by Stephen Fleischman

We know why there are wars, and we’ve known it for a long time. Good wars, that is, necessary wars, not wars by powerful foreign invaders, wars that might threaten our country.

Everybody knows we’re in the process of old-hat empire building, the kind designed by the British and for which they took hits around the world by the likes of George Washington and Mahatma Gandhi.

No lessons learned there. President Obama is about to make a momentous decision on Afghanistan. He has been mulling over, for the last few weeks, how many more troops he will be sending to McChrystal, to further his counter-insurgency in that country. It’s a process of foregone futility and everybody knows it. But the mainstream media, heavy with punditry, spends endless hours hashing over every detail, combination and permutation. The propaganda circle from government handout to media coverage is complete.

These graphs are provided by The Center for Public Integrity whose mission is to produce original investigative journalism to make institutional power more transparent and accountable. Just an example at random:

The Top 100 PRIVATE CONTRACTORS IN IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN, 2004–2006

* Unidentified Foreign Entities $20,435,870,190
1 KBR Inc (formerly known as Kellogg Brown and Root) $16,059,282,020
2 DynCorp International (Veritas Capital) $1,838,156,100
3 Washington Group International Inc $1,044,686,850
4 IAP Worldwide Services Inc (Cerberus Capital Management LP) $901,973,910
5 Environmental Chemical Corp $899,701,070
6 L-3 Communications Holdings Inc $853,535,680
7 Fluor Corp $736,853,200
8 Perini Corp $720,859,110
9 Orascom Construction Industries (OCI) $617,089,510
10 Parsons Corp $579,265,450
11 First Kuwaiti General Trading And Contracting Company Wll $495,404,500
12 Blackwater USA $485,149,590
13 Tetra Tech Inc $362,107,010
14 AMEC PLC $317,171,280

Here’s a nice little interactive site showing how the circle of influence works

We elected Barack Obama to change all that, didn’t we?

But Obama took over from Bush without missing a stroke. The faceless corporate oligarchy that runs this country and that ran Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush, now runs Obama.

Who are these oligarchs?

Yes, there are factions within the oligarchy. They have their differences. They don’t all agree. They represent different entities of industrial and corporate power. They are the pillars of capitalism. They are mostly unheard and unseen, but occasionally you may get a glimpse of a face…

Obamastocks.net says this:

Zbigniew Brzezinski – Puppet Master of Obama?

Zbigniew Brzezinski is the puppet master of Obama. This is a fact. Brzezinski is an 80-year old man from Poland who despises Russia. He was behind the catastrophic Carter administration. Brzezinski has the ultimate plan of preventing China from gaining access to African oil. China must have access to African oil or else the Chinese economy will recess rapidly. Brzezinski figures this will force China to invade the oil rich fields of southeast Russia just above North Korea. If China were to militarily take these oil fields from Russia, the two would obviously war which is what Brzezinski seeks. That plan is perfect in his eyes as it will weaken those two super-powers thus enabling American imperialism to regain strength. The real problem with this plan is that the Russians and Chinese are well aware of it. They know what Brzezinski intends to do. Unfortunately, the end result will most likely back fire on the west and produce world war III. China, and Russia against the US, and Europe.

The strategy of the George W. Bush administration to keep war going was to keep the American public in a state of fear. Obama is continuing that strategy. We must keep an enemy in the cross-hairs.

Al Qaeda, of course, is the one that does the trick—an Islamic group calling for global jihad. They claimed responsibility for 9/11—blowing up the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City—for blowing a hole in the USS Cole, for bombing US embassies in Africa. Al-Qaeda has attacked civilian and military targets in various countries. They have instilled fear in many places. When you hear the words “Al Qaeda”, think bogeyman.

The demonizing of the word “terror” didn’t originate with George W. Bush. Ariel Sharon, army general and a former Israeli Prime Minister, and others before him, used the technique quite effectively. They turned just about every Palestinian into a “terrorist” which put the mission of Zionism on the road to a Greater Israel. Sharon’s own government found that he bore personal responsibility for the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp massacre of Palestinians in September of 1982.

Acts like these notwithstanding, the United States has been a staunch ally and supporter of Israel in this special relationship, through the years, despite its war-like moves against the Palestinians, Gaza and Lebanon. According to Kathleen and Bill Christison, writing in Counterpunch, the United States is committed to giving Israel $30 billion over the next decade. The only stipulation imposed on Israel’s use of this cash gift in that it spend 74% of it to purchase U.S. military goods and services. Israel is, by far, the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid.

Not bad for our war industry. We can keep our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan going, and then some.

Do you like the idea of your son or daughter giving his or her life for the profits of KRB or DynCorp International?

I don’t think anyone could call that “service to my country”.

by Stephen Fleischman

In the first Boston tea party, the colonists dumped the British tea into Boston Harbor because of taxation without representation.

The tea-baggers, today, are making a fracas because they want corporation representation without taxation.

Michelle Bachman, Congresswoman from Minnesota, also known as the “Crazy Lady”, is leading the tea-bag movement against the health care reform bill and right into the arms of the health insurance industry.

“It was Thomas Jefferson who said a revolution every now and then is a good thing”, she says, as she slams a two-foot stack of paper representing the bill.

The main-stream media, as is there wont, are picking up the oligarchy’s propaganda beat. The issue they’re beating around the bush about now is the pubic option. Another issue is more de-troupes for Afghanistan.

The oligarchy is pushing the pundits, and the punditry is bringing out their big guns—David Gergel and Wolf Donner Blitzer. They have panels, too, with Leslie Stalled, Lucrezia Borgia and her sister Gloria, Keith Globerman and Rachel Rachel. They can talk a hatful.

AC-DC 360, Gloria Vanderbilt’s son, has a firm grip on the teats of the cash cow at CNN. They know, over at Ted Turner’s barnyard, that if you put an hour’s worth of programming together, you can snowball that into a 24-hour news cycle on a cable-grable channel.

Over at 13th Century Fox, you’ve got Bill O’Pig and his piglets, Insanity Hannity, Glenn Beckish and Crispy Wallace under the aegis of Rupert In-The-Dock Murderock and Roger Beerandailes.

Now, Barry Obama, with his chief henchman, David Axelgrease, have an important decision to make and they’re not making it. Will they, won’t they, will they, won’t they, will they send the troops?

You’ve got twenty four hours of prime time chawed right there. The military pundits, chief among them Armchair General Barry McCaffrey, who’s probably the preeminent military analyst for NBC and MSNBC, are having their crack at it, too.

The profusion of talk about the pubic option coming up for a vote maybe next week or maybe not, is almost as good as Michael Jackson dying but comes nowhere close to the O.J. Simpson romp.

There were times when we used to have third parties kicking around; most recently, Monkey Wrench, Ralph Nader and his raiders. He kept running for president (of the United States, that is) and getting about 0.02% of the vote, giving the Democrats the perfect excuse for losing the elections.

We had Texas business man Ross Perot, candidate for president in 1992 and 1996, the second time under the banner of the Reform Party that got him absolutely nowhere, not even onto the platform with the tea party candidates in the presidential debates.

In 1955, the Communist Party (CPUSA) finally dissolved because its membership consisted solely of FBI agents.

Ah, but there was a time when Third Parties struck!

Wikipedia says, “Labor Party was the name or partial name of a number of United States political parties which were organized during the 1870s and 1880s.

The Social Democratic Workingmen’s Party of North America was formed in 1874. By 1877 the party changed its name to the Socialist Labor Party of North America, and continues under that name.

In 1877, the racist Workingman’s Party was formed in California, led by Dennis Kearney; by 1879 it was powerful enough to help re-write the state constitution of California, inserting provisions intended to curb the powers of capital and to abolish Chinese contract labor.

In 1878, the Greenback Party, under the influence of leaders of organized labor, changed its name to the Greenback Labor Party, and continued to operate in some states, electing a congressman as late as 1886; but by 1888 had dissipated. In 1886, a United Labor Party was organized in Chicago under the leadership of that city’s Central Labor Union; It drew over 20,000 votes for its county ticket in the fall of 1886, and in the following spring elections garnered 28,000 votes for its candidate for Mayor; but by 1888 it had merged with the Democratic Party in that city.

Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party split the Republican Party in 1912, long before Sarah Palin got around to it..

So, you see, there is still hope for America!

by Stephen Fleischman

I learned my first lesson in capitalism when I was a kid during the Great Depression of the 1930s. (Yes, I was a teenager in 1933)

In our living room, we had only one electric light bulb. It hung down from the middle of the ceiling on an electric wire. My father insisted that when you left the room, even for a short while, you turned off the light. You don’t waste electricity.

Every so often the bulb would blow out and have to be replaced. It was common belief, at the time, that the manufacturers could make an electric light bulb that would never blow out, but they wouldn’t do that because they wanted to keep selling light bulbs. We believed that was true of other items as well. That’s how capitalism worked.

I now know that it was called “planned obsolescence” and it was a well known and accepted tenet of capitalist marketing.

We’re coming to the end of the road, now.

See where planned obsolescence has taken General Motors. It is one of the nation’s iconic corporations that practiced it.

This was true of the auto industry in general. The new models appeared yearly, most of the time with nothing but cosmetic changes. The American consumer was programmed. A trade-in every year or two or three was “de rigueur”, but when foreign cars started penetrating the American market, Mercedes, BMWs, Toyotas, Hondas, the American consumer wised up. Here were better products that lasted longer.

In later years, I learned other lessons about the contradictions of capitalism and the path it must take to its own destruction.

Going back to Adam Smith, the concept that the “invisible hand” of the free market would keep the capitalist economy in balance has been the conventional wisdom. Capitalism must grow or die. And grow it did. Mergers and acquisitions became the modus operandi as corporate enterprises struggled with their competitors to survive.

We have a world-wide economic system of monopoly capitalism, now, that is in a state of perpetual class struggle—capital vs. labor –or bourgeoisie vs. proletariat, as Karl Marx put it. Within it, the contradictions are legion—in all aspects of life, even within the context of one politician’s speech.

Take this one, for example, that David Henderson of Econlog points out about the Obama health care speech to a joint session of Congress, last September 9th.

He’s for a public option and against it within a single speech.

“These private companies can’t fairly compete with the government,” the President said. “And they’d be right if taxpayers were subsidizing this public insurance option.”

“But they won’t be,” Obama continued, “the public insurance option would have to be self-sufficient and rely on the premiums it collects.”

Then, two paragraphs later, he has “great concern” about how to pay for the government option. He states flatly that money will come out of Medicare and Medicaid. So, some of the money for a public option in the health care reform bill will come out of currently existing government health care programs. Is that a contradiction, or what!

Take Wall Street and Main Street. While the banks are making money again and bonuses are flying like hydrogen balloons, employment is dropping like a lead balloon. The government regulators are doing nothing about reinstating the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 that established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and separated commercial banks from investment banks. Like church and state, they don’t go together unless you want a gambling casino. Glass-Steagall staunched the bleeding and was pivotal in saving the financial system after the Great Depression.

By 1999, the Wall Street fat cats forgot everything they learned from that period. Apparently, they wanted a gambling casino. Provisions that prohibited a bank holding company from owning other financial companies were repealed on November 12th by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act—that’s Gramm as in Senator Phil Gramm, a practiced croupier at the craps table.

Wall Street went on a rampage, creating all kinds of financial gimmicks derived from derivatives you could bet on; things like packaged debt that they could bundle and sell in foreign markets and sub-prime mortgages that eventually put peoples’ homes under water.

This is what put our country into financial crisis in 2008 when we had to socialize the debt and privatize the perpetrators.

When we elected Barack Obama, we thought we were going to get change we could believe in. But Barack put the same old foxes into the chicken coop—Summers and Geithner, the ones who presided over the disaster to begin with.

Just another contradiction of Capitalism.

We are yet to see anything like Glass-Steagall reinstalled or anything that resembles it; any kind of robust regulation of the Wall Street gambling joint.

Just hold your breath and cross your fingers. Maybe the scales will fall away from eyes. That’s what scales usually do when truths become self-evident.

by Stephen Fleischman

Senator “Chuck” Grassley (R) Iowa, roiled up over the proposal for a public option in the health reform bill, called government a “predator not a competitor”.

Government has been called many names, good and bad. Predator. That’s a new one.

If Chuck feels that way about government, why doesn’t he get out of it? Resign from the Senate.

Government is a neutral thing. Government is simply the organization through which control or administration of a city or state is exercised. It is used in the service of the entire nation not for a few special interests.

The conventional wisdom is that government cannot operate as efficiently as private industry.

It’s a classic myth, the result of years, decades, even centuries of brainwashing. The propaganda of capitalism. Keep the notion of “public options”, government run programs, out of peoples’ minds. Demonize them as “socialism”.

After all, if the working class got the idea that they, through a socialized government, can manage the means of production as efficiently as the capitalists, they might decide to do just that.

Entrepreneurs don’t like to tackle that problem head on. They don’t attack government, per se. They attack “big government”.

“Big government is bad” –the common disparaging cliché.

The badness of big government is often raised when discretionary spending is being considered for some program to benefit the people. It signifies taxes and rich people don’t like to pay taxes. Let the middle and working classes pay them. Rich people favor tax cuts, remember? They loved George W. Bush for that.

The rich don’t mind discretionary spending for increases in the defense budget, for wars against small and weak countries that can’t fight back. This means big bucks for the arms makers and the parasitic corporations that thrive along with them.

We’ve amassed a 2 trillion dollar deficit on that kind of discretionary spending. But not one dime for a universal single-payer health care system. Medicare is like a bone stuck in the throat of the health insurance industry.

For some unexplainable reason, we, as a nation, must keep a totally useless gang of blood-sucking corporatists, called a health insurance industry, a thousand pound gorilla, on our backs.

Republicans have declared they will do anything to kill any health care reform legislation. Their cry is that the Democrats are trying to restructure one-sixth of the economy, “writing a bill that will affect almost every American, every business and every doctor and hospital in the country,” reports The New York Times. (10-4-09) The Democrats say the challenges are daunting.

True, the challenges are “daunting”. They might not be so daunting if we could elect a congress of honest people, legislators who can’t be bought off by the health insurance industry; legislators who represent us instead of them.

Hasn’t the government taken on daunting jobs before? How about Medicare and universal health care for all Congressmen and Senators?

And besides… what’s wrong with restructuring the economy. Isn’t it about time?

We should use San Francisco as a model.

Maria L. La Ganga reports in The Los Angeles Times (10.4.09) that over the last two years, three-quarters of San Francisco’s uninsured adults have been enrolled in a public program that guarantees access to medical care called “Healthy San Francisco”.

So far, more than 46,000 adults have been enrolled in this city-run universal health care plan, the first in the nation. It has received high marks in recent independent studies.

Patients receive preventive services and ongoing treatment for chronic conditions. Prescriptions are covered and so are hospital stays.

A unique feature of the plan, patients must pick a “medical home” out of a network of more than thirty public and private clinics, physicians groups and hospitals within the city limits. The idea is that patients get consistent care and the system avoids duplicating services. Kaiser Permanente, a major private HMO, just joined and plans to accept up to 3000 patients.

The program is funded in part by an employer mandate, a controversial component of the plans now under discussion in Washington for the federal health care reform bill.

San Francisco Mayor, Gavin Newsom, described the program as “a public option”, “a strategy to provide health care regardless of your ability to pay, regardless of any pre-existing conditions”.

The city’s plan is government run and subsidized—a “public option”—and has not caused workers or employers to bail out of private insurance, another lesson for the national debate.

It might be a good idea for Chuck Grassley to drop everything, make a trip to San Francisco, and take a look at this predator. That might make him decide to resign from the Senate—or he may learn something that will help him complete a health care reform bill with a “public option” that will pass the House and Senate and be signed into law by President Barack Obama.

(With apologies to Lewis Carroll)

by Stephen Fleischman

“…a properly resourced counter-insurgency probably means more forces,” said Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, before the Senate Armed Services Committee, “… more time and more commitment to the protection of the Afghan people and to the development of good governance.”

“The time has come,” the Walrus said, “to talk of many things: of shoes — and ships – and sealing wax –of cabbages and kings …

The Carpenter said nothing but, “cut us another slice…”

“Oh, Oysters, come walk with us. The day is warm and bright. A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk, would be a sheer delight. Yes, and should we get hungry on the way, we’ll stop and, uh, have a bite.”

“I weep for you,” the Walrus said, “I deeply sympathize.” With sobs and tears he sorted out those of the largest size…

The United States of America hardly sheds a tear when it destroys a nation. We always do it for the good of the people of that nation. We must protect them from themselves. We can’t allow the Taliban to return to Afghanistan. The Taliban happens to be an indigenous, religious and political movement that governed Afghanistan for five years when it was removed from power by US and NATO forces in 2001. Whatever happened to self-determination? In some strange way, the Taliban is being held responsible for 9/11. In 2004, the Taliban reared its hoary head again, and started a strong insurgency, fighting a guerrilla war against the puppet government in Kabul and its US and NATO allies participating in “Operation Enduring Freedom”—the one Adm. Mullen was talking about.

We had to cause regime change in Iraq. Saddam Hussein was a threat to the United States with his weapons of mass destruction which he didn’t have. Eight years of pounding is not enough. There is hardly a structure left standing, untouched.

No matter.

“Little Oysters? Little Oysters? But answer there came none. And this was scarcely odd because they’d been eaten. Every one!”

Panama and Grenada were necessary wars. In Grenada, medical students were threatened, and Panama…well, Noriega came from there.

Korea was another matter. The North Koreans were being helped by Red China. Why were we there? I don’t exactly remember.

Now, Vietnam! That was a war! That’s where we learned about guerrillas—fighters who swim among the people like fish is water. Not many people had ever heard of the place, down in South-East Asia somewhere. The country was split during World War II. The French colonialists held onto the south, Red China took the north.

We had dominoes back then. Vietnam was a domino. The domino theory had it that if South Vietnam fell, all of Southeast Asia would go Communist. The French had been playing dominoes in Vietnam since before World War II. And when the war was over, the French came back to continue the game. But they found a guy there by the name of Ho Chi Minh who didn’t like the idea, and he put up quite a fight. In fact, he beat the feces out of the French at a place called Dien Bien Phu. The French yelled “Help!” The US sent in the Marines and eventually took over the war, as it is wont to do. We couldn’t let all of Southeast Asia go Communist, now, could we?

We should apply what we learned in Vietnam to what’s happening in Afghanistan now. The Russians learned their lesson. The one thing you can say for the war in Vietnam; it created the strongest anti-war movement America had ever known. It put a stop to the war. Nothing like that has been accomplished since.

The War Between the States—the US Civil War—Lincoln’s war, you could call it, was a war to preserve the union, and incidentally, end slavery. The official figure is that about 620,000 Americans perished in that war, in the four years between 1861 and 1865—360,000 on the Union side—258,000 on the Confederate side—more than in all other wars from the Revolution to Vietnam.

We live in a country that was born in genocide with the extermination of the Native American tribes, and we matured in a state of slavery to nourish the plantation system. One hundred and fifty years later, racial antagonism is still a hallmark of this country. Now, with a black president, one would think that racism has relented, but beneath the surface the stench of it can be felt (or smelt). When a Senator yells “you lie!” at our president during an address to a joint session of Congress; how do you interpret that? A civil war smoldering beneath the surface?

You be the judge. With a corporate oligarchy running the country, you can expect some fall-out. Barack Obama knows how to handle himself in the clinches. He gets screaming applause when he mentions “public option” at a rally for health care reform, and boos when he mentions Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, head of the Finance Committee, that just put out a health care reform bill that would warm the cockles of the health insurance industry’s heart (if it had one). Obama knows how to maneuver and that’s what the oligarchy likes and why he’s in the job. You can be sure that there will be no “public option” in the bill that eventually passes.

And you can be sure that there will be more troops heading to Afghanistan, perhaps as many as 45,000, to join the 68,000 already there. You can bet your McChrystal on it. Adm. Mullen tipped Congress off last Tuesday and if the Democrats oppose the request, they would be seen as flouting independent military advice.

“But Mother Oyster winked her eye and shook her hairy head. She knew too well this was no time to leave her oyster bed.”

Does this mean that we are living in an Alice in Wonderland world?

by Stephen Fleischman

We’ve been witnessing a torrent of twisted logic, lately, in the jousting over the Obama Administration’s health care plans. The Obama mantra seems to be that in order to get more health care we have to cut it. This is scaring the pants off old people on Medicare and those in other government programs like Social Security, Medicaid for the poor, Veterans’ programs and Champus, also called Tricare, providing health care to military families. If Obama really wanted to cut health costs in order to afford universal health insurance, he would be screaming for the single-payer option that has been forced off the table by the clout of the insurance industry.

When he was a candidate for President, seeking your vote, Obama was all for the single-payer plan. When elected, you saw a federal twist in action when he was joining in, rather than fighting off, the cabal. Now he is a well indoctrinated member of the corporate oligarchy. He has continued just about every one of the Bush policies, foreign and domestic. Not only his health care stance, but equally outrageous, the continuation and escalation of the war in Afghanistan while war in Iraq drags on. Something new has been added with Af-Pak, the inclusion of Pakistan in the package, and the killing of civilians with pilotless drones. The tease about closing Guantanamo was just that, a tease, and another promise broken.

Boiling over on the front burner, at the moment, is the public health care option while keeping the single payer plan under the radar screen.
The way the single-payer health plan works, the government collects all medical fees and then pays for all services through a single government (or government-related) agency. In Congress, H.R. 676, if passed into law, would replace private insurance companies with just such a publicly managed insurance plan. It would prove how superfluous health insurance companies are. They pocket one-third of the money you pay them in premiums which is why they make such whopping profits and why they’ll fight to the death to maintain the status-quo.

Why should there be people making money on your health?

Just about every civilized, industrial nation, and even some third-world countries, have government run health plans. Australia’s Medicare, Canada’s Medicare, and healthcare in Taiwan are examples of single-payer universal health care systems. In contrast, socialized medicine would be a system “in which all health personnel and health facilities, including doctors and hospitals, work for the government and draw salaries from the government,” an example being the U.S. Veterans Administration. Medicare is a single payer system which is not socialized medicine. Under the British National Health Service, which also uses a universal single-payer fund, the public owns the health systems and facilities. The term single-payer thus only describes the funding mechanism—referring to health care being paid for by a single public body—and does not specify the type of delivery, or who doctors work for.

The term single payer does not imply a socialized medicine system.

Since Americans are so frightened by the word “socialism”, this is one distinction they’ve got to get under their belts. The majority of physicians in the United States are in favor of a national health insurance system. A recent study published in 2008 in Annals of Internal Medicine, a leading medical journal, showed 59% of physicians “support government legislation to establish national health insurance,” while 32% oppose it and 9% are neutral. This represented an increase of 10 percentage points as compared with a similar survey in 2002 in which support for such legislation stood at 49% of physicians. Among the general U.S. public, recent polling ratings for single-payer are apparently dependent on how the question is asked, ranging from 49% to 65% in favor.

President Obama is taking a drubbing on the issue from those Blue Dog Democrats who should be stacked on the dead-wood pile along with the Republicans. Blue Dog Senator Max Baucus, D-Mont., chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, working on a health care bill, made it clear that “the so-called ‘public option’ would not be part of any deal with his name on it.” Obama, so far, has not said he will demand a public option. He also has not said he will veto a package that omits a government-run health insurance program. This late in the game, he is keeping everyone guessing. But since Obama, himself, was on the take from the insurance industry fat-cats, he may wind up, as well, on the dead-wood pile if that public option doesn’t get into the bill from Congress everybody is waiting for.

People are making book on whether it will or won’t. If not, it’s a no-win option for all Americans, another turn of the Federal Twist. And I don’t mean that pretty place in New Jersey.

by Stephen Fleischman

We have the mechanism—built into our system—to save our country.

Every corporation or limited liability company in the United States is chartered by a State.

A corporate charter is a document filed with a US state by the founders of a corporation detailing the major components of a company such as its objectives, its structure and its planned operations. If the charter is approved by the state government, the company becomes a legal corporation.

Health insurance companies are such legal corporations with state charters.

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.

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.

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 their opinions in public and in the media as you or I can. This gives them enormous power. They can buy up commercial television time and print media ads and faux news coverage because they have the power and the money.

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.”

There is a myriad of different, and overlapping, health care organizations generating a blizzard of paperwork in an administrative wilderness creating enormous waste—thousands, if not millions of people pushing paper around—forms needed to be completed in order to get paid, to say nothing of patients fighting their way through a jungle of obstacles trying to get the health care they need.

In the current situation—in the battle for health care reform—the health insurance industry is exercising its clout. They are spending whopping amounts of money in the mainstream media propagandizing against the health care reform plans being worked on in Congress.

The insurance companies are terrorized by the possibility of a “public option” being included in the bill that comes out of the legislature. Single payer, universal health care is, of course, off the table. Any kind of government plan similar to Medicare, they fear, would jeopardize their billions in health care profits.

Their fear is so great, they are losing their cool. In addition to the propaganda barrage, they are calling out the goon squads to disrupt civil discussion of the various health care reform plans being considered.

Members of Congress and the Senate, who have returned to their constituencies during the August break, and are holding town hall public meetings with their voters to discuss the health care plans are getting a taste of some poisonous medicine.

In addition to angry shouting and disruption, some legislators favoring liberal features in the plan are getting death threats, one even hung is effigy. One goon came to a town meeting with his gun showing.

The insurance companies’ misinformation campaign raises the bug-a-boo of “socialized medicine”. You’d think it was some kind of torture instead of the government’s granting a benefit to the people, very much like Social Security and Medicare.

Some of the behavior the insurance companies are exhibiting, moreover encouraging, is in obvious violation of their charters.

So why isn’t something done about it?

Revoke their charters!

Health insurance companies are useless, anyway. They make a profit, and an enormous one, on your health and mine.

End the merry-go-round on health care by political candidates. Get rid of the blood-sucking health insurance industry, once and for all.

There are legitimate grounds on which to revoke their charters!

Make health care for our citizens a right and not a privilege. Small businesses that have the burden of supplying health coverage for their employees will thank us for it. Let’s join the world of civilized, industrial nations that provide single payer, universal health insurance for their people. Everybody in. Nobody out.

With the misinformation dispelled, any candidate running for office will get elected on that platform.

by Stephen Fleischman

It’s out in the open now. They can’t work us over anymore. We know who they are.

Our own oligarchy is out to bring this country down. Global capitalism, feel-ing the pulse of socialism, is fighting to make the world safe for corporate hegemony—and corporate America is leading the pack.

It began with the destruction of our manufacturing base; off-shoring plants, outsourcing jobs to the lowest wage areas—a race to the bottom.

Will we let them continue the process? Who do we have to stop?

–the military-industrial complex that President Ike Eisenhower warned us about way back in the 20th Century. You can add the mainstream media complex to that…

–and the mighty corporate insurance and pharmaceutical industry that’s been keeping proper health care from the American people for over sixty years. When they hear the words “single payer”, they reach for their guns.

–and there is the rest of corporate America and its rabble of sycophants, the military contractors and their mercenaries to keep the wars going, the hordes of lobbyists, the propagandists that pervade our institutions, all of academia from grade schools to universities, radio, television, internet, print and new media.

Leading this parade is the custom made front man—POTUS—the President of the United States. It was originally conceived to be a front woman, Hil-lary Clinton. But along came a Chicagoan, Barack Obama, with a liberal and wishful thinker following, promising to end the wars and give the people single payer health care.

So the power structure dumped Hillary and gave the prize to Obama. (Oh, you thought the election had something to do with it?)

Obama fit the image of the POTUS they wanted, from his charm to the color of his skin —the Pied Piper of the South Side—his subservience guaranteed by the two major pillars of the oligarchy.

Hillary, of course, was pissed but she wasn’t going to break ranks. She gracefully accepted the position of Secretary of State.

The oligarchy’s strategy, the Ayn Rand sagacity of the 20th Century—attack “big” government, return to laissez-faire capitalism.

It goes with monopoly and war. One or two or more wars must be kept go-ing for the economy’s sake. Empire building is part of this game. Our empire is extensive.

“Obama is commander-in-chief of an unprecedented network of military bases that is still expanding,” says Catherine Lutz in “The New Statesman” (7/30/09). She has made the count. “The global reach of the US military today is unprecedented and unparalleled. Officially, more than 190,000 troops and 115,000 civilian employees are massed in approximately 900 military facilities in 46 countries and territories. The US military owns or rents 795,000 acres of land, with 26,000 buildings and structures, valued at $146bn (£89bn). The bases bristle with an inventory of weapons whose worth is measured in the trillions and whose killing power could wipe out all life on earth several times over.”

Obama continues the surge of US troops into Afghanistan. Apparently, he hasn’t heard yet that Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires. Hasn’t he read Kipling?

“When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle an’ blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.

I guess Obama has never kippled.

He continues to spread the beneficence of America into what is now called Af-Pak, killing civilians indiscriminately in Pakistan with his new toy, the remote controlled drone.

While all this is going on, we are also leading this country and the world into an economic predicament. Employment is flopping, businesses are flipping and home mortgages failing.

Wall Street is being led by the same people who brought it to the ragged edge of disaster. Two of them, Gaithner and Summers, are rewarded by Obama, the former, made Secretary of the Treasury, the latter, top economic advisor to the President.

Legislation for the people is languishing in Congress.

“We have a system today that works well for the insurance industry, but it doesn’t always work well for you,” President Obama admitted in a speech to a town hall meeting in Raleigh, NC, last week, “what we will have when we pass these reforms, are health insurance consumer protections to make sure that those who have insurance are treated fairly and insurance companies are held accountable.”

What he hasn’t insisted on is the “public option” in the legislative package. Is he worried he won’t have the insurance industry’s bundle when he runs for re-election in a few years?

Corporate power stands in the way–antithesis of democracy. Corporate groups are joined together into a single governing body in which the different groups are mandated to negotiate with each other to establish policies in the interest of the multiple groups. This is defined by Wikipedia, the internet encyclopedia, as Corporatism.

Now that we know what is happening and who the scoundrels are, what are we going to do about it?

by Stephen Fleischman

Single Payer National Health Insurance.  Horrors! We can’t have that! That’s Socialism!

Yes, say the word, Socialism!

We can say it and we can have it—at least a little bit of it; even in a capitalist country. A little government for the people—not the corporations—might be a good thing.

Insurance is defined as a promise of compensation for future losses in exchange for a periodic payment. We’ve been sold every kind there is—life insurance, fire insurance, auto insurance, health insurance…

Health doesn’t belong in that group. You can’t put a price on a person’s health. Health care is a right, like education, and not a privilege.

Insurance Companies are in business for profit. Health insurance companies are in business to make a profit on your health. There should be a law against that!

The health insurance companies, in this country, have made so many billions of dollars on peoples’ health, have created so powerful a lobby, bought up so many legislators, it’s going to be a mammoth job to get rid of them, but that’s what we have to do. Health insurance companies are useless and unnecessary. They’re just blood suckers.

Meanwhile their minions, and that includes President Barack Obama, are trying to put on a show. There’s a lot of palaver about health care “reform”.  “Cut health care costs” is the mantra. Have the American people fallen to the level where they will believe that drivel?

It’s a red herring. Billions can be saved by getting rid of the health insurance companies. It can be done with the stroke of a pen. But that’s the chippie. The purpose of the desperate obfuscation is to save the health insurance industry’s sacred profits.

Going in the wrong direction, Obama is gunning for cuts in Medicare and Medicaid? Why pick on the old and the poor, for God’s sake!

To use an aphorism of your professed role model, Abraham Lincoln, you’re trying to fool all of the people all of the time.

Why do the minions of the health insurance companies cringe when they hear the term “single payer”? Because they know it means real universal health care, the kind civilized, industrial nations, around the world, offer to their citizens.

The health insurance companies (we’ll call them bloodsuckers) won’t allow the term “single payer” or the term “public option” to be used in the so-called debate that’s going on now in the halls of Congress.

Senator Max Baucus, Democrat from Montana, is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, one of the committees whose job it is to craft some legislation performing the miracle of “health care reform”. Recently, in the course of one of these debates, he threw some advocates of the single payer system out of his office. And furthermore, they were arrested! And they happened to be some prominent people in the health care field.

Psychiatrist Carol Paris, one of “the Baucus 13” who got arrested, told The Billings (Montana) Gazette, “The next 60 days are critical; we need to keep the heat on Sen. Baucus (and Congress and the president).”

In an interview with The Gazette, Paris said she used to believe that the private health insurance market could be reformed to improve health care, and she spent several years lobbying for it.

“After a few years, I came to the conclusion that it was just a phenomenal waste of time,” she said. “At that point, I just said, there has to be a better place for me to put my time and energy.”

Paris is now a member of Physicians for a National Health Program, whose 16,000 members are pushing for a national, publicly funded insurance plan that would replace private health insurance.

When she joined PNHP, to push for a single-payer system, Paris and other members found themselves basically ignored by Congress. They felt they had to do something dramatic to gain attention.

The Billing Gazette reports that they deliberately planned to protest – and get arrested – at a Senate Finance Committee hearing on health reform, chaired by Baucus.

Paris and her colleagues showed up the morning of May 5, spread themselves around in the gallery audience and, one by one, interrupted Baucus as he started the meeting.

“I interrupt this so-called public hearing to bring you the following unpaid political announcement: Put single-payer on the table,” Paris said before she was arrested. “My name is Dr. Carol Paris, and I approved this message.”

Capitol police arrested the protesters, who have been charged with disrupting Congress.

Amy Goodman of “Democracy Now!” reports that Senator Baucus has received more campaign money from health and insurance industry interests than any other member of Congress. “In the past six years, nearly one-fourth of every dime raised by Baucus and his political-action committee has come from groups and individuals associated with drug companies.

Dr. Paris said her experience in private practice has convinced her that true reform can happen only if private health insurance is replaced with national, public insurance for all.

“No longer would physicians’ staff have to spend hours dealing with multiple insurers on billing, and no longer would patients have to worry about which doctor they can go to,” she said. “You can go to any doctor of their choice. It’s in the private insurance industry where choice is restricted.”

Dr. Paris says she hears “over and over and over again” how people are frustrated by the current system, and that as soon as they understand how single-payer would work, they usually support it.

“I think that the only thing that keeps this from happening is the lack of political will by the president and our Congress,”

So, yes, say the word.

A little bit of Socialism, anyone?

by Stephen Fleischman

The death of Walter Cronkite is an appropriate time to reflect on what’s happened to journalism in America.

Walter and I came to CBS around the same time, in the early 1950s. Sig Mickelson, head of the CBS News and Public Affairs division, at the time, brought Walter in to anchor the first television coverage of a presidential election convention in 1952 and incidentally coined the term “anchorman”.

Irving Gitlin, who ran the Public Affairs section, under Mickelson, brought me in to produce documentaries. In most cases, network correspondents came out of print journalism, television news producers out of film docu-mentaries. Fred Friendly, who started the controversial program “See It Now” in 1951, came out of radio and always thought of television as radio with pictures, and admitted it.

Cronkite embodied the spirit of television journalism. In the 1960s and 70s, there was still some leeway for experimentation. I produced a number of news documentaries with Walter as host and narrator during that period.

In those days, the networks were still mostly independently owned—they had not yet been conglomerated.

William S. Paley, a cigar-maker in Philadelphia created the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) from a small radio network he bought in order to advertise his cigars.

By 1981, when Walter Cronkite handed over the CBS anchor desk to Dan Rather, the process of mergers and acquisitions was well under way.

Television networks were created in order to provide programming to affili-ate local stations. The cost of producing the entertainment or news programs was financed through advertising; so commercial operations got into the game from the very beginning. Profits were shared between the network and their affiliated stations.

In the beginning, each network was limited to owning and operating only five local stations, (called the o&os), usually in the major markets, but they serviced many affiliates.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), an independent US gov-ernment agency, established by the Communications Act of 1934, was charged with regulating interstate and international communications by ra-dio, television, wire, satellite and cable. The FCC makes and is supposed to enforce the rules.

Rule #1—the Fairness Doctrine. In news and public affairs programming, stations must present controversial issues of public importance in a manner that is “honest, equitable and balanced” in the Commission’s view or they could be subject to losing their broadcast license.

I haven’t heard of a case where a station lost its license for this reason, but I guess there must be one. However, in 1987, the FCC abolished the Fairness Doctrine. Oh, well, I guess it didn’t matter.

With the coming of color and the cable news networks, television became even more marinated in commercialism than it was when there were only three commercial networks.

As early as 1961, Newton Minnow, then-head of the FCC made his famous “vaste wasteland” speech before the National Association of Broadcasters convention. Minnow gave the broadcasters unshirted hell for not doing more to serve the public interest.

But that message went in one ear and out the other.

As time went on, the FCC kept loosening the reins, allowing the networks more and more latitude, not only in accumulating more and more o&os, but in deregulating mergers and acquisitions as well.

Today, the mainstream media is in a sorry state. Six corporate media giants with a stranglehold on information, control most of what we see, hear, and read. The five largest are AOL Time-Warner; the Walt Disney Company that now owns the ABC Television Network; Bertelsmann, a German firm with more than $15 billion in media assets; Sumner Redstone’s Viacom that owns CBS; Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation that controls and runs Fox News on TV and the New York Post on paper and all the news they fix to print.

In addition, they all have interests in major movie studios, other TV chan-nels and networks, cable companies, most of the music companies, book publishing, retail stores, amusement parks, video games, and merchandising and on and on.

Such a concentration of media power in so few hands violates every known theory of a free market place of ideas that is the essence of democracy.

“While television is supposed to be free,” said Walter Lippmann, prominent journalist, in 1959, “it has, in fact, become the creature, the servant and in-deed the prostitute of merchandising.”

Despite his distain for commercial television, Lippmann also exhibited his distain for the intelligence of the American public. He didn’t think they were smart enough to understand complex political issues. The public needed journalists to filter the news for them; elites to interpret what policy-makers and politicians were doing, something called “manufacturing consent” as de-fined by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky in their book by that name, subtitled “The Political Economy of the Mass Media”.

In their view, the media serves and propagandizes for “powerful societal in-terests” that controls and finances them. These interests have important agendas that they want to advance and they have the means with which to do it. It is not accomplished by crude intervention but by the “selection of right-thinking personnel, by editors and working journalists who internalize the priorities and definitions of newsworthiness that conform to the institution’s policy.”

Reporters working in the field call it “Do-It-Yourself Censorship”. You have to know just how far you can push the envelope or you won’t be working in the field very long.

The big change in television came when news became a profit center. With the collapse of the Fairness Doctrine and the laxity of the FCC, the News Departments at the Networks no longer felt they had to perform a public service. “Earn your own way, Buddy. Get a sponsor. Show a profit.” News shows started running commercials.

This was the new media world Walter Cronkite saw coming. He didn’t like it, either.

Good-bye, Walter.

Good night and good luck, as Ed Murrow would say.

And that’s the way it is.