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Dissing Doctors
July 1, 2008
U.S. doctors are wondering if this might be the first year since 2002 that Congress won't intervene to keep Medicare fully funded, since lawmakers failed to pass legislation before leaving for their July Fourth recess. The Bush administration said Monday that it will delay Medicare payments to doctors for ten business days to give Congress time to reach a deal to block the cut.
Meanwhile, just coincidentally (or maybe not) some - like Minnesota Senator NOrm Coleman are all steamed up about a GAO report that alleges that thousands of Medicare providers owe more than $2 billion in back taxes. "Crack down on Medicare scofflaws," run the headlines. "It's shocking" says Coleman.
Some Medicare facilities may not be paying out what they should in tax, but if we want to talk about who's making out in our medical system let's keep some perspective.
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Swift Boaters Support McCain
July 1, 2008
In 2004 Republicans had a strategy: turn John Kerry's biggest strength into an electoral liability. Democrats nominated Kerry largely because of his decorated military service in Vietnam, believing that Kerry's Purple Hearts would insulate him from Republican attacks on national security.
Kerry's military service was indeed an asset, until the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth attacked both his combat experiences in Vietnam and his antiwar activism after.
Now what Wesley Clark said about John McCain is being compared to what the Swift Boaters said about John Kerry. I can't imagine a more ludicrous comparison. Clark, a retired four star general and former commander of NATO, was offering his opinion about whether McCain is supremely qualified to be commander-in-chief. As my colleague Ari Melber wrote today, others who wore the uniform have made similar points (including McCain!), without inciting the least bit of controversy.
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No to Solar and No to Clean-up
June 30, 2008
So much for the Government's much touted commitment to alternative energy. The New York Times reports that the Bush administration has placed a nearly two-year moratorium on the construction of new solar energy projects on public land. While the amount of oil drilling and gas drilling on public land has reached a new high -- the President approved a record 7,100 new licenses in 2007 alone --- the Bureau of Land Management is saying it needs until the spring of 2010 to study the environmental impact solar projects might have on land in Arizona, Nevada, California and other western states.
Meanwhile in other news, the Washington Post reports that the Defense Department is resisting orders to clean up Fort Meade, and two other military bases where "dumped chemicals pose an imminent threat to the public health and the environment." The Pentagon is also in violation of EPA orders to clean up twelve other military sites on the SuperFund list of most polluted spots. The Pentagon doesn't want to follow the law, and guess what, the EPA isn't going to push it. "Under executive branch policy, the EPA will not sue the Pentagon as it would a private polluter." According to the Post, military officials wrote to the DOJ last month to challenge the EPA's authority. And challenged it was.
Do you feel defended? Protected, Managed? I say it's time for some departmental renaming. What do you call a Defense Department that makes you sicker, an environmental protection agency that can't, and a bureau of Land Management that seems to care most about managing threats to the oil and gas industry. You can post your suggestions here.
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Smoking Guns and Melting Ice
June 27, 2008
For those who didn't happen to notice, perhaps because it wasn't exactly front-page news in most of the country, NASA's James Hansen, the man who first alerted Congress to the dangers of global warming 20 years ago, returned to testify before the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming this week. This time around, he was essentially offering a final warning on the subject. Unless the U.S. begins to act soon, he pointed out, "it will become impractical to constrain atmospheric carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas produced in burning fossil fuels, to a level that prevents the climate system from passing tipping points that lead to disastrous climate changes that spiral dynamically out of humanity's control."
For the "elements of a 'perfect storm,' a global cataclysm" being assembled, he placed special blame on the "CEOs of fossil energy companies [who] know what they are doing and are aware of [the] long-term consequences of continued business as usual." He added that they should, in his opinion, "be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature… I anticipate testifying against relevant CEOs in future public trials." That's a novel thought in our nation's capital. Oh, and while he was at it, he probably should have thrown in George W., Dick C., and crew. What they haven't done (and what they've blocked from being done) over these last eight years may turn out to be their greatest crime of all. Talk about smoking guns... or is it melting ice?
And here's the sad thing, as with so much else in these last years, the only way global warming has gotten the slightest respect in Bush's Washington is as a national security issue. Big surprise. The Navy, for instance, was already holding a symposium entitled "Naval operations in an Ice-Free Arctic" in April 2001; now, it seems that by 2010, or 2015 at the latest, it may have its wish -- an iceless Arctic Ocean in the summer for the first time in perhaps one million years and a scramble for energy and mineral wealth at the poles. An office of the Pentagon, war-gaming climate change back in 2004, wrote up a hair-raising, spine-tingling end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it report on a future planet in eternal conflict amid every kind of weather disaster; and only this week, the U.S. Intelligence Community, the official 16 agencies gathering the stuff for the government, chimed in with a grim new report, "The National Security Implications of Global Climate Change Through 2030."
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What You Don't See Can Hurt You
June 26, 2008
At $34 billion, you're already counting pretty high. After all, that's Harvard's endowment; it's the amount of damage the triple hurricanes -- Charley, Ivan, and Jeanne -- inflicted in 2004; it's what car crashes involving 15-to-17-year-old teenage drivers mean yearly in "medical expenses, lost work, property damage, quality of life loss and other related costs"; it's the loans the nation's largest, crippled, home lender, Countrywide Financial, holds for home-equity lines of credit and second liens; it's Citigroup's recent write-off, mainly for subprime exposure; it's what New Jersey's tourism industry is worth -- and, according to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, it's the minimal figure for the Pentagon's "black budget" for fiscal year 2009 -- money for, among other things, "classified weapons purchases and development," money for which the Pentagon will remain unaccountable because almost no Americans will have any way of knowing what it's being spent for.
Now, imagine that, due to a little more Pentagon/Bush administration wizardry, even this black budget estimate is undoubtedly a low-ball figure. One reason is simple enough: The proposed $541 billion Pentagon 2009 budget doesn't even include money for actual wars. George W. Bush's wars are all paid for by "supplemental" bills like the $162 billion one Congress will soon pass -- so the Department of Defense's $34 billion black budget skips "war-related funding." This means that even the overall figure for that budget remains darker than we might imagine (as in "black hole"). The Pentagon not only produces stealth planes, it is, in budgetary terms, a stealth operation. If honestly accounted, the actual Pentagon yearly budget, including all the "military-related" funds salted away elsewhere, is probably now more than $1 trillion a year.
There is, however, another stealth side to the Pentagon--the corporate side where a range of giant companies you've never heard of are gobbling up our tax dollars at phenomenal rates. Nick Turse, author of the single best account of how our lives are being militarized, our civilian economy Pentagonized, and the Pentagon privatized--I'm talking about The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives--just offered us all a glimpse into the stealth corporate side of the Pentagon, the ever larger black hole into which our tax dollars pour. He did a portrait of five companies--he calls them "billion-dollar babies"--that take in more than a billion dollars yearly from the Pentagon, but whose bland names will be utterly unfamiliar to all but the most inside of insiders. What, after all, do you know about MacAndrews & Forbes Holdings Inc. (Total DoD dollars in 2007: $3,360,739,032) or DRS Technologies, Inc. (Total DoD dollars in 2007: $1,791,321,140)?
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Huffington Hails Obsessive Compulsive Media
June 23, 2008
Web entrepreneur Arianna Huffington slammed old media at a political conference in New York today, assailing reporters for abandoning the pursuit of truth in favor of a "fake neutrality" and quailing in the face of government intimidation.
Even when traditional news organizations do break significant investigative stories, such as the Times' Pentagon propaganda article, Huffington said reporters still rush off to the next topic. As an alternative to this "attention deficit disorder" reporting, Huffington hailed the "obsessive compulsive disorder" tendencies of new media -- picking apart stories; blending research and activism; and pressing politicians to comment and act in response to news in an autocatalytic process that creates more news. That's what happened when the blogosphere seized on the Pentagon propaganda issue, eventually forcing late responses from Congress and presidential candidates, she noted. The same dynamics animate this week's netroots effort to fight the White House surveillance bill, building on past reporting and pressure to get Barack Obama on the record against retroactive amnesty for telecom companies. And author Clay Shirky, who addressed the same Personal Democracy Forum conference after Huffington, hit a similar theme, declaring that nowadays "media is not a source of information, it's a site of action."
Huffington also discussed some dark sides of the blogosphere, such as "vile" comments from people hiding their identities. Her "Internet newspaper" site, The Huffington Post, now has 30 part-time comment editors to patrol feedback. She added that her staff and volunteer bloggers are guided by a trio of new media values: transparency, accountability and community.
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Shelling Out for Shell
June 20, 2008
Free trade... Free oil contracts... There it is again, that cute word "free."
Of 46 international oil companies, including firms from China, India and Russia that had their eye on the first major oil deals in post-Saddam Iraq, guess who got the gig? Exxon-Mobil, Shell, Total and BP!
The western giants got the first-of-a-kind no-bid contracts to service Iraq's biggest fields NOT because the US invaded Iraq for oil. Oh NO. According to the Iraqi Oil Ministry, Exxon-Mobil, Shell, Total et al received the first-of-a-kind, no-bid deals because, of the years of "free" consultations those companies have been giving to the ministry. The ministry also cited a certain "comfort level" in their joint operations. That's the ministry's word.
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The End of the eXile?
June 19, 2008
The crackdown on Russian media is a familiar story. Certainly, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and particularly the Washington Post are quick to hurl charges of authoritarianism, autocracy, even Stalinism at the Kremlin and Putin whenever free speech in Russia is threatened. So why haven't all those influential mainstream newspapers reported on the silencing of Moscow's English-language alt-newspaper The eXile?
The eXile was forced to shut down June 11 after a surprise on-site audit by the Russian authorities. There are different theories as to why those authorities moved against the paper at this time. Some believe the crackdown was connected to the newspaper's regular columnist, Eduard Limonov, a radical opposition leader, or to an ongoing clan war in the Kremlin that the paper had been reporting on. But the explanation is less important than the silence of the American media.
Launched in 1997, the tabloid rocked Moscow's expat community with a mix of gonzo-style journalism, meticulous reporting, hard-hitting political analysis, quirky columns and sophomoric, often scatological humor. There was also a seriousness of purpose. Co-founders Matt Taibbi, now a correspondent for Rolling Stone, and Mark Ames scrutinized and exposed what they saw as inaccurate and ideologically slanted reporting by US correspondents in Moscow, especially their apologias for the misery caused by the US-backed shock-therapy reforms in the Boris Yeltsin years. The eXile's annual "Worst Foreign Correspondent in Moscow" contest was dreaded by many--and cheered by a few, including this magazine. (For an example of their keen press criticism, see Taibbi and Ames's "The Journal's Russia Scandal" in the October 4, 1999, issue of The Nation.) The eXile was an equal-opportunity critic, contemptuous as well of US academics who took the same line.
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Small Donors Matter More Than Outdated Laws
June 19, 2008
Last winter, in the early stages of his run for the presidency, Barack Obama said he'd consider accepting public financing for the general election if his Republican opponent would do the same and agree to a set of ground rules, including limiting spending by party committees and outside 527 political advocacy groups.
That statement by Obama came before he assembled the most impressive fundraising juggernaut in modern political history, thanks in large part to an explosion of small donors giving over the internet. If Obama accepted public financing in the general, he'd have $85 million to spend between the end of his party's convention in late August and November 4. Obama realized he could raise far more than that for the late stages of his campaign and do so in a generally honorable way. (John McCain, in turn, refused to limit spending by the RNC or referee 527 groups active on his behalf). So today his campaign announced it would opt out of public financing in the general. As the great economist John Maynard Keynes once said, when accused of inconsistency: "When the facts change, I change my mind -- what do you do, sir?"
The facts changed for Obama. "It's not an easy decision, and especially because I support a robust system of public financing of elections," Obama said in a message to supporters today. "But the public financing of presidential elections as it exists today is broken, and we face opponents who've become masters at gaming this broken system."
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Major Floods, No Context
June 19, 2008
It's been a curious experience, each evening recently, turning on the NBC or ABC nightly news, with historic levels of flooding in Iowa as the lead story. ("Uncharted territory," National Weather Service meteorologist Brian Pierce called these floods.) After all, there are those stunning images of Cedar Rapids, a small city now simply in the water. The National Weather Service has already termed what's happened to the city an "historic hydrologic event," with the Cedar River topping its banks at, or above, half-millennium highs. (That's an every 500 year "event"!)
But here's the special strangeness of this TV moment as the flood waters head down the Mississippi: Network news loves weather disasters, and yet, as with historic droughts in the Southeast or Southwest, as with the hordes of tornadoes coursing through the center of the country, as with so many other extreme weather phenomena of recent times, including flooding in Southern China and the Burmese cyclone, when it comes to the Midwestern floods, night after night no TV talking head seems ever to mention the possibility that climate change/global warming might somehow be involved. (Nor, by the way, are our major newspapers any better on the subject.) As an omission, it's kinda staggering, really, for an event already being labeled "a Midwestern Katrina."
All that soggy Iowa acreage and an estimated 20% of the corn and soya crops in the region already lost -- forget ethanol, but think soaring food prices -- and yet not a word. Of course, it's true that no single weather catastrophe like this one can be simply and definitively linked to climate change -- and undoubtedly some may have nothing to do with it. But when the weather is this extreme, wouldn't you want, as a reporter or news editor, to make sure the subject was at least raised and considered? Or is it simply: been there, done that?
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