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Why We Reform
By PAUL KRUGMAN
One way or another, the fate of health care reform is going to be decided in the next few days. If House Democratic leaders find 216 votes, reform will almost immediately become the law of the land. If they don’t, reform may well be put off for many years — possibly a decade or more.
So this seems like a good time to revisit the reasons we need this reform, imperfect as it is.
As it happens, Reuters published an investigative report this week that powerfully illustrates the vileness of our current system. The report concerns the insurer Fortis, now part of Assurant Health, which turns out to have had a systematic policy of revoking its clients’ policies when they got sick. In particular, according to the Reuters report, it targeted every single policyholder who contracted H.I.V., looking for any excuse, no matter how flimsy, for cancellation. In the case that brought all this to light, Assurant Health used an obviously misdated handwritten note by a nurse, who wrote “2001” instead of “2002,” to claim that the infection was a pre-existing condition that the client had failed to declare, and revoked his policy.
Dodd's Dud
Shocking! Dodd and the Senate forget to take care of the cause of the financial crisis - Credit Default Swaps.
By Robert Oak - Economic Populist Posted by Michael Collins
You may be wondering why you haven't seen a post overview on the latest Senator Dodd's Financial Reform Bill, Restoring American Financial Stability Act of 2010 (link has legislative summary and text). That's because, as usual, it's a dud.
The Armenian, Assyrian and Greek Genocides: An Inconvenient Truth
By Lucine Kasbarian
Recent articles in the mainstream media would have us believe that governments around the world somehow question the factuality of the 1915 Armenian, Assyrian and Greek genocides committed by Turkey. These articles would also have us believe that the Turkish government’s latest temper tantrums over these genocides are justified. Turkey, of course, just recalled its ambassadors to protest the passage of resolutions by the U.S. House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee and the Swedish Parliament that acknowledged Turkish culpability for these genocides.
Despite what today’s mainstream media are declaring, the evidence proving the 1915 genocides is overwhelming. And formal resolutions affirming these unpunished crimes against humanity made appearances around the world long before 2010. Regardless of what pro-Turkish apologists would have us believe, the issue has never been about whether the Turkish regime carried out genocide. Rather, it has always been about when Turkey would be punished and deliver reparations and restitution to the rightful, indigenous inhabitants.
The Lawfare Project's Anti-Democratic Agenda
by Stephen Lendman
Its web site (thelawfareproject.org) calls Lawfare:
"The use of the law as a weapon of war."
Fact Check
Provided they contradict no others, laws are sacrosanct, especially fundamental international ones like the UN Charter, Four Geneva Conventions, their Common Article 3, the Rome Statute, Nuremberg Tribunal and judgment, Genocide Convention, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and many others - ones Israel and America are sworn to uphold but consistently violate with impunity.
New Left
Marcia Bernsten & Andrew Lehman
We've been mulling over the relationship between the American Left and the new communications technologies. Integrally involved with this process is our role as co-facilitators of PJEP and its network of 41 statewide or multistate websites, where we are constantly seeking ways to empower small local organizations. The network sites provide them access to easy ways of communicating with allied organizations while building their effectiveness and contact lists through online petitions, eletters, boycotts and fundraisers. For example, right now we're posting demonstrations surrounding the 7th anniversary of the US led invasion of Iraq. Actions are occurring across the country, appearing in the 40 networks, to a central position on the home page of pjep.org that lists over 120 actions around the country. The question we keep asking ourselves is: What other vehicles are there, that not only share information, but also offer opportunities for organizing?
Anti-Semitism - What is it?
Jeff Gates
Is it Anti-Semitic to call for a New 911 Commission?
(TEMPE, Az.) - Several of us among the incurably curious asked ourselves a simple question: what is anti-Semitism? That it must be written with a capital “S” says a lot.
Then we realized it also morphs. To that feature I can attest. In November 2002, I met a “John Doe” in London who proposed a research challenge. While meeting that challenge, I encountered various versions of anti-Semitism.
A colleague advised against this challenge. First he fretted at the criminal nature of what the research has since confirmed. Then he inquired about my safety. That said a lot.
The colleague was M.I.T. Professor Noam Chomsky. For his criticism of Israeli policy, he was attacked as a self-hating Jew. Were he not Jewish, doubtless he would have been an anti-Semite. For critics of Israel, those are the only two options. He cautioned me:
Re-Remembering Rachel Corrie in the 60th year of the Nakba
Zahir Ebrahim
Re-Remembering Rachel Corrie (1979 – 2003) as the selfless teacher of Moral-Activism in the 60th year of the on-going Nakba of the Palestinian peoples with no end in sight!
On this 5th anniversary of Rachel's supreme self-sacrifice to stand up to tyranny on behalf of the beleaguered Palestinian people, it is à propos remembering this forgottened American victim of Jewish violence with these pitiless 1943 words of Yitzhak Shamir the import of which, among other atrocities upon its indigenous peoples, deliberately harvested the cataclysm of the holocaust and European anti-semitism for the construction of 'Eretz Yisrael' in Palestine:
“Neither Jewish morality nor Jewish tradition can be used to disallow terror as a means of war, ... We are very far from any moral hesitations when concerned with the national struggle”.
Lest those living in the void of modernity and 'united we stand' with the inexplicable 'war on terror' which has been deliberately divorced from its historical and imperial contexts think such terror doctrines were an aberration due to the tumultuous founding of 'Der Judenstaadt' in the aftermath of the holocaust in the otherwise vastly moral and lofty traditions of Zionism, it is also pertinent to remember Rachel Corrie in the context of these remorseless 1939 confessional words of Israel's first Statesman uttered before the word 'holocaust' even existed:
After Seven Years of War in Iraq, 8 Years in Afghanistan, Opposition to War Crosses the U.S. Political Spectrum
Kevin Zeese
Come Home, America: A New Anti-War Network Brings Conservatives and Progressives, Liberals and Libertarians Together to Oppose U.S. Wars and Empire
Washington, DC: Come Home, America a national network of Americans from across the political spectrum is forming on the 7th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq to oppose U.S. war and Empire. See www.ComeHomeAmerica.US.
“After 7 years of the Iraq war, 8 years of war in Afghanistan and in the midst of a ‘Long War’ projected to last decades, Americans from across the political spectrum are joining together to form a broad-based effort to oppose war and Empire,” said Kevin Zeese, executive director of Voters For Peace (www.VotersForPeace.US) who with George D. O’Neill, Jr. formerly the chairman of the Rockford Institute a leading traditional conservative intellectual think tank, is bringing right and left together to oppose U.S. wars and Empire. “Americans oppose military intervention around the globe. In fact, a December 2009 Pew Poll found that a plurality of 49% of Americans think the U.S. should ‘mind its own business internationally’ but their views are not reflected in the debate in Washington, DC. Those who oppose U.S. militarism need to join together to create effective advocacy against weapons and war spending.”
America's Secret Prisons
by Stephen Lendman
On January 28 in TomDispatch.com, Anand Gopal headlined, "Night Raids, Hidden Detention Centers, the 'Black Jail,' and the Dogs of War in Afghanistan," recounting unreported US media stories about killings, abductions, detentions, interrogations, and torture in "a series of prisons on US military bases around the country." Bagram prison, for example, is "a facility with a notorious reputation for abusive behavior," including brutalizing torture and cold-blooded murder.
Even worse is the "Black Jail," a facility consisting of individual windowless concrete cells with bright 24-hour lighting, described by one former detainee as "the most dangerous and fearful place" in which prisoners endure appalling treatment.
Euro crisis: Latvia and the PIGS
Eric Walberg
Down on the Euro Animal Farm, some animals are more equal than others.
Two million people took to the streets of Athens last week in the country's second general strike this month, protesting the austerity measures proposed by their socialist government. All of Greece came to a 24-hour standstill and the airport was closed as a result of the action. The only public transport was the commuter train so that protesters could reach the demonstration.
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