The dangerous consequences of a militarized foreign policy

Chalmers Johnson is a former CIA consultant and a professor of Asian studies at Berkeley, and was an avowed cold-war warrior during the Vietnam war era. He has written a very interesting article titled Evil Empire: Is Imperial Liquidation Possible for America? He points out the Iraq war as an unmitigated disaster on many levels and the failure of the media as culpable.

The people of the United States became mere spectators as an array of ideological extremists, vested interests, and foreign operatives — including domestic neoconservatives, Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi exiles, the Israeli Lobby, the petroleum and automobile industries, warmongers and profiteers allied with the military-industrial complex, and the entrenched interests of the professional military establishment — essentially hijacked the government.
. . .
One subject that the government, the military, and the news media try to avoid like the plague is the racist and murderous culture of rank-and-file American troops when operating abroad. Partly as a result of the background racism that is embedded in many Americans’ mental make-up and the propaganda of American imperialism that is drummed into recruits during military training, they do not see assaults on unarmed “rag heads” or “hajis” as murder. . . Some militarists will reply that such inhumanity to the defenseless is always inculcated into the properly trained soldier.
. . .
Imperialism and militarism have thus begun to imperil both the financial and social well-being of our republic. What the country desperately needs is a popular movement to rebuild the Constitutional system and subject the government once again to the discipline of checks and balances. Neither the replacement of one political party by the other, nor protectionist economic policies aimed at rescuing what’s left of our manufacturing economy will correct what has gone wrong. Both of these solutions fail to address the root cause of our national decline.

I believe that there is only one solution to the crisis we face. The American people must make the decision to dismantle both the empire that has been created in their name and the huge (still growing) military establishment that undergirds it.

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The story of evolution-16: The evolution of the eye

The eye is one organ almost invariably brought out by creationists to argue against evolution. How could something so complex have possibly evolved incrementally, they ask?

Darwin himself suggested the way that the eye could come into being. Due to the fact that eyes don’t fossilize and thus leave a permanent record, it is hard to trace back in time and see the various stages in the evolution of the eye as linear developments. So he looked instead at the eyes of currently existing different organisms at intermediate stages of development, and concluded (On the Origin of Species, 1859, p. 188):

With these facts, here, far too briefly and imperfectly given, which show that there is much graduated diversity in the eyes of living crustaceans, and bearing in mind how small the number of living animals is in proportion to those which have become extinct, I can see no very great difficulty (not more than that in the case of many other creatures) in believing that natural selection has converted the simple apparatus of an optic nerve merely coated with pigment and invested with transparent membrane, into an optical instrument as perfect as is possessed by any member of the great Articulate class.

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The story of evolution-15: How species evolve

The final feature that needs to be addressed is the probability of mutations cumulating to produce new organs and species.

This question lies at the heart of many people’s objections to evolutionary ideas. They cannot envisage how infinitesimal changes, each invisible to the eye, can add up to major changes. That is because they tend to think that the two foundations for this to occur (the occurrence of successful mutations and the mutations then spreading throughout the population) are both highly unlikely, and so that the chance of a whole sequence of such processes occurring must be infinitesimally small.
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Single payer health universal insurance coming to Ohio?

(For previous posts on the topic of health care, see here.)

Efforts are underway to try get a universal, single payer health care system in Ohio. The group behind it is the Single-Payer Action Network Ohio (SPAN Ohio), which is supporting legislation instituting such a plan. Their website provides more information about their initiatives and meetings.

The Health Care for All Ohioans Act has been introduced in the Ohio House (H. B. 186) and the Senate (S. B. 168).

The main points of the legislation can be seen here but here are the highlights:

  • Patients get free choice of health care providers and hospitals.
  • When you go to your own personal physician for visits, there are NO premiums, NO co-payments, NO deductibles, NO one excluded. You pay nothing.
  • When you get your prescription filled by your pharmacist, there are NO premiums, NO co-payments, NO deductibles, NO one excluded. You pay nothing.
  • If you need hospitalization, there are NO premiums, NO co-payments, NO deductibles, NO one excluded. You pay nothing.

In each case, the health care provider is reimbursed from the Ohio Health Care Fund.

So how does the Ohio Health Care Fund get its money? Under the proposed plan, people who earn less than the Social Security tax cap (currently $97,500 per year) pay no additional taxes. The money to fund the system comes from a variety of sources: up to 3.85% payroll tax paid by employers; up to 3% gross receipts tax paid by businesses; 6.2% tax on individual compensation in excess of the Social Security tax cap; 5% surtax on adjusted gross income over $200,000; funds from other government sources. Remember that currently employers that provide private health insurance have to pay for it. That money can now be directed to the Ohio Health Care Fund instead.

An Ohio health care agency runs the program and its governing board consists of the state director of health and fourteen other members, two from each of the seven regions that make up the state. The two members are elected for two-year terms by a regional health advisory committee, which in turn is elected by a meeting convened of the county and city health commissioners of each region.

Since there are many misconceptions (often deliberately perpetrated by the health care industry and its allies in the media) about what a single payer system involves, here is a handy document that compares the myths with the realities.

One of the big distortions that will be perpetrated by the health insurance and drug industries and politicians is to treat ‘universal’ and ‘single-payer’ as if they are synonymous terms. They are not and people should be vigilant when that sleight-of-hand is attempted. ‘Universal’ refers to the fact that every person should be covered, with no exceptions. ‘Single payer’ refers to the mechanism by which the health care system is financed and health care providers reimbursed.

It is not difficult to provide ‘universal’ private health insurance coverage, if that coverage is bad. All one needs to do to achieve that is to compel everyone to purchase some kind of health insurance, like the way people are compelled to buy auto insurance in order to drive, and some states have gone that route. But all that achieves is people or their employers being forced to purchase high-deductible, low-treatment coverage. Such policies will not result in better and more accessible treatment for more people or reduce the frustrating bureaucracy that we all encounter now. In fact, it will be a profit windfall for the private insurance companies as they get even more people into their nets. Such ‘universal’ programs would not be an improvement on the current system, though it will be touted as such by the health-care industry and their apologists.

‘Single-payer’ means something different, that there should be just one single entity, preferably run by the government or at the very least a non-profit publicly accountable board, that collects the money and spends it on the health care system. The single payer plan calls for the complete elimination of profit-driven private health insurance companies from the health care system, and has to be an essential component of any meaningful health care reform. As Sicko pointed out, the introduction of profit-making bodies between the patient and the doctor is the single feature that has resulted in the health care system in the US being so inferior to its peer countries.

Candidates should not be able to evade the issue by saying they support universal health-care. The question that should be asked is whether they support single-payer universal health care. Of all the presidential candidates in both parties, only Dennis Kucinich is calling for such a universal single-payer system, although many of the other Democratic candidates have signed onto the vague ‘universal’ health care part.

A petition has also been started by SPAN Ohio to gather signatures to put the legislation onto the statewide ballot. This petition contains the officially approved summary of what the legislation contains, as well as the full text of the bill. It is a parallel track strategy to the bills in the state legislature to get the same results.

I am collecting petition signatures so if anyone wants to sign it, or collect signatures as well, please contact me or SPAN Ohio. My petition form is limited to those who reside in Cuyahoga County.

The Cleveland branch of SPAN Ohio meets at 7:00pm on the first Monday of each month at the ACLU building, 4506 Chester Avenue. Other branch locations and meeting times can be found on their website.

POST SCRIPT: Handy guide to candidates

With so many people running for president, it is hard to compare their stands on the various issues. One enterprising website has done us all a favor by preparing a table that gives capsule summaries of their views. Of course, you will need to look elsewhere for more details and nuances.

The story of evolution-14: How a single mutation spreads everywhere

In the previous post, we saw that if we start with a trait that is present in just 0.1% of the population (i.e., f=0.001), and if this has a small selection advantage of size s=0.01, this will grow to 99.9% (F=0.999) in just under 1,400 generations, which is a very short time on the geological scale.

But in a population of one million, an initial fraction of f=0.001 means that we are starting with about 1000 organisms having the favorable mutation. But it could be argued that new mutations usually start with just a single new kind of organism being produced in one single organism. How does that affect the calculation?

Suppose that you have a population of organisms of size N and they all start out having the same gene at a particular position (called the ‘locus’) on one of the chromosomes that make up the DNA. Now suppose a random mutation occurs in just one organism, the way that it was described in an earlier post in this series describing the shift from violet to UV sensitive sight in some birds. Most of the time, even a favorable mutation will disappear because of random chance because (say) that mutated organism died before it produced any offspring or it did produce a few and that particular gene was not inherited. But on occasion that mutation will spread. How likely is it that such a single mutation will spread to every single organism (i.e., become ‘fixed’ in the population)?
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CNN, Michael Moore, Sicko, and fact-checking as propaganda tool

(For previous posts on the topic of health care, see here.)

All Michael Moore’s films deal with very serious topics in ways that are both informative and entertaining. His films have dealt with corporate greed, violence in society, the Iraq war, and now the health industry. Along with Robert Greenwald’s Brave New Films, he provides a perspective and viewpoint that is almost completely absent from the mainstream media.
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The story of evolution-13: Differential rates of survival

Of the three stages of natural selection outlined before, the only one that occurs purely by chance is the first one, that of the occurrence of mutations. I discussed how although the chances of producing a favorable mutation by changes in any individual site in the DNA (called ‘point mutations’) on an individual member of the species is very small, when the number of individuals in a species and the long times available for the changes to occur are factored into the calculation, the result is that such mutations are not only likely, they are almost inevitable to occur and furthermore are likely to occur many times.
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The story of evolution-12: Population genetics and the Hardy-Weinberg law

In the previous post, I discussed the puzzle posed by a naïve understanding of Mendelian genetics, which was that one might expect that organisms that displayed recessive gene traits would slowly disappear in a population while those with dominant gene traits would grow in number. But if that were true that would prevent new mutations from gaining a foothold in the population and growing in number, if it happened to be a recessive trait.

The crucial work that formed the breakthrough that revived the theory of natural selection was done in 1908 by G. H. Hardy (a Cambridge University mathematician and author of a fascinating book A Mathematician’s Apology) and Wilhelm Weinberg (a German physician), working independently. What is nice is that the result is quite simple to derive, and surprising.
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Oh, and about those wait times for medical treatment. . .

When all their other arguments about the advantages of the current US health care system compared to universal, single-payer systems in France, Canada, England, Germany, etc. are shown to be false, apologists for the US health care system turn to their trump card: alleging that wait times to see a doctor in those countries is longer than it is in the US. This statement by the lobbying group America’s Health Insurance Plans is typical: “The American people do not support a government takeover of the entire health-care system because they know that means long waits for rationed care.”

The problem with this type of allegation is that the US does not systematically collect data on wait times, whereas the other countries do collect the data and make them public. The assumption seems to be that in the US, if there is no data, then the wait times must be zero. No data, no problem!

But using the scant data that is available, BusinessWeek points out that except in a few selected, non-emergency situations, even this charge is false: “In reality, both data and anecdotes show that the American people are already waiting as long or longer than patients living with universal health-care systems.”

As Paul Krugman points out in his New York Times July 16, 2007 column:

[B]y and large, opponents of universal health care paint a glowing portrait of the American system that bears as little resemblance to reality as the scare stories they tell about health care in France, Britain, and Canada.

The claim that the uninsured can get all the care they need in emergency rooms is just the beginning. Beyond that is the myth that Americans who are lucky enough to have insurance never face long waits for medical care.
. . .
[N]ot all medical delays are created equal. In Canada and Britain, delays are caused by doctors trying to devote limited medical resources to the most urgent cases. In the United States, they’re often caused by insurance companies trying to save money.

This can lead to ordeals like the one recently described by Mark Kleiman, a professor at U.C.L.A., who nearly died of cancer because his insurer kept delaying approval for a necessary biopsy. ”It was only later,” writes Mr. Kleiman on his blog, ”that I discovered why the insurance company was stalling; I had an option, which I didn’t know I had, to avoid all the approvals by going to ‘Tier II,’ which would have meant higher co-payments.”

He adds, ”I don’t know how many people my insurance company waited to death that year, but I’m certain the number wasn’t zero.”

(You can read about Kleiman’s plight here, which occurred despite having what he calls “fancy-dancy health insurance through my employer, which as it happens also owns one of the world’s dozen best medical centers”.)

And what about that favorite of US health care apologists, the waiting time for hip replacements? Krugman looked at that too:

On the other hand, it’s true that Americans get hip replacements faster than Canadians. But there’s a funny thing about that example, which is used constantly as an argument for the superiority of private health insurance over a government-run system: the large majority of hip replacements in the United States are paid for by, um, Medicare.

That’s right: the hip-replacement gap is actually a comparison of two government health insurance systems. American Medicare has shorter waits than Canadian Medicare (yes, that’s what they call their system) because it has more lavish funding — end of story. The alleged virtues of private insurance have nothing to do with it.

Krugman’s conclusion is right on target:

The bottom line is that the opponents of universal health care appear to have run out of honest arguments. All they have left are fantasies: horror fiction about health care in other countries, and fairy tales about health care here in America.

POST SCRIPT: Déjà vu

As usual, cartoonist Tom Tomorrow succinctly captures how the media is colluding with the administration in fanning the flames for war with Iran, exactly the way it did with Iraq.

The story of evolution-11: The rise of population genetics and the neo-Darwinian synthesis

The joining of Darwin’s theory of natural selection with the Mendelian theory of genetics is one of the great triumphs of biology, now called somewhat grandly the ‘neo-Darwinian synthesis’. It forms the basis of all modern biology, and was strengthened by the discovery of DNA as the structure of genetic information and which explained how Mendelian genetics worked on a microscopic scale. The modern ability to map out the entire genome of humans and other species has produced overwhelming evidence in support of Darwin’s theory of how organisms evolve and branch out into different forms. The rough tree of life that Darwin sketched out in his book based on the anatomy of biological species has now been made more precise and detailed by the mapping of the DNA of species, showing ever more clearly how species are related to one another and when they separated from a common ancestor.
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