Is this spot by a potential candidate for the Republican presidential nomination the future of political advertising?
Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
(For previous posts about the oligarchy, see here.)
I have repeatedly said that progressives have to be most on the alert when Democrats are in power. It is under Democratic administrations that the oligarchy tries to achieve major goals because the party’s base, ever-vigilant to guard against encroachments when Republicans hold power, falls asleep when their own party is at the helm. We see Obama doing things in the name of national security that would have evoked howls of protest if Bush had done them. We see Obama treating Wall Street with a generosity that would be loudly protested if a Republican did it.
The big prize for the oligarchy is, of course, Social Security. The privatization of Social Security has been a long-cherished dream of Wall Street anxious to get their hands on that trillion-dollar account. In general, Republicans have been thwarted when they tried to do it. George W. Bush tried to privatize it in his second term but was beaten back and gave up on it. The Democratic Party has long been seen as the defenders of Social Security, which is why the oligarchy sees it as a better agent for achieving its goals.
On CNN, Piers Morgan asks Ricky Gervais why he offended people at the Golden Globes award show by thanking god for making him an atheist. Gervais points out the absurdity of such an attitude.
(For previous posts about the oligarchy, see here.)
I wrote earlier about how cracks appeared in the oligarchy during the late stages of the Vietnam war. In that case, the oligarchy split between those businesses for whom the war remained a good thing because their businesses directly benefited from the war effort, and those for whom it was a bad thing because the people and resources that might have benefited them were being drained away to service a war that seemed to have no end. In the current situation, while the pressures due to an over-extended military are still there, the split in the oligarchy is more likely to occur between the financial sector and the manufacturing/agricultural sector because the financial sector is increasingly being seen as a parasite that produces little of value but instead becomes bloated by sucking the blood out of the productive sectors of the economy, all with the active collusion of the government. These cracks in the oligarchy are being widened by its out-of-control rapacity, as sectors within it seek to advance at the expense of others. This intraoligarchic competition to see who can enrich themselves the most will likely less to its own downfall.
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Jerry Coyne provides links to film clips that show the 100 best movie quotes of all time. Can you guess which one is #1?
Here’s the first twenty.
Rather than quibble with the list or its rankings (after all, these were done by some anonymous person and reflect just his or her opinions), I found it fun to watch all the clips and note how many I had seen.
Apparently the willingness of people to be duped by hucksters into believing that inanimate objects wield magical powers that can improve their lives has resulted in the popularity of something called ‘Power Balance’ bands, a silicone band containing a hologram. It seems like all it takes is for some celebrity to endorse some nonsense for others to rush out and buy them, even if there is zero evidence in its favor. Articles about these things never seem to include people who buy these things and then have their lives take a turn for the worse.
I blame religion for this kind of idiocy. It encourages people to believe in magic, and once you go down that anti-science road, you become a sucker just waiting to be taken in by hucksters.
Gulet Mohamed, whose story I have written about before, is back in the US.
His case illustrates how the US government, headed by that noted constitutional scholar Barack Obama, subverts the constitutional protections of its citizens by using the no-fly list to coercively detain and interrogate citizens in other countries which have far fewer protections, at least on paper.
Civil liberties groups charge that his case is the latest episode in which the U.S. government has temporarily exiled U.S. citizens or legal residents so they can be questioned about possible terrorist links without legal counsel.
The American Civil Liberties Union is suing the U.S. government on behalf of 17 citizens or legal residents who were not allowed to board flights to, from or within the United States, presumably because, like Mohamed, they were on the government’s no-fly list. Of those stranded overseas, all were eventually told they could return, often after they agreed to speak to the FBI. None was arrested upon their return.
The ACLU suit, filed in Portland, Ore., alleges that Americans placed on the no-fly list are denied due process because there is no effective way to challenge their inclusion.
There is a weird Orwellian quality to the no-fly lists.
The government does not acknowledge that any particular individual is on the no-fly list or its other watch lists. Nor will it reveal the exact criteria it uses to place people on its list… But U.S. officials insist that the process used to place individuals on the no-fly list is legal and well founded, and relies on credible intelligence.
Right. After all, the government has such a good reputation for telling the truth and behaving according to the law so why shouldn’t we trust it implicitly?
As Nat Hentoff writes, we are allowing the creation of a system of secret rules and prisons to be used at the will and discretion of the president, outside the range of the constitution.
Apparently that portion of the press conference where Chinese president Hu Jintao was asked about human rights issues was blacked out in the state-run China media. Damian Grammaticas, the Beijing correspondent of BBC News, says smugly, “Just hearing a Chinese president deal with direct questions on human rights is incredibly rare. In China the heavily state-controlled media doesn’t pose them”
But when have you heard anyone in the major US media ask Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton at a press conference how the US can lecture other countries on human rights when it is itself a serious serial violator?
The point is that the filters in the media that weed out independent thinkers works so well that it would never occur to almost all those who rise to the level of being allowed into these press conferences to pose such a question. Any journalist who had the temerity to do so would be frozen out by the government (and even his or her colleagues) and never be called upon again and would have to be replaced by his organization. This would be a bad career move and journalists likely realize this, at least at a gut level.
This is why the US does not have to be so crude as China and censor broadcasts. The media does it itself perfectly well.
There is a common misunderstanding that the single payer system of health insurance means that the government provides all the health services. That is not true. There are many systems of single payer in which doctors and hospitals are private. It is just that the multiplicity of for-profit health insurance firms that do not add anything of value but simply introduce a vast and expensive bureaucratic layer between doctor and patient would be eliminated.
This story from the public radio program Marketplace shows how even in the rural farming sector in India, introducing a single payer system called Yeshavini has resulted in a vast improvement in health care at very low cost.
[W]hile Congress, and the rest of the country, continue to argue over who’s helped and who’s hurt by health care reform, the world’s cheapest health insurance program can be found in India. It covers at least 4 million of that country’s poorest farmers with a fairly simple philosophy: More patients means lower costs.
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About a third of all of the patients at [Dr. Devi] Shetty’s hospital are farmers from rural villages. They’re here because they have something called Yeshaswini insurance. It doesn’t cover routine doctors visits for, say, a cough or a cold, but the insurance does cover all surgical procedures. The farmer pays approximately three cents a month; the government puts in one and a half cents and farmers cooperatives operate the program.
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That volume actually allows them to negotiate really good deals, lower costs of medical equipment and drugs. And the success rate for surgery at Shetty’s hospital is as good as hospitals in the U.S. at a fraction of the cost.
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Typically, farmers have to sell their land, take out crippling loans or just not have surgery. That’s why Yeshaswini insurance is immensely popular. Farmers can choose from any one of 350 hospitals in the region.Dr. Julius Punnen is a cardiac surgeon who helped set up the program. He says every day the hospital battles with private insurance companies to get reimbursed. But Yeshaswini is different. It was designed to provide treatment.
The private for-profit health insurance companies are a cancer on the health care system that must be eliminated.
