Good Morning America

It’s election time America.

It’s been a dark 8 years. Lies, illegal wars, torture, military tribunals, wiretapping, extremist judges, neocon yahoos in suits, and the war on intelligence, science, and the Constitution don’t exactly make for happy days for the American Republic. The long winter of reactionary politics, birthed in 1970s anti-civil rights backlash, carried to term with double digit inflation, and delivered by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, is breaking to a new spring of progressive change.

It is the end of the conservative era. And now is our moment.

History turns its pages slowly and turns only after the mass struggle of ordinary people compel our “leaders” to ratify the changes that we, the people, have already made up our mind about. True leaders are led by the people.

The Bhatany Report endorses Hope, Change, and the Constitution. I know, that’s like saying I love my mother and apple pie.

For you see, what we’ve forgotten is that nations have souls, just like people. And after hacking away and pissing away at the few fundamental things that make us all American (practicality, common sense, the Constitution), 89% of us think that things are heading the wrong way. And we ARE going the wrong way, and perhaps terminally so.

After 8 years of watching a blue blood-Connecticut Yankee play cowboy president like he was Theodore Roosevelt (without none of that fancy book learnin’), can we really afford to give the keys to White House to a pair that thinks that Iraq borders Pakistan? Can we risk even a 2% chance that hockey mom/moron Sarah Palin will become president? Do we need another Reaganite who wants us to party like its 1986 in the Oval Office? And, finally, should we let those who subscribe to the deregulatory free market fantasies that brought us on the cusp of a new Great Depression into the people’s White House?

No. We will not.

The up-and-comer, Barack Obama, is not my ideal candidate. He’s a little too cautious, a smidge too cool, and a bit too comfortable with the Establishment than I care for. But he has fundamentally changed America and American politics for good and for the better.

Obama’s stint in community organizing has become a nationwide campaign-as-community-organizing experience, re-connecting millions with the community they live in at a grassroots level. My work in the Texas campaign will be will remembered fondly in my mind for the rest of my life. The seeds of organizing that Obama spread must lead to a mass movement if the urgent reforms we need in health care, banking, conservation, and foreign policy America needs are to get through Washington.

The worst that can happen to America is that we get what we want (fame, fortune, and the blissful ignorance of an easy life) at the expense of what we need (family, community, justice, tolerance and unity).

Obama gave us what we needed, not what we wanted. And we need him…. in the White House.

C’mon y’all, let’s turn those pages. Let’s make history.

E pluribus unum.

Meanwhile in the rest of América

While the rest of you are tuning into the pageantry of the Democratic National Convention and the BarackMcCainBidenfest that is American news these days, I was going to point out two important stories occurring in other parts of América.

Bolivia
The president of Bolivia, Evo Morales, won a recall election instigated by his enemies in a landslide with over 60% of the vote. Evo (as he is known) is the first indigenous head of state since Emperor Atahualpa was overthrown by the Spanish despite the fact that Indians represent the majority of Bolivia’s population. Evo came from an extremely humble background. His family members were peasants and miners, and he was a trade union leader for coca leaf growers.

However, the people of Santa Cruz and other provinces don’t care too much for this indio government made up of maids, Indian intellectuals, leftists, and social movement leaders. They are pushing for “state’s rights” (autonomy) for their rich provinces. It just so happens that those areas are loaded with natural gas, huge plantations, and white people: natural gas that Evo nationalized to share with the poor majority and plantations he wants to break up and redistribute to the landless (most land in Bolivia, like much of Latin America, is highly concentrated in the hands of a small percentage of farmers). Naturally, these white folk refuse to share their riches with poor, Incan and Aymaran Indian majority and want to control their borders to keep out the Indians from moving down from the Andes and keep their gas money to themselves.

To say cruceños are racist is hardly an understatement. I spent a month in Santa Cruz in 2005. When I introduced myself as an “indio” I got the dirtiest looks I ever seen post-9/11. “De la India” brought relief to the stranger. “Oh… from India? The indios…. they are a dirty people. We are good people… descended from European blood. Santa Cruz… is not Bolivia. La Paz is another world.” And my favorite, “Evo Morales is a campesino sonofabitch.”

Will Bolivia split apart again like it has so many times in its sad past?

Paraguay
Meanwhile in Paraguay, a country completely forgotten by the outside world, a new president was inaugurated. The “red bishop” Fernando Lugo defeated the dictatorial Colorado Party after six decades in power. A Guarani-speaking former Roman Catholic bishop as president interested the international media enough that I saw Paraguay in the news for the first time I can remember. This brings another left-wing government to power leaving all of South America a tint of red with the exception of Colombia.

This new political unity has been leading to a possible United States of South America. Think I’m joking? Venezuela kickstarted a Bank of the South to replace the influence of Washington’s World Bank and International Monetary Fund while an international regional parliament will sit in Bolivia and a secretary general will reside in Ecuador. Mercosur will unite the nations into a single market like the European Union, Telesur competes with CNN and the BBC, and a Petrosur could combine state oil companies into a single OPEC of South America.

How come no one mentions that stuff in the media?

Issue XVIII: My Case for Universal Health Care

Sometime earlier this year, I got into an argument with someone about health insurance, and what I thought should happen for health care in America. I wrote an e-mail to this person showing him what I thought, but more importantly WHY and what facts I used to come to those conclusions.

Why Universal Health Care? If something is cheaper, more efficient, and better, why not? Here is my primer and reading list for you guys based on that e-mail.

American Medical Student Association – Universal Health Care Page
particularly: http://www.amsa.org/uhc/HealthCareSystemOverview.pdf
and the “Case for universal health care” adds this paragraph which I think think is key.

“The important point to take away from Thorpe’s study is that universal health care, coupled with cost controls, can save money while expanding health care access to everyone. If universal health care simply expanded access, the net expenditure would be large. The only way to pay for this expanded access is to institute cost controls such as administrative simplification”

New York Review of Books Paul Krugman article
this also explains why “making better health coverage” for an insurance company is not necessarily in the interest of the insurance company

“The cost advantage of public health insurance appears to arise from two main sources. The first is lower administrative costs. Private insurers spend large sums fighting adverse selection, trying to identify and screen out high-cost customers. Systems such as Medicare, which covers every American sixty-five or older, or the Canadian single-payer system, which covers everyone, avoid these costs. In 2003 Medicare spent less than 2 percent of its resources on administration, while private insurance companies spent more than 13 percent.”

Physicians for National Health Plan

• http://www.pnhp.org/facts/single_payer_resources.php
• Liberal Benefits with Conservative Spending

Medicare overpayments show the public health insurance is more efficient

http://www.cbpp.org/5-10-07health.htm

According to both the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) — Congress’ expert advisory body on Medicare payment policy — and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), Medicare is paying private insurers 12 percent more than it costs to treat the same beneficiaries under the regular Medicare program. The overpayment works out to about $1,000 per beneficiary per year, on average. This disparity costs Medicare billions of dollars each year. As a result of these findings, MedPAC has unanimously recommended that Congress “level the playing field” by paying the insurance companies the same amounts it pays under the regular Medicare program. A paper issued by the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation in 2004 made the same recommendation. (See the box on page 5.) CBO has reported that this step would save $54 billion over five years and $150 billion over ten years.

Slate.com

• “A short history of health care” – http://www.slate.com/id/2161736/
• Thought experiment where national defense is run like health care
• “The case for socialized medicine” where the author argues for complete nationalization of the health care sector where doctors work for the government, like the VA System and the National Health Service in Britain.

American College of Physicians – “What the United States Can Learn from Other Countries“

The American College of Physicians, which represents all doctors who practice adult medicine (internal medicine) and its subspecialties, recently came out for universal single-payer health care. This is the article announcing their change in political objectives. The ACP article is amazing in its scope and it shows how administrative costs are highest in the United States, less in multipayer systems, and lowest in universal single payer health care systems.

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There is a lot of information around there repeating my basic contention that if everyone were forced to pay into a government Medicare for all, administrative costs which seem to eat between 13-30% of private insurance costs, would fall to the much lower numbers of 2-10% for administration I have seen. That excess money can be used to cover all people or reduce costs or fund prevention. If universal health care has been repeatedly proven to work in the rest of the OECD, what makes America so darn different?

People haven’t been given the basic facts on this debate. I just want to show people the facts, and they can make their own philosophical conclusions. Everyone’s entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.

Issue XVII: Rumble in Rhodesia

The first and only president of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, cruised to an opponent-less win in the Zimbabwean presidential runoff. Despite beating the head in of his main opponent, Morgan Tsvangirai, and ruining the economy with an inflation rate of one million percent, old man Mugabe will stay president for another term.

What’s the story behind the story?

The long Rhode
Rhodesia was a British colony named after Cecil Rhodes, the great British imperialist who carved up Africa for the glory of the Queen. As the OG of the blood diamond trade, Rhodes started up De Beers Mining Company with mines in South Africa. In his quest for more mining profits, he moved north into present-day Zimbabwe bringing British settlers to colonize the land. And, perhaps feeling bad about his dirty money, he gave the world the coveted Rhodes Scholarships.

Rhodesia, like South Africa until recently, was a racist apartheid state where a minority of white settlers owned all and governed all of the land. When the British government in the 1960s started pushing the colony towards democracy for all, Prime Minister Ian Smith unilaterally declared independence rather than follow instructions from the motherland.
Vowing that “not in a thousand years” would blacks rule Rhodesia, Ian Smith fought against the black majority and a guerrilla war against his government.

He lasted fifteen years. His main opponent? A certain Robert Mugabe and his Zanu-PF party. Mugabe’s gang took over in 1980 when the new nation of Zimbabwe was born. Bob Marley played at the independence ceremony. Nice…. right?

Outstaying his welcome
Mugabe is a classic example of an independence hero and first president who stays around too long and forgets the classy exit after a term or two à la Washington or Mandela. With a grudge against the British, his veterans and he run the whites off their farmlands to redistribute the land to the black majority. I don’t disagree with land reform and redistribution, but in the process he depopulated the one population able to run large farming estates. Mugabe also still accuses anyone who opposes him of being traitors in league with the British settlers (most of whom have emigrated). Now even his lifelong supporters can’t get food to eat.

Now with a basketcase economy, international sanctions, and pariah status comes the presidential election of 2008. The Movement for Democratic Change ran Morgan Tsivangirai hoping to defeat Mugabe in the first round while Mugabe was still deluded that the people still loved him. Tsivangirai probably landslided Mugabe (who was caught off guard) and even despite all the votes his party stole (in the countryside where 80% of people live and Zanu-PF is strongest), Tsivangirai beat Mugabe 48% to 45%, with the rest going to another opponent. The opposition won a majority in Parliament for the first time.

The election results took days to announce, and Mugabe apparently decided to accept defeat but his generals told him to stay because they were afraid they would all go to jail for their crimes. Mugabe delayed the second round until he could beat up enough of the opposition and intimidate enough people that Morgan Tsivangirai quit the second round knowing the vote would be a joke. Mugabe won without an opponent.

And where were Africa’s leaders? The regional power, South Africa, sat on its hands during this multi-month crisis doing nothing. The always unimpressive, AIDS-denying President Thabo Mbeki never took charge on the issue and let it fester into this pathetic sham election while his political enemy Jacob Zuma showed much more foresight months ago. The African Union allowed Mugabe to attend their meeting this week.

Thabo Mbeki now says that “we need to move with speed” with Zimbabwe now. He wasn’t in a rush before. I guess he’s never spent one billion dollars for bread before.

Links
Washington Post – Anonymous report of life in Zimbabwe
Guardian – Video of election stealing

• Who is worst dictator you have never heard of? Slate.com has the answer.
• One of the most repulsive creatures in American politics died, Jesse Helms. Jesse Helms, of North Carolina. He battled the gays, the women, the communists, and the liberals. We all owe a debt to him.
• Unless you have been under a rock, you may have heard that the Supreme Court ruled for the first time that individuals have a right to bear arms in the first ruling on the Second Amendment since 1939. And if you were a privileged Bhatany Report reader, you would have known this case was coming because I mentioned it in November.
• My favorite election blog has changed locations and is now at www.narconews.com/thefield

Issue XVI: The Case Against Everyone – Change I am not so sure about

Barack Obama is now the Democratic nominee for President. He promises change, but promises are the currency of the politicians everywhere. What does this mean for America, and should we be so sure about the “change” he is bringing to the nation?

Oh yeah, it is a “change” that he is a Kansas-Kenyan hybrid born in Hawaii. Obama has lived in the three major divisions of American life: inner city, rural Kansas, and (I think) suburbia with the bonus of having lived in a foreign nation. It has given him the multiple perspectives of white, black, and foreign eyes. But we knew that stuff already, he sells himself on his story. What about the substance? What kind of America is he leading us to?

Chicago boy
Overlooked in so much of the talk about Barack Obama is the fact he is a politician from Chicago, Illinois, one of the dirtiest places to practice politics in America. Chicago, if you don’t know, is a familial dictatorship of Mayor Richard Daley, Jr. and his political machine. Graft is common and hardball politics is the rule.

How hard is Obama? Pop quiz: anyone know how he got into public office and got that fancy Illinois record before he ran for U.S. Senate? By knocking the opposition right off the ballot.
Obama ran against a popular African-American state senator in a majority black neighborhood in the South Side of Chicago. Since the district would always vote Democratic, one only had to win the Democratic primary to win since no Republican would run. Obama’s lawyers challenged her filing paperwork and petition signatures, won the challenge, and ended up being the only candidate on the ballot sending him straight to Springfield.

And his Senate record in Springfield? Nothing to speak of until he decided to run for U.S. Senate in 2004. Obama didn’t pass a single bill until 2003, when the Democrats took over the Illinois Senate. The new president of the Senate, Emil Jones, was black and “adopted” Obama, stealing other senators’ bills and handing him 26 high profile laws to pass so he could get an excellent record before he started running for national office. Emil Jones said he was going to “make me a U.S. Senator” and oh boy did he get one. Read all about Obama’s Illinois days and his testy relationship with the black community in the Houston Press.

Even neoconservative David Brooks called Obama the perfect merger of an academic liberal and a brass knuckle Chicago operator. Obama can talk nice, but he knows how to fight. Or fuck you over.

The New Politics or just another hack?
The promise of Obama is not in the silly symbolism and rock star appeal of a black man becoming president. Charisma doesn’t sell me, but Obama is using his charisma to re-build American community and democracy by making his supporters rebuilt, revamp, and re-sexify community organizing (“the first mass multi-racial collaboration in the United States since the Southern Civil Rights movement.”)

What is often forgotten when discussing Obama’s electoral successes is his past as a community organizer in Chicago. Rather than use the Democratic establishment to get votes out, Obama relies on young people as precinct captains and full time field organizers to get the vote out in every state and in almost every county.

Obama has a special fellowship in community organizing for his volunteers. What he emphasizes is that those skills will not just be for putting Barack Obama into the White House but for rest of your life life when you need to help improve your town and community. Obamamania will hopefully spread democracy in America, and he will putting staff in all 50 states by the end of the summer. When he says “you are the change you have been waiting for” he means it. We would never have had grassroots leverage with other candidates.

But will he sell us out for $2,300 checks and a little political posturing? Despite his obscene lead in fundraising, Obama says he will forgo public financing in the general election and keep collecting donations (he says from the general public, I say from the special interests). Obama’s compromises range from the excusable (pandering to the Israel lobby) to the indefensible.

Wall Street has been pouring money into the Democrats this year for the first time, and Obama admits in his book he has a softness for investment bankers for donations. Will he still let the hedge funds get away with paying only 15% tax while the rest of us pay full fare?

What about his economic advisers from the University of Chicago? The University of Chicago gave the world the “Chicago School” of free market fundamentalists. Their handiwork in tearing up livelihoods can be seen throughout the hemisphere from privatizing tin mines in Bolivia, pushing Argentina into a depression, and the Caracazo food riots in Venezuela. Right-wing Friedmanite economics has had its run in this country for long enough, isn’t it time for a, um, change? What are these hacks doing vetting his vice-presidential search?

Obama recently swore allegiance to AIPAC and giving all of Jerusalem to Israel after hinting he would be even-handed on the Israel-Palestine issue. His health care and fuel efficiency proposals are laughable compromises. Hillary Clinton and he both voted for the Patriot Act renewal, and he says he will vote for the outrageous telecom wiretapping bill.

Parties as grassroots and left-wing as the Brazilian Workers’ Party, South African African National Congress, and British Labour Party have all seen right turns to market fundamentalism, sometimes even before inauguration. Like Obama says, it is up to us.

Keep an eye on that boy.

Must read links
The Nation – “Obama’s Chicago boys“
Houston Press – “Barack Obama and me“