Nancy-Ann DeParle: Obama & the Industry’s Health Care Czar

Obama’s “public option” for federal involvement in ensuring health care coverage will be jettisoned soon.

Obama was joined on the call with lawmakers by White House health czar Nancy-Ann DeParle… DeParle and White House deputy chief of staff Jim Messina have been in intense negotiations with hospital representatives in the hope of extracting guaranteed spending reductions from the industry.

Obama would leave his progressive supporters in the political wilderness, if they will not support his unworkable proposal.   As with the Clinton health care plan if 1993, Obama is plainly hoping to win industry to a quango, a public-private partnership.   Health Care Czar Nancy-Ann DeParle is the appropriate point person for that goal, if nothing else.

At any rate, DeParle has earned more than $2 Million from DaVita, Inc., a company that aggressively pursues market position even at the cost of affordable dialysis for patients.

Posters on DailyKOS, implicitly criticize Obama for undermining “public option” advocates while the health care industry spends $1.4 Million per day lobbying for industry.   The President’s action by itself might reflect the Liberal love of compromise, but the appointment of DeParle indicates that the goal has only been the most limited kind of health care reform

DeParle is a partisan of the current health-care industry.  She managed Medicare during the Clinton administration, then entered the health care industry, where she worked with such firms as DaVita Inc, Boston Scientific Corp, and Guidant.  The Colorado Springs Gazette recently reported that DaVita has sued small dialysis providers for conspiring to deny the company business.

In recent years, the Fortune 500 company – one of the country’s largest dialysis providers – has filed at least six suits in five states against physicians and competing dialysis centers that pose a threat to its profits, according to court documents examined by The Gazette. In those suits the publicly traded company or its subsidiaries have alleged a list of wrongdoings, from breaching contracts and ignoring noncompete arrangements to slander.

In each one, the company contends physicians and its competitors have secretly conspired to harm its business. The doctors say DaVita is waging a legal war to crush its competition.

“A David vs. Goliath battle emerges in the fight for dialysis dollars”.

by Brian Newsom, Colorado Springs Gazette, June 26, 2009 – 9:54 PM.

More generally, a recent investigation by Fred Schulte for the Investigative Report workshop foud that DeParle directed health care corporations which have engaged in denial of service and tardy notifications of violation of federal health care standards.

In touting DeParle’s accomplishments when he appointed her in March, Obama didn’t mention the lucrative private-sector career she built since September 2000, when she left her government job running Medicare for the Clinton administration. Records show she earned more than $6.6 million since early 2001, according to a tally by the Investigative Reporting Workshop.

And the public wasn’t told that much of that corporate career was built at companies that have frequently had to defend themselves against federal investigations. After leaving government, DeParle accepted director positions at half a dozen companies suspected of violating the very laws and regulations she had enforced for Medicare. Those companies got into further trouble on her watch as a director. Now she’s back in government as a leading voice in deciding the shape of health care reform. As director of the White House Office of Health Reform, DeParle is the point person in pushing for the administration’s plans for changing health care and the ways Americans pay for it — changes in whichher former companies have a great deal at stake.

Links:

• Nancy-Ann DeParle vita at NNDB: http://www.nndb.com/people/945/000169438/

• “Obama health czar directed firms in trouble:  DeParle made millions from companies under federal investigation.” by Fred Schulte. MSNBC. July 4, 2009. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31566399/ns/health-health_care/

• “DeParle profited from health care companies under scrutiny” by Fred Shulte. Investigative Reporting Workshop. July 1, 2009.  http://investigativereportingworkshop.org/investigations/deparle-portfolio/

• Checking In With… Nancy-Ann DeParle: A Health Reform Bill “By Thanksgiving” by Julie Appleby. Kaiser Health Care News.  June 1, 2009. http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Stories/2009/June/01/checkininwithdeparle.aspx

• “The Clinton Health Care Plan: Fundamental or Incremental Reform?” by Steven A. Schroeder.  Annals of Internal Medicine. 1 November 1993, Volume 119 Issue 9,  Pages 945-947. http://www.annals.org/cgi/content/full/119/9/945

• DaVita: “A David vs. Goliath battle emerges in the fight for dialysis dollars”. by Brian Newsom, Colorado Springs Gazette, June 26, 2009 – 9:54 PM. http://www.gazette.com/articles/davita-57449-dialysis-doctors.html

• Boston Scientific Corp: “Payment disclosures: ‘Compliance in name only’  A Minnesota law requiring drugmakers to report payments to medical practitioners is generating data that is incomplete, inconsistent and hard to search.” By Janet Moore. Star Tribune. July 5, 2009. http://www.startribune.com/business/49886157.html?elr=KArksLckD8EQDUoaEyqyP4O:DW3ckUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aUUsZ

• Guidiant: “What a Culture of Candor Really Takes”  12:00 PM Wednesday June 17, 2009 by John T. Landry. HBR Editors’ Blog. Harvard Business Review. http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/hbr/hbreditors/2009/06/what_a_culture_of_candor_reall.html

Only National Health Care Controls Costs, Provides Care

National Single-Payer Health Insurance is the only way to control the cost of health care services and ensure universal care.   Costs would be controlled by setting a national rate for all services, in distinction to the inflated rate charged to those who can actually afford to pay, an excess that is used to cover private insurance profit and subsidize the health care needs of many uninsured or marginally insured patients who must default on payments.

The capping of costs would NOT come at the expense of salaries or necessary procedures.   The salaries of health care workers must naturally increase with the cost of living and through earned merit raises.   Medical procedures will be conducted at the discretion of the attending physician, as is the case now, but without the pressure to milk private insurance through irrelevant or opportunistic testing.  As Arnold Relman writes in an excellent article in the July 2 New York Times Review of Books:

The central problem is its expense. Health care in the US is about twice as expensive per capita as in other developed countries—nearly 17 percent of US GDP in 2008—and its costs are rising faster. High costs partly account for another huge health care problem—nearly 50 million people are uninsured, and the number is rapidly increasing. Economists say that the main reason for high costs is the ever-expanding use of expensive kinds of diagnosis and treatment, such as new drugs, diagnostic tests, imaging methods, and surgical procedures. Physicians in most other advanced countries have access to virtually the same resources, but use them less.

[...]

Profits and management expenses take at least 10 to 20 percent of the premiums charged by investor-owned plans, including the costs of selecting those they will insure, whereas the overhead costs of Medicare—a government-run insurance plan covering everyone sixty-five and older—are about 3 percent. When private insurance companies provide coverage for Medicare patients (as in the Medicare Advantage plans), they cost the US government about 13 percent more than standard Medicare coverage.

The public/private plan of President Obama, essentially expanding Medicade to the uninsured 50 million Americans, would do nothing to control costs.  Under the Obama plan, the contradictions of inflated cost to those who can pay and withheld services to those who cannot, would result in continued curtailment of care and the death of persons in the receiving the lower de facto standard of care.

Savings will come through cost and service efficiency.  So, how much does the largest physicians group in favor of National Insurance think the new system will cost?  The Physicians for a National Health Program have collected more than a dozen studies going back eighteen years to support their conclusion that national health care would be more efficient and provide better services than the private insurance system now covering only the majority of Americans.

How Much Would a Single Payer System Cost? Editors’ Note: With the recent resurgence of interest in controlling health care costs, we thought a review of some of the state and national fiscal studies performed on single payer over the years might be useful.

Read the reports: http://www.pnhp.org/facts/single_payer_system_cost.php?page=all

Daily Show on the New York Times

This clip is broad like the steppe, offers no solutions and runs right at the most obvious jokes.

That said, you can still see that the NYT is in trouble here, but will continue forward ostensibly as is.

Why do people in a bind and possessing no sense of humor consent to be interviewed by Daily Show correspondents?

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
End Times
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Newt Gingrich Unedited Interview

Link: http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=230076&title=end-times

I picked up this link from a blog entry on the UK Guardian website, a paper that has seemingly better managed the transition to the internet: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2009/jun/12/new-york-times-jon-stewart.  Better in that the Guardian treats its online and print editions as two separate entities.  The guardian website has the same reporting as the paper, the same analysis, the same editorial stance. Transitory news and information earns more prominence on the Guardian website.  The appearance of the medium kind of demands that.   But the analysis is there, and you’ll find it reading online.

The NYT hasn’t apparently adapted its editorial style to the new medium: it always leads with the analysis in political stories, a personal anecdote in news stories.  If you want to know what’s going on in a NYT article. Skip to the 10th paragraph.  Harder to do on the web.

More:
http://correspondents.theatlantic.com/conor_clarke/2009/06/is_the_huffington_post_killing_the_new_york_times_and_the_washington_post.php

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2009/06/07/the-new-york-times-we-may-slide-into-irrelevancy-but-at-least-we-update-daily/

Lindsey Graham Supports Torture

Lindsey Graham once seemed like the conscience of the Republican party in the torture debate.  In yesterday’s Senate hearings on torture, he spoke in favor of interrogation techniques he has called illegal, and used false reports based on retracted misinformation to question the veracity of witnesses with opinions much like his own in 2007.

Back in 2007, Graham indicated he would oppose the nomination of Michael Mukasey over Mukasey’s support for waterboarding:

“If he does not believe that waterboarding is illegal, then that would really put doubts in my own mind…I think it would serve the attorney general nominee well to embrace that concept. He’s talked around it.”

That’s not the clearest statement in the world, but is evidence for disapproval of waterboarding, at least.  With the recent revelations about the realities of “harsh interrogation” Graham would have the political cover to plainly state opposition to torture.

In the May 13, 2009, Graham grilled witnesses called in opposition to the torture practices that Graham himself once opposed.   He claimed

“..one of the reasons these techniques have survived for about 500 years is apparently they work“

Graham also cited a since debunked ABC News report of April 2007 which claimed to show that a single instance of waterboarding had produced full compliance from Abu Zubaydah.  In fact, Zubaydah been waterboarded at least 83 times, Khalid Sheikh Mohamed at least 183 times and no information of any use had been obtained.  ABC subsequently admitted that it had been taken in by  former CIA officer John Kiriakou, who now claims that he himself was misinformed and believes that waterboarding is torture.  The CIA appears now to blame the entire ‘aggressive interrogation’ mess on the recommendations of two retired military psychologists, Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen.

So Graham’s 2007 positions have been reinforced, but the senator has tacked against his own judgment.

Graham prevaricated after the hearing, telling a reporter that “I don’t think that these techniques as a whole have made us safer, because of the problems we’ve had.“

In the article quoted above, ThinkProgress characterized Graham’s shift this way:

Graham, a former JAG lawyer, has tried to walk a fine line in the torture debate. To his credit, he has been a frequent critic of the Bush administration’s interrogation program, saying that waterboarding is torture and forcefully criticizing Bush officials who have hedged on the topic. Yet he has also voted against banning waterboarding, tried to argue just yesterday that waterboarding was effective, and opposes efforts to investigate the Bush administration.

Another way to look at it: in 2007, Graham was flanking for good friend and torture supporter John McCain, fleshing out the GOP’s humanistic credentials for the Presidential campaign.  In 2009, Graham is seeking to legitimize torture and embarrass Democrats, like Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, who previously implied support for the technique, but now  backtrack under the new administration.

So there is no moral principle of opposition to torture in either party, just political expediency.

Coordinated plans for Southeastern High Speed Rail

President Obama announced plans today for nine regional high speed rail lines in the US. State transportation authorities have been working on plans regionally with the Department of Transportation’s Federal Railroad Administration and with private railroad companies like NS.

The proposed line running from DC to Miami is called the Southeast High Speed Rail Corridor.  Georgian and North Carolina appear to be the most active. South Carolina doesn’t have any state reports available on the relevant wikipedia page.
You can get an idea of what the high speed rail connections through SC would look like from the US Department of Transportations’ Southeast Corridor project website. I’ve excerpted parts of the January 8, 2009 project report which discuss the proposed high speed rail extension from Charlotte to Atlanta.  The reports themselves have useful pictures, cost estimates, formulas for computing ridership and profitability and many other things you probably don’t know.

Southeast High Speed Rail website: http://www.sehsr.org/

SEHSR 2009 report: Evaluation of High-Speed Rail Options in the Macon-Atlanta-Greenville-Charlotte Rail Corridor
Executive summary: http://www.sehsr.org/reports/hsr/hsr_options_exec_sum.pdf
Full report: http://www.sehsr.org/reports/hsr/eval_hsr_options.pdf

Extracts follow the jump.

NYT: Police “Storm the New School”

Today at the New School:

A video, above, shot by a freelance journalist, Brandon Jourdan of Brooklyn, showed about a half-dozen police officers standing near the door on 14th Street when it was pushed open from inside. Then it shows officers shaking cans of pepper spray as they hold the door back, spraying inside the corridor, and forcing the door shut. It shows an officer, a few moments later, lunging toward Mr. Jourdan’s camera, before swerving toward a young man standing on the street shouting. In the video, the officer pushes the man’s face and knockes him to the ground before arresting him.

source: http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/10/students-occupy-new-school-building-again/?hp

From “On The Poverty of Student Life” a pamphlet produced in 1966 by students at the University of Strasbourg who were influenced by the Situationist International.

By revolting against their studies, the American students have directly called in question a society that needs such studies. And their revolt (in Berkeley and elsewhere) against the university hierarchy has from the start asserted itself as a revolt against the whole social system based on hierarchy and on the dictatorship of the economy and the state. By refusing to accept the business and institutional roles for which their specialized studies have been designed to prepare them, they are profoundly calling in question a system of production that alienates all activity and its products from their producers. For all their groping and confusion, the rebelling American youth are already seeking a coherent revolutionary alternative from within the “affluent society.”

From the New York Times blog today, April 10, 2009:

[...]

The students had occupied the building shortly before 6 a.m. on Fridaywith the intention of staging a takeover similar to the one carried outat the university in December, according to a graduate student who isinvolved in the demonstration.

“The students just entered the building, the student said at 5:55 a.m., adding that he was outside, on a sidewalk. “And the police are already here.”

Around 7 a.m. several dozen students, standing on the sidewalk on fifth avenue, erupted into cheers when several masked people appeared on the roof of 65 Fifth Avenue, waving red and black flags and lifting clenched fists in the air. The students on the roof, draped banners over the side of the building that read, “Kerrey and Murtha resign now!”

[...]

As senior police officers and fire official arrived on the scene the masked students on the roof used a megaphone to address the crowd below. One of the masked figures read a lengthy critique of capitalism and contemporary life, which a student below identified as an essay, ‘On the Poverty of Student Life,’ that originated at the University of Strasbourg.

The students adopted a list of eight demands including a greater student voice in university affairs and the resignations of Mr. Kerrey, a former senator from Nebraska; James Murtha, the executive vice president; and Robert Millard, treasurer of the board of trustees, who students said was connected to a private security company working in Iraq.

[...]

That action ended after negotiations, but a students group calling itself the New School in Exile promised further disruptions if Mr. Kerrey did not accede to their demand to resign by April 1.

“With their demand still unmet as of this date, students have once again reclaimed this neglected, symbolic building which housed the New School for Social Research,” student organizers said in a news release on Friday. “On the 75th anniversary of the University in Exile, New School students are reclaiming the tradition of protest and political action that birthed the university and gave it meaning for generations to come.”

source: http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/10/students-occupy-new-school-building-again/?hp

The unmet demands from the original December occupation are:

Demands of the Occupation

• The removal of Bob Kerrey as president of our university
• The removal of James Murtha as executive vice president of our university
• Students, faculty, and staff elect the president, EVP, and Provost.
• Students are part of the interim committee to hire a provost.
• The removal of Robert B. Millard as treasurer of the board of trustees.
• Intelligible transparency and disclosure of the university budget and investments.
• The creation of a committee on socially responsible investments.
• The immediate suspension of capital improvement projects like the tearing down of 65 fifth Ave.
  • Instead, money towards the creation of an autonomous student space.
  • Instead, money towards scholarships and reducing tuition.
  • Instead, money for the library and student life generally.

source: http://monthlyreview.org/mrzine/ns181208.html

On the Poverty of Student Life:

with footnotes: http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/poverty.htm
without: http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/141

French original: http://library.nothingness.org/articles/4/fr/display/12

“SC nears the Abyss”

South Carolinian Wayne Clark wrote up a timely rant on Governor Sanford’s unblinking adherence to an ideology of inhuman subservience to the Free Market:

The heart of the problem – theirs and ours – is not that our political leaders are conservatives, but rather that they are inflexible ideologues wedded to a failed economic system. They are generals fighting not the last war but the one before that. Ronald Reagan has fallen off his horse. The invisible hand of Adam Smith has slapped us down. The free market first ran amuck then ran aground. Government is now regarded as the solution, not the problem, and this sticks in their craws like day-old cornbread.

Not an analysis, but precient.

Read it on Counterpunch here: http://www.counterpunch.org/clark02202009.html

Israeli Knesset Election Quiz

Elections to the Knesset, Israel’s parliament are today.

This Dutch site has an English-language quiz that lines you up with an Israeli political party. Israel has many many parties, because only 2% of the national vote is needed to secure representation in the Knesset. That said, most of the Israeli parties are quite right wing.

http://israel.kieskompas.nl/page/0/thema+s/

Taking a quiz likes this will make it apparent how little we outside the Middle East know about the internal debates of Israeli politics.

The quiz posits statements encapsulating Israeli political positions. You agree or disagree more or less strongly to the political statements as a way of gauging your position on Israeli political spectrum.

The boilerplate presupposes certain position for the test taker.

For example, the first question posed is “Under no circumstances should settlements be removed from Judea and Samaria.” Judea and Samaria is a term often used in Israel for the Occupied Territories, especially by supporters of the occupation and Jewish settlement.

Other statements like “The government should see to it that public life is conducted according to Jewish religious tradition” reflect disagreement between secular and observant Israeli Jews.

“The High Court of Justice should be able to rule on any action brought before it, even political ones.” is probably a reference to the recent tendency of the Knesset’s right-wing to outlaw largely Israeli Arab political parties just prior to elections. The High Court of Justice has reversed these political decisions before the two most recent elections.

While it may be that I’m posting the link to this quiz a little late for this election, the taking the quiz will be a good way of getting familiar with what you don’t know when the election results are determined.

Israeli News Resources, in English:

ynet: http://www.ynetnews.com/home/0,7340,L-3082,00.html

Haaretz Daily Newspaper:

http://haaretz.com/

Arabic News Resources, in English:

http://english.aljazeera.net/

Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_legislative_election,_2009

SC NAACP standing up to SC Electoral Commission

Its been a while since the election and, like the return of Paul Volcker, South Carolina’s electoral difficulties were predictable.  The Spartanburg Chapter of the SC NAACP held a public forum on problems and possible fixes with the election last night.

Spartanburg County Director of Voter Registration and Elections Henry Laye was there, addressing a widely reported technical failing of the vote:

Part of the problem with long lines in this year’s presidential election was that laptop computers with lists of registered voters on them couldn’t talk to one another — a problem that led to awkward, sometimes arbitrary divisions in line based on people’s last names. Laye said he was given a quote of $37,000 on Monday from a vendor that would allow those laptops to share a secure wireless connection and eliminate the need to divide people into any kind of alphabetical line.

 Laye was speaking to the Herald-Journal this past summer about long lines and you’d think from the June 10th article that the state had the problem well in hand.  In fact the ten precincts which used the laptops were among the slowest, with some waiting four hours to vote. 

Laye’s reference to a secure connection to the internet is puzzling, since he makes a virute of each machine’s independence from wireless communication in the June 10th article.   It may be that Laye is merely looking for a vendor to assume responsibility, as the BofE has wholeheartedly accepted the ES&S marketing strategy of the states problematic iVotronic machines.

I don’t believed that the South Carolina Board of Elections was dilligently vetting its purchases.  Unlike states like Ohio and Florida, South Carolina’s BofE doesn’t post much in the way of critical information on its website.  If this state has commissioned academic trials of its voting system, then it hasn’t seen fit to share the results with the public.  Florida and Ohio have done so, and it would probably be acceptable for South Carolina to make use of their work.

Its well known locally, but maybe is less known outside the state that the SC NAACP has taken the state government to task over removal of the Confederate flag from the State House grounds.

 

NAACP initiates public discussion on voting issues

By Jason Spencer
jason.spencer@shj.com

Published: Tuesday, December 2, 2008 at 3:44 p.m.
Last Modified: Tuesday, December 2, 2008 at 3:45 p.m.

Striking while the iron is hot, as Dwight James put it, the South Carolina NAACP and its local branches hosted a town hall meeting Monday night to go over the good, the bad and the potential changes that need to be made in this state’s election process.

James, the executive director of the state organization, left saying the discussion has only begun.

“I’m taking away from this a sense that there is growing support for an early-voting system in South Carolina,” he said. “And public officials are beginning to wake up to the fact that they need to make it easier and more accessible to vote.”

After the introduction of nine panelists — which included state Sen. Glenn Reese, state Rep. Harold Mitchell and Spartanburg County Councilman Michael Brown — the night quickly turned into a forum where people could vent their frustration and brainstorm ways in which the state could move forward. State Reps. Mike Forrester and Derham Cole Jr. were among the 50 or so people in the audience.

While some of the concerns have been raised in a public setting before, frustration from long lines — and some claims of voter intimidation — are still simmering from Election Day. Any change in the process will be at the feet of the state Legislature, which convenes in January, and perhaps to a limited extent, county government.

Office of Registrations and Elections Director Henry Laye will make a presentation to Spartanburg County Council later this month and to the Spartanburg County Legislative Delegation in February.

Some ideas broached Monday night:

– Early voting has become an increasingly hot topic. Such a system would be similar to what’s in place in North Carolina, where multiple polls are set up around a county two to three weeks before an election and any registered voter can cast a ballot there for any reason. There are multiple costs associated with such a system, not to mention the problem of finding venues to host the polls. But Bob Hall, head of the voting rights group Democracy NC, pointed out that this year, about 60 percent of Tarheel State voters took advantage of early voting. He also said counties like Buncombe (home to Asheville) and Wake (where Raleigh is) began opening polls in malls and other places that draw large numbers of people.

– Mitchell said he’s willing to look into a system that establishes a secure database that would allow online voting in South Carolina.

– Part of the problem with long lines in this year’s presidential election was that laptop computers with lists of registered voters on them couldn’t talk to one another — a problem that led to awkward, sometimes arbitrary divisions in line based on people’s last names. Laye said he was given a quote of $37,000 on Monday from a vendor that would allow those laptops to share a secure wireless connection and eliminate the need to divide people into any kind of alphabetical line.

– Disagreement over the necessity and fallibility of same-day voter registration intensified whenever that subject was brought up.

– Mitchell and Reese both said the state needed to crack down on the Division of Motor Vehicles, where many people choose to register to vote. One woman, Yvette Lee, told a story of 122 young people who had registered to vote for the first time this year at the DMV — only to have Election Day find them still without voter registration cards or any way to cast a ballot.

– Alice Henderson, an officer in the League of Women Voters, expressed interest in going to an all-mail form of voting, similar to what Oregon has adopted.

– Reese said candidates should be outlawed from going to any polls for the purpose of greeting people on Election Day.

The Spartanburg County Democratic Party will hold a post-election forum at 6 p.m. Monday at the Chapman Cultural Center.

URL: http://www.goupstate.com/article/20081202/NEWS/812020225/1083?Title=NAACP_initiates_public_discussion_on_voting_issues

 

Further reading:

Ellen Theisen. “The Privatization of United States Elections:  June 18, 2005. Speech to the Washington Federation of Democratic Women“.

Post-Election Thoughts on Minor Party and Independent Performance

The preliminary Presidential election results, according to CNN are:

Obama	63,364,884	52%
McCain	56,022,312	46%
Nader	651,356	1%
Barr	486,121	1%
Baldwin	173,632	0%
McKinney	140,507	0%

The numbers will change somewhat as the final results come in. Nader will probably hit 700,000. McKinney does only slightly better than Green nominee Cobb did in 2004.

I voted for Cynthia McKinney, Green Party candidate. However, I did some, very minor, campaigning for Nader/Gonzalez in the last few weeks. I campaigned for Nader to maximize the progressive vote, I figure the relative strength of the Nader campaign gave it a better chance of picking up wavering voters.

A few of my co-workers talked about their minister’s endorsing McCain from the pulpit. I waited in line for about an hour and a half to vote at Inman Mills Baptist Church. Small town Republicans were motivated to vote, there was no likelihood of the Obama taking SC.

Neither was there much possibility of a progressive breakthrough. My neighbors and co-workers knew Nader was running. Almost everyone thought he was the Green Party candidate. Mentioning McKinney produced confusion, and lecturing at that stage of the game seemed counterproductive.

Of all the minor campaigns, Nader/Gonzalez was the best organized. The McKinney campaign needed one break in this election: Hillary Clinton had to be Democratic nominee. Without being situated as the progressive African-American candidate for President, McKinney’s opportunities to attract attention evaporated. The subsequent disorganization of the campaign did nothing to overcome the already massive hurdles. Maybe Nader hired all the experienced people. Maybe the Greens didn’t have any money to hire anyone. Probably both. Somebody should write a book on the third party campaigns in 2008.

The media’s complete and utter fixation on the Presidential election as a horserace precluded the introduction of alternatives even when the McCain and Obama patently agreed on an issue. The best chance for breaking this lock occurred around the breakout: when Obama and McCain both flew back to Washington to endorse the Bush-Paulson emergency plan and massive public opposition erupted. Well, we got through that and back to talking about Joe the Plumber in the space of about a week. Topics that were never even seriously entertained in the media were the essential sameness of the GOP and Dems on Healthcare – neither plan corrects the basic problem of controlling cost – and the War in Iraq – both major parties support continued U.S. military presence until a stable puppet regime is established.

A national progressive Presidential campaign should simply hire the Nader organization. There aren’t sufficient resources or opportunities to run more than one national independent-progressive campaign. A Nader/McKinney ticket would have made more since than the Green campaign we got. I don’t think this is the end of the Green Party, which has done relatively well in in local elections this time. In Chicago, the Bay Area, Portland, Maine the Greens are the second party vs a Democratic machine. It would be foolish to rebrand that local organization. It might be possible to establish a federative structure at the national level that would preserve the Green Party, but expand the base to include the independent voter’s that nader attracts, independent unions like the United Electrical Workers, state parties like Vermont’s Progressive Party, and progressive organizations like Physicans for a National Health Plan and the Wilderness Society, whatever socialist organizations that would come on board, etc. Most of these organizations either did, or came close to, endorsing Nader in 2000. There’s your ready-made cabinet.

Maybe desirable to expand the party to more mainstream independents like the Independent Party of Minnesota, which at least declined to endorse either McCain or Obama and has a strong left-libertarian element. It was always Nader’s goal to build a reform movement, not an ideological party.  Taking in the results of this election, maybe that’s a better use of energy.

Maybe a looser national structure is needed. Nader’s organization is run by the man like a CEO.  The Greens appear to be poor at articulating the effective parts of the party as a whole.  A federative structure might use the strength of both. Set political reform, national health care, and withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan as the baseline.  Emphasize independence from the two parties, not a whole new party structure.  The Greens continue to participate as a national party, the Progressives, Peace and Freedom Party and others as state or regional parties.  If the Democrats fail to establish national health care and the war in Iraq is dragging on in 2010, then you may lay the groundwork for a federation to endorse a progressive candidate, using the ballot lines available, and getting new lines in other states in a collective basis – but work on healthcare, withdrawal and political reform first.

A federated political party hasn’t really been tried in the U.S. The Labor parties of Europe were traditionally organized this way. The Conference for Progressive Political Action was an attempt in the Twenties, wrecked by labor leaders too close to the Democrats. If you learn that lesson, the thing could work, and maybe later form the basis for a new political party. A federative national platform for progressive politics could represent solutions to national problems, like single-payer healthcare, and provide a context for local campaigns to work.

Where to find South Carolina Election Returns

South Carolina’s returns for the 2008 general election can be found here:

• Unofficial Results from the SC Election Commission: here.

• C-SPAN, using Associated Press data

• New York Times South Carolina results

• Fox News

• Google: Election map; News search on ‘“South Carolina” vote 2008‘

• CNN

• CBS

• AOL

Of all the sites, C-SPAN andthe New York Times appears to have the best minor party coverage.

Chris Hedges: Only Nader Is Right On All the Issues

Only Nader Is Right on the Issues

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20081103_only_nader_is_right_on_the_issues/
Posted on Nov 3, 2008

By Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist who has covered many
wars around the world. His column appears Mondays on Truthdig.

Tomorrow I will go to a polling station in Princeton, N.J., and vote for Ralph Nader. I know the tired arguments against a Nader vote. He can’t win. A vote for Nader is a vote for McCain. He threw the election to George W. Bush in 2000. He is an egomaniac.

There is little disagreement among liberals and progressives about the Nader and Obama campaign issues. Nader would win among us in a landslide if this was based on issues. Sen. Barack Obama’s vote to renew the Patriot Act, his votes to continue to fund the Iraq war, his backing of the FISA Reform Act, his craven courting of the Israeli lobby, his support of the death penalty, his refusal to champion universal, single-payer not-for-profit health care for all Americans, his call to increase troop levels and expand the war in Afghanistan, his failure to call for a reduction in the bloated and wasteful defense spending and his lobbying for the huge taxpayer swindle known as the bailout are repugnant to most of us on the left. Nader stands on the other side of all those issues.

So if the argument is not about issues what is it about?

Those on the left who back Obama, although they disagree with much of what he promotes, believe they are choosing the practical over the moral. They see themselves as political realists. They fear John McCain and the Republicans. They believe Obama is better for the country. They are right. Obama is better. He is not John McCain. There will be under Obama marginal improvements for some Americans although the corporate state, as Obama knows, will remain our shadow government and the working class will continue to descend into poverty. Democratic administrations have, at least until Bill Clinton, been more receptive to social programs that provide benefits, better working conditions and higher wages. An Obama presidency, however, will make no difference to those in the Middle East.

I can’t join the practical. I spent two decades of my life witnessing the suffering of those on the receiving end of American power. I have stood over the rows of bodies, including women and children, butchered by Ronald Reagan’s Contra forces in Nicaragua. I have inspected the mutilated corpses dumped in pits outside San Salvador by the death squads. I have crouched in a concrete hovel as American-made F-16 fighter jets, piloted by Israelis, dropped 500- and 1,000-pound iron-fragmentation bombs on Gaza City.

I can’t join the practical because I do not see myself exclusively as an American.  The narrow, provincial and national lines that divide cultures and races blurred and evaporated during the years I spent in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Europe and the Balkans. I built friendships around a shared morality, not a common language, religion, history or tradition. I cannot support any candidate who does not call for immediate withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan and an end to Israeli abuse of Palestinians. We have no moral or legal right to debate the terms of the occupation. And we will recover our sanity as a nation only when our troops have left Iraq and our president flies to Baghdad, kneels before a monument to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi war dead and asks for forgiveness.

We dismiss the suffering of others because it is not our suffering. There are between 600,000 and perhaps a million dead in Iraq. They died because we invaded and occupied their country. At least three Afghan civilians have died at the hands of the occupation forces for every foreign soldier killed this year. The dead Afghans include the 95 people, 60 of them children, killed by an air assault in Azizabad in August and the 47 wedding guests butchered in July during a bombardment in Nangarhar. The Palestinians are forgotten. Obama and McCain, courting the Israeli lobby, do not mention them. The 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza live in a vast open-air prison. Supplies and food dribble through the Israeli blockade. Ninety-five percent of local industries have shut down. Unemployment is rampant. Childhood malnutrition has skyrocketed. A staggering 80 percent of families in Gaza are dependent on international food aid to survive.

It is bad enough that I pay taxes, although I will stop paying taxes if we go to war with Iran. It is bad enough that I have retreated into a safe, privileged corner of the globe, a product of industrialized wealth and militarism. These are enough moral concessions, indeed moral failings. I will not accept that the unlawful use of American military power be politely debated among us like the subtle pros and cons of tort law.

George Bush has shredded, violated or absented America from its obligations under international law. He has refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol, backed out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, tried to kill the International Criminal Court, walked out on negotiations on chemical and biological weapons and defied the Geneva Conventions and human rights law in the treatment of detainees in our offshore penal colonies. Most egregiously, he launched an illegal war in Iraq based on fabricated evidence we now know had been discredited even before it was made public. The president is guilty, in short, of what in legal circles is known as the “crime of aggression.”

The legacy of the Bush administration may be the codification of a world without treaties, statutes and laws. Bush may have bequeathed to us a world where any nation, from a rogue nuclear state to a great imperial power, will be able to invoke its domestic laws to annul its obligations to others. This new order will undo five decades of international cooperation – largely put in place by the United States – and thrust us into a Hobbesian nightmare. The exercise of power without law is tyranny.

If we demolish the fragile and delicate international order, if we do not restore a world where diplomacy, broad cooperation and the law are respected, we will see our moral and political authority disintegrate. We will erode the possibility of cooperation between nation-states, including our closest allies, and see visited upon us the evils we visit on others. Obama, like McCain, may tinker with this new world, but neither says they will dismantle it. Nader would.

Practical men and women do not stand up against injustice. The practical remain silent. A voice, even one voice, which speaks the truth and denounces injustice is never useless. It is not impractical. It reminds us of what we should strive to become. It defies moral concession after moral concession that leaves us chanting empty slogans.

When I sat on the summit of Mount Igman in my armored jeep, the engine idling, before nervously running the gantlet of Serb gunfire that raked the dirt road into the besieged city of Sarajevo, I never asked myself if what I was doing was practical. Forty-five foreign correspondents died in the city along with some 12,000 Bosnians, including 2,000 children. Some 50,000 people were wounded. Of the dead and wounded 85 percent were civilians. I drove down the slope into Sarajevo, which was being hit by 2,000 shells a day and under constant sniper fire, because what was happening there was a crime. I drove down because I had friends in the city. I did not want them to be alone. Their stories had become mine.

War, with all its euphemisms about surges and the escalation of troops and collateral damage, is not an abstraction to me. I am haunted by hundreds of memories of violence and trauma. I have abandoned, because I no longer cover these conflicts, many I care about. They live in Gaza, Baghdad, Jerusalem, Beirut, Kabul and Tehran. They cannot vote in our election. They will, however, bear the consequences of our decision. Some, if the wars continue, may be injured or killed. The quest for justice is not about being practical. It is required by the bonds we share. They would do no less for me.

Vote No on South Carolina Ballot Measures 2 & 3

South Carolina has three statewide ballot questions on the 2008 ballot, which are amendments to the state’s constitution.

Voting “Yes” to  Amendment 1 brings the state constitution in compliance with the SC State Code by eliminating the constitutional mandate setting the female age of consent at 14.

Voting “No” to Amendment 2 will preserve the state constitution’s prohibition on investing state employee retirement funds in the stock market (”equity securities” in the language of the amendment).

Voting “No” to Amendment 3 will preserve the state constitution’s prohibition on any local government agencies from investing their employees’ retirement funds in the stock market.

Amendments 2 & 3 depend on an ever-growing stockmarket to increase the State’s investments for its retirees.  Given the current state of the stock market,  we shouldn’t get state retiree funds tied up in unstable equities.

Public agencies who previously invested their retirees’ pensions in stocks have experienced some dire losses recently, as this November 2, 2008 New York Times article explains:

NY Times, November 2, 2008
The Reckoning
From Midwest to M.T.A., Pain From Global Gamble
By CHARLES DUHIGG and CARTER DOUGHERTY

“People come up to me in the grocery store and say, ‘How did we get
suckered into this?’ “-  Marc Hujik, of the Kenosha, Wis., school board

On a snowy day two years ago, the school board in Whitefish Bay, Wis., gathered to discuss a looming problem: how to plug a gaping hole in the teachers’ retirement plan.

It turned to David W. Noack, a trusted local investment banker, who proposed that the district borrow from overseas and use the money for a complex investment that offered big profits.

“Every three months you’re going to get a payment,” he promised, according to a tape of the meeting. But would it be risky? “There would need to be 15 Enrons” for the district to lose money, he said.

The board and four other nearby districts ultimately invested $200 million in the deal, most of it borrowed from an Irish bank. Without realizing it, the schools were imitating hedge funds.

Half a continent away, New York subway officials were also being wooed by bankers. Officials were told that just as home buyers had embraced adjustable-rate loans, New York could save money by borrowing at lower interest rates that changed every day.

For some of the deals, the officials were encouraged to rely on the same Irish bank as the Wisconsin schools.

During the go-go investing years, school districts, transit agencies and other government entities were quick to jump into the global economy, hoping for fast gains to cover growing pension costs and budgets without raising taxes. Deals were arranged by armies of persuasive financiers who received big paydays.

But now, hundreds of cities and government agencies are facing economic turmoil. Far from being isolated examples, the Wisconsin schools and New York’s transportation system are among the many players in a financial fiasco that has ricocheted globally.

The Wisconsin schools are on the brink of losing their money, confronting educators with possible budget cuts. Interest rates for New York’s subways are skyrocketing and contributing to budget woes that have transportation officials considering higher fares and delaying long-planned track repairs.

The rest of the article is available here to NYTimes: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/02/business/02global.html?ref=us.

At the moment it’s free, but will be subscription only in a while.

South Carolina’s Two Party Monopoly At Work

Bob Walkeris the incumbent Republican representative to the South Carolina State Assembly from the 34th District in Spartanburg County. Walker lost the Republican primaryto Joey Millwood, by only 19 votes. a newcomer supported by the Governor Mark Sanford and the Spartanburg County GOP chair Rick Beltram.  Millwood is on the ballot against Democrat Mark Chambers tomorrow.
Spartanburg’s daily paper published an editorial endorsing Walker and requesting that voters write his name in on the ballot.  The papers justifications are reasonable: neither of the two candidates on the ballot seem ready and/or capable of serving as Representative.  I’ve quoted the editorial in full at the bottom of this post.

The unsought endorsement of a Walker has led to a collusion of the Spartanburg Republican and Democratic Parties which is intended to completely deprive Walker of a hearing and the opportunity to be elected. In a highly unusual move, the chairmen of the Spartanburg Democratic and Republican Parties held a joint press conference condeming the paper for encouraging votes for any candidate other than the two on the ballot.  With typically twisted logic, GOP chair Rick Beltram cast the paper’s endorsement as putting a burden on his party to suppress Walker’s vote:

Spartanburg County Republican Party Chairman Rick Beltramsaid Wednesday’s editorial endorsing Walker over both Millwood and Chambers put a burden on his team of volunteers to make sure the outgoing state representative does not engage in any kind of campaigning.

Beltram claims that if Walker says so much as a “thank-you” to someone encouraging him to run that the county party will file an injunction against the non-candidate.

The paper condemned the two parties in a subsequent editorial, putting the case for political openness very plainly:

Why do the parties want to limit the choices available to voters?

They are not the legitimate gatekeepers of the political process. They have no authority under the Constitution. A candidate does not have to earn the approval of one of the parties before he can be considered by voters.

If the county parties are threatened when voters are encouraged to consider options outside their narrow offerings, their only viable choice is to offer better candidates, not try to impose artificial limits on the political process. And they certainly have no right to stifle political speech they dislike.

The Spartanburg County Republican Party  subsequently did file an injunction in state circuit court to prohibit Walker from campaigning.  The county GOP charged that Walker was violating the state’s “sore loser” law, the same law that the Democratic Party used to keep Eugene Platt from running as a Green in the 115th Assembly district outside Charleston. 

Judge Roger Couch sided with the GOP, ruling:

‘Defendant, Robert E. ‘Bob’ Walker is hereby ordered, to refrain from offering or campaigning in the ensuing (2008) general election for election to this office (House District 38) or any other office for which a nominee has been elected in the party primary election.‘

Campaigning for Walker quitely continues, without his involvement.  It doesn’t seem that the courts or the County GOP can overcome the reservations of the paper and a large number of citizens: that the Democrat is unready and the Republican is a ideologue in the pocket of a school voucher’s PAC.

An organization called “Citizens For A Better Spartanburg” has been supporting Walker through phone calls and campaign literature.  BothWalker and the group say they are not in contact with each other.

The Herald Journal has been quite good about opposing the “sore loser” law, even writing an editorial in support of Platt back in the spring.   Hopefully the exposure of the manipulation of voter choice by the two parties will lead to the law’s repeal.

In the meantime, since I live in the 34th Assembly District, I’ll be able to tell just how the electoral commission is equiped to handle write in votes.  Given the extremely poor reputation of the iVotronic machines, and the laxidazical attitude of the SC Election Commission, I’m prepared to witness some frustration, and possibly a botched election.

 

•  Bob Walker’s profile on project votesmart is here.
• The Herald Journal October 15, 2008 editorial endorsing Walker.

Write in Bob Walker
Spartanburg Herald Journal Editorial
Published: Wednesday, October 15, 2008 at 3:15 a.m.
Last Modified: Wednesday, October 15, 2008 at 11:21 a.m.
Citizens in state House District 38 don’t have a good choice for effective representation on the ballot this year. That’s why they should write in the name of Bob Walker.

Order a Reprint Walker, the district’s incumbent representative, lost the Republican nomination to political newcomer Joey Millwoodby a margin of 19 votes in a primary with just over 3,000 votes cast.

The state’s “sore loser” law prohibits Walker from running against Millwood, and he has made no move to do so, but the law doesn’t prohibit voters from rethinking the decision made by a small turnout in the GOP primary.

Millwood is opposed on the ballot by Democratic nominee Mark Chambers. Neither candidate is likely to represent the district well in Columbia.

Millwood, sports editor of the Tryon Daily Bulletin, is a reflexive, ideological conservative. He backs the proper position on some issues, but his understanding of those issues is superficial. For instance, he says that one of his top priorities is to cut state spending, but he cannot say what he would cut beyond the money that goes to the General Assembly’s competitive grants program, a tiny portion of the state budget.

More troublesome is Millwood’s willingness to support using public funds to pay for private school tuition through tax credits. Supporters of such programs have poured large amounts of money into Millwood’s campaign.

Millwood has been funded by these groups to such a degree that voters have to wonder whether he can break away from what he calls his “movement” if the best interests of his district dictate such a break.

Mark Chambers, who provides maintenance for restaurants, is a well-intentioned and community-spirited man but is not up to the job of representing northern Spartanburg County in the Statehouse.

An effective lawmaker has to be able to take a serious, in-depth look at the issues before him and let the practical concerns of his district determine his vote. He also has to be able to work with other lawmakers to affect important legislation.

We are not confident that either Millwood or Chambers can provide that level of representation. We know that Walker can. He has a record of effective work in Columbia.

It is unusual to recommend that voters look outside the ballot to fill an office, but it is necessary in this election. House District 38 voters should write in the name of Bob Walker.

This story appeared in print on page A12

GOP challenges to black voters in Spartanburg County

From the October 31, 2008 Spartanburg Herald-Journal, Page A-1:  

…Spartanburg County Republican Party Chairman Rick Beltram, taking the role of a poll watcher, challenged the vote of 74-year-old Fannie Rogers because he didn’t believe her signature matched what was on her credentials. This upset the actual poll worker — the person who checks in a voter — and soon Ruby Rice, president of the Spartanburg NAACP branch, was involved.

‘I don’t have real good handwriting anyway, and this man (Beltram) said it didn’t match the writing on my card,’ Rogers said. ‘It really upset me. Ruby came over and asked him if he was harassing me. He said no. I said yes.’

The poll worker left in tears, Beltram left, saying attorneys for Republican candidates would be at the Election Office today, and Rice left to call the state Election Commission and complain.

…

Beltram painted himself as the victim in the situation, saying once he questioned the validity of Rogers’ signature, ‘all the black ladies ganged up on me.’

‘They targeted me. Soon as I walked in, it was clear,’ Beltram said. ‘As soon as I saw Michael Reese, I knew right away what was going on. But I didn’t talk to a voter. I talked to a poll worker, and she’s the one who wanted to bark back.’