Weapons of Mass Delusion

Quote Of The Day
"We need a president who can walk and chew gum at the same time."
-- John Edwards, quoted by ABC News talking about his qualifications at a news conference today. Well, it's a start, anyway.
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Quite honestly I did not know we were still looking for those fictional weapons!!

(June 17, 2007 Two weeks ago, the Washington Post reported that more than four years after the fall of Baghdad, the "United Nations is spending millions of dollars in Iraqi oil money to continue the hunt for Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction." Everyone fully recognizes that there are no weapons to be found, but bureaucratic hurdles keep inspectors where they aren't needed. "The inspectors acknowledge that their chief task -- disarming Iraq -- was largely fulfilled long ago. But, they say, their masters at the U.N. Security Council have been unable to agree to either shut down their effort or revise their mandate to make their work more relevant," the Post explained.
Two weeks later, good news: the pointless hunt is nearing an end.
The search for Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction appears close to an official conclusion, several years after their absence became a foregone one.
The United States and Britain have circulated a new proposal to the members of the United Nations Security Council to “terminate immediately the mandates” of the weapons inspectors. Staff meetings on the latest proposal have already taken place, and officials say that the permanent Council members, each of whom has veto power, seem ready to let the inspection group — the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission — meet its end.
Two weeks ago, Feisal Amin al-Istrabadi, Iraq’s deputy permanent representative to the United Nations, said, “This is really absurd. We’re approaching five years now of this exercise in futility."
Finally, the exercise appears ready to come to a merciful conclusion -- several years too late.

What a waste of money!
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The Rich Are Making the Poor Poorer
By Barbara Ehrenreich, The Nation.
A bloated overclass can drag down a society as surely as a swelling underclass. A great deal of the wealth at the top is built on the low-wage labor of the poor.Top of Form 1
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Twenty years ago it was risky to point out the growing inequality in America. I did it in a New York Times essay and was quickly denounced, in the Washington Times, as a "Marxist." If only. I've never been able to get through more than a couple of pages of Das Kapital, even in English, and the Grundrisse functions like Rozerem.
But it no longer takes a Marxist, real or alleged, to see that America is being polarized between the super-rich and the sub-rich everyone else. In Sunday's New York Times magazine we learn that Larry Summers, the centrist Democratic economist and former Harvard president, is now obsessed with the statistic that, since 1979, the share of pretax income going to the top 1 percent of American households has risen by 7 percentage points, to 16 percent. At the same time, the share of income going to the bottom 80 percent has fallen by 7 percentage points.
As the Times puts it: "It's as if every household in that bottom 80 percent is writing a check for $7,000 every year and sending it to the top 1 percent." Summers now admits that his former cheerleading for the corporate-dominated global economy feels like "pretty thin gruel."
But the moderate-to-conservative economic thinkers who long refused to think about class polarization have a fallback position, sketched out by Roger Lowenstein in an essay in the same issue of the New York Times magazine that features Larry Summers' sobered mood.
Briefly put: As long as the middle class is still trudging along and the poor are not starving flamboyantly in the streets, what does it matter if the super-rich are absorbing an ever larger share of the national income?
In Lowenstein's view: "...whether Roger Clemens, who will get something like $10,000 for every pitch he throws, earns 100 times or 200 times what I earn is kind of irrelevant. My kids still have health care, and they go to decent schools. It's not the rich people who are pulling away at the top who are the problem..."
Well, there is a problem with the super-rich, several of them in fact. A bloated overclass can drag down a society as surely as a swelling underclass.
First, the Clemens example distracts from the reality that a great deal of the wealth at the top is built on the low-wage labor of the poor. Take Wal-Mart, our largest private employer and premiere exploiter of the working class: Every year, 4 or 5 of the people on Forbes magazine's list of the ten richest Americans carry the surname Walton, meaning they are the children, nieces, and nephews of Wal-Mart's founder.
You think it's a coincidence that this union-busting low-wage retail empire happens to have generated a $200 billion family fortune?
Second, though a lot of today's wealth is being made in the financial industry, by means that are occult to the average citizen and do not seem to involve much labor of any kind, we all pay a price, somewhere down the line. All those late fees, puffed up interest rates and exorbitant charges for low-balance checking accounts do not, as far as I can determine, go to soup kitchens.
Third, the overclass bids up the price of goods that ordinary people also need -- housing, for example. Gentrification is dispersing the urban poor into overcrowded suburban ranch houses, while billionaires' horse farms displace the rural poor and middle class. Similarly, the rich can swallow tuitions of $40,000 and up, making a college education increasingly a privilege of the upper classes.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the huge concentration of wealth at the top is routinely used to tilt the political process in favor of the wealthy. Yes, we should acknowledge the philanthropic efforts of exceptional billionaires like George Soros and Bill Gates.
But if we don't end up with universal health insurance in the next few years, it won't be because the average American isn't pining for relief from escalating medical costs. It may well turn out to be because Hillary Clinton is, as The Nation reports, "the number-one Congressional recipient of donations from the healthcare industry." And who do you think demanded those Bush tax cuts for the wealthy -- the AFLCIO.
Lowenstein notes, that "if the very upper crust were banished to a Caribbean island, the America that remained would be a lot more egalitarian."
Well, duh. The point is that it would also be more prosperous, at the individual level, and democratic. In fact, why give the upper crust an island in the Caribbean? After all they've done for us recently, I think the Aleutians should be more than adequate.
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Washington Dispatch: With Americans pegging health care reform as the top domestic priority, the candidates are unveiling their plans. Some are better than others, but none include the changes necessary to take on the twin scourges of the health care system: insurance providers and Big Pharma.
By James Ridgeway
Considering the fundamental failings of the U.S. health care system—which is overpriced for all Americans, inadequate for many, and deadly for some—it comes as no surprise that health care ranked second only to Iraq in a recent Gallup poll on top priorities for the president and Congress and was first among domestic priorities. Another poll, commissioned by SEIU, the health care workers' union, found that 82 percent of likely voters in the first four caucus and primary states agree that "everyone has a right to quality, affordable health care coverage." (This included 92 percent of Democratic voters and, more surprisingly, 72 percent of Republicans.)
The more complex question, of course, is just how to reform the system and, of late, many of the presidential candidates have entered the debate, unveiling health care plans that offer varying degrees of specificity. While the Republican candidates' platforms are decidedly short on content—most believe the "power of the market" can heal a sick system—the leading Democrats have provided fairly detailed proposals, all of them promising what the polls say Americans want, "quality, affordable health care" for everyone.
"Universal health care" has become the grand Democratic mantra, found on every campaign web site and repeated in every stump speech and debate. But the phrase itself is misleading—most often, it actually means "universal health insurance." While the plans do outline some modest and not altogether meaningless reforms, especially when it comes to care for children, most are designed to preserve—and even benefit—the twin scourges of the U.S. health care system: the insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry. With the exception of the acknowledged mavericks Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) and Mike Gravel, no one has suggested anything resembling a single-payer national health care system (that is, one that is managed and administered by the federal government), which would boot out the rapacious middlemen of the insurance industry and reign in Big Pharma—the primary obstacles to quality, affordable health care in this country.
On the Democratic side, many of the candidates are proposing to subsidize private insurance purchases for the uninsured. Most likely, this would actually wind up bringing the insurance companies billions in new income, while in some cases failing to serve the neediest individuals. As Steffie Woolhandler, the Harvard doctor who has compiled voluminous data on the structure of the industry points out, tax credits, medical savings plans, and other subsidies are next to meaningless to people without jobs or money. What good is an income tax credit if you don't have an income? And why, for that matter, is universal health insurance presented as such a bright shining promise, when, more and more, people who do have insurance continually have to jump through hoops to get the coverage they pay for?
The most effective weapon against the pharmaceutical industry and health insurance companies would of course be a single-payer system, which would give the government clout in negotiating prices with the drug companies, and render the insurance providers obsolete.