Open Letter to the Senators

Please feel free to copy my letter, ammend it or leave it as is, but please send it to your Senator today. Thanks!

Dear Senator Kerry,

According to an AP article in December sixth’s newspaper, the Senate is going to cut 42 billion in Medicare spending on home health care. More people will die in institutions rather than at home thanks to this cut. How cruel.

Insurance companies have been allowed to consolidate and monopolize the market allowing them to fix prices and eliminate competition across the country, this is why so many people lack health insurance. To solve the health insurance debacle the giant insurance corporations need to be busted up. Perhaps that’s the avenue you should be investigating rather than looking for cuts in Medicare.

Thomas Jefferson believed one of the government’s roles in society was to prevent corporations from taking the bread out of the mouth of the laborer who has earned it. As a representative of the people, you have failed that role. First you let the banks steal half the value of my home, then you let the corporations steal the value of my labor, now you've let the insurance compnaies steal the value of my life.

A large part of the problem today is that we measure value in dollars only. As long as you’re a health insurance premium paying consumer you have value. But when you become sick, injured or fatally ill and the insurance companies have to spend money on you, (as in when you need home health care), that’s when we become liabilities, we lose value. How can a ‘for profit’ corporation interested only in cutting costs for the ‘bottom line’ decide how much medical care a person gets? There is something ethically and morally wrong going on here.

We give banks seventeen trillion and we’ll spend three trillion on war in Afghanistan alone, not even counting the trillions in Iraq, but we don’t have 42 billion for Americans. Surely you can see there’s something wrong with this picture Senator. Andrew Jackson said one man with courage makes a majority. Where is that one man today?

Sincerely,

Nancy T. Lindsay

Registered Voter

Stopping the Spread of "Ism's"

During Vietnam the country was told we were there “to stop the spread of communism.” Now we’re being told we’re in Afghanistan to prevent it from becoming a safe haven for Al Qaeda and to stop the spread of terrorism.

Al Qaeda does not need Afghanistan for a safe haven, they enjoy safe harbor around the globe as witnessed by suicide bombings in Iran, Iraq, India, Saudi Arabia, the Philippines, Somalia, England, Spain and Afghanistan just to name a few.

Suicide bombings are a tactic of Al Qaeda. Compare sending ninety-six thousand soldiers to Afghanistan to route out 100 members of Al Qaeda, to loading up an individual with a suicide vest. Their main weapon is cheap and inexhaustible while we spend trillions.

We’re told this “war” in Afghanistan is vital to national interest. We’re paying thugs, warlords and the Taliban to keep them from attacking convoys that supply the US troops. The son of an Afghani minister provides the security which he obtains through the cousin of the Afghan president Harmid Karzai. How is paying these people millions in our national interest?

There are two things to do to stop the spread of terrorism. One is to solve the Palestinian Israeli crisis and the other action needed is to get out of Arab lands. These are the main recruiting tools terrorists use to wage jihad around the globe. Eliminate these reasons and we stop the growth of terrorism.

The US was able to win two wars and develop the atom bomb in four years, yet we can’t solve our reliance on oil to end this “war on terror” Why is that?

Contradictions that Confuse

For years it’s been drummed into our heads that early detection of breast cancer increases the odds of survival, and advocates for health care reform have said they’re going to make screening exams a covered benefit.

Then a government picked panel of experts recommends women wait until they’re fifty to start getting mammograms for breast cancer screening. If mammograms aren’t covered, then a woman’s risk of dying from breast cancer increases. Given the evidence about stories of women who have survived breast cancer due to early detection, how could they possibly come out with something like this?

According to the government task force one in 1900 mammograms saves a life. If that one was you, all those mammograms would be worth it. Right? They’re just not worth it to the insurance company. To them we are premium paying consumers, not a human being whose life is worth 1900 mammograms. And the government agrees! Have Medical insurance company stocks gone up on the news that they’ll be saving five billion dollars a year for mammograms?

One excuse offered up by a doctor on the task force is that the message was misinterpreted. What they really mean is at age forty a woman should start talking to her doctor about obtaining mammograms. I rely on my physician to keep up with all the news in the world of medicine and to inform me as to the benefits or necessity of tests available to prevent early death. It is isn’t up to the patient to self-treat themselves or keep abreast of which screening tests we should be talking about.

It’s unethical and morally unjust that a ‘for profit’ company concerned with cutting costs as a corporate measure can have so much control over whether people live or die due to corporate profits.

We are the only ‘civilized’ country in the world that mixes & confuses corporate profits with an individuals life or death.

The blame can be laid on our reprehensible representatives in congress who cater to the bribes the health care lobbyists bestow into their re-election campaigns, instead of doing what they can for the voters health.　

We'll Never Know

Alexis De Toqueville wrote “in America there is a general distaste for accepting any man’s words as proof of anything".

Not so today, Glen Beck who started out as a stand up comedian, has many followers who praise his words as gospel truth.

James Madison said "A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy, or perhaps both.”

A former managing director on Wall Street Nomi Prins said in the Nation magazine that we’ve given the sum of 17.5 trillion to banks in loans and guarantees to keep them afloat!

In just one of these programs the Treasury Secretary has set aside one trillion in the public private investment fund to entice billionaires to buy toxic assets (our homes) from banks. Are these and all the other ways we’re baling out banks popular on these news programs?

The farce is the orchestrated outrage over spending one trillion in ten years for health insurance and the tragedy is our silence when it comes to spending over 20 trillion for war, wall street and banks.

It’s all about marketing. TV talking heads are interested in grabbing as much market share to continue to rake in their millions, as opposed to obtaining popular information about our government. And thanks to these marketers we have gone from thinking citizens to mindless consumers.

Chalmers Johnson a former CIA analyst stated in 2007 that Americans do not know what is going on in their government; it’s too late, we’ll never know. 　

Circus Complex

The politicians are right in saying we facing complex issues. We face a medical / pharmaceutical /industrial complex with millions being paid to the very politicians who are turning their backs on the ‘will of the people‘, and we mustn’t forget the military industrial complex, which blatantly pushes for war in spite of the wishes of the majority.

When are the politicians going to grow a set and do what’s right for the general public instead of doing whatever they can for the bottom line of the medical; pharmaceutical and insurance megaliths.

The theatrics over the public option is scripted. Republicans say their lines and the Democrats say theirs. Neither side is addressing the real issue, which is corporate control, the real reason why so many Americans are uninsured and we’re bankrupt.

It’s all a dog and pony show, which complex is the pea under?

Having a majority in the House and Senate and the Executive branch, the Democrats could pass any solution they wanted, that is if they were actually motivated to find the solution.

The proposed legislation on “health care reform” will supposedly cost nine hundred billion over ten years.

Republicans are saying it’ll bankrupt us. Hello?? Who doesn’t know we’re already bankrupt.

Why don’t the Republicans come out and complain about the seventeen trillion we’re giving to the banks and wall street, or the three trillion Afghanistan will cost us? And that’s not counting the lives of American troops, and the uncountable enemy/civilian lives, nor the cost of Iraq which Bush never included in the budget.

Our government is a circus with the public option back in the center ring.　

Memories of Antitrust Laws

Health insurance companies are exempt from antitrust laws. Senator Leahy is sponsoring legislation in the Senate to eliminate this exemption stating- “Virtually every company in America has to follow the antitrust rules. They can't conspire to set prices and cut out competition. There's one exception, in all the industries in America, one exception: health insurance.”

“And they can get together, without violating the antitrust laws. They can do what they want in carving up markets without getting involved in the antitrust laws. All I'm saying, if the law applies to everybody else, it should apply to them.”

This is astounding, because it is not the reality on the ground in American society. Every facet of our lives is controlled by monopolies who exploit us. Teddy Roosevelt’s anti-trust laws have been striped bare and precisely why we bailed out banks who were allowed to become “too big to fail“. Ever since the failures of the Savings and Loans, banks have been consolidating. This “financial meltdown” is causing more banks to fail, creating even bigger banks. Talk about getting together, literally.

We used to have hundreds of oil companies, today we have four or five. Competing gas stations used to be plentiful, now there’s very little competition. The price at the pump is fixed by Big Oil.

Big Pharma and Agri-Business control the price and of food and medicine. More people are dying from poison food, and if the government can’t protect us from poison food, there’s little hope they can enforce anti-trust laws.

The media of print, radio and television have been consolidated until there’s just a few news corporations left. Now we have to pay for cable with few choices in cable companies.

Ever since the late eighties health insurance companies have been consolidating and setting prices. UnitedHealth Care alone has 23 million members and the CEO makes one hundred and eight six million dollars a year. No wonder they can’t pay claims, they have to pay the CEO. Airlines and utilities have consolidated leaving us with fewer choices and poorer services.

Much of our over seas military operations are out sourced to private corporations, with companies like Blackwater Security performing missions on the level of the CIA. More and more of our prisons and schools are being run by private companies.

With all this going on around us how can the Senator say every company in America is following the anti-trust laws? Maybe antitrust laws exist in the Senator’s memory, but they certainly do not exist today nor will the insurance companies ever be subjected to them.

Sink or Swim

The 700 billion bank bailout was only the tip of the iceberg, between the capital injections; guarantees; indirect loans, and propping up of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, we’ve invested 17.5 trillion into the country’s financial institutions.

Due to increased earnings the stock market is up for banks like JPMorgan- Chase and Goldman Sachs, who are on track for doling out record bonuses. If it wasn’t for the tax payer these financial institutions wouldn’t even exist. Millions of Americans are in foreclosure yet we’re supporting Wall Street with trillions. There’s something wrong with that picture.

Where is the orchestrated outrage over the trillions we’re pouring into Wall Street causing deficits “as far as the eye can see”?

There isn’t any, we only see the outrage over Acorn, not the morally bankrupt actions of the nation’s financial institutions while our government spurs them on.

Having two bankers in a row as Treasury Secretary’s doesn’t help. Former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson was former CEO of Goldman Sachs and Timothy Geithner headed the Federal Reserve of New York while we bailed out Wall Street Banks.

Secretary Giethner has set aside one trillion to the Public Private Investment Fund, which guarantees the purchaser of “toxic assets” six dollars for every one dollar invested to sell these toxic assets. If prices go up the purchaser wins, if the price goes down the purchaser loses little while the tax payer picks up the difference. That money could be better used investing in ordinary Americans to reduce principals rather than enticing billionaires to buy toxic assets.

FDR's New Deal brought us deposit insurance; stock market regulation, and the separation of commercial and investment banking. Since the seventies our politicians both Democrats and Republicans alike have whittled away these and other protections leaving us in the situation we face today: an economy supported by over inflated values and financing of debt.

In a capitalistic democracy all boats rise not just the yachts. Our economy is experiencing an inverted gravity, only the yachts are rising while all the other boats and dinghies sink in the shark infested economy. This is why earnings are up on Wall Street while Main Street is being boarded up.