politics

Is health care a right? In his recent odious Wall Street Journal editorial, John Mackey argues that "A careful reading of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution will not reveal any intrinsic right to health care, food or shelter. That’s because there isn’t any. This “right” has never existed in America."

(Markey is co-founder and CEO of Whole Foods Market Inc., and his Thatcher-quoting article promoting a "you're own your own, buddy" version of health care has spawned a boycott movement.)

Now, if Mr. Mackey had actually read the Constitution, he would have seen Amendment IX: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." I.e., the fact that a right is not enumerated, can not be used to argue that it does not exist.

There is, for example, no right to privacy mentioned in the Constitution. That does not mean that one does not exist.

And something may not be a "right", and yet might be expected as a basic government service. In cases like Warren v. District of Columbia and Castle Rock v. Gonzales, the courts have found that there is no right to a police response -- yet we expect tax-funded, government-provided cops to show up if we dial 911. There is no "right to food", but a government that does not deal with hunger and famine is going to at minimum have a lot of crime, and quite possibly political unrest -- hungry people are ready-made followers for radicals, and so we have food stamps and agricultural policy.

Warning: this may make you feel ill. In fact, it ought to.

From The American Chronicle, back in May when the House was debating legislation to expand the 1969 federal hate-crime law. The proposed "Matthew Shepard Act" would expand the law to include crimes motivated by gender, sexual orientation, or disability.

Now, there are some legitimate concerns about some hate-crime laws, "thought crime" and all that; I haven't read the details of this bill and don't know if I'd support all of it's provisions. But that's irrelevant to this:

While Matthew's mother, Judy Shepard looked on from above in the House gallery, [Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC)], who managed the floor for those opposed to the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act, spoke saying, "The hate crimes bill that's called the Matthew Shepard Bill is named after a very unfortunate incident that happened where a young man was killed, but we know that the young man was killed in the commitment of a robbery. It wasn't because he was gay. The bill was named for him … but it's really a hoax that continues to be used as an excuse for passing these bills."

Matthew Shepard, of course, was a young man who was tortured and murdered by two homophobic lunatics, and whose death brought national attention to gay-bashing and to hate crimes in general. The "it was a robbery gone bad" defense that the defense attempted at one point, was contradicted by the thug's own testimony. That someone can claim that this is some sort of a hoax, and not be instantly run out of town on a rail, is the most stomach-churning thing I've read this week -- and I've been reading a lot of politics this week, my friends.

I am not surprised that this insane bitch's position on health care reform is that "There are no Americans who don’t have healthcare", and that she's one of the GOP politicos spreading the "death panel" Big Lie.

Johann Hari, writing in The Independent (UK), on how the insanity of the contemporary GOP looks from the other side of the pond:

Something strange has happened in America in the nine months since Barack Obama was elected. It has best been summarised by the comedian Bill Maher: "The Democrats have moved to the right, and the Republicans have moved to a mental hospital."

...

Since Obama's rise, the US right has been skipping frantically from one fantasy to another, like a person in the throes of a mental breakdown. It started when they claimed he was a secret Muslim, and – at the same time – that he was a member of a black nationalist church that hated white people. Then, once these arguments were rejected and Obama won, they began to argue that he was born in Kenya and secretly smuggled into the United States as a baby, and the Hawaiian authorities conspired to fake his US birth certificate. So he is ineligible to rule and the office of President should pass to... the Republican runner-up, John McCain.

These aren't fringe phenomena: a Research 200 poll found that a majority of Republicans and Southerners say Obama wasn't born in the US, or aren't sure. A steady steam of Republican congressmen have been jabbering that Obama has "questions to answer". No amount of hard evidence – here's his birth certificate, here's a picture of his mother heavily pregnant in Hawaii, here's the announcement of his birth in the local Hawaiian paper – can pierce this conviction.

...

You have to admire the audacity of the right. Here's what's actually happening. The US is the only major industrialised country that does not provide regular healthcare to all its citizens. Instead, they are required to provide for themselves – and 50 million people can't afford the insurance. As a result, 18,000 US citizens die every year needlessly, because they can't access the care they require. That's equivalent to six 9/11s, every year, year on year.

Joe Klien, in Time:

...How can you maintain the illusion of journalistic impartiality when one of the political parties has jumped the shark?

I'm not going to try. I've written countless "Democrats in Disarray" stories over the years and been critical of the left on numerous issues in the past....

Back in 2004, when the Department of Homeland Security raised the terror alert level during the campaign season, czar Tom Ridge claimed, "We don't do politics in the Department of Homeland Security."

But, surprising no one who's been paying attention, it now comes out that the whole thing was intensely political: Ridge was pushed by Rumsfeld and Ashcroft to raise the security alert on the eve of the 2004 Presidential elections.

(Just in case fanning the flames of homophobia, and election fraud in Ohio --including a nonexistent terrorist threat made up by GOP election officials to keep reporters from monitoring the ballot coun -- weren't enough to ensure a Bush "victory", I suppose.)

Ridge refused, and resigned -- after the election. Rather then speak out when it could have made a difference, this cowardly sack of partisanship kept silent for five years.

I used to be disgusted. Now I'm just kind of numb.

I missed this lovely bit of dialog between Glenn Beck and Craig T. Nelson back in May, but it just came up on The Daily Show.

It's just so perfectly illustrative of the same sort of mindset that has 39% of Americans agreeing that the government should "stay out of Medicare".

For readers outside the U.S., or for fatally ignorant Americans, I should note that Medicare is a government program to provide medical care to senior citizens and the disabled. I'm guessing there's a large overlap between these folks, and the astounding 24% of Americans who think that Obama wasn't born in the U.S. -- including 6% who think he was born in Hawaii but that Hawaii is not a state. (I'd also bet that almost every one of these folks is in the 50% of Americans who think that a woman should be legally required to take her husband's last name after marriage. Remember folks, when you're dealing with a bell curve like intelligence, half the people are going to be below average...)

Anyway, in this gem Nelson says he's not going to pay taxes anymore because the government is cutting funding for important things like education and fire fighters. And he goes on to say, "What happened to society? I go into business, I don't make it, I go bankrupt. I've been on food stamps and welfare, did anybody help me out? No. No." (Again, for readers outside the U.S., or for fatally ignorant Americans, welfare and food stamps are tax-funded government programs that help people like Craig T. Nelson out when they fall on hard times.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYlZiWK2Iy8

TPMmuckraker reports on a leaked oil industry memo about a plan to stage astroturf rallies in opposition to climate change legislation:

The memo -- sent by the American Petroleum Institute and obtained by Greenpeace, which sent it to reporters -- urges oil companies to recruit their employees for events that will "put a human face on the impacts of unsound energy policy," and will urge senators to "avoid the mistakes embodied in the House climate bill."

API tells TPMmuckraker that the campaign is being funded by a coalition of corporate and conservative groups that includes the anti-health-care-reform group 60 Plus, FreedomWorks, and Grover Norquist's Americans For Tax Reform.

The memo, signed by API president Jack Gerard, asks recipients to give API "the name of one central coordinator for your company's involvement in the rallies."

And it warns: "Please treat this information as sensitive ... we don't want critics to know our game plan."

Seems we can look forward to the same sort of lies, manipulation, and manufactured outrage about climate change we're currently enjoying about health care. (I did see some teabaggers at the healthcare town hall I went to last week.)

(some notes toward a manifesto of sorts)

I've generally found myself in agreement with Thoreau:

"I heartily accept the motto, -- 'That government is best which governs least'; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe, -- 'That government is best which governs not at all'; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have."

and with Kerry Thornley's "Zenarchy":

"As a doctrine, it holds Universal Enlightenment a prerequisite to abolition of the State, after which the State will inevitably vanish. Or - that failing - nobody will give a damn."

Over the years, some of you have heard me rail against many things the government has done: war, drug policy, domestic surveillance, censorship, and so on. For example, way back in 1993, in a USENET discussion about drug policy I spoke of the feds as

"...the government that gave us the Dredd Scott decision, Prohibition, McCarthyism, MK-ULTRA mind-control experiments with LSD, the Bay of Pigs, the Vietnam police action, Watergate, Iran-Contra, the House banking and Post Office scandals, the Waco [assault], and 20-page MILSPECS for brownies..."

and a decade and a half later, I find nothing to disagree with in that statement.

(I Am Not Making This Up: the 2003 version of the military specification for brownies actually runs to 26 pages.)

So, how is it that I now find myself arguing in favor of that same government taking up a greater role in health care?

It is because, under current and foreseeable circumstances, the alternative is health care from the same sorts of massive corporations that brought us the Bhopal disaster, the Exxon Valdez debacle, the Merck fake medical journals, the Enron and Halliburton and KBR and Blackwater and Madoff and Goldman Sachs scandals.

A large corporation is an animal dedicated to its own preservation and growth; if actual goods and services are produced, that's just a fortunate by-product of its metabolic processes. And that's fine when we're dealing with ordinary consumer goods. But a health care system in which some people might occasionally receive care, if it doesn't affect the bottom line too much? Stacked against that, a government-regulated system (however subject to inefficiency and corruption and mistakes) that claims as its prime directive to provide care, starts to sound attractive.

ExxonMobil's 2008 profits, according to Fortune magazine: $40.6 billion dollars. That's profit, mind you, not total revenue; that was a bit under $373 billion.

2010 budget for the entire EPA: $10.5 billion.

I.e., if the EPA devoted itself entirely to policing this one oil company, ExxonMobil could outspend it three to one and still remain profitable.

Res ipsa loquitor.