By The River

With the government plan, said Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan, “you will have to call a bureaucrat and hope to God his calculator is more compassionate and smarter than your doctor.”
--New York Times, July 31, 2009

The moral bankruptcy of the corporations and politicians fighting against national healthcare for all is summed up in the above quote from Congressman Mike Rogers, a Republican who represents a district in the middle of Michigan that includes the state capital, Lansing, but also numerous small towns. The quote is a complete and utter lie, part of the scare tactics being used against national healthcare that are hammered home by rightwing television and radio commentators.

Do you know someone on Medicare, the "government-run healthcare" that serves people over 65 in this country, and serves them well? Ask them if they've ever once had to call a "government bureaucrat" for permission to be treated, or for anything else. Rogers, a former FBI agent and home builder, knows what he's saying is a lie. Either that or he's too deluded to master even the Washington, D.C., Metro system, let along serious legislation. One of Rogers' previous big issues was stopping the importation of Canadian garbage to landfills in the United States. He apparently sees a Canadian-style health plan in much the same light, even though vast majorities of Canadians have no problem with a system that remove financial worries from the picture and gives them longer life expectancies than Americans.

Coming from an economic basket case state with the nation's highest unemployment rate, he could help his constituents far more by ensuring the Obama healthcare plan passes than by shilling for the healthcare industry and the diehard ideologues of the Republican Party.

One reason national healthcare seems to be losing is that we no longer have a Fairness Doctrine to ensure that television and radio stations present balanced stories, or give people the right to reply on air with their own points of view. The law was in effect from 1949 to the mid-1980s, and was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in a case involving a rightwing Christian radio station in Red Lion, Pennsylvania. Congress repealed the law during the Reagan era de-regulation of the middle 1980s.

It is no accident that the American Right began its rise at about the same time. Repeal of the Fairness Doctrine gave rise to Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and Bill O'Reilley, who could not operate with quite the same unmitigated venom if the Fairness Doctrine was still in place. Nothing would stop them from reporting facts to their listeners, but there's the rub. The Fairness Doctrine, for better or worse, enforced an unsteady moderation in American political discourse, legally only for broadcast discourse but through a spillover effect to all political discourse. It made it harder for extreme political minorities to get airtime for their views, but they were not foreclosed in any way from print media.

Without the Fairness Doctrine, minority political factions backed by big corporate money can broadcast any old lie they want without fear of having a "response" run on the same station. In a perfect world, listeners to slanted broadcasts would take the time to research the issues and draw their own conclusions. But in fact, as the bad guys of world history discovered, if you tell people that they'll have to get the permission of a government bureaucrat to get treated for illness often enough, many will come to believe it.

Even if it is a lie.

Posted by David at 08:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

It's been more than six months since I took a buy-out from the Patriot-News and entered into the brave new world of Something Else.

I finished documentary film school at George Washington University, not so happily, and am figuring out what to do now. I finished an updated edition of my book on the Centralia mine fire, formerly called Unseen Danger, now to be called Fire Underground. Globe Pequot Press, my first "real," commercial publisher in the nearly 23 years my book has been in print, will release Fire Underground on Sept. 1. It takes the Centralia story up to this summer, with the state beginning to ease the remaining dozen residents out, and adds a lot of new detail throughout.

Cream cheese frosting on this cake: Fire Underground includes about 50 of my Centralia photographs, many in color. It's the next best thing to the book of my Centralia photography that I've always dreamed of doing.

So it's looking like Labor Day weekend will be big one. My wife is planning a book release party, which will probably dovetail with the opening of "The Town That Was," the documentary film about Centralia in which I appear several times, for a one-week run at the Midtown Cinema in Harrisburg.

In the meantime, I'm waiting to hear from Globe Pequot whether they'll publish my next book, tentatively titled, "The Epidemic," about a typhoid epidemic that ravaged Ithaca, New York, and Cornell University in 1903. It was one of the worst typhoid epidemics in United State history (in percentage terms) and one of the last, and was caused by corporate greed and stupidity. It is a surprisingly modern story. One factoid that fascinates me: Cornell students and their frantic parents (29 students died) kept in touch by long distance telephone call, then a new and quite novel technology. I envision men and women students in Hello, Dolly-era clothing picking up the telephone to tell parents that friends have died and yes, mother, I'll be on the next train home. The suffering and death in Ithaca was immense, criminal, and so, so avoidable.

So there's that. In the meantime, I worry about cash flow (the freelance writer's lament) and paying the bills, and should I get a real job? Not that there's many of those around in the kind of work I do best, sorry to say.

Posted by David at 07:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Americans really don't have much of a tradition of taking to the streets in mass protest. Despite images and events dating back 40 years to the Vietnam War, most Americans are exceedingly reluctant to parade their grievances against government or corporations for all to see. And that's a shame, given that nice First Amendment we have in our Constitution.

What I'd really like to see is a million or more Americans descend on Washington, D.C., to demand that Congress enact single-payer national health care, or at least the Obama plan with the so-called "public option" to compete with the private insurance companies. Polls show overwhelming public support for the Obama plan, yet healthcare reform is in danger of failing because of the millions of dollars the insurance industry is spending every day to defeat the plan. Their allies among the rightwing talk radio hosts put out a daily diet of distortions and lies about national healthcare. We are in grave danger of keeping the awful status quo, or at best status quo plus a few meaningless "reforms" that still leave 40 million Americans uninsured.

Something is needed to break the stranglehold of the lobbyists and talk radio over this critical debate. And that is a massive invasion of angry but polite citizens into our nation's capital to demand that Congress do the right thing--or else. I'd like to see large rallies on the same day in each of the 50 state capitals to drive home the point that America wants healthcare for all at a minimum, reasonable price to individuals and families. Like in France, Canada, and Britain.

While I'm at it, I would also encourage the state employees of Pennsylvania to take their grievances to the streets of Harrisburg. They're about to lose their paychecks indefinitely because the Senate Republicans won't, for purely ideological reasons, agree to a modest, temporary tax hike on individuals and a delay in a scheduled reduction in the state's Capital Stock and Franchise Tax (don't ask) on large businesses much beloved by the Chamber of Commerce types. As a result, the budget stalemate continues.

The Senate Republicans say a recession is no time for a tax hike. Guess what--they say that when times are flush, too. They see the recession as a perfect opportunity to slash the size of government, and too bad if you happened to like your local library or small business development center. That modest tax hike will be paid only by individuals who still have jobs, since unemployment compensation is not taxed in Pennsylvania (were that so at the Federal level--thank you Ronald Reagan).

So state workers--to the barricades! Let them know you are angry at being pawns in this GOP ideological game. You have families to feed and bills to pay. Get going.

Posted by David at 06:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

You won't find anything about it in the obituaries that ran yesterday, but the incident in Robert McNamara's life that always fascinated me was when a young anti-war protester tried and nearly succeeded in throwing the former Defense Secretary off the Martha's Vineyard ferry on Sept. 29, 1972. He had him over the side, but McNamara saved himself by clingling tightly to the railing until help arrived. He did not press charges, and the 27-year-old artist who had tried to kill him vanished.

But not entirely. Washington Post reporter Paul Hendrickson tracked him down and interviewed him for a 1995 book on McNamara. The artist still lives on Martha's Vineyard, according to Hendrickson, and has run into McNamara at least once over the years.

He had been consumed by rage over the 58,000 useless American deaths in the Vietnam War, of which McNamara was the chief architect and engineer. When he saw McNamara enjoying himself with friends on the ferry, he lured him out to the deck and tried to kill him. Such were the passions engendered by the Vietnam War.

If you want to know what McNamara was all about, watch Errol Morris' Academy Award-winning 2000 documentary, "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara." McNamara, by then in a repentant stage in his life, cooperated fully with Morris. The film is chilling. Watch it and then consider what happened to McNamara that day on the ferry.

Posted by David at 09:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I read articles like today's "Europe's Free, State-Run Healthcare Has Drawbacks" in the Washington Post and despair if the vast majority of Americans who want a similar healthcare system here have any chance at all to see it happen.

Here's a headline you won't see in the Post: "Canadians, French, British laud their national healthcare systems, dismiss problems as minor." Or, "Canadians fear to travel to U.S. for fear of having an accident and being hit with crippling medical bills." Or, "If you get sick in France, you're treated for free: no questions asked."

Too many American journalists have been cowed by the right into not writing stories they logically should write, namely that by huge majorities, residents of single-payer healthcare system countries like Canada, Britain, and France love their system. The Washington Post, which leans ever further to the right (forget about Watergate--this is penance for that), even dropped the "free" from the headline of today's story on the website. You only see the word "free" if you actually call up the story.

Do single-payer national healthcare systems have problems? Sure. But our own system has a helluva lot more. It is elitist and silly to argue that we can't have single-payer health care here because it might cause a brief delay in new drug introduction WHEN MILLIONS OF AMERICANS HAVE NO HEALTH INSURANCE AND CAN'T GET ANY DRUGS AT ALL. I'm friends with two French doctors, a husband and wife, who work at Hershey Medical Center. They've told me there are good drugs they routinely prescribed in France that are simply not available here.

It is time for all of us who want single-payer health care to begin to write letters to the editor of our local newspapers demanding that they print the truth about single-payer healthcare in foreign countries. And if that doesn't work, picket outside their buildings and call the local TV stations.

Posted by David at 08:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Patriot-News in Harrisburg, Pa., needs to be more careful in the letters from readers it allows to be printed. There is one in Wednesday's paper that can be read, without too much trouble, as a call to assassinate President Obama.

After fulminating against "liberal" attempts to take over health care, the writer's rhetoric takes an apocalyptic turn. "It is so frightening to see what is happening in our country and the pace in which it is spinning out of control. Our forefathers must be churning in their graves. What they built and the bloodshed (sic) we spilled to protect and defend us is rapidly turning to sand."

And then the payoff line: "Someone has to stop all the takeovers and giveaways and do it quickly."

Someone.

The writer will no doubt say assassination wasn't the intent, but in the context of the rest of the letter this can be read as a call to murder and should not have been published. A weak-minded rightist, a Timothy McVeigh type, could be moved to action by words like that. Especially amid growing calls among the more dangerous elements of the right to do away with the President. Pennsylvania is not immune from that sort of thinking, or lack thereof. Newspapers need to be careful.

The Warren Times-Observer in Warren, Pennsylvania, actually ran a classified ad in May that expressed the hope that Obama would follow in the footsteps of "Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy," the four murdered U.S. presidents. No one on the classified ad staff apparently made the connection, and the publisher issued a public apology. The Secret Service is said to be investigating.

This is not a free speech issue. No one has the right under the First Amendment to publicly advocate the murder of another person, whether they use carefully coded language or not.

So Patriot-News, screen your letters more carefully. The editorial page and op-ed page are something I never fail to read, but I don't want to read rightwing garbage like today's letter.

Posted by David at 09:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)