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A Rose By Any Other Name Or Speak No Evil, See No Evil, Hear No Evil Things have been a little quiet on the healthcare debate front over the past day or two, but the 800 pound gorilla is still in the room and is still very much alive and well. During this short lull I wanted to take a look at the critical public option piece for the program, and the fact that it is apparently losing its luster with many on the near left as a it remains a huge impediment to any legislation having a chance of being passed. And not getting something passed will doom the democrats in mid-term elections...

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I intended to post sporadically or not at all this week, and that's still my plan, but there is a new Washington Post article which contains three short passages that I really want to highlight because they so vividly capture the essence of so much. The article, by Greg Miller, is being promoted by the Post this way: "In 3 years, the Obama administration has built a vast drone/killing operation"; it describes the complete secrecy behind which this is all being carried out and notes: "no president has ever relied so extensively on the secret killing of individuals to advance the nation's security goals." Here is the first beautifully revealing passage:

NOTE: It is important to separate hunting down terrorists who attack our country and deserve justice (which Ron Paul is 100% for), and not confuse justice with occupying entire countries for a decade under the guise of the "War on Terror" or "Spreading Democracy". Terrorists are individuals and small groups, so why are we picking fights with entire nations? BILLIONS for Defense, NOT A PENNY for Empire. This speech is called "Imagine" and it was given by Ron Paul on March 11, 2009. The original text of the talk is below: Imagine for a moment that somewhere in the middle of Texas there was a large foreign military base, say Chinese or Russian. Imagine that thousands of armed foreign troops were constantly patrolling American streets in military vehicles. Imagine they were here under the auspices of "keeping us safe" or "promoting democracy" or "protecting their strategic interests." Imagine that they operated outside of US law, and that the Constitution did not apply to them. Imagine that every now and then they made mistakes or acted on bad information and accidentally killed or terrorized innocent Americans, including women and children, most of the time with little to no repercussions or consequences. Imagine that they set up checkpoints on our soil and routinely searched and ransacked entire neighborhoods of homes. Imagine if Americans were fearful of these foreign troops, and overwhelmingly thought America would be better off without their presence. Imagine if some Americans were so angry about them being in Texas that they actually joined together to fight them off, in defense of our soil and sovereignty, because leadership in government refused or were unable to do so. Imagine that those Americans were labeled terrorists or insurgents for their defensive actions, and routinely killed, or captured and tortured by the foreign troops on our land. Imagine that the occupiers' attitude was that if they just killed enough Americans, the resistance would stop, but inst

"You have to be asleep to believe it." A short excerpt from the video "Life Is Worth Losing" (2005).

Any rigorous conception of youth must take into account the inescapable intersection of the personal, social, political and pedagogical embodied by young people. Beneath the abstract codifying of youth around the discourses of law, medicine, psychology, employment, education and marketing statistics, there is the lived experience of being young. For me, youth invokes a repository of memories fueled by my own journey through an adult world, which largely seemed to be in the way, a world held together by a web of disciplinary practices and restrictions that appeared at the time more oppressive than liberating. Lacking the security of a middle-class childhood, my friends and I seemed suspended in a society that neither accorded us a voice nor guaranteed economic independence. Identity didn't come easy in my neighborhood. It was painfully clear to all of us that our identities were constructed out of daily battles waged around masculinity, the ability to mediate a terrain fraught with violence and the need to find an anchor through which to negotiate a culture in which life was fast and short-lived. I grew up amid the motion and force of mostly working-class male bodies - bodies asserting their physical strength as one of the few resources over which we had control.

One of the most bewildering aspects of the current health care debate is the failure to learn key lessons from health systems abroad. Conservative talk show hosts decry the alleged evils of "socialized medicine" in countries with universal health coverage; they warn grimly of rationed health care. Yet there's nary a peep from Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck - let alone Congress - about countries such as Germany, France, Switzerland or Japan, where coverage is universal, affordable, and top quality, and patients see private doctors with little or no waiting. And, oh yes, their health costs are a fraction of our bloated numbers: The French spend 10 percent of GDP on health care, the Germans 11 percent, and they cover every citizen. We spend a whopping 17 percent and leave tens of millions of Americans uninsured. If you want a very readable short course on how European systems really work, take a look at "The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care," by T.R. Reid, a former Washington Post foreign correspondent. You might also watch a fascinating 2008 Frontline series, available online, in which Reid was an adviser: "Sick Around the World: Can the U.S. Learn Anything From the Rest of the World About How to Run a Health Care System?"

Article continued (Diigo would not highlight!?) - So far, the answer seems to be "no," not because there aren't valuable lessons, but because politicians won't relinquish their myths about European health Advertisement systems. Reid takes up that task. Myth No. 1, he says, is that foreign systems with universal coverage are all "socialized medicine." In countries such as France, Germany, Switzerland, and Japan, the coverage is universal while doctors and insurers are private. Individuals get their insurance through their workplace, sharing the premium with their employer as we do - and the government picks up the premium if they lose their job. Myth No. 2 - long waits and rationed care - is another whopper. "In many developed countries," Reid writes, "people have quicker access to care and more choice than Americans do." In France, Germany, and Japan, you can pick any provider or hospital in the country. Care is speedy and high quality, and no one is turned down. Myth No. 3 really grabs my attention: the delusion that countries with universal care "are wasteful systems run by bloated bureaucracies." In fact, the opposite is true. America's for-profit health insurance companies have the highest administrative costs of any developed country. Twenty percent or more of every premium dollar goes to nonmedical costs: paperwork, marketing, profits, etc. In developed countries with universal coverage, such as France and Germany, the administrative costs average about 5 percent. That's because every developed country but ours has decided health insurance should be a nonprofit operation. These countries also hold down costs by making coverage mandatory and by using a unified set of rules and payment schedules for all hospitals and doctors. This does not mean a single-payer system or a government-run health system. But it does sharply cut health costs by eliminating the mishmash of records and charges used by our myriad insurance firms, who use all kinds of gimmi

Tim Fernholz wrote an excellent article in the National Journal about the "bait and switch" of Governor Walker's Wisconsin plan. Fernholz points out that the short-term deficit problem can be covered by debt restructuring, and that the big pieces of the bill that relate to dismantling public sector unions, control over Medicaid and creating a no-bid energy asset sale process are not directly budget related. There's a three-prong approach in Governor Walker's plan that highlights a blueprint for conservative governorship after the 2010 election. The first is breaking public sector unions and public sector workers generally. The second is streamlining benefits away from legislative authority, especially for health care and in fighting the Health Care Reform Act. The third is the selling of public assets to private interests under firesale and crony capitalist situations. This wasn't clear to me at first. I thought this was about a narrow disagreement over teacher's unions. Depending on what you read, you may have only seen a few of these parts, and you may have not seen them put together as a coherent whole. This will be the framework that other conservative governors, and even a few Democratic ones, will use in their state, so it is good to get a working model in place. In order to frame where it stands now, I'm going to chart this and give a set of descriptions and must-read links:

ISO is Short form of International Organization for Standard. ISO 9001:2008 require an organization to develop a quality management system that fits the product & Process requirement as well as regulatory requirement AS an ISO 9001:2008 certified company,

ISO is Short form of International Organization for Standard. ISO 9001:2008 require an organization to develop a quality management system that fits the product & Process requirement as well as regulatory requirement AS an ISO 9001:2008 certified company, iso 9000

Martin Luther King - A Time to Break SilenceStarting in 1965, King began to express doubts about the United States' role in the Vietnam War. In an April 4, 1967, appearance at the New York City Riverside Church - exactly one year before his death - King delivered Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence. In the speech he spoke strongly against the U.S.'s role in the war, insisting that the U.S. was in Vietnam "to occupy it as an American colony" and calling the U.S. government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.""Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.""At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless in Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called "enemy," I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor." Martin Luther King, Jr. (January 15, 1929 -- April 4, 1968), was one of the main leaders of the American civil rights movement. A Baptist minister b

Excerpt: 'The only way out of the vicious economic cycle is for government to adopt an expansionary fiscal policy - spending more in the short term in order to make up for the shortfall in consumer demand.' Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog

These problems have very little to do with short-term or even medium-term budget arithmetic. The U.S. government is having no trouble borrowing to cover its current deficit. It's true that we're building up debt, on which we'll eventually have to pay interest. But if you actually do the math, instead of intoning big numbers in your best Dr. Evil voice, you discover that even very large deficits over the next few years will have remarkably little impact on U.S. fiscal sustainability. No, what makes America look unreliable isn't budget math, it's politics. And please, let's not have the usual declarations that both sides are at fault. Our problems are almost entirely one-sided - specifically, they're caused by the rise of an extremist right that is prepared to create repeated crises rather than give an inch on its demands.

I get a little bored repeating over and over that our short-term deficit is almost entirely not Barack Obama's fault. It's mostly the fault of the Bush tax cuts, the Bush wars, and the financial collapse that happened during the Bush presidency. At this point, though, this is more in the nature of a religious debate than a factual one, and conservatives are going to keep repeating the same tired disinformation about the deficit regardless of any evidence one way or the other. Still, just on the off chance that a few people are still persuadable on this, it's nice of CBPP to update its chart showing the source of the deficit over the next decade. (Farther out than that, Medicare is largely responsible for most deficit projections.) As you can see, by 2013 or so, virtually the entire deficit is due to Bush-era policies/disasters. So cut this out and post it on your refrigerator.

On July 25th, for instance, while John Boehner raced around the Capitol desperately pressing Republican House members for votes on a debt-ceiling bill that Harry Reid was calling dead-on-arrival in the Senate, America's new ambassador to Afghanistan, Ryan Crocker, took his oath of office in distant Kabul.  According to the New York Times, he then gave a short speech "warning" that "Western powers needed to 'proceed carefully'" and emphasized that when it came to the war, there would "be no rush for the exits." If, in Washington, people were rushing for those exits, no chance of that in Kabul almost a decade into America's second Afghan War.  There, the air strikes, night raids, assassinations, roadside bombs, and soldier and civilian deaths, we are assured, will continue to 2014 and beyond.  In a war in which every gallon of gas used by a fuel-guzzling US military costs $400 to $800 to import, time is no object and -- despite the panic in Washington over debt payments -- neither evidently is cost.

Mathew Yglesias: CBPP Analysis of John Boehner's Plan: The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities concludes that if enacted, John Boehner's debt ceiling plan "could well produce the greatest increase in poverty and hardship produced by any law in modern U.S. history." That sounds to me like something that would create strong incentives to not be poor and, indeed, to fully incentive richness. Consequently, we'll have massive economic growth. Right? Think of all the old people who will be willing to do odd jobs, whatever, in order to pay for health care. No more free-riding from grandma and grandpa to slow the economy down. The CBPP adds: This may sound hyperbolic, but it is not. The mathematics are inexorable. ... In short, the Boehner plan would force policymakers to choose among cutting the incomes and health benefits of ordinary retirees, repealing the guts of health reform and leaving an estimated 34 million more Americans uninsured, and savaging the safety net for the poor. It would do so even as it shielded all tax breaks, including the many lucrative tax breaks for the wealthiest and most powerful individuals and corporations. As for the way the debt ceiling talks are going, what a disaster.

The big question, 10 years later, is whether things have improved or worsened for those in the bottom third of the income distribution, the people who clean hotel rooms, work in warehouses, wash dishes in restaurants, care for the very young and very old, and keep the shelves stocked in our stores. The short answer is that things have gotten much worse, especially since the economic downturn that began in 2008.