to health insurance and pharmaceutical companies to enrich their stockholders and executives for a service that adds nothing to the nation’s well-being and could be provided better by a single-payer system.

They have rigged our system with appeals to the kind of libertarian arguments made by Paul and others, while 45,000 Americans die needlessly each year because they can’t afford health insurance.

The U.S. health care system ranks 37th in the world in its quality of care and its efficiency according to the World Health Organization. It is this way only because too many people have bought the lie that we have a free enterprise system, which is falsely seen by them as the greatest idea in the world, more important even than all the world’s religions.

But we don’t have a free enterprise system. We have a cooperative enterprise system, and that system does not serve the people well when it comes to health care.

It is the government’s responsibility, acting on behalf of the people, to make our society work for the people’s benefit when any system becomes dysfunctional. When that dysfunctionality results in the unnecessary deaths of tens of thousands of Americans each year, that responsibility becomes an imperative.

I am not advocating that government pay everyone’s health care bill. I am advocating that government help create a health care system that everyone can afford to participate in. That’s not socialism, as some falsely charge; it’s American democracy.

For nearly 100 million Americans with no health insurance or inadequate coverage, having meaningful health insurance reform will do more than almost anything else to assure that the promises of the Constitution are fulfilled.

It is past time for us to have a government of, by, and for the people, not of, by, and for the giant corporations who now control access to the health care system. When ideology prevents our system of government from working as was intended by the founders, its adherents are ideologues, not patriots.

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

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Posted on September 20, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

From the end of World War II through 1979, the gains in productivity in the U.S. were shared between workers and owners, “and both benefited as wages rose along with company profits.” That was before Reagan and “trickle-down” economics. Ted McLaughlin shows us how unregulated capitalism has led to a “hoarding’ of productivity, resulting in a vast inequality in wealth and income, and has put us on the path to a second Great Depression.

Posted in RagBlog | Leave a comment

Posted on September 20, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

The Republicans’ callousness about health care

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / September 19, 2011

Now that the Republican nomination for president is in full swing, we once again return to the topic of health care, especially the role of government in assuring that all Americans have access to that life necessity.

Living adequately in a modern society requires many things — transportation, housing, food, income, security from crime, education, water, fire protection, fuel for home needs and vehicles, and information about what is going on in our community, state, and nation.

Few people disagree with this list, but when health care is added to it, some people become uncomfortable — some almost apoplectic.

The government at all levels helps provide everything on the list, as does the private sector. We have a mixed economy. Usually, government and the private sector cooperate in providing needed goods and services. Sometimes the government takes the lead role; sometimes it is the private sector leading. Few, if any, vital services are provided exclusively by the private sector.

I may buy natural gas from a private company, but the transmission of that natural gas to my home requires the assistance of government to assure that it is done with sufficient care that no one is put at risk. The public highways and streets are used by the gas company to provide the service. Public rights of way are used for the natural gas lines. The government inspects the company’s installation and maintenance of the company’s gas lines to insure that they are safe and citizens are protected. It is a cooperative endeavor that benefits all of us.

Neither the government nor the company is perfect, however. Mistakes are made by both on occasion, but the system works about as well as any human enterprise can be expected to work. When there is a failure, the causes are determined and actions are taken to correct the deficiencies in the system. If the failures are too great, changes in leadership occur in either the government, the private company, or both.

Few goods and services are provided in our society without this sort of cooperation, coordination, and connectedness between the private sector and government. In fact, I am unable to think of a single 100% private-sector activity; that is, an activity that does not use some resource of the government or the public to carry out its purpose. If you come up with one, please share it.

This system works, more or less, for all of the needs of modern life. But when we start discussing health care, people who believe strongly in self-sufficiency and rugged individualism posit the notion that health care needs must be entirely the responsibility of the individual. This happened at one of the recent Republican presidential nomination debates, as described by The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson:

The lowest point of the evening — and perhaps of the political season — came when moderator Wolf Blitzer asked Ron Paul a hypothetical question about a young man who elects not to purchase health insurance. The man has a medical crisis, goes into a coma and needs expensive care. “Who pays?” Blitzer asked. “That’s what freedom is all about, taking your own risks,” Paul answered. … Blitzer interrupted: “But Congressman, are you saying that society should just let him die?” There were enthusiastic shouts of “Yeah!” from the crowd.

Paul then mentioned that the churches would take care of such people. Most listeners and watchers to that debate probably missed the irony in this exchange between Paul and Blitzer. Jay Bookman, a columnist and blogger for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, explained in 2008 what Paul has ignored and Blitzer likely did not know:

Kent Snyder, 49, served as Paul’s 2008 campaign manager but died of complications from pneumonia two weeks after Paul withdrew from the ‘08 race. … However, Snyder did not have health insurance. According to his mother, he had a pre-existing condition that made it financially impossible to buy it on his own. (Interestingly, Snyder is credited with raising $19.5 million for the Paul campaign in the fourth quarter of 2007 alone, but none of that money was apparently used to buy insurance for campaign staffers.)

Because we treat health care as a de facto right in this country, Snyder did get at least some health care, racking up $400,000 in unpaid medical bills before he died. A fundraising effort after his death — the charity approach advocated by Paul — produced only $35,000 toward paying off those bills.

That’s not an unusual story. … [Patients such as Snyder don’t] come close to having the resources to pay off their bills. But somebody paid them. You did, and I did, and we paid Kent Snyder’s bill as well. It’s a convoluted, extremely irrational, unnecessarily expensive and inefficient system, and the only two approaches that show any promise of rationalizing it are the individual mandate or single-payer.

When Bookman writes that “we paid Kent Snyder’s bill,” what he means is that Snyder’s bill was absorbed into the rate structure that all of us who have health insurance support. We pay for all the Snyders by increased premiums and increased co-pays.

What such situations point out to me is that many people in our political system are driven by an ideology that ignores the reality of our lives. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the health care debate. The indisputable facts are that the U.S. is alone among the advanced societies in failing to assure that health care is available to all its citizens.

Access to health care is controlled mostly by health insurance corporations and pharmaceutical giants so that these companies can rake off large profits at the expense of 50 million Americans who do not have insurance, as well as at the expense of every policy-holder.

One of those Americans without health insurance is a friend of mine who has had to take out crushing loans that could leave him penniless to pay for two essential surgeries and other medical procedures as a result of accidental injuries he sustained doing a good deed for another person. He can’t afford health insurance in the present system. Where are the churches that Ron Paul touts as the solution? Where is the compassion?

For the same amount of money we spend in this country for health care and health insurance, we could cover those 50 million uninsured and an equal number of poorly insured with one simple reform — a single-payer system. What we would miss out on is paying millions of dollars to health insurance and pharmaceutical companies to enrich their stockholders and executives for a service that adds nothing to the nation’s well-being and could be provided better by a single-payer system.

They have rigged our system with appeals to the kind of libertarian arguments made by Paul and others, while 45,000 Americans die needlessly each year because they can’t afford health insurance.

The U.S. health care system ranks 37th in the world in its quality of care and its efficiency according to the World Health Organization. It is this way only because too many people have bought the lie that we have a free enterprise system, which is falsely seen by them as the greatest idea in the world, more important even than all the world’s religions.

But we don’t have a free enterprise system. We have a cooperative enterprise system, and that system does not serve the people well when it comes to health care.

It is the government’s responsibility, acting on behalf of the people, to make our society work for the people’s benefit when any system becomes dysfunctional. When that dysfunctionality results in the unnecessary deaths of tens of thousands of Americans each year, that responsibility becomes an imperative.

I am not advocating that government pay everyone’s health care bill. I am advocating that government help create a health care system that everyone can afford to participate in. That’s not socialism, as some falsely charge; it’s American democracy.

For nearly 100 million Americans with no health insurance or inadequate coverage, having meaningful health insurance reform will do more than almost anything else to assure that the promises of the Constitution are fulfilled.

It is past time for us to have a government of, by, and for the people, not of, by, and for the giant corporations who now control access to the health care system. When ideology prevents our system of government from working as was intended by the founders, its adherents are ideologues, not patriots.

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

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Posted on September 20, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

The Republicans’ callousness about health care

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / September 19, 2011

Now that the Republican nomination for president is in full swing, we once again return to the topic of health care, especially the role of government in assuring that all Americans have access to that life necessity.

Living adequately in a modern society requires many things — transportation, housing, food, income, security from crime, education, water, fire protection, fuel for home needs and vehicles, and information about what is going on in our community, state, and nation.

Few people disagree with this list, but when health care is added to it, some people become uncomfortable — some almost apoplectic.

The government at all levels helps provide everything on the list, as does the private sector. We have a mixed economy. Usually, government and the private sector cooperate in providing needed goods and services. Sometimes the government takes the lead role; sometimes it is the private sector leading. Few, if any, vital services are provided exclusively by the private sector.

I may buy natural gas from a private company, but the transmission of that natural gas to my home requires the assistance of government to assure that it is done with sufficient care that no one is put at risk. The public highways and streets are used by the gas company to provide the service. Public rights of way are used for the natural gas lines. The government inspects the company’s installation and maintenance of the company’s gas lines to insure that they are safe and citizens are protected. It is a cooperative endeavor that benefits all of us.

Neither the government nor the company is perfect, however. Mistakes are made by both on occasion, but the system works about as well as any human enterprise can be expected to work. When there is a failure, the causes are determined and actions are taken to correct the deficiencies in the system. If the failures are too great, changes in leadership occur in either the government, the private company, or both.

Few goods and services are provided in our society without this sort of cooperation, coordination, and connectedness between the private sector and government. In fact, I am unable to think of a single 100% private-sector activity; that is, an activity that does not use some resource of the government or the public to carry out its purpose. If you come up with one, please share it.

This system works, more or less, for all of the needs of modern life. But when we start discussing health care, people who believe strongly in self-sufficiency and rugged individualism posit the notion that health care needs must be entirely the responsibility of the individual. This happened at one of the recent Republican presidential nomination debates, as described by The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson:

The lowest point of the evening — and perhaps of the political season — came when moderator Wolf Blitzer asked Ron Paul a hypothetical question about a young man who elects not to purchase health insurance. The man has a medical crisis, goes into a coma and needs expensive care. “Who pays?” Blitzer asked. “That’s what freedom is all about, taking your own risks,” Paul answered. … Blitzer interrupted: “But Congressman, are you saying that society should just let him die?” There were enthusiastic shouts of “Yeah!” from the crowd.

Paul then mentioned that the churches would take care of such people. Most listeners and watchers to that debate probably missed the irony in this exchange between Paul and Blitzer. Jay Bookman, a columnist and blogger for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, explained in 2008 what Paul has ignored and Blitzer likely did not know:

Kent Snyder, 49, served as Paul’s 2008 campaign manager but died of complications from pneumonia two weeks after Paul withdrew from the ‘08 race. … However, Snyder did not have health insurance. According to his mother, he had a pre-existing condition that made it financially impossible to buy it on his own. (Interestingly, Snyder is credited with raising $19.5 million for the Paul campaign in the fourth quarter of 2007 alone, but none of that money was apparently used to buy insurance for campaign staffers.)

Because we treat health care as a de facto right in this country, Snyder did get at least some health care, racking up $400,000 in unpaid medical bills before he died. A fundraising effort after his death — the charity approach advocated by Paul — produced only $35,000 toward paying off those bills.

That’s not an unusual story. … [Patients such as Snyder don’t] come close to having the resources to pay off their bills. But somebody paid them. You did, and I did, and we paid Kent Snyder’s bill as well. It’s a convoluted, extremely irrational, unnecessarily expensive and inefficient system, and the only two approaches that show any promise of rationalizing it are the individual mandate or single-payer.

When Bookman writes that “we paid Kent Snyder’s bill,” what he means is that Snyder’s bill was absorbed into the rate structure that all of us who have health insurance support. We pay for all the Snyders by increased premiums and increased co-pays.

What such situations point out to me is that many people in our political system are driven by an ideology that ignores the reality of our lives. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the health care debate. The indisputable facts are that the U.S. is alone among the advanced societies in failing to assure that health care is available to all its citizens.

Access to health care is controlled mostly by health insurance corporations and pharmaceutical giants so that these companies can rake off large profits at the expense of 50 million Americans who do not have insurance, as well as at the expense of every policy-holder.

One of those Americans without health insurance is a friend of mine who has had to take out crushing loans that could leave him penniless to pay for two essential surgeries and other medical procedures as a result of accidental injuries he sustained doing a good deed for another person. He can’t afford health insurance in the present system. Where are the churches that Ron Paul touts as the solution? Where is the compassion?

For the same amount of money we spend in this country for health care and health insurance, we could cover those 50 million uninsured and an equal number of poorly insured with one simple reform — a single-payer system. What we would miss out on is paying millions of dollars to health insurance and pharmaceutical companies to enrich their stockholders and executives for a service that adds nothing to the nation’s well-being and could be provided better by a single-payer system.

They have rigged our system with appeals to the kind of libertarian arguments made by Paul and others, while 45,000 Americans die needlessly each year because they can’t afford health insurance.

The U.S. health care system ranks 37th in the world in its quality of care and its efficiency according to the World Health Organization. It is this way only because too many people have bought the lie that we have a free enterprise system, which is falsely seen by them as the greatest idea in the world, more important even than all the world’s religions.

But we don’t have a free enterprise system. We have a cooperative enterprise system, and that system does not serve the people well when it comes to health care.

It is the government’s responsibility, acting on behalf of the people, to make our society work for the people’s benefit when any system becomes dysfunctional. When that dysfunctionality results in the unnecessary deaths of tens of thousands of Americans each year, that responsibility becomes an imperative.

I am not advocating that government pay everyone’s health care bill. I am advocating that government help create a health care system that everyone can afford to participate in. That’s not socialism, as some falsely charge; it’s American democracy.

For nearly 100 million Americans with no health insurance or inadequate coverage, having meaningful health insurance reform will do more than almost anything else to assure that the promises of the Constitution are fulfilled.

It is past time for us to have a government of, by, and for the people, not of, by, and for the giant corporations who now control access to the health care system. When ideology prevents our system of government from working as was intended by the founders, its adherents are ideologues, not patriots.

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

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Posted on September 19, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

Retired history prof Don Swift paints an alarming picture of Dominionism and what he calls its “threat to American liberties.” “Both Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann have clear ties to the Christian Dominionists,” he warns, “who do not believe in the separation of church and state.” He tells us what dominionism is, how it works, and the influence it is having on today’s religious right.

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Kate Braun : Fall Equinox is Celebration of Balance

Posted on September 19, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

A celebration of balance. Image from Lifehack.

Mabon, Harvest Home:
Friday is the Fall Equinox

By Kate Braun / The Rag Blog / September 19, 2011

“We can’t return we can only look behind
From where we came…” — The Circle Game

Friday, September 23, 2011 is Mabon, Harvest Home, the Fall Equinox.

Friday is Frigga’s day; her power combines with Lady Moon’s waning energies to achieve the harmony traditional to this celebration of balance. When the hours of daylight and darkness are equal, as they are twice a year, there is a quantifiable balance which can be measured. Harmony comes from within and is an immeasurable quality in our lives.

With the loss of homes and trees to wildfires, with the disruption of the rhythms of our lives, not only balance but also harmony is being lost. I strongly recommend making the time on September 23 to perform whatever actions or rituals are helpful to restoring feelings of both balance and harmony. Only then will we be able to create plans for moving forward.

Use the colors red, orange, russet, maroon, brown, deep gold, and violet; select from gourds, pine cones, acorns, apples, dried seeds, grapes, autumn leaves, horns of plenty, cauldrons, and ivy for your decorations; drape your table and clothe yourself in textured fabrics such as velvet, velour, and corduroy.

This is a season sacred to Cerridwen, a Celtic Goddess of Autumn. Her symbol is the cauldron; her fruit is the apple; all nuts and seeds are sacred to her. Lore tells us that when souls leave the body they go to Cerridwen’s cauldron, where she stirs the brew that helps the souls within the cauldron make good sense of the lives they have left. When that lesson is learned, then the soul is ready for the next lesson in another body, another life, another time.

Such is the seasonal progression of the soul, measured in lifetimes, not months, and just as rhythmical as the turning of the Wheel of Life.

Change is inevitable. It will come when it will come, not always when we choose. As we should now be mindful of the needs of others, we should also be mindful of the changes in our lives and not be too quick to label them negative changes. In Brother Cadfael’s Penance: the Twentieth Chronicle of Brother Cadfael, of the Benedictine Abbey of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, at Shrewsbury (Mysterious Press, 1994), Ellis Peters writes:

The year proceeds not in a straight line through the seasons, but in a circle that brings the world and man back to the dimness and mystery in which both began, and out of which a new seed-time and a new generation are about to begin.

Out of the ashes of homes and forests a new beginning shall rise.

[Kate Braun‘s website is www.tarotbykatebraun.com. She can be reached at kate_braun2000@yahoo.com. Read more of Kate Braun’s writing on The Rag Blog.]

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CARTOON / Joshua Brown : Life During Wartime: Cutting the Deal

Posted on September 19, 2011 by Thorne Dreyer

Political cartoon by Joshua Brown / The Rag Blog / September 18, 2011.

[Joshua Brown is the executive director of the Center for Media and Learning/American Social History Project, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York and is a professor of history at CUNY. Find more political cartoons by Joshua Brown on The Rag Blog.]

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