Making the case for World War III.

Crossposted from Left Toon Lane, Bilerico Project & My Left Wing click to enlarge If an alliance of first world nations like France, Germany and the UK joined in battle to stop America's reckless foreign policy, it might be good for America in the long run. It might be a good wake-up call to dead-end citizen demographic who simply don't give a shit about anything other than themselves. They don't care about kids. They don't care about economics. They don't care about law. They sure as Hell don't care about the environment. But they do want to control you and monitor you in every way imaginable. If America is conquered, we might get our taxation realigned with reality, we might get universal healthcare - we might even get our economy rolling again. In all seriousness, if the Esercito Italiano (Italian Army) came knocking on my door, I think I might just say "Ciao! Sangiovese?"

I no longer fear the Kucinich Revolution: Part 4

Crossposted from Left Toon Lane, Bilerico Project & My Left Wing click to enlarge In Parts One and Two, I discussed the support Kucinich has and the irrational fear also associated with electing Kucinich. In Part Three, I discussed Kucinich's time as Mayor of Cleveland and how the GOP slander machine stating "he drove Cleveland into bankruptcy" is an out right lie. Today we are moving on to the real important stuff - issues. I have heard a lot of talk from the candidates stating "any Democrat running for President will be better than Bush." I believe that sentiment is true. But I also believe there are varying degrees of HOW MUCH BETTER they will be than Bush. In the comments in the previous parts of this series, there are claims that the changes we (The People) want to make to this country "can't be done." "The shift is too fast, these things will take time to change." Oh I hope not. We have 50 million people in this nation without health care. The rest of us have health insurance that is precarious. My wife just got a letter from our policy holder, Blue Cross, asking whether her recent yearly physical was the result of a work related injury - she has been out of the workforce for over ten years, yet we had to go through the damn motions with these chuckle-heads to get the claim paid. If it was something serious like cancer, I can't imagine the red tape that would get thrown at our face. With Americans daily needing health care that either allows them to live or die, this is not a problem we can gradually ease our way out of. We need swift, decisive legislation and leadership to get us out of this mess. Kucinich is the lone candidate that has universal health care for all as part of his platform - everyone else is offering "insurance." I have enough of insurance. Haven't you? Our jobs are being sucked out of this country at an alarming rate. A very alarming rate. When I was growing up in the real town of Dobson, NC, the town of 1,200 people was teeming with textile mills. They were everywhere. Even the gas station across from the court house had rented out one of the car repair bays to a guy who was making socks day and night. Jobs were plentiful, parents could send their kids to UNC or NC State and there was enough money to retire at 60. That was the horrible days of the Carter Administration in 1980. When Reagan got into office, the borders began to open for business and the jobs from my hometown were siphoned off and weren't replaced with new jobs. Now, the number one industry in North Carolina is logging. People in that Congressional District (NC-05) have had to go through "skill retraining" several times since then. You simply can't have a single career anymore in rural America. Hell, you can't even keep the same employer for more than four years - right about when you would receive matching funds for your 401K you find yourself out of work. Now, 27 years later, our economic base, the middle class has been pushed off a cliff and they (we) are tumbling toward a very nasty end. Our open border policies need to be clamped shut and not over the span of three decades. We need to exit NAFTA, CAFTA, GATT and the WTO today, now, 10 minutes ago. Which candidate has this as a policy? Take a guess. Kucinich. And oddly enough, this actually makes him appealing to conservatives. This brings us to the mother-fucking war. BushCo wants another $50 billion on top of all the other requests. Hillary wants to keep troops there, Obama wants to take our time getting out of Iraq. Biden wants to split Iraq into three pieces and keep troops there (that means we will be fighting a six front civil war). No thanks. We need out, we need out now. Kucinich is the only one willing to state the obvious - the war was a failure and we need to get out. He was the only one in the race not snookered into voting for the damn thing to begin with. Hillary was for the war up until six months before the 2006 election. If it took her that long to figure out the war was an idiotic idea, then for me, she doesn't have the mental capabilities to get this nation out of the cesspool of despair we are in. If you look at Kucinich's voting record and his anthology of submitted legislation over the past 10 years, they read as if written by someone with prescient abilities. I am not saying he is a soothsayer or a prophet from Ohio, I am saying he is one smart guy and we need more of people like him in Congress, not less. Our nation is in serious trouble and we have long since passed the point where half-measures would make any difference. Unless we get a President that is willing to actually take, Honest-To-God bold steps, we may be seeing the last days of Jefferson's America. Hillary, Obama and Edwards would be an improvement to what we currently have in the White House, but their histories show they are ill-equipped to handle the challenges ahead of us. Only Dennis Kucinich has risked ridicule and even his political career to do the right thing. His political past has been nothing BUT a series of career-ending decisions, but every decision has been for the benefit for the citizens, never corporate interests. That is why he keeps getting re-elected. He is the only one that has ever gone out on a limb for We The People. Now, I wonder how many VOTERS will join him? How many will join the Second American Revolution?

Who isn’t selling us down river?

Crossposted from Left Toon Lane & My Left Wing click to enlarge Where is what Wikipedia has to say on fascism: Fascism is associated by many scholars with one or more of the following characteristics: a very high degree of nationalism, economic corporatism, a powerful, dictatorial leader who portrays the nation, state or collective as superior to the individuals or groups composing it. First off, our government has sold us off to the highest corporate bidder. No longer are the needs of We The People met, but the needs of the Corporation are set higher than the individual. Big Oil has attacked democracy by price gouging, the insistence of gross over consumption and lobbying to prevent alternative fuels from coming to market. Why bring about a hydrogen economy - a renewable resource, when over $90 trillion in fossil fuel is still in the ground? Profit Over People should be the official tag line for the healthcare industry. Most drugs today are either wholly funded or partially funded by the US taxpayers, yet these medical discoveries and patents are not considered owned by We The People, nor does the US Treasury see any windfall from these outrageous profits from medical and pharmaceutical research. If the taxpayers finance the development, the drugs should be generic - right off the bat. The military industrial complex is one of the worst. HALF of our non-discretionary budget goes to funding war and the preparation of war. Instead of using that money to buy off a dictator a week or bring peace via diplomatic channels, we build new nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction that we block other countries from NOT developing. If we used half of our defense budget to buy off dictators, would could wipe out war on this planet in just a few months. That is how Bill Clinton controlled North Korea - the good old fashion bribe. God love him.

Brits and their snooty healthcare!

Crossposted from Left Toon Lane & My Left Wing click to enlarge I had the opportunity to have dinner with a living, breathing human who was a product of socialized medicine, otherwise known as the English Bloke. Once a month, my car club gets together for a dinner and since it is a British car club, well, Brits attend. Usually we sing the glories of boots and bonnets, wings and sills but last night we chatted about socialized medicine. According to him, anyone can get free medical care. He had a relative that fell off the top of his house and broke his hip. He had a replacement hip that night. Grand total? Nada. But if your hip was wearing out and needing replacing due to wear, it may take three months to get that done. Which was the two months shorter than what my Grandmother got here in the US with damn fine health insurance. Plus she had a huge bill afterward, plus a stroke during surgery (more cash) and some of the physical therapy wasn't covered. Our cost? Close to $10k with a 60 day longer wait. The other issue that BushCo never brings up about socialized medicine is you can still have insurance. In Britain, most employers offer supplemental private insurance ON TOP of the regular socialized medical care. Think AFLAC. Bottom line is this - Britain's National Health Service provides regular check-ups, emergency services and in-home care for free. Emergency things like broken bones, pediatric fevers and other issues like cancer that need immediate care gets immediate attention. Things that are not immediate medical threats like joint replacement, male pattern baldness and erectile dysfunction you will need to make an appointment, just like in the US. Visit the NHS site or line up to watch SiCKO in the upcoming weeks. Either way, take a few minutes to leanr how much you are really being lied to about healthcare.

How sunflowers helped me deal with the healthcare system.

Crossposted from Left Toon Lane & My Left Wing click to enlarge Years ago in 1993, I was in a car accident that put me out of work for about 5 years (God bless my wife for pulling BOTH of us through that). Above and beyond being angry for being hit by a half-drunk woman running a red light, I also had to contend with the healthcare system - or what passed for one. I would be in agony and call up for a doc visit and could only get an appointment in 30 days. I would need painkillers and because of my demographic they would only give me NSAIDS (non-narcotic Tylenol and other similar drugs). Nope, nothing powerful for the white boy. The only option I had was self-medication - I grew pot on the back porch camouflaged by sunflowers. Although not a cure, but it helped relieve the muscular pain around my lumbar and neck (my neck still hurts every fucking day, including right this minute - but no where near as bad). By my fourth year of treatment, my physical therapy consisted of not moving my lumbar (where the muscles detached from the spine) and to strengthen the area around it. So far, this path provided no relief and I am not going into the botched spinal nerve block where I coded on the table - yes friends, dead for a bit. You know it is bad when you wake up and you have 30 people in the room and the first thing out of the doctor's mouth is, "well, we won't try that again." My exit out of the nightmare was switching hospitals and finding a new doctor. I learned of this doctor through an underground network of other disgruntled patients near my home and it was whispered he was a miracle worker. I can imagine this was analogous to finding an abortion doctor pre Rove V. Wade, but without the criminal aspects and high risk of mortality. So I made an appointment and waited the typical 30 days. I arrived at the new docs office and he gave my a bucket of hydrocodone and told me to hit the gym EVERY DAY and begin exercising my lumbar area and to INCLUDE the dreaded torsion exercises! About six months later, while sleeping late at night, I woke up with a start. Something was wrong - different somehow and after a few minutes of trying to untangle the fact that I was astonished at something but didn't know what, it hit me. My back didn't hurt, but it hadn't hurt for weeks! I told the physician the good news at the next visit. He scheduled a follow-up for the next month but in effect, the big source of pain had been healed. The ironic thing, is the physician that fixed my back pain suffered from kyphosis - in layman's terms, he was a humpback.

No More Honeymoon

The topic below was originally posted on my blog, the Intrepid Liberal Journal and crossposted at The Peace Tree. Election night 2006 was a satisfying result after the calamity of one party reactionary rule. On a personal level, I juggled my day job and after hours phone banking to help in the effort. Many other activists did the same out of patriotism and desire to establish a bulwark against the corporate theocrats in Washington. It feels like another lifetime and as The Nation duly noted in their latest edition, “The Honeymoon Is Over”: “As Congress left town for its Memorial Day recess, the euphoria cast by the 2006 election victories was gone. Disappointed by the Democrats' inability to force a withdrawal timeline into the war-funding bill, angered by a trade deal hatched in secret, dismayed at backsliding on cleaning up Capitol Hill, progressives were faced with the unpleasant reality of the new Congress, warts and all. The slim Democratic majority in both Houses is not a progressive majority. Just as distressing as the cave-in on war funding was the continued power of the bipartisan money party. Beyond ending the war, Democrats were elected because of popular rejection of corporate trade policies and the stench of corruption in Washington. Tom DeLay is gone, but the corporate lobbies just reloaded with Democrats. When the House leadership announced a trade accord that the Chamber of Commerce celebrated as a model for giving Bush renewed fast-track authority, hopes for a new economic course were punctured. Then, House Democrats wouldn't support even a two-year hiatus that would slow the revolving door between Congress and the lobby world. (‘That's our retirement plan,’ complained anonymous legislators.)” I largely agree with that assessment about the Democratic majority’s corporatist leanings and sympathy for the K-Street industry. As for the war, even before Democrats assumed control, I advocated for either invoking the War Powers Act or cutting off funding. Timid and feckless, the Democrats were more concerned with implementing a political strategy of bleed and win. While the ongoing war continued to bleed Bush and the GOP, the Democrats were content to pass bills that scored political points and accomplished very little. The so-called benchmarks the Bush Administration agreed to is window dressing. Ultimately, the plug will be pulled on this war by the GOP in September. Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has said his party doesn’t want another election campaign about Iraq. All that remains is for some more soldiers to “die for a mistake” as the young John Kerry once put it, while the Iraqis continue to kill each other. Bush had hoped to hand off the war to his successor so defeat would not happen on his watch. How ironic that Bush's fellow Republicans who enabled him to pursue this immoral and diastrous war of choice, will have their fingerprints on our withdrawal. But the overall problem of combating radical Islam with a foreign policy based on international cooperation and strategic logic remains. We're losing Afghanistan and getting little value from our support of Musharaff in Pakistan. Democrats deliver platitudes about sending more troops to Afghanistan after we leave Iraq. Yet they don't explain why an escalation in Afghanistan would be any more successful than the current surge in Iraq. Meanwhile, an economic policy guided by corporatism at the expense of working people struggling to keep up with the cost of living is not being reversed. Why don’t they pass a bill overturning the hideous Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 passed by the Republican majority? Or make a push for reforming healthcare? Granted, President Bush remains an obstacle to enacting a progressive program and more can be accomplished if the right person is elected to the White House next year. But that is no excuse for not maximizing their majority platform today to build public support and educate the citizenry. Congressional Democrats have wasted five months. Precious time that could’ve been used to aggressively advocate for replacing this insipid era of deranged privatization and cronyism, with bold initiatives designed to lift the working poor, nurture a vibrant middle class and yes provide healthcare for all. However, the elections of 2006 were simply a first step in a long journey. Expecting a progressive reformation after one midterm election cycle was never realistic. Progressive activists, bloggers and citizens nationwide need to put their cynicism aside and remain engaged. The Nation put it best in their editorial’s closing paragraph: “Democratic majorities have provided us with relatively progressive leaders in both houses of Congress and several aggressive committee chairs who are beginning to unearth the hidden horrors of this rogue Administration. But we still don't have the progressive strength in Congress or the leadership in the White House that can change this country's course. The serial disappointments of recent weeks are but a reminder that we've got work to do.” We’ve only begun to fight for what is right.