cos's Open Salon Blog

Insurance Companies Would Rather We Worry About Their Health

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 22:09:43 -0400

Last night, I submitted this as a letter to the editor to USA Today:

For decades, private for-profit insurance companies have been spreading fear about "government run health insurance". Despite the fact that people on Medicare - run by the government - are more satisfied with their insurance than people on private insurance, the private insurance companies have been telling us that national health care wouldn't work, because the government can't run a good insurance system, and we're all better off with private insurance. Obama's plan puts their claims to the test, and it's time to put up or shut up.

Obama proposes a compromise between a national single payer system, and the private insurance we have now: he wants to put a public health insurance option in the same market as private companies, to let people choose and see what works better.

Insurance companies' complaints about "unfair competition" are a smokescreen. They want to mislead us into a conversation about how to be fair to insurance companies, while they continue being unfair to the American people.

What the for-profit insurance companies are really saying is that they fear the government can run a better health insurance - that satisfies people more, and leaves us healthier, at a lower cost. They may be right. Congress owes it to us to create a public option so we can try it and find out. Stop worrying about the health of the insurance companies, and care for the health of the American people for a change.

The Other Side(s) of Tank Man

Mon, 8 Jun 2009 10:06:35 -0400

(I posted this on my personal blog on Friday of last week, June 5th, and based on comments I got there, decided to re-post here.)

Yesterday was the 20th aniversary of June 4th, 1989 - the Chinese crackdown on a massive protest in Tiananmen Square, Beijing. Although we remember June 4th as the climax, the military crackdown actually took several days, beginning on June 3rd - which was also the day the Ayatollah Khomeini died, and a massive gas explosion on the Trans-Siberian Railway destroyed two trains and killed 575 people. It was not a slow news day.

Today is the aniversary of the photo that came to represent June 4th, 1989, but was actually taken the following day, as the military crackdown continued after Tiananmen Square itself was cleared. At the time, we saw it on TV: the man standing in the street as a column of tanks approach and then stop. The lead tank trying to go around him to the left and right a few times, but he keeps moving into its path. Finally, after about a minute, he climbs onto the tank, leans into the compartment to apparently say something (or just look?), and walks off.

Tank Man became a symbol of individual courage against the military machine of authoritarianism, as well as the icon representing the Chinese protests and movement of 1989.

That fall Shen Tong, one of the leaders of the Tiananmen Square protesters, started college at Brandeis: He had already been accepted for a Wien Scholarship at Brandeis, and had a passport and visa which allowed him to escape to the US. Brandeis became a center of Chinese dissidents and activisim in the few years after June 4th.

That fall I also started college at Brandeis, and I attended a big conference on the Chinese protests and prodemocracy movement that was held in a building almost adjacent to my dorm. Shen Tong was the keynote, of course, and I remember listening to him speak, but I don't specifically remember what he said. What sticks out most in my memory is a panel presentation on how the protests and crackdown were portrayed in the Chinese press...

... apparently, the famous photo of Tank Man was ubiquitous on Chinese TV as well. Although the entire incident has been whitewashed from Chinese history in the decades since, back in 1989 it was big news, and so was Tank Man. Here in the west, he represented courage and standing up to authority. In China, said the professor who had recently been there, he meant something else: He was the Chinese Government's symbol of the peacefulness of their military. How, even in the midst of it all, a column of tanks stopped for a lone unarmed man in the street, and did not move forward until he walked away of his own accord.

I was temporarily stunned, but then I realized: You know what? They were right, too. A column of armed tanks did stop for a lone unarmed man in the street. He represents that, too. Truth is like the blind men's elephant, but even though we have the capacity to look at other parts of it, we often don't notice they're there.

Yesterday, a new photograph of tank man was published for the first time. Take from street level, it shows a couple of other protesters fleeing, with him in the background standing alone on the street, waiting for the tanks. It tells a related but somewhat different story than the images we've seen.

What about all the stories that could be told of this incident, that we're never going to see, because a photographer didn't happen to be in the right spot to capture them? Or because a propogandist didn't happen to exist with the vested interest in ferretting out that particular interpretation?

Terrorists on American soil, oh no!

Sat, 23 May 2009 11:05:10 -0400

In 1993, a terrorist plot to destroy the World Trade Center towers in New York City did not succeed in toppling the towers, but the 1,500lb bomb killed 6 and injured over a thousand. 5 men were eventually convicted of carrying out the attack. All of them are being held in prison here in the United States.

A sixth man, Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 attack, went on to plant a bomb on an airliner. He then plotted to explode 11 passenger airliners over the Pacific, but was caught shortly before it was to happen, so his most massive terrorist plot was foiled. Where's Ramzi Yousef now? In prison in Colorado.

That same year, a terrorist bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City killed 168 people. Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were convicted and imprisoned... in the United States.

That Republican Senators and disgraced former Republican leaders would claim it's too dangerous to hold terrorism suspects in American prisons is not surprising. What is surprising is that some Democrats and much of the press treat this as a serious objection. Republicans are grasping at straws to save their relevance. But everyone else playing along is displaying insanity in the face of the ridiculous.

Look, we already know exactly why the people at Guantanamo are held there rather than on the mainland, and it has nothing to do with safety. Cheney, Bush, and their administration were bluntly open about their reasons: They wanted a place where the US has complete unquestioned control (like the mainland) but where they can pretend that it's not actually "American soil", so they can claim that legal protections do not apply.

American law clearly applies in the US, but Cheney and Bush's people claimed it does not apply in Guantanamo because it's outside the US, so for example, people held there couldn't ask American courts to rule on their rights. The Geneva conventions unambiguously require basic humane treatment for all people held in a signatory country's territory, but are ambiguous enough on what is required outside such countries' territory that the Bush administration could cling to the legal fiction that human treatment was not required on Guantanamo.

Most of these reasons have crumbled over time. The Supreme Court has twice ruled that Guantanamo prisoners do have access to American courts. The Obama administration has made it clear that the Geneva Conventions requirements for basic humane treatment will be honored.

There are some really dangerous people held in American prisons, but they're mostly gang leaders and mobsters, who have connections to criminals currently active in the US. Nobody's suggesting we can't hold mafiosos and MS-13 gangsters in American prisons, though.

If holding terrorists on the American mainland were truly dangerous, they'd have transferred Terry Nichols, Ramzi Yousef, and others out of the country years ago. These people have been here for well over a decade, and none of the Republicans currently screaming about Guantanamo have ever tried to do much about it.

With an administration that no longer has any interest in pretending that holding people there makes any difference in their legal rights, what's Guantanamo good for now? Except as a symbol to the world of what the Bush administration believed and did, nothing.

We can continue to have legal disputes about how to handle these prisoners when they're in the US. There's no reason to keep them at Guantanamo. Republicans are trying to preserve Bush's legal fictions after they're already dead.

The City Where They Legalized Theft

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 14:04:15 -0400

In the city of Columbiana, it came out a few years ago that municipal employees were stealing from residents' homes. Some of them had legitimate access, others used their positions (rodent control, tax assessor, etc.) to get into houses when they shouldn't have been there. And they took money if they saw it lying around.

At first, city hall quelled the outrage by prosecuting a few city workers who'd been caught. All of them said everyone else was doing it, and their supervisors knew and approved, but the city's lawyers didn't pursue it, and the mayor said these were "a few bad apples".

It turned out that lots of other homes were robbed, in places where the now-jailed workers had never been. And there was an internal investigative report, leaked, that showed the practice was widespread.

None of this really shook things up until a couple of years later, when a memo from one of the top city lawyers became public: A memo that directly addressed how and when city workers should be legally allowed to rob residents.

More than a year has passed since then. The mayor and most of the council have been voted out of office. More memos have come out that show clearly that the city's legal department built up a rationale for stealing from residents' homes, and the former mayor knew about it. Everyone involved is now saying that they did nothing wrong because they were told that all this theft was legal.

Residents of Columbiana are angry.

Yet some - political supporters of the former mayor, his allies on the council, and the city lawyers (one of whom is now a judge, a position he got before his memo came out) - say that stealing isn't necessarily wrong. They're being interviewed by the local newspaper and radio station and TV news, and this is what some of them are saying:

"What if you've got two small children at home, and you and your spouse have lost your jobs, and you're running out of money. You have very little food and you know that if you don't get more soon, your children will be malnourished and probably suffer permanent brain damage.

You're walking by a rich man's house - you know he owns several restaurants in town - and you see some packages of food in front of his door, probably delivered recently. He hasn't been home yet to bring the food inside. Should you take a small amount, off the top of the pile, to bring home to your children, to tide them over until you can find a job?"

Columbiana is fictional. Of course you know that nobody would be so brazen as to justify obvious crimes by appealing to a scenario which might possibly justify similar actions, but which has nothing to do with what actually happened!

And yet, the "ticking time bomb" scenario of torture is being taken seriously in our public debate.

Leave aside for the moment the fact that that scenario, unlike stealing food for starving children, is one that is unlikely to ever happen, anywhere, any time. Because the ticking time bomb fantasy requires all of the following:

You know some horrible disaster is immediately imminent.
That horrible thing will kill many many people if not prevented.
You have a prisoner who you know, for a fact, knows the key fact you need to prevent the horrible disaster.
Although the prisoner is unwilling to tell you, they will tell you if tortured.
You can trust what they tell you under torture; they're not going to lie to misdirect you.

Leave aside for the moment any judgement about how likely all of those factors are to ever line up together in the real world. Pretend that it's actually possible, even though it is almost impossible.

Nobody, nobody, has presented a single case of torture by the US government that actually met these criteria.

So why are we lending credence to the idea that talking about this ticking time bomb fantasy, whatever we think about the fantasy itself, can possibly justify crimes actually committed under very different circumstances?

Or, to put it another way: Columbiana's city workers had jobs, and their children had enough to eat.