Like talking to five year olds...

Robert Frank, the author of this NY Times op-ed on the superiority of the Swedish government health insurance system, knew this before he even went to Sweden. He knew it because he is not dumb. And he is not a total cynic.

The superiority of the type of health insurance system that takes away the waste of the profit and the waste of having multiple insurers with multiple legal, sales, marketing, human resources departments, and bloated executive salaries; the superiority of the type of health insurance system that covers everyone for little or no direct individual cost and without having people worry about where they are employed or if they are employed; the superiority of a system that can fold the public bureaucracies of the Veterans' Administration, Medicaid, and now Obamacare into Medicare for All...well, it's just too damned obvious to anyone not blinded by a fetish of the private market, damned obvious to someone who is not making money off the current U.S. system, and anyone who is not too darned rich to notice the inequities in the current system.

Yet Frank's article is written in a "gee-whiz" manner of feigned surprise, and in a way that gently tries to tell us, as if we were five year olds, "Please, try this. Do Mommy a favor and eat your carrot. It tastes good too."

We have a pathetic discourse in our nation, and we who are Baby Boomers and older ought to be ashamed. And yet we make fun of our children for having their noses stuck in their cell phone-computers....when our children work harder at school than we ever did, face college costs that are multiple times what we faced and have job prospects far worse than we had. Yeah, it's all their fault.

One caveat: Frank says it takes only a week to get a hip replacement. That is rare in the U.S. Most hip replacement surgeries are set about four to six weeks and sometimes two months. I'll wait three months for a hip replacement to have what the Swedes and other civilized nations have.

Iran's Green movement is beginning to be heard

The election of the less theocratic (saying "moderate" tells us nothing) cleric to the presidency of Iran is an important first step. Hopefully, people in Iran will continue to take to the streets to pressure the Revolutionary Guard and the leading Ayatollah, who really control the government, to start to engage with the West and perhaps even with Israel.

The war mongers in Israel and in the DC-NY corridor are not happy with these results as it proves why Iran is not yet Nazi Germany, and may never be.

Still, if one thinks the nuclear program in Iran will automatically be abandoned, one is dreaming. Just as Indians and Pakistanis pushed for nuclear capability, so will Iranians, even those otherwise well-disposed toward the West or again even Israel. It is a sign of national "manhood" to possess "The Bomb" and that goes beyond typical politics, left, right or "moderate."

Right on schedule...Obama will suddenly find "bi-partisanship" on job killing trade deal

What do Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II and Obama have in common?

They all love corporate trade deals that codify the destruction of American industry and undermine worker wages here and in other nations. And while poll after poll for decades now, show how most Americans oppose these deals, the deals pass one after the other.

Corporate media pundits constantly push putative Democratic Party leaders such as Obama and Clinton to be "bi-partisan" with an opposition party that normally as a matter of principle does not compromise. The opposition party seeks gridlock when not in power--and then runs against the other side for not doing anything. Trade deals present, for putative Democratic Party leaders especially, a chance to be bi-partisan in a manner corporate media loves, and on an issue which elite corporate media bobble-heads believe is important for the national interest (though this issue becomes less obviously "national" each time...).

It is interesting to me that American politicians rarely run on any platform favoring these trade deals, yet these deals magically get passed in off years or early in the election year. For two decades now, most Republicans in Congress tend to vote in favor of these deals and most Democrats against. One would think Democratic Party candidates would highlight that difference and run on an anti-trade platform. They don't, however, because they want to raise money from corporate interests. So elections tend not to turn on what the bobble heads in corporate media call a "technical" issue. Of course, these trade deals are fundamental and anything but "technical."

Heck, one may say gay marriage is more technical since the issue concerns merely a slice of Americans while trade deals affect us all most deeply and directly. But as Walter Lippmann wrote nearly a century ago, the goal of the American elite was to take such issues out of the public discourse--what Lippmann and others called "manufacturing consent."

Is this a conspiracy on the part of corporate media? No. It is simply a dovetailing of "giving people what they want" aligning itself with the desire of the elite to not bother people with such "technical" things. If we want to find out about the TPP, we merely have to step outside "mainstream" media. The megaphone of corporate media is sure loud, though. For example, people are able to tell me the latest with Amanda Bynes and Lindsay Lohan. Somehow most of us know about the antics of those two troubled young women. And for those who watch the bobble head shows or read certain bloggers, we know what politician or pundit just said what outrageous statement in the last 24 hours. And we are nearly constantly treated with talk about Hillary's chances for the presidency in 2016. Also, did we see the latest cat video on the Internet?

But tell me, who knows about the Trans Pacific Trade deal? This AP wire article tells the latest inside political scoop. But note, when reading it, the manner of the writer who is well trained to look upon this issue as a "technical" one that we little people shouldn't worry our pretty little heads about--it's good for us, doncha see...

If corporate media was really interested in a discussion of the merits of this issue in the way gay marriage is discussed, we'd hear much more from Lori Wallach and Public Citizen, who are on top of this issue in a way that is most salutary. Here is the sub-home page from Public Citizen on the TPP.

And please don't tell me, as a fellow liberal minded pro-Democratic Party person, that Obama doesn't really care about this issue, or that he didn't run on it, and that he will listen to the constituency of the Democratic Party. Sorry. Obama is very serious about this issue and wants it passed with no interference from labor or environmental interests. He did tell us his position during the confetti thrown up during the 2012 campaign, ever so quietly with a compliant corporate owned media that knows most workers who hear about such deals hate the deals. And plus, Obama has no intention to listen to labor or environmental interests. None.

This is business. Not Main Street business, but instead international corporate global hedge funded business. And that business needs to get done. And Alexander Hamilton, who spoke and wrote so highly in favor of tariff policy to build the American nation (see Federalist Paper no. 11 and his 1791 Report on Manufactures), weeps.

We're all subversives now...

Let's let Congressman Alan Grayson (D-FL) explain it to us here. (Hat-tip to Digby)

The biggest unproven in response to Grayson's analysis is the statement, "Well, this program is what keeps us safe."

Excuse me, but we have no reason to believe that such spying programs are what stops a terrorist attack. We do know that the program missed the knucklehead brothers behind the Boston Marathon bombing earlier this spring. And the program did not stop the crazed guy in Santa Monica from going on a killing spree. We have no evidence that this program stopped any sort of 9/11 type of attack.

But what we do know is that when the intelligence agencies warn our leaders (cough, ahem, Bush-Cheney, NIE warning in August 2001 "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US"), they don't listen anyway.

Secrecy is overrated. Military intelligence is too often used against unarmed reformers within a society, not foreign attackers. Those are the points we should keep in mind as we analyze this imbroglio, and recognize our Founders would understand those first two italicized sentences in this paragraph as well.

Excellent review of "Subversives"

Adam Hochschild, in the New York Review of Books, has nicely summarized Seth Rosenfeld's "Subversives," a book I read late last year. Hochschild recognizes that Clark Kerr was a decent fellow who was wrongly hated by the New Left, though the New Left had good reason to believe what it did at the time. He also saves a word at the end for Mario Savio, the late and lamented leader of the Berkeley student movement in the early to mid-1960s.

And finally, while Hochschild does not think Rosenfeld made his case that Ronald Wilson Reagan was an FBI stoolie who owed his career to J. Edgar Hoover, Hochschild inadvertently makes that case by noting how Hoover protected Reagan from (1) the unnamed source who said Reagan was a card-carrying member of the John Birch Society, which would have undermined Reagan's folksy charm that covered his extremist positions; and (2) the fallout that would have arisen had Reagan's son Michael continued to cavort with a Mobster's son. Reagan also gladly took orders from the FBI to repeat scurrilous statements against reformers and agitators, even when the FBI's information had already been discredited. Rosenfeld also shows how Reagan had lied for decades when he said he never turned in anyone for being a Red, when in fact he did so at least three times--and helped maintain the blacklist in Hollywood from his leadership position with the Screen Actors Guild.

Rosenfeld's book is a great read, a work of great investigative work (both reviewing archives and tracking down people for interviews), and names the names with nothing notable hidden with an unnamed source. Hochschild's review though not perfect may be the best review I've seen of this particular book in any mainstream or even liberal journal.

Three charts that show why we need unions, why we need to re-develop our nation and pursue tariff policies

See the charts at Business Insider magazine here.

If we re-develop infrastructure and pursue tariff policies, it would require companies to hire more people in the industries affected, which would push up wages and then push demand for products in the rest of the companies. That would put more pressure to hire, too. Labor shortages do often lead to increases. But if we make it easier to form unions, we really get the wage increases rolling.

This quote from the Business Insider article is quite stunning only when we consider the source:

In short, our current obsessed-with-profits philosophy is creating a country of a few million overlords and 300+ million serfs.

But it shows what I have said, which is we are out of balance with regard to the interests of labor and capital. The author of the article, Henry Blodget, has another article here that deals with inequality. Chart 7 helps us understand once again how corporate media fools so many people when it comes to these particular types of economic issues. The culture wars tend to have the effect of crowding out the economic analysis we need as citizens.

As they say, read the whole thing...

Three handy charts and a short analysis of the deficit and spending picture of the US government

See it here from Dollars & Sense magazine, from an economist at UMass Amherst.

Time for some practical justice, honoring life in the breach and understanding true morality

This story of the El Salvadoran woman who is being denied an abortion when her fetus has no brain stem and no chance for consciousness, and where continuing the pregnancy is a likely death sentence for her, is a good reason to question the anti-abortion laws some folks want to pass.

I am wondering, why aren't we just paying for her to get a plane ticket to Los Angeles or NYC and get her to a Planned Parenthood clinic or hospital?

I'm not sure what's going on here in terms of an immediate solution for the particular woman. I am also hoping that those who are so wrapped up in an anti-abortion position are doing some soul-searching right now. We should not let abstract or theoretical principles block our path to protecting women in these circumstances. There should be no need for mental gymnastics and syllogisms. Just take care of her and protect her.

Yup.

A sociologist notices something most corporate media pundits won't piece together for fear of becoming too shrill for television, which is explaining the decline of workers' share of national income.

If only corporate owned media would have Bernie Sanders on the weekly Sunday morning chat shows...

John McCain is on the Sunday morning chat shows nearly every week.

If only Bernie Sanders was on these shows even half as often, we might see a change in the discourse. But of course that is precisely why Bernie Sanders is not on the Sunday morning chat shows...

Here is Sanders explaining corporate priorities and wage gaps in the immigration debate. My goodness, even Ezra Klein, who sometimes falls for neo-liberal propaganda, gets what Sanders is saying in the interview.