Nation Topics - Private | The Nation

This article discusses the new prescription drug benefit called Medicare Part D. Under the program, the government pays private insurers to provide the drug coverage. Seniors that want the benefit have to sign up by May 15th, or face a financial penalty. Many believe that Part D may pave the way for a Medicare that functions on the private market.

Offers a look at U.S. President George W. Bush's judicial nominee for the Supreme Court, John Roberts, and his views on civil rights, civil liberties and social justice. Difficulty of predicting the performance of a Supreme Court nominee; Claim that Roberts was involved in an ethics scandal because he was interviewed for the nomination while hearing a Bush administration appeal; Question of how Roberts would handle cases that conflict with his private religious views; Report that Roberts has promoted the doctrine that Congress could strip federal courts of their enforcement power in civil rights and abortion cases; Demands of Democrats for release of Roberts's Solicitor General papers.

The article focuses on political conditions in California under Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Schwarzenegger announced he was giving up on his proposal to shift public employee pensions into private accounts. Demonstrations and falling poll numbers have underlined the governor's political decline and his now uncertain future in office. Apart from the pension privatization scheme, Schwarzenegger was also proposing a merit pay plan for teachers and an erosion of their tenure, as well as diverting $2 billion away from public school funding. Schwarzenegger was saying he would go directly to the voters and ask them to approve his teacher merit-pay plan, the private pension proposal, a political redistricting measure and a budget spending cap. So his pullback of the private pension plan is an implicit recognition by him that he was losing the initiative.

The article discusses the case of Terri Schiavo, a brain-damaged woman whose husband fought for her right to die. Schiavo is a woman whose bulimic aversion to food was extreme enough to induce a massive systemic crisis that left her in what doctors describe as a "persistent vegetative state." Schiavo's case has turned into a messy public legislation of what was already a messy enough private tragedy capped off by the unprecedented bill to allow federal courts to review the state court decision. The bill that gave Terri Schiavo's parents a onetime individual right to sue in federal court would, if it became a general law, turn the medical disposition of other "innocent," "terrorized" passive bodies--think fetuses--over to the federal courts for final determination. Even as President George W. Bush was signing the bill to give Schiavo's parents standing to appeal in federal court, Texas hospitals were routinely yanking life support from those whom central casting too often depict not as "innocent" but as hangers-on, not only as incapacitated but as inconvenient, not as priceless but as greedy, resource-sucking welfare/Medicaid/Medicare profligates.

The article discusses the impact of Social Security on women in the United States. The Institute for Women's Policy Research in Washington, DC, estimates that half the women over 65 would fall into poverty without Social Security income because 70 percent of Social Security beneficiaries over 85 are women. Worried that his privatization plan is in peril, President George W. Bush has been touting its benefits to widows. Bush's plan for private accounts would deepen the crisis faced by vast numbers of elderly women. To educate women, the National Council of Women's Organizations held a national press conference in to express its strong opposition to private accounts. Real reform in Social Security should express our core conviction that we are not isolated, self-made men and women but a society of individuals who should care for the most vulnerable.

The article looks at the 2004 Boston Social Forum, a gathering of political activists that took place at the same time as the Democratic National Convention. When organizers were planning the Boston Social Forum, they envisioned a gathering that would counter the Democratic National Convention in every way. Whereas the DNC would be a tightly scripted and essentially private affair (locals refer to the convention's site, the FleetCenter, as the Fleece Center), the BSF would be open and democratic, a three-day festival of ideas held on the campus of UMass Boston, the city's only truly public university. But if the BSF bore little resemblance to the official Democratic gathering just five miles away, neither did it look much like Boston--a majority nonwhite city--or even UMass Boston, often the first step for working-class and immigrant students in search of a toehold in the middle class. There was little sign of the exciting new alliance between African-Americans and Latinos that is beginning to reshape local politics, and save for SEIU, which brought leaders as well as members, the only union presence belonged to the police, hundreds of whom were using the campus as a staging ground for the DNC. The event was a far cry from the vision behind the first such gathering in Brazil, in 2001, which sought to create not a political lonely-hearts club but a summit of powerful and emerging social movements that could serve as a counterweight to the World Economic Forum in Davos. Any such event in the United States faces a monumental challenge in that our social movements, by contrast, are small and struggling.

In 2004, Arizona has more than 31,000 prison inmates and still growing, with much of the momentum for the ongoing expansion squarely attributable to the private prison lobby--which succeeded in getting the industry exempted from most state taxes. Private prison companies lure state-employed guards by offering short-term bonuses and pay raises. They do not dwell on the fact that, unlike the unionized state prison guards--whose union, AFSCME, has negotiated a generous, and guaranteed, pension package over the years--private guards receive a benefits package that in the long term is virtually worthless. Florida Police Benevolent Association legislative assistant Ken Kopczynski, who has spent years tracking the expansion of the private prison sector, has identified close to 300 state and federal prisons, jails, juvenile detention facilities and holding centers for illegal immigrants operated by the private sector nationwide, housing some 132,000. Many small states have chosen to export large numbers of their prisoners to out-of-state private facilities rather than bear the cost of building their own new prisons. At the same time, many impoverished counties have essentially converted themselves into for-profit prison speculators, often in conjunction with private companies, their lobbyists and middlemen. These small counties have issued bonds to build prisons and immigrant detention centers and have then approached federal agencies, trying to woo prisoner contracts by offering rock-bottom prices.

The author argues that more comprehensive campaign-finance reform is needed to reduce the influence of special interests in U.S. politics. For anyone who wants to reduce the role of big money in politics, the 2004 election is an object lesson in how not to solve the problem. John Kerry's briefly floated proposal to delay his formal presidential nomination, which would have allowed him to keep raising private money for as long as George W. Bush, is the latest sign that the post-Watergate system of partial public financing is simply not up to the task. If we want elections, not auctions, where candidates compete on a level playing field and all voters are equal, we have to overhaul the system. That's why those who want to keep comprehensive campaign-finance reform moving forward should pay attention to the fight quietly under way in Arizona, one of a handful of states (including Maine) with some form of Clean Elections systems, which offer candidates full public financing. In Arizona the new system has increased competition and diversity among candidates, reduced the money gap between challengers and incumbents, and freed its participants from the all-consuming money chase.

The war on Iraq has made us all painfully aware of the Pentagon's growing reliance on private companies. Commercial firms have been hired to do everything from cooking meals to interrogating prisoners to providing security for US proconsul Paul Bremer. Peter Singer of the Brookings Institution estimates that for every ten troops on the ground in Iraq, there is one contract employee. Military outsourcing is nothing new. The latest wave of military privatization started in the first Bush Administration, when Defense Secretary Cheney asked Halliburton to study what it would cost to have a private company take charge of getting US forces overseas in a hurry. The Clinton Administration picked up where Bush/Cheney left off, hiring Halliburton--then run by Cheney--as the logistics arm for the war in Kosovo. The 1990s military outsourcing boom was driven by a combination of practicality and ideology. There is a reason that governments have historically maintained a monopoly over the use of force. Allowing private companies into the mix interferes with the ability of citizens to hold their government accountable for when and how force is used. Key members of Congress have started to press for action on this issue.

The author comments on the April 25 pro-choice demonstration in Washington, D.C. By the most conservative estimates, the March for Women's Lives in Washington on April 25 was the biggest pro-choice demo ever--and it may have been the biggest march of any kind in US history. If justice existed in the mass-media universe, the newsweeklies would now pose the question, "Is Post-Feminism Dead?" Of course, it doesn't, and they won't. But the political reverberations of this groundbreaking event could be significant. The stealth antichoice strategy pursued by the Bush Administration has been premised on the expectation that a gradual whittling away of women's reproductive rights will have little political consequence. The pro-choice movement's response, embodied in the broad-ranging theme of the March for Women's Lives, is to unmask the anti-woman agenda connecting the assault on sex-ed and contraception to the global gag rule to Attorney General Ashcroft's outrageous subpoena of women's private medical records to defend the "Partial-Birth" Abortion Ban. After congratulating the throngs for turning out, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who received a reception fit for a rock star, noted, "If all we do is march today, that will not change the direction this country is headed under the leadership of this Administration." She had a point. So, yes, there is much unglamorous work to be done (including pressuring centrist Dems like Clinton and Kerry to stand up on the full range of issues affecting women's lives). But the importance of the march itself--for networking, coordinating, strategizing as well as morale boosting--should not be discounted.