Like wind power, the Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act will, in the long run,  do more damage that it will do good.  It does very little to make anyone responsible and affords government the opportunity to step aside while extremely costly and wasteful medical applications are applied wily, nily to diseases, the bulk of which are created by our irresponsible treatment of our bodies, our air, our land, and our water.  The damage that is being done is that people are led to believe that something effective is happening when in fact we are merely massaging the same old system.

Corporations make money making us sick and a lot of money applying fixes such as angioplasty, heart bypasses, implanting devices, etc., etc.  We let them get away with it.  We are all responsible.  We have to demand change.  We cannot overcome our insane lifestyles with new technologies.

A few years ago, the Lawrence Public Schools were cutting a deal with Coca Cola to put soda machines in the middle schools.  That motivated me to go to the school board and protest – the first time in my life.  I assumed that the meeting would be packed with outraged parents.  Only Dickie Heckler (see his comments below on the last “wind power” post), and I were there to raise hell about addicting children to a product that harms their health.  I haven’t been back to a school board meeting since; I have done nothing about the junk food and pop machines in the schools; and I have done nothing about the fat-loaded, low-nutrition school lunch programs.

So, like wind power, the affordable care act is a chimera.  They make us believe that we are moving in a positive directions and reversing catastrophes in process.  However, we are willing to lay waste to precious prairie and desert lands, and large swathes of ocean vistas while we consume, manufacture, package, and ship products in the most insane possible ways.  We build wind farms that destroy desert ecosystems beside watered golf courses and blue grass lawns.

We are destroying our Kansas land and water by dumping harmful chemical fertilizers on good framland and by center pivot irrigation systems.  Now the Ogallah Aquifer is contaminated with atrazine and will become increasingly saline until it is no longer useable.  The type of farming we are witnessing in Kansas not only destroys our land and our health, it requires far more oil than, healthier,  alternative, sustainable forms of agriculture.

What makes nice liberal programs like wind power and the Affordable Care Act dangerous is that they trick us into believeing things are changing when they can do nothing but get worse – if we don’t transform our lifestyles and economic system.

One commenter is Ken Lassman – a knowlegeable and highly respected environmentalist.  You can visit his blog “Wild Douglas County” at http://kenlassman.blogspot.com/.  I have also added his blog to my blog roll on this home page.  I have heard from Clark Coen, a dedicated environmentalist who knows what is going on environmentally across Kansas like few other people.  Mary Lindsay, the organizer of MoveToAmend in Kansas City states that she has “mixed feelings” about the issue, which I understand (the blog roll on this home page also includes KC MoveToAmend).

Paula Friedman out in Oregon agrees with my position on wind power (see her comments on wind power posts below).  All of the comments have been from people for whom I have respect.  We probably agree on most everything related to the environment. Nevertheless, we have opened a discussion on this topic – one that is healthy and that we need to have.

Nuclear & More Fossil Fuels Are Not Answers:  The Church Rock Mine Nuclear Disaster

I want to make it clear that I do not believe that nuclear power is  clean or in any way a viable alternative to fossil fuels.  As the industrial relations manager of New Mexico Operations for United Nuclear Corporation in the 1970s, I saw mining-related  environmental degradation, which will inevitably result from uranium mining, up close.  Most people are not aware of the Church Rock mine nuclear disaster -  to which Three Mile Island pales in comparison.

What was and is the Church Rock mine disaster?  It is the biggest of the literally thousands of environmental damaging events that have occured as the result of mining the essential fuel for nuclear power, i.e uranium.  The mill at Church Rock (21 miles north of Gallup, New Mexico) slurried tailings from the milling process into a tailings pond that was placed right on the edge of the Navajo Reservation and the Rio Puerco River.

Eventually, the dam failed and dumped millions of gallon of radioactive and otherwise toxic liquor into the Rio Puerco.  The health effects to the people in the area and the long-term damage to the land are immeasurable and permanent (these toxic tailings are not the only things causing damage to the environment due to uranium mining – they are too numerous to mention).

To varying degrees, the uranium mining industry has left disasters all over the U.S. – mostly in the Western states.  Tailings along tributaries feeding the Colorado River are leeching radioactive waste into that river right now.  So Kansas prairies are not the only open spaces to which corporations are willing to lay waste for short term profits.

A Lot of Carbon-based Fuels Fuels Remain in the Ground:  That is Not Good News

One problem with wind power is that it might lead us to believe that we are really doing something about the release of CO2 into the environment.  I agree with Richard Heinberg that oil reserves have peaked and that resource will eventually be depleted.  But the tar sands of Canada could produce 1.5 trillion barrels of oil – a bigger reserve than Saudi Arabia.

The U.S. wants that oil to burn in our gas guzzlers.  My guess is that it will take continued protests like the one launched against the Keystone XL pipeline to stop that oil from flowing into the U.S.  If that pipeline doesn’t make it in, then another route will be cooked up by the U.S. State Department and Canada.

This Has to Stop:  The Planet Can’t Handle It!

So, whether we build wind farms or not, corporations, the congress, and the White House (whomever is occupying it) will continue to push us down the road toward fossil fuel disaster.  EXXON, etc., etc. are so powerful that legislators cannot stop the Wall Street, fossil fuel industry juggernaut unless we put more protests lines around the White House – thank you Bill McKibben.

We don’t need more wind farms, we need honesty form our government and a behavioral revolution – everything else will be a mere massaging of a totally destructive and slowly dying form of energy (dying too slowly to help us save the planet).  Khadafy was not turned from a terrorist to an ally because he had a moral epiphany and gave up his nukes.  We made a deal to make him a respectable part of the world community if we could have his oil – the 9th largest oil reserve in the world.

Furthermore, this issue goes deeper than oil for automobiles, etc.  Oil trades in dollars and dollars have become the number one U.S. commodity.  That is the real story.  However, this post is long enough so I will save the oil trading in dollars thing for another day.

We can plant these horrendous wind machines on every beautiful hill and across every wonderful sweeping vista of the plains, and it will hardly dent the problems caused by the immoral waste of energy on our clogged freeways and in our 10,000 square foot houses occupied by 2 people.  As our electronic gizmos and gadgets proliferate to satisfy economic growth and mindless consumerism, wind farms will only benefit the farmers and ranchers willing to lease property and the industries profiting from spoiling our state.

There is no technological solution to the moral problem of trashing our planet.  Rather than make our land suffer, we must demand a change in behavior.  That is how we will be good stewards of the land – that is our moral obligation.

Kudos to the Kansas Audubon Society for taking this issue on in the Fall/Winter 2011 issue of Prairie Wings (page 21 & page 23).  Here is what Ron Klataske has to say on page 21:  “Massive industrial windpower developments are promoted as ‘green’ but built foremost for dazzling tax subsidizes measured in tens of millions.”  Also on page 23 you can read about the fight Wabaunsee County Commissioners are waging against this defilement of our Kansas beauty and harm to the environment.

My great grandfather homesteaded on the Kansas prairies in the 1880s.  I grew up loving the open spaces covered with buffalo grass on our homestead near the Smoky Hill River in Ellis County.  What is left of our natural grasslands is near and dear to me.  I plan to support the Audubon Society and its fight to preserve this beautiful land and the wildlife it supports.

Ron Wyden: Democrat Senator Working with Ultra Right Wing Congressman Paul Ryan to Reduce Medicare Benefits

Destruction of Social Security has been a Republican dream from the day it was legislated into existence.  Conservatives have never wavered from their ardent desire to bring about the demise of this beloved, humane, and much needed program – fully funded, I might add, by the people who benefit from it.

Probably never in their wildest dreams did Republicans believe that the most effective destroyers of Social Security would be a Democratic President and his Democratic helpers in the United States Congress.  But that is what’s happening – right now.

DRAINING THE SOCIAL SECURITY TRUST FUND

While making Orwellian claims that their objective is to make the Social Security Trust Fund solvent  (see discussion of Simpson-Bowls below) - to strengthen it – the Democrats and President Obama are inflicting damage on the long-term strength of the SSTF by reducing the 6.2% employee contribution to 4.2%.  This ineffective stimulous program has been draining the SSTF for the past year.  Now they are fighting like hell to extend this unwise cut for another year and have even proposed to cut the employers 6.2% to 4.2% also.  Unbelievable!

AUSTERITY FOR THE 99% HURTS SOCIAL SECURITY AND RETIREES

Proposals for cutting Social Security benefits and undermining the soundness of the SS Trust Fund are still on the horizon in the form of deficit reduction proposals – including the ones from the President’s deficit reduction commission, i.e., the Simpson-Bowles plan, which the President and all but a few progressive Democrats have endorsed.  Here are a couple of goodies in Simpson-Bowls: (1) the push for a chained CPI, which would unfairly lower adjustments for keeping monthly benefits in sync with price increases, and (2) proposal to increase the age for full benefits to 70.  These are severe benefit cuts.

What you will not find in Simpson-Bowls is a proposal to immediately push up the salary cap – to be raised to $110,100 in 2012 – to a level that captures much more than 82%  of taxable payroll as it now does.  The longer this situation remains unaddressed, the more the solvency of the SSTF will be undermined. At least 92% of taxable pay should be subjected to this tax.

SIMPSON-BOWLES IS INTERLOCKED WITH OTHER PLANS FROM CORPORATE DOMINATED THINK TANKS

If you carefully peruse the Simpson-Bowles plan along with plans developed and distributed by Washington, corporate-dominated, think tanks like the Bipartisan Policy Center, The New American Way, the Committe for a Responsible Federal Budget, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, and the Pew Charitable Trust, you will find that they are practically identical and heavily stacked against  ordinary working folks.  The low and middle income classes will take a huge hit from the implementation of these plans while the richest of the richest will remain unscathed.

Plans such as the Dominici-Rivlin plan (Bipartisan Policy Center) and the Peterson Foundation-Pew Charitable Foundation plan are practically identical to Simpson-Bowles.  You will also find interlocking members of the committees creating these plans.  For instance, both Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles served on the Bipartisan Policy Center committee responsible for the Dominici-Rivlin plan.

The Sick Joke

Saving in a capitalist system is a desirable and economically beneficial behavior.  However, hoarding is not a good behavior.  Bottling up too much money in sovereign wealth funds, college and non-profit foundation endowments, off-shore accounts, etc. reduces tax revenues, investment in plant and equipment, and direct fiscal stimulation of the economy   We have so much “super hoarding” throughout the world that demand for goods and services is weak while the world sits on piles of capital and idle factories - otherwise known as low demand, excess liquidity and excess capacity.  Not a good thing.

The government of China now has a current account surplus of $3 trillion – much of which is invested in low yield U.S. bonds. Yes U.S. treasuries are considered one of the safest places to park oodles and piles of excess dollars today.  What does that say about the validity of the S&P downgrade of U.S. debt?  With the price for a barrel of oil at the $100 mark, the SWFs of the oil exporter nations will keep growing at a phenomenal pace.  The top 40 university endowments are sitting on at least $200 billion.  With thousands of university endowment funds plus huge amounts of super-rich family dollars parked in 501(c)(3) or some other form of tax shelter, trillions of dollars that could be invested in roads, bridges, schools, housing, and other projects – in the people of all the countries of the world – is moved about the financial markets as the super rich attempt to enhance and/or protect their “hoarded wealth.”

The problem is this:  too much capital flowing into countries like Greece, Italy, Ireland, Spain, and Portugal from countries like Germany, from massive hedge funds, or from the petro-dollar recyclers in London and the U.S., fuels crony capitalism, speculative bubbles, politically popular too-low tax rates,  and ill-conceived and wasteful governmental programs (think farm subsidies, war, and other give-aways that do nothing for the betterment of society).  This became a particularly glaring problem when the world-wide economic weltanschauung morphed into the Reagan-Thatcher promoted ”dog eat dog,” “winner take all,” deregulated, free market belief system.  In other words, grab all you can get and don’t give a damn about your fellow humans, the planet, and the future of the human species.

The Sick Punch Line

The super-rich and bankers in countries that invested heavily in bonds of countries like Greece fueled out-of-control consumerism – made possible by government fiscal policy.  Ostensibly, this was irresponsible behavior only on the part of the debtor countries.  However, as in the case of Europe, the consumerism of debtor countries fueled the very robust economic growth of  creditor countries.  In other words, the healthier economies of Northern Europe were recycling their export Euros back to the less healthy economies of Southern Europe so they could keep up their consumer madness.  It was a crazy feedback loop.

Eventually, all of this hot capital flow had to end badly.  The Southern European nations can no longer service their massive debt and, with bond yields rising rapidly, this can only get worse.  With U.S. and European banks heavily exposed in the European bond markets, this financial collapse will eventually be devastating.

But wait!  There is a solution.  The European Central Bank could step in and “bail out” the Greeks, Italians, Portugese, and so forth.  They could stop this catstrophe from happening and keep everyone from suffering badly – including the Germans.  If the collapse continues – and it may be too late to stop it – we are looking at a very deep world-wide recession and perhaps a depression.

Here is the sick punch line:  Just as in the United States, the super rich of Europe - particularly the Germans and bankers of Germany - are demanding that economic collapse be solved through austerity.  Lay off teachers, cut pensions, increase unemployment – make the people suffer.  Teach those profligates a lesson.  This will be disastrous for the bankers, super rich, and nations calling for punishment of the debtor nations’ peoples.  As demand continues to dissipate from their economies,  bonds held by the bankers and other investors won’t be worth diddly squat.  But they will ride this thing down before they share some wealth to save the whole system.  Take their lives – they are saving their money for their old ages.

The Solution

Nations must regain control of their economies and their wealth.  The way to do this is to equalize their tax codes, control their own capital markets, invest – through direct fiscal stimulation and creation of meaningful jobs and projects – in their people.  Taxation must be designed to produce adequate government revenue for equitable housing, education, health care, for infrastructure, research and development, and all of the other things that modern, progressive countries should and could do (and all nations should become modern and progressive).

However, if the rich and powerful persist in punishing debtor nations gone bad, and if they persist in hoarding their wealth in endowments, 501(c)3s, in off shore accounts, and through finding various and sundry other forms of legal gimmicks for escaping their tax responsibilities, the current catastrophic failure mode of the world economy will end very badly for them as well as for all of us.

Herman is apparently so dense that he failed to realize that sexual harrassment had become legally unacceptable in the corporate world as far back as the late 1970s.  You would think that the CEO of the National Restuarant Association would know that for God’s sake.  Having said that, I am mystified by the apoplexy suffered by liberals on MSNBC and in other venues over Herman’s sickening behavior when most of them had very little to say about the behavior Bill Clinton was alleged to have directed at Kathleen Willey, Paula Jones, and Juanita Broderick (amongst others).

Kathleen Willey, a liberal and Clinton supporter, has written an entire book about what happened to her (Target).  If what Juanita Broderick said is true, Bill Clinton viciously and physically assaulted her.  And why would she and Paula Jones be any less believable than the women coming forth in regard to Herman Cain?

It would be difficult to know exactly what really took place in Bill Clinton’s long career at exercising his political power in consensual and not so consensual relationships.  It is likely that many women were dissuaded from coming forth by not very subtle messages from the notorious private detective Jack Palladino.  In case you haven’t heard of Jack Palladino, he is famous around Hollywood for digging up dirt on and threatening to destroy the lives of spouses of the rich and famous in divorce cases.  Apparently, the Clintons had a penchant for using Palladino’s services.

Here is a quote regarding Clinton assistant Betsy Wright (from Carl Berstein’s Hillary Clinton biography A Woman in Charge):

“Wright was technically assigned to work for Lyons, who had helped her investigate some of the women who had claimed to have had affiars with Bill.  The reports of a private detective Lyons had hired, Jack Palladino, were among the papers in the files she assembled.” (page 479)

Make no mistake about it, a woman who comes forward against a man as powerful as Herman Cain, let alone President Bill Clinton, will, no matter the substance of her charges, be assaulted in a way that she could hardly imagine.

The American Health Care System is Despicable

Just how despicable is the U.S. health care system?  Although the U.S. spends over $8000 per capita and 18% of GDP on health care - more than any other country – at least 50 million Americans are uninsured.  According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development (OECD), countries such as Japan, Sweden, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, and England generally spend half as much per capita and as a percentage of GDP  while providing health care access to all of their citizens.

So who pays and who benefits from  the bloated, corrupt, immoral U.S. health care system?

Here is a list of who pays: (1) all wage & salary earners who pay a 1.5% tax on everything they earn, (2) the U.S. government, i.e. taxpayers in general, which transfers the 1.5% tax and hundreds of billions more to the medical-industrial complex, (3) businesses offering health insurance to their employees, (4) employees lucky enough to have employers provided health insurance, i.e., premiums, co-pays, and deductibles, (5) Medicare beneficiaries forced to pay large premiums, co-pays, and deductibles, and (6) uninsured patients and consumers stuck medical bills that often drive them into bankruptcy.

Here is a list of who benefits from the massive wealth transfer through health care gouging: (1) for profit hospital chains, (2) nursing home chains, (3) pharmaceutical companies, (4) medical device manufacturers, (5) corporate owned physician practices, (6) insurance companies, and (7) senator and congresspersons who receive untold millions in political contributions from the medical-industrial complex.

The American Medical Association Has Played a Major Role in Shaping the Shameful U.S. Health Care System

The Occupy Wall Street Movement needs to turn some of its attention toward Occupy the American Medical Association.

Amongst political groups fighting to block humane and decent health care, the American Medical Association – the association representing healers of sick people – has  been one of the most effective and potent forces throughout the past century.  It is hard to understand how an organization representing physicians, who have taken an oath to heal, could fight universal health care and, by virtue of that fight, insure that tens of millions of U.S. citizens will suffer and often die due to medical neglect.

Who are the 50 million uninsured Americans resulting from AMA efforts?  A couple of years ago, I spent two days volunteering at a free clinic sponsored by the National Association of Free Clinics at Bartle Hall.  I met some of the 50 million medically neglected people in our country.  By the thousands, they streamed through the convention center – humbly, thankfully, without rancor and resentment.  They came for help with complications of diabetes, hypertension, abscesses, tumors, and generally the full array of ailments needing medical attention.

The AMA and the politicians they pay off to perpetuate the current national health care embarassment should have spent a couple of days at Bartle Hall looking the uninsured in their eyes and explaining why they scream socialism and extol the virtues of an unbrided free market health care system that has failed our country so miserably.  Perhaps this representative of doctors could come forth and explain how its fight for a cruel health care system is compatible with medical ethics.

Who are the Politicians Raking in AMA Dough and Other Medical-Industrial Complex Pay Offs?  Let’s Take a Look at One Democrat on the Undemocratic, Super-Secret, Super-Committee

Democratic congressman Chris Van Hollen of Maryland is a darling of the medical-industrial complex.  If you check the top contributors to the members of the undemocratic, super-secret, super-committee, you will notice that Van Hollen does best amongst health care industry lobbyists and better amongst that group of givers than other members of the committee.  For instance, the AMA, which donated $22,000 to Van Hollen, ranks 27th in the amount donated out of the nearly 3,000 contributors to the senators and congresspersons.  Van Hollen received more than other members from the AMA and other medical-industrial givers.  Nevertheless, Democratic congressman James Clyburn did very well amongst the this group of givers as well.

According to the Sunlight Foundation, Dr. Jeffrey Drezner, owner of Clinical Care options and a founder member of the CME Coalition (a medical industry front group) held a fund raiser for Van Hollen days after the first meeting of the super committee.  The foundation blog noted that “Drezner sent tens of thousands of dollars to multiple committees associated with Van Hollen from 2007 to 2010, including the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which Van Hollen led during those years, according to to data from the Center for Responsive Politics” (http://reporting.sunlightfoundation.com/20ll/van-hollens-alternative-fundraising-vehicle-wakes/).

Republicans or Democrats – it doesn’t matter.

Republicans are insulting and denigrating the Occupy Wall Street Movement while Democrats are approaching it with trepidation and worry until they can determine if it will benefit them politically.  Neither party has been, is now, or will be, a solution to the social and economic causes of the suffering which caused the movement  to take hold in the first instance.  Quite the opposite, they are part of the problem.

We are in the final stages – the denouement so to speak – of a failed economic system unable to meet the needs of two-thirds of the world population while  enriching a tiny minority of the 7 billion human inhabitants of the planet.  The global economic system is in catastrophic failure mode and will completely collapse in due time.  Nevertheless, dominant economic entities and their major beneficiaries will not go quietly into that good night.

Wallmart, the largest corporation in the world, has revenues of over $400 billion, EXXON is not far behind, and all of the top 50 multinational corps have revenues of well over $100 billion.  Top management at Walmart, EXXON, and autocratic, communist party, state capitalists (what a bundle of contradictions) at China National Petroleum (revenues of $240 billion) are a brotherhood/sisterhood with no sense of loyalty to any population or any nation.  Acting in concert, these corporate behemoths dominate national/state legislatures, all of whom will help them squeeze enough juice out of their populations to keep their corrupt, decadent, dying system on life support for a substantial period of time – for decades perhaps.

Squeezing the masses

The dictatorship of the proletariat cum cruel, autocratic state capitalist elite in China has taken advantage of hundreds of millions of hard working Chinese (my brothers and sisters) who believe in saving their hard earned money.  Their savings in “state owned” banks are yielding such little interest that their nest eggs are declining due to inflation. These deposits are made available cheap to what I guess you could call communistic-capitalistic corporations and individual Marxist-moguls.  What are they doing with it?  For one thing, they are – surprise, surprise – speculating with it.  The managers of communist/capitalistic, state-owned enterprises and members of the communist elite are in the process of enriching themselves and blowing a real estate bubble that will, at some point, collapse to the detriment of all of us ordinary folk in the U.S., China, and pretty much the masses everywhere.

In the United States we are being squeezed by corporations cum congress through a redistribution of wealth in the form of a transfer of payroll and income taxes to pharmaceutical companies, hospital corporations, medical device manufacturers, health insurance companies, defense contractors, agri-corporations, and so on and so forth.  When the financiers collapsed the economy through speculation, deceit, and criminal behavior, the taxpayers were forced to bail out the entire world economic system  and now are being told that they need to be squeezed even more for the purpose of lowering a budget deficit resulting from wars and corrupt financial practices.

The Super Congress Doesn’t Want You to Know What is Going On but They are Meeting with Lobbyists

Here is a hint that neither Democratic or Republican members of the undemocratic and super-secretive super congress has any intention of doing anything significant to ameliorate the economic decline of the American population as a whole:  these legislators, who represent a small proportion of the U.S. population, hold no public hearings and make no disclosures about their discussions.  However, they are meeting with corporate lobbyists.  Whatever they come up with must be fast tracked through congress, which means no debate and no amendments.  Need I say more about this?

Where is the Occupy Wall Street Movement Headed?

The Occupy Wall Street movement is another stage in the development of an U.S. political/economic system that has been forming for a long time but is just ready to break out of it primordial roots into a full blown alternative to the unviable and unsustainable system we now have.  This parallel system has been growing for some time in the development of alternative agriculture (urban gardening, the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, etc.); in the form of cooperatives for sustaining housing, food, clothing, medical care and other necessities of life; in the form of alternative media (KKFI, the Nation, blogs, Facebook, etc.); and in the form of a progressive, political infrastructure (MoveOn, Bold Progressives, Occupy Wall Street, Green Party, Progressives United (KC), Gray Panthers, etc., etc.).

If you haven’t seen the coming together of these organizations into a potent political force, you aren’t looking.  Just pay attention and you will see it.

As unemployment and consequent homelessness and hunger grow, people will finally see the value in forming cooperatives to take care of each other.  Massive amounts of  vacant land and buildings in cities are ripe for take over by movements like Occupy Wall Street/Kansas City for self sustainable living for people forced out of a decadent, deteriorating economic system.

In the final analysis, there is no point in taking the “establishment” seriously.  There is no point in counting on the current electoral process to solve the growing spiritual, social, political, and economic problems of the U.S. or the world.  “The people” must and will solve their own problems.