Who’s Buried In Grant’s Tomb?

I guess this answers the question I asked a couple of weeks ago.

Top 10 Reasons Why The Worldwide Pants Deal is a Good Idea

United Hollywood gives us this from Howard A. Rodman, a member of the WGA Board and founder of the Guild’s independent film writers committee:

Top 10 Reasons Why The Worldwide Pants Deal is a Good Idea

10. The AMPTP says that we’re too crazy, too ideological, too amateurish to make a deal, and this lets us say, oh yeah?

9. The Networks That Are Not CBS will be hard put to justify to their advertisers and stockholders why they’re letting the competition have a real late-night show while they go forth with writerless efforts. (As The Canadian Press put it yesterday, “Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien, Jimmy Kimmel and Jon Stewart all plan returns to late-night television over the next two weeks, but aside from their familiar faces, viewers may not recognize much.”)

8. And despite what some will say, that’s genuine pressure. Yes, the conglomerates have deep pockets. But they do have to answer to the folks who pay the bills.

7. Because it’s not just a plain vanilla interim deal: this is a deal we can use as a model, with cherries on top.

6. Cherries, in this case, meaning that the Letterman deal is the full MBA, complete with the New Media proposals we couldn’t get the other side to move on at the Big Table. This shows our proposals are affordable. And, perhaps best of all, Worldwide Pants is taking on the liability of our contract provisions, including not only the payment terms, but also the backstop of the fair market valuation test under the MBA.

5. Although this will be very hard on Leno, Conan, Kimmel and other late-night Guild writers, the wedge that it drives between the networks is deeper and sharper than the wedge it drives between writers. While the companies understand ROI, only we understand solidarity.

4. Go re-read number 10.

3. Like the waiver for the SAG awards, it lets people know that, when we are able to, we honor those who honor us.

2. Because in 1988, Letterman called management “money-grubbing scum.” Out loud. In public.

1. Worldwide Pants has a better logo than the AMPTP.

On a more serious note, though: we should all remember what writers gave up in 1960 so that all writers who came after them — meaning us — could have residuals. In order to make that deal, they gave up the rights to residuals for everything they had written prior to 1960. The sacrifice they made for the future is inspiring, and humbling in the best possible sense.

Ok, I really love what Howard had to say there at the end, and with the possible exception of number four, those are nine really good reasons why the WWP deal is good for Labor. But they are in the wrong order and Howard just skimmed the surface of number seven, which is the best one.

The reality of this situation is that this strike will likely continue for some time to come, but eventually it will have to be settled. Eventually the writers will be back to work with some kind of a deal. Everyone knows this. What this WWP deal does is to set the bar for all deals to come. If the Guilds stick together they will almost certainly get at least as good a deal from the AMPTP as the one that the writers just got from Worldwide Pants. The DGA goes in a week from Monday to begin negotiations with the AMPTP on their next contract. Do you think that they will settle for less than what the WGA just got from WWP? What about SAG? What about IATSE? This is will wind up fracturing the AMPTP as long as the Guilds maintain solidarity.

We are fighting for the future and we are all on the same page. Viva La Huelga!

The Oligarchy Has Picked Its Candidate!

by Stephen Fleischman

The wreckage caused by the Republicans and the Bush Administration is even too much for the corporate oligarchy to take. Although Republicans have usually been their favored party, they now want a Democrat in the White House and they want that Democrat to be Hillary Clinton.

The Hillary-Bill combo has worked for the oligarchy before and will work for it again. They’ve been tried, tested, and vetted to carry forward the oligarch agenda. Our two-party system pays close attention to the dressing of democracy; there always has to be a choice, a Tweedledee and a Tweedledum and always a way to vote for a lesser of two evils—which, unfortunately, becomes the evil of two lessers. Through the strategy of triangulation, the Clintons have achieved the strangulation of the democratic wing of the Democratic Party. Where are you, Dick Morris, now that the Clintons need you again?

The running dogs (the fourth estate) have gotten the message and you can hear the slow build of their howl. They can stage a mighty convincing horse race. But the election is already being fixed, as it was stolen in 2000 and 2004.

That’s capitalism, for you. Its nature is to show the appearance of democracy, masking the actuality of oligarchic control, while robbing the working class of the surplus value it creates. The Clintons have proven they can do the oligarchy’s dirty work when called upon to do it. They will get the prize money for services rendered.

So, let’s follow the money.

The Military Industrial Complex is a Member of the Oligarchy (MOTO). This year, the war industry, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop-Grumman, Raytheon and General Dynamics, to name a few, has shelled out more money to Democratic candidates than to Republicans, and Hillary has gotten the lion’s share of that. The manipulators of power always hedge their bets. They play both sided against the middle.

“Mrs. Clinton has also emerged as Wall Street’s favorite.” says Leonard Doyle, Washington correspondent for The Independent, “Investment bankers have opened their wallets in unprecedented numbers for the New York senator and, in the process, dumped their earlier favorite, Barack Obama.”

Big Pharma and the Health Insurance Industry (MOTO) has already socked it to ‘em. Even though you never heard the words, “single payer” even whispered, back in ’93 when the Clintons were faking a Universal Health Plan, the “industry” dropped Harry and Louise, characters in a TV commercial, on them that exposed their plan as a “Rube Goldberg” that would never work. Now that Hillary is running for president, she is tinkering with another Hillarycare plan. This time she is making sure the plan won’t offend the industry. So the industry has opened its “alms” to her.

According to the California Nurses Association and the National Nurses Organizing Committee, the healthcare industry (which includes drug and insurance companies) spent more that $2.2 billion on federal lobbying over the past decade. Senator Hillary Clinton (D) and Senator John McCain (R) collected 40% of the overall total.

The Oil and Gas Industry (MOTO) is a major player in the Oligarchy. Big Oil is not running on empty yet. There is still oil to be stolen around the world. But, there will be blood. Senator Hillary Clinton is the receiver of the largest largesse of Oil and Gas than any other Democrat in the presidential campaign: $151,950.00.

Iraq and Iran – a couple of delicate subjects. Hillary walks on eggs when she talks about them. Her stance must please the Oligarchy.

On October 10, 2002, she made her now famous, or infamous, speech on the Senate floor, and voted in favor of S.J. Res. 45, “A Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq” in support of Bush’s war. Even more despicable, in defending her position, she subtlety implies a connection between the attack on the World Trade Towers of 9/11 and Saddam Hussein in these words, “…from the perspective of a Senator from New York who has seen all too closely the consequences of last year’s terrible attacks on our nation…in balancing the risks of action versus inaction, I think New Yorkers who have gone through the fires of hell may be more attuned to the risk of not acting. I know I am.”

Hawk Hillary goes even further on Iran. Speaking at Princeton University on the occasion of the Wilson School’s 75th anniversary, last year, she must have pleased both the Oligarchy and the Israel Lobby with these words: “…a nuclear Iran is a danger to Israel, to its neighbors and beyond. The regime’s pro-terrorist, anti-American and anti-Israel rhetoric only underscores the urgency of the threat it poses…and we cannot take any option off the table” (emphasis mine).

The Kyl-Lieberman Amendment in the Senate, designating Iran’s National Guard as a terrorist organization, for which Hillary voted, rests on intelligence as shaky as the claims that led us into the Iraq war and plays right into the hands of the neo-con oligarchy thirsting for another war.

So, what’s the answer, campaign finance reform? We have a chicken-egg situation here. You can’t get the hawks out of the nest with other hawks bought and paid for by the oligarchy.

Where is Houdini now that we really need him?

Funeral Dirge For NOLA

I thought that this would be an appropriate time to post this video, which was posted on YouTube around the time of the anniversary of Katrina. Last week the New Orleans City Council passed a plan to demolish the four largest public housing projects in New Orleans.

I agree with what His Rudeness had to say about this in his post entitled “Fucked New Orleans (Demolition Edition of a Never-Ending Series)”:

Truly, the best and worst you could say about the four public housing projects approved for demolition by the New Orleans City Council yesterday is that they were shitholes people called “home.” If you ever happened to go into the Lafitte projects (that’s them in the picture there in 2006), pre-Katrina, you saw a community; yes, you might even think, “In the realm of the shit-strewn poverty dumps we call ‘public housing’ in the country, there are kinda quaint.” And you might even enter an apartment or two that was nicely decorated, cozy, and welcoming. But, yes, truly, that was merely painted gloss on a turd. For nobody gave a fuck about doing much about Lafitte until after Hurricane Katrina. They were built in the 1940s and were models for what projects could be, and then, through cruel neglect and outright animosity, they were left to rot for a generation, with residents in them. Like the St. Bernard, Cooper, and Peete projects also scheduled to be demolished, they were, indeed, shitholes.But, as Greg Palast and others have documented, Lafitte’s shitholes were not flooded out by Katrina. And the Housing Authority of New Orleans shut them up and refused to let residents back in, citing mold, asbestos and other “safety” concerns that you can sure as hell bet were there before the hurricane. Think about it for just a sec here: you shutter up the doors and windows and cut the electricity to a home in New Orleans, where most of the year it feels like you’re living in Satan’s sweaty taint, and you might just get some pretty damn bad mold, floods or no. And it’s a testament to either human resilience or stupidity that residents want to come back. Because, at the end of the day, a shithole to call home is better than no home at all.

See, yesterday’s near riot at the City Council meeting where the plan to demolish over 4500 units of public housing was approved unanimously was not just about that plan; it was also about seeing a chance disappear to actually improve the projects rather than just wreck them and start from scratch. It was also about, once again, the poor in the city being told to go fuck themselves while the grown-ups do what they think is best for them. Like a World’s Fair. Or a casino. Yeah, all those other things that worked out so well.

It was about a barrage of broken promises, like what happened when the St. Thomas housing development was leveled to make room for the much-vaunted “mixed-income” housing, where the wretched and downtrodden could learn to live with their financial betters. River Garden, as it was called, took the homes of 800 families and turned them into a space with “25 percent affordable units versus 75 percent market-rate.” So seventy of those 800 families were able to return. See, for the poor in New Orleans, “progress” means “destruction.” Or “progress for everyone else.”

There is no will in the state, in the nation, to do something about entrenched poverty, the intractable disease that plagues so much of urban America. Hell, John Edwards is called “angry” for merely suggesting that the poor be considered in the upcoming presidential race.

And if none of that warms your heart for this holiday season, there’s an article in the Guardian about the destruction wrought by the illegal drug epidemic in New Orleans. It’s got this wonderful list from hell: “white crystal meth cookers instructing black crack dealers on how to cook up the drug on their kitchen stoves; an explosion in heroin use and availability that has resulted in the drug being consumed in all manner of strange and fascinating ways from heroin-laced gumbo sold for $10 a cup, to tightly-rolled marijuana blunts packed with the drug; dealers from storm-wracked neighborhoods moving into surrounding areas and clashing with established dealers (this may go far in explaining the current murder epidemic in New Orleans); and, perhaps most disturbingly, thousands of ‘emancipated youths’ (teenagers returning to New Orleans to live on their own, with absolutely no parental supervision) entering into the drug game in order to support themselves financially.”

“Fucked” doesn’t even do it justice.

Terrance is a national treasure. So is The Rude Pundit.

I found out yesterday that a dear friend and colleague has just been laid off, just two years short of her vested retirement after 34 years with the company, by the heartless corporate entity which owns one of the major sound facilities in Hollywood. It’s the same greedy coprporate bullshit which drove the NOLA decision. This shit just makes me so angry. Whenever I hear about crap like this I ask myself the same question, and I seem to asking it over and over again lately. The question is this:

How did we become such a cold, hearltless, and greedy people? When did this happen and how did we let it happen?

I have no answer, and I am ashamed of our nation today.

Late Night Music: Living With War

I was born in 1951, and I have literally been living with war my entire life. As a child the memory of World War II was still fresh in everyone’s mind. It was only six years after the end of the war after all, and everyone that I knew had been touched by it. Then there was Korea, USSR, Cuba, Vietnam, Israel&Neighbors, India&Pakistan, Iran&Iraq, Grenada, Falklands, Panama, Iraq , Somalia, Bosnia, Iraq Pt 2.

Looking back on the 56 year span of my life, with the exception of the late 1950′s when (all I cared about was Mickey Mantle) and the Carter years, I can’t think of a five consecutive year period that has gone by without some kind of military conflict involving people getting killed going on somewhere.

I’m living with war in my heart
I’m living with war in my heart in my mind
I’m living with war right now

Don’t take no tidal wave
Don’t take no mass grave
Don’t take no smokin’ gun
To show how the west was won
But when the curtain falls, I pray for peace
Try to remember peace (visualize)

In the crowded streets
In the big hotels
In the mosques and the doors of the old museum
I take a holy vow
To never kill again
Try to remember peace

Neil’s new film which I posted about here last week, is now almost complete and will play at the Sundance Film Festival in January. It is a powerful and moving film not only about the tour, but about living with war and what it does to us as a people.

Stay tuned, and try to remember peace.

Winging It

This ought to be interesting. Not only will Leno, O’Brien, and Kimmel be winging it (and hopefully making fools of themselves in the process), but the big awards shows should be more fun to watch this year than ever before.

United Hollywood:

Members will conduct black-tie pickets at the various awards shows; any nominee who wins an award but chooses not to cross the picket line will have the choice to accept that award on the line, with their acceptance broadcast live on the Internet.

[...]

LOS ANGELES – The Writers Guild has notified the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and dick clark productions that their requests for an agreement to allow writers to prepare material for the 65th Annual Golden Globe Awards show have been denied.

The Guild has also denied a request from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for a waiver in connection with the use of clips from motion pictures and past Academy Awards shows for use during the annual Academy Awards presentation.

In letters to the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, WGAW President Patric M. Verrone described the Guild’s respect and admiration for both organizations, explaining that:

“Writers are engaged in a crucial struggle to achieve a collective bargaining agreement that will protect their compensation and intellectual property rights now and in the future. We must do everything we can to bring our negotiations to a swift and fair conclusion for the benefit of writers and all those who are being harmed by the companies’ failure to engage in serious negotiations.”

The signatories producing the Golden Globes and the Oscars are West Coast signatories. The WGAW’s Board of Directors concluded, reluctantly, that granting exceptions for the Golden Globes or the Academy Awards would not advance that goal.

I can’t wait to see some of these people accepting their awards out on the line.

Only Pawns in the Game

by Stephen Fleischman

You can demonize Bush and Cheney (rightfully) until hell freezes over—but it’s not going to change anything. Keith Olbermann does it almost every night on his MSNBC television show, but it doesn’t change anything. Trashing Bush and Cheney or Hillary or Obama might make a lot of people feel good, but it doesn’t change anything. They’re only pawns in the game.

The real power resides in the corporate oligarchy that runs this country. It has a stranglehold on America. The only point of an election in our two-party-one-party system is to determine which one carries out the agenda. If we do something about that, we might be able to change something.

David Korten, author of “When Corporations Rule the World”, points out that “the basic design of the private-benefit corporation was created in 1600 when the British crown chartered the British East India Company as what is best described as a legalized criminal syndicate to colonize the resources and economies of distant lands…” Today’s American corporations evolved from that.

When you see the feeding frenzy of US corporations in Iraq—Halliburton, Bechtel, Blackwater, and a host of others, you can understand what Korten is talking about.

The corporation is a separate legal entity having its own rights, privileges, and liabilities distinct from those of its members. The private-benefit corporation is just that—a corporation chartered for its own private benefit, but it has to provide some socially positive good. If the corporation, chartered by the state, fails to provide the function for which it is chartered, or misapplies the function, the charter can be revoked. The state giveth and the state can taketh away. But when was the last time you heard of a corporation’s charter being revoked?

Over the years, the Supreme Court has bestowed additional blessings on corporations. In effect, it has made them almost human, granting them some of the same rights as US citizens, freedom of speech and freedom of the press, for example. Corporations can express there opinions in public and in the media as you or I can. This gives them enormous power, simply because they have more mullah than you or I. They can buy up commercial television time and print media ads and faux news coverage, because they have the power and the money and besides, they own most of the mainstream media.

As Sarah Stodola says in The Brooklyn Rail, “The Supreme Court has interpreted the Constitution in a manner that has allowed corporations to ascend to unprecedented levels of power. The phenomenon even has a name, and that name is ‘corporate personhood.’ And corporate personhood, friends, is why corporations are able to buy elections.”

So what are we going to do to change all this?

Well, there are some things that can be done, short of revolution. We can start evaluating capitalism, for starters.

Elect a Congress that serves “We the People”, not “They, the corporations”. Easier said than done. How do you find candidates who are not beholden to corporations, special interests or any ethnic voting block?

I would hate to think we will have to wait for the looming economic collapse to do the job for us. We are living on borrowed time. When purchasing power of the US citizen reaches the end of its rope, the collapse will come. You can take that to the bank.

The Great Depression of the 1930s must have taught us something. When people lose everything they tend to wake up. They look around and see what’s been done to them and what they’ve done to themselves by not paying attention. From their Hoovervilles, the people, hit by the depression, saw Hoover and his rotten administration for what it was, and threw the bums out. They elected new, progressive leaders (FDR Democrats), who saved capitalism with safety nets and a “New Deal”.

Can we do something like that again; hopefully before the coming economic collapse? We’d better start trying now, and maybe ease the pain. Here are some things that need to be done.

Reverse Reaganomics – Reinstitute regulation of industry. Make the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), for example, do their jobs, so that we don’t have US corporations off-shoring their manufacturing to another country, like China, for example, and then importing their product, like toys, for example, painted with lead, for our children to play with.

Soak the Rich – A phrase coined by FDR when he spoke about the “Economic Royalists” who brought this country to its knees. Instead of cutting taxes for the rich, as Bush has been doing, raise taxes for the rich and their corporate enterprises, as they did during the great depression when FDR laid a tax rate on them of over 90% in the upper brackets.

Marshal Plan on Energy – Go cold turkey on our addiction to oil. Massive investment in the new technologies of alternative energy sources, wind, so-lar, geothermal. Halt the return to nuclear, and head off the development of biofuels that will put our food into your gas tanks. We can create new high-tech industries and high paying jobs with a new energy world.

Single Payer Universal Health Care – end the merry-go-round on health care by political candidates. Get rid of the blood-sucking health insurance companies, once and for all. And make health care for our citizens a right and not a privilege. Any candidate for office will get elected on that platform.

Stop the Hemorrhaging in Afghanistan and Iraq – Four thousand dead American soldiers is four thousand too many. Two trillion dollars to destroy two countries is two trillion dollars that could have been used to rebuild the infrastructure of our country and have enough left to enhance the lives of our young and our old.

David Korten says, “Capitalism, which means quite literally rule by financial capital—by money and those who have it—in disregard of all non-financial values, has triumphed over democracy, markets, justice, life, and spirit. There are other ways to organize human societies to actualize the positive benefits of markets and private ownership. They require strong, active, democratically accountable governments to set and enforce rules that assure costs are internalized, equity is maintained, and market forces are channeled to the service of democracy, justice, life, and spirit.”

Yes, we can do all that, if we want to.

Late Night Music: Rock Away

I’ve always loved this song, it’s nostalgic and reminds me of times gone by in Morningside Heights.

Oh yeah, oh I miss those days yes
I miss those days yeah
Remember the songs
Used to make you rock away
Those were the days
When love used to reign, hey
We danced all night to the songs they played
Weekend come again, do it just the same

Now I feel it to my heart
Being such a golden time had to part yes
Now there’s hardly any safe place left to go
Someone’s bound to come
And try to spoil the show, oh oh

Remember the songs
Used to make you rock away
Those were the days
When love used to reighn
We danced all night to the songs they played
Weekend come again
We do it just the same, hey

Hail John Holt, Alton Ellis, Delroy Wilson, Dennis Brown, hey hey
Big Youth, Josey Wales,
Daddy Roy would wake the town, yeah
And you had to hold your woman real close when Smokey starts to sing
Temptations, Marvin Gaye,
Spinners all the way
Aretha Franklin
Patti Labelle used to make me drift away
Play Stevie play, Sam Cooke anyday, yeah
We dance all night to the songs they played
Weekend come again do it just the same

Right now we need a brand new start
People everywhere need more music,
From the heart
And if there remains such a place that I can go
Will someone tell me tell me I want to know

Remember the songs
Used to make you rock away
Those were the days
When love used to reign
We danced all night to the songs they played
Weekend come again
We do it just the same, hey
Remember the songs
Used to make you rock away
Those were the days
When love used to reighn
Danced all night to the songs they played
Weekend come again
We do it just the same
Remember the nights

Remember the songs

Universal Shell Game

by Stephen Fleischman

Talk about clout! The power of the Health Insurance Industry in the United States is staggering. If they were sent to Iraq, they’d win the war in a day.

Most of the candidates in the horse race for the 2008 presidential nomination are doing a Ring Around the Rosie, an old, fabled, nursery rhyme that dates back to the days of the bubonic plague, when a red rash ring was a symptom of the disease.

“My health care program is better than yours!” the candidates shout at each other as their campaigns ring around the nation.

The Democrats are particularly vociferous. Each claims that their plan will give the people Universal Health Insurance. Of course, all their plans are about the same, with minor differences, all feeding into the maw of the Health Insurance Industry, which we shall call HI or bubonic plague.

What are the candidates actually talking about? Listen to this! Individual mandates. That means people without health insurance will be forced to buy it. It will be compulsory, like auto insurance is for car owners. But, who will they buy it from? The health insurance companies, of course.

And if they can’t afford it? Well, there’s always Uncle Sam. The Democrats lay that one off on the government. If a family can’t afford the insurance, the government will subsidize the family by paying part of the cost. What a bonanza for the HI, a bubonic plague for the rest of us.

There is only one, among the candidates, in either party—Dennis Kucinich, a Democrat, who has the guts to grab the tiger by the tail and use those dreaded words: SINGLE PAYER, the key words representing a true Universal Health Plan, where the government collects the taxes and is the single payer for all health services. Every civilized industrial country has such a plan. That’s the very nature of the concept: “insurance”. All for one. One for all. We all put money into the big pot, through premiums or taxes, call it what you will—the greater the number of participants (why not the whole country) the wider the pool, the less cost to the individual subscribers—and when we need it, we get all necessary health care services free of charge. Is that so hard to understand?

In a stroke, this would make America’s health insurance industry (the most inefficient organism in the world) obsolete. What we have now is a multiplicity of employer, individual and government plans, a wilderness of paper work, sky-high administrative costs, increasing co-pays and cut-backs in care. Can’t we get rid of that? Not so easy. It’s a Catch 22. Don’t mess with the sacred cow.

Back in 1993, in the salad days of the Clinton administration, Bill and Hillary, the Bonnie and Clyde of politics, tried to construct a government- aided health care program that would fit into the existing system, otherwise known as “a Rube Goldberg”. They stirred up the hornets’ nest.

Harry and Louise, a nice middle-aged couple, stars of the television commercial sponsored by the health insurance industry sat around the homey kitchen table, talking about the threat of “socialized medicine” hanging over the nation like the sword of Damocles.

Hillary got her head handed to her. She set the single payer movement back a generation. Now, she’s trying it again, this time as candidate for the presidency.

Just this week, the Securities and Exchange Commission pulled back the curtain a bit so that we could get a glimpse of the mountains of loot and corruption that exists in the health insurance industry.

As reported in The New York Times, (12-08-07) Dr. William W. McGuire, the former chief executive of UnitedHealth Group, the largest conglomerate of health insurance companies in the country, has agreed to give back $418 million to settle claims related to back-dated stock options. He will also return $198 million to UnitedHealth shareholders. However, he will be allowed to keep stock options valued at $800 million.

“These forfeitures,” says The New York Times, “are the first time regulators have successfully employed corporate governance rules put in place after the collapse of Enron that force executives to disgorge ill-gotten gains.”

This gives you an inkling of the kind of money CEOs of health insurance companies walk away with—money that should be going into payment for your medical care.

Doctors don’t like the present system any more than their patients do. For years, the American Medical Association fought pre-paid medical plans, calling them “socialized medicine”, although the government had nothing to do with them. The AMA didn’t anticipate the sneak attack of the insurance industry.

The health insurance companies gobbled up these pre-paid medical plans, calling them Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs). They readily accepted Medicare and Medicaid, sopping up all that loose cash. They turned the HMOs into their opposite—not “socialized medicine” for the people but corporate welfare for the insurance companies. Through the years, they increased premiums and cut services, raking in billions in profits. The doctors allowed themselves to be co-opted and blind-sided. They allowed the pre-paid plans to get away from them. Their fear of “socialized medicine” dimmed their vision. Instead of “socialized medicine” they got privatized sweat-shops where some doctors can’t make medical decisions without the approval of an HMO bureaucrat.

Health Insurance has now become a major issue in the 2008 presidential campaign. Isn’t there anyone else in the campaign or in Congress, besides Dennis Kucinich, who is willing to take on this health industry behemoth?

You may find the answer to that question in the amount the health insurance industry is contributing to the campaigns of the candidates.

One Big Union

On November 29th the AMPTP put forth an insulting and incomplete proposal and promised the rest this week.

As Patric Verrone explained today, last Thursday, the AMPTP promised to offer up the second part of their “breakthrough” proposal. A week later, they still haven’t added to the initial and unacceptable offer. The back channel conversations have only increased the widely-held impression that the AMPTP wants to prolong the strike. During the week, we’ve heard that two PR firms specializing in crisis-management have been hired by the studios at great expense, in an apparent effort to put an avuncular mask on the scowling face of the AMPTP negotiators.

Every indication from the AMPTP is that their negotiators are getting ready to storm out of the room, exiting with their usual hand-wringing lament that writers are an unreasonable bunch of emotional artists.

Clearly the AMPTP would like us to think that we are victims in a trap of their making. They would like us to fear that they hold all the cards, that we have no power, that we are doomed. All that will save us is to accept their offers (whatever they actually are) and return to the comfort of their bosoms.

As much as the AMPTP wants us to feel helpless, the facts of the past week suggest otherwise. We’ve all read here and in the news that the companies are being hurt by the strike.

Television networks are having to give back advertising revenue because ratings have fallen off, especially in late night, normally a cash cow. Targeted by fans, advertisers are actively considering pulling their ad dollars from networks until the strike is concluded. More and more financially important tent-pole movies are falling off the studios’ production schedules. The stock prices of the AMPTP member companies are dropping.

The rest never came. Yesterday the AMPTP delivered an ultimatum and left the bargaining table. These bastards have not been negotiating in good faith.

Jane at Firedoglake has put together a tool to let television viewers write to the executives and CEOs of the corporations that produce their favorite shows. This makes it easy for anyone to write an email to Les Moonves or Sumner Redstone or Rupert Murdoch and let them know how much they love their shows and how much they want the producers to sit down, negotiate in good faith, and make a fair deal with the WGA. If you’ve been wondering what you can do to let the members of the AMPTP know directly how you feel about their union busting tactics here is an easy way for everyone to help out. Just click the link, select your favorite show, or shows, and let the CEOs know that you want them to get back to the bargaining table and make a fair deal. Here is the default text of the email that will be sent. Of course, if you are a writer, you can also write your own:

I cannot tell you how many hours of pleasure the creators and writers of this show have brought into our lives. It is for that reason that I write to ask you to treat those writers fairly.

The writers are asking for a fair share of internet and new media revenues–revenues you yourselves trumpet loudly. Robert Iger talks about “a billion five in digital.” Sumner Redstone says, “Viacom will double its revenues this year from digital.” Rupert Murdoch says the digital era holds “golden opportunities.” Disney’s annual report says, “The popularity of the ABC.com player adds to the Company’s considerable success in monetizing its biggest hits.” Les Moonves says that when five million people watch CSI on the internet, “We will get paid for it regardless… We’re going to get paid no matter where you get it from.” (He projected a two billion dollar profit from that show alone.) Yet the Alliance of Television and Motion Picture Producers (AMPTP), negotiating for your company, says that the internet and new media markets are still too iffy, too conjectural to give writers a fair piece of. Worse, it claims the right to stream entire movies and whole television episodes, with advertising, for “promotional” purposes, without compensating the writers for this re-use. These positions do not make common sense. (When studios and networks doesn’t get paid, it’s called “piracy.” When the studios and networks don’t pay writers, it’s called “promotion.”)

Please tell the AMPTP to negotiate fairly so that the television season–and my favorite show–can resume. I love watching it, but I love the idea of treating its creators and writers fairly even more.

Contact the CEOs here.

We are all on the same page.