Think Humanely

Our Nobel Peace Prize-winning president has not only continued the same savage foreign policies of his rightfully maligned and disgraced predecessor, he has actually escalated and expanded them. He has defended Bush’s policies in both the federal and Supreme Courts. He has continued the war in Iraq (and to his followers who would like to argue that he has promised to end it – is it over yet? What about the tens of thousands of troops that he’s clearly said will remain and the tens of thousands of “private contractors” who will join them? What of the several permanent military bases?) and escalated the war in Afghanistan. Glenn Greenwald concisely writes

if you count our occupation of Iraq, our twice-escalated war in Afghanistan, our rapidly escalating bombing campaigns in Pakistan and Yemen, and various forms of covert war involvement in Somalia, one could reasonably say that we’re fighting five different wars in Muslim countries.

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Add to those five fronts the “crippling” sanctions on Iran many Democratic Party luminaries are now advocating, combined with the chest-besting threats from our Middle East client state that the next wars they fight against Muslims will be even “harsher” than the prior ones, and it’s almost easier to count the Muslim countries we’re not attacking or threatening than to count the ones we are.

Aside from the inherent abhorrence of these actions, there is another, more disgusting and dangerous aspect to what the President is doing. Greenwald has previously cited an article in The Independent written by Johann Hari. In it, Hari interviews a number of former religious extremists who came to renounce their jihadist-leanings. He writes

Seventeen former radical Islamists have “come out” in the past 12 months and have begun to fight back. Would they be able to tell me the reasons that pulled them into jihadism, and out again? Could they be the key to understanding – and defusing – Western jihadism?

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The most famous former Islamist fanatic in Britain is Maajid Nawaz . . . He started to recruit other students, as he had done so many times before. But it was harder. “Everyone hated the [unelected] government [of Hosni Mubarak], and the US for backing it,” he says. But there was an inhibiting sympathy for the victims of 9/11 – until the Bush administration began to respond with Guantanamo Bay and bombs. “That made it much easier. After that, I could persuade people a lot faster.”

After having spent significant time with a number of ex-fanatics, Hari concludes

To my surprise, the ex-jihadis said their rage about Western foreign policy – which was real, and burning – emerged only after their identity crises, and as a result of it. They identified with the story of oppressed Muslims abroad because it seemed to mirror the oppressive disorientation they felt in their own minds. Usman Raja, a bluff, buff boxer who begged to become a suicide bomber in the mid-1990s, tells me: “Your inner life is chaotic and you feel under threat the whole time. And then you’re told by Islamists that life for Muslims everywhere is chaotic and under threat. It becomes bigger than you. It’s about the world – and that’s an amazing relief. The answer isn’t inside your confused self. It’s out there in the world.”

But once they had made that leap to identify with the Umma – the global Muslim community – they got angrier the more abusive our foreign policy came. Every one of them said the Bush administration’s response to 9/11 – from Guantanamo to Iraq – made jihadism seem more like an accurate description of the world. Hadiya Masieh, a tiny female former HT organiser, tells me: “You’d see Bush on the television building torture camps and bombing Muslims and you think – anything is justified to stop this. What are we meant to do, just stand still and let him cut our throats?”

But the converse was – they stressed – also true. When they saw ordinary Westerners trying to uphold human rights, their jihadism began to stutter. Almost all of them said that they doubted their Islamism when they saw a million non-Muslims march in London to oppose the Iraq War: “How could we demonise people who obviously opposed aggression against Muslims?” asks Hadiya.

These “Bush” policies, as so many liberals like to think of them, are now Obama policies. He defends them, uses them, and expands upon them. We continue to bomb foreign, sovereign nations and, due largely to the way we indiscriminately attack and the weapons that we use, innocent civilians inevitably are murdered. The result?:

Protesters took to the streets in Afghanistan on Wednesday, burning an effigy of the US president and shouting “death to Obama” to slam civilian deaths during Western military operations.

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“The government must prevent such unilateral operations otherwise we will take guns instead of pens and fight against them (foreign forces),” students from the University of Nangahar’s education faculty said in a statement.

Marching through the main street of Jalalabad, the students chanted “death to Obama” and “death to foreign forces”, witnesses said.

The protesters torched a US flag and an effigy of US President Barack Obama in a public square in central Jalalabad, before dispersing.

“Our demonstration is against those foreigners who have come to our country,” Safiullah Aminzai, a student organiser, told AFP.

“They have not brought democracy to Afghanistan but they are killing our religious scholars and children,” he added.

If the goal is to minimize terrorism and the recruitment of terrorists, then Obama and this country aren’t simply taking the wrong course of action, they’re taking the exact course of action that makes such a goal absolutely impossible to attain. There will be no minimization. Recruitment will not decline. Terrorism will continue and it will increase. Those willing to join a jihad against belligerent, murderous superpower will continue to grow. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Our government claims that those crazy Muslims are incredibly dangerous, that they “want to kill our children,” and “hate us for our freedoms.” Yet it is our actions that continue to allow such danger to not only exist, but grow.

The senate has now finished rubbing their greasy, McTeague-like fingers all over their health care bill, having made it progressively worse with every single Congressional meeting and change. Let’s remember: the House version was already considered a weak, watered-down version of true reform that didn’t go nearly far enough in helping individual Americans. In fact, it seemed to be more supportive of the very insurance companies that the bill was supposedly designed to protect Americans from in the first place. This version now looks like the Civil Rights Act compared to what the Senate has managed to shit out.

The senate version has no public option, which in and of itself was a down-syndrome version of a universal or single-payer system. Nick Skala, who worked for Physicians for a National Health Program, had this to say about the public option:

The public option preserves all the systemic deficiencies that we see in the current system…It maintains a finance system that is based on private insurance and private insurers and their drive to fight claims, issue denials, screen out the sick and make a big profit generate tremendous administrative waste — 400 billion dollars a year.

Now you can expand coverage by just raising taxes and paying insurers to cover people but that’s not a sustainable system…But it won’t cover every body and it will fall apart quickly due to rising cost as we’ve seen in Massachusetts, Vermont, Oregon, Tennessee and Minnesota — state after state after state and it hasn’t worked.

Now the definition of insanity is to repeat what has gone on in the past and expect a different result. Yet that’s what we’re doing with the public option. And as a representative of physicians in that capacity, and certainly the relationship I have with nurses and patients, I feel it’s my duty to be honest about the best policy research, the best literature, and the best experience that we have and that all indicates that the public option is going to fail.

Also see this chart comparing a single-payer system with that of the public option. It is important to note that a single-payer system would actually save an estimated $400 billion a year.

So our elected representatives first refused to adopt a single-payer system that has been proven effective by various western industrialized nations, all of whom are generally ranked higher in terms of medical care than the United States. At least the public option, despite all of its serious faults, at least provided Americans with a choice beyond the corrupt, malignant private insurers. People could finally get care and treatment at a relatively affordable cost without being subject to the whims of corporations that value profit over its customers. But that, too, is now gone.

Despite the fact that the Senate stripped their bill of such an option for the American people, they have continued to insist on a mandate. This literally baffles me. I’m a misanthrope. A cynic. I expect incompetence and corruption from our elected officials. I expect dishonesty and theft. Despite this, despite my low, in-the-gutter covered with toxic runoff expectations, I am still shocked by the unbelievable, blatantly corrupt and unethical nature of this mandate. Let’s be clear: the government is going to force every American to buy private insurance or face significant fines and possible confiscation of funds by the IRS. Some people will qualify for some government assistance, but ultimately, a gun is being put to your head and you’re being told to open your wallet and hand over your hard-earned income to the same assholes who provide such an expensive, shitty service that you either can’t already afford it or don’t want to. Democrat Anthony Weiner, echoing propaganda common among his colleagues and uncritical supporters of this legislation, tries to mask the mandate as a responsible obligation that every American should fulfill and has compared it to car insurance.

Weiner is either deluding himself to make the bill more palatable, suffering from a rather serious intellectual deficiency, or outright lying to the public. This comparison to car insurance is a classic false analogy, finding one or two similarities between the two and therefore concluding that they are entirely alike or comparable. Weiner assumes that the driving of a car is comparable to being able to receive medical treatment. No one argues that driving a car is a universal or moral right, let alone an imperative. Being able to do so is obviously helpful, but you’re not going to die or watch someone you love die as a result of not having one or having one that is of inferior quality.

Also, what is the reason for driver’s insurance? It is so that if you carelessly or recklessly cause damage to someone else’s property (or damage is done to yours), no one has to go bankrupt in order to pay for repairs. More importantly is the fact that paying for car insurance doesn’t lead to bankruptcy at all. There is a vast price difference between car and health insurance. The average cost of car insurance is $795 in 2007, an actual decrease of 2. 6%. The cost of health insurance in 2009, however, is $4,824 for an individual and $13,375 for a family, an increase of 5% from the previous year. In this same report from USAToday, John Fritz notes, “Since 1999, health insurance premiums for families rose 131%, the report found, far more than the general rate of inflation, which increased 28% over the same period. Overall, health care in the United States is expected to cost $2.6 trillion this year, or 17% of the nation’s economy, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office.”

If you can’t afford car insurance, you still have options. You can possibly drive someone else’s car or rely on public transportation. Comparable options do not exist for health care.

In most of the western industrialized world, health care is considered a right, not a luxury. Such a belief isn’t even a recent development. Dr. King said, “Of all forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.” Hippocrates argued that, “A wise man should consider that health is the greatest of human blessings.” And Buddha: “Without health life is not life; it is only a state of languor and suffering – an image of death.” No one bats an eye at not being given or provided a car. But it is grossly inhumane to deny someone medical attention, or at least the means to attain it. People die from one, inconvenienced by the other. Medical insurance isn’t about protecting other people from a mistake on your part, but about protecting yourself against the inevitable deterioration of our bodies, from accidents outside our control, from environmental poisons and toxins, from anguish and suffering itself.

The service provided by private insurance companies is so astronomically priced and provides so very little that of all the medical-related bankruptcies in this country, 60% are actually already insured. The average cost of health insurance doesn’t reflect the hundreds of thousands that one is still likely to incur if ever seriously injured or ill. This isn’t protection. It’s more akin to a mafia shakedown. Pay us money or we’ll beat the shit out of you. Paying this mandate won’t be the sign of a responsible American, but a desperate one who has been mugged in the alley, an American that is likely to fall further and further into economic disarray while receiving a product that has consistently been ranked as one of the worst in the Western world. The World Health Organization currently has us rated #37 in the world , far behind all of those “evil socialist” countries in Europe and elsewhere.

The very idea of forcing Americans to give more of their money – money that they do not have – to private insurance companies is repulsive. These companies already make billions of dollars. According to FactCheck.org, the following companies posted these earnings:

UnitedHealth Group: $859 million in the second quarter of 2009
Humana Inc.: $282 million quarterly profit
Health Net: $40 million profit in the spring alone
Wellpoint: $693 million in this quarter
CIGNA: $435 million for the quarter

All of this while the average family income has fallen. David Leonhardt writes , “the typical American household made less money last year than the typical household made a full decade ago. . . In the four decades that the Census Bureau has been tracking household income, there has never before been a full decade in which median income failed to rise. (The previous record was seven years, ending in 1985.) Other Census data suggest that it also never happened between the late 1940s and the late 1960s. So it doesn’t seem to have happened since at least the 1930s.” As if further stuffing the coffers of gluttonous, indifferent insurers with the diminishing savings of Americans were not offensive enough, consider not just the inferiority of the service, but the character of the companies providing it. Their profits are in direct proportion to the suffering of Americans. Former senior executive at CIGNA Wendell Potter testified against his former company before the very Senate that craft this bill. As Ezra Klein reports

The industry, Potter says, is driven by “two key figures: earnings per share and the medical-loss ratio, or medical-benefit ratio, as the industry now terms it. That is the ratio between what the company actually pays out in claims and what it has left over to cover sales, marketing, underwriting and other administrative expenses and, of course, profits.”

Think about that term for a moment: The industry literally has a term for how much money it “loses” paying for health care.

Knowing this, these companies find ways to refuse the authorization of treatments. Americans will be paying for something that they may never receive, not because of some product shortage or lack of need but simply because the insurance companies know they can increase their profit off of saying no to the sick and dying. And whereas a car insurance company’s refusal to pay a claim may only result in having to live with a dent in the side of your car, a health insurer’s declination can and does result in death.

This is who the Senate, knowing all of this full well, wants to force you to enrich. This is who they want to force you to rely on in order to live and be healthy. Is it any wonder then that the stock for these companies have increased upon completion of a bill that is supposedly reforming and regulating the industry? Shahien Nasiripour notes

Investors are seeing the Senate’s version of health care reform as a massive public subsidy for insurance companies — and as a result, are sending the sector’s stock prices shooting up, up, up. Stripped of a government-run insurance plan, the bill would give tens of millions of Americans no option but to start paying hefty premiums to private companies.

The rise in stock prices has been particularly striking in the period since Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) said on October 27 that he would filibuster a Senate health care reform bill if it included a public option – a threat that caused Senate leaders to cave without much of a fight.

Here’s a quick breakdown of major health insurance company stock performance from Oct. 27 to Friday’s market close:

• Coventry Health Care, Inc. is up 31.6 percent;
• CIGNA Corp. is up 29.1 percent;
• Aetna Inc. is up 27.1 percent;
• WellPoint, Inc. is up 26.6 percent;
• UnitedHealth Group Inc. is up 20.5 percent;
• And Humana Inc. is up 13.6 percent.

Americans aren’t the ones that the United States Senate are protecting and trying to help. Private insurance companies, however, are. After all, healthcare companies have spent $ 635 million dollars on lobbying Congress in just the past two years alone while the average American is still spending his or her money on frivolous things, such as food and shelter.

Bellow is an interview of Howard Zinn conducted by Bill Moyers on his PBS program, Bill Moyers Journal. Zinn is a social activist, historian, and award-winning author. One of my favorite quotes of his is, “I’m worried that students will take their obedient place in society and look to become successful cogs in the wheel – let the wheel spin them around as it wants without taking a look at what they’re doing. I’m concerned that students not become passive acceptors of the official doctrine that’s handed down to them from the White House, the media, textbooks, teachers and preachers.”

Courtesy of DemocracyNow! :

“Noam Chomsky delivers the 5th Annual Edward Said Memorial Lecture: The Unipolar Moment and the Culture of Imperialism at Columbia University School for International Affairs.”

The following is a press release from the Center for Constitutional Rights . More thoughts on this – to put it mildly – disappointing decision will follow either later tonight or tomorrow.

December 14, 2009—Today, the United States Supreme Court refused to review a lower court’s dismissal of a case brought by four British former detainees against Donald Rumsfeld and senior military officers for ordering torture and religious abuse at Guantánamo. The British detainees spent more than two years in Guantanamo and were repatriated to the U.K. in 2004.

The Obama administration had asked the court not to hear the case. By refusing to hear the case, the Court let stand an earlier opinion by the D.C. Circuit Court which found that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a statute that applies by its terms to all “persons” did not apply to detainees at Guantanamo, effectively ruling that the detainees are not persons at all for purposes of U.S. law. The lower court also dismissed the detainees’ claims under the Alien Tort Statute and the Geneva Conventions, finding defendants immune on the basis that “torture is a foreseeable consequence of the military’s detention of suspected enemy combatants.” Finally, the circuit court found that, even if torture and religious abuse were illegal, defendants were immune under the Constitution because they could not have reasonably known that detainees at Guantanamo had any Constitutional rights.

Eric Lewis, a partner in Washington, D.C.’s Baach Robinson & Lewis, lead attorney for the detainees, said, “It is an awful day for the rule of law and common decency when the Supreme Court lets stand such an inhuman decision. The final word on whether these men had a right not to be tortured or a right to practice their religion free from abuse is that they did not. Future prospective torturers can now draw comfort from this decision. The lower court found that torture is all in a days’ work for the Secretary of Defense and senior generals. That violates the President’s stated policy, our treaty obligations and universal legal norms. Yet the Obama administration, in its rush to protect executive power, lost its moral compass and persuaded the Supreme Court to avoid a central moral challenge. Today our standing in the world has suffered a further great loss.”

The four former detainees – Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal, Rhuhel Ahmed, and Jamal Al-Harith – were held from 2002 to 2004 at Guantánamo before being sent home to England without being charged with any offense. They filed their case in 2004 seeking damages from former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and senior American military officers for violations of their constitutional rights and of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which prohibits infringement of religion by the U.S. government against any person. Their claims were dismissed in 2008 by the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit when that court held that detainees have no rights under the Constitution and do not count as “persons” for purposes of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

Last year, the Supreme Court granted the men’s first petition, vacated the Court of Appeals decision and ordered the D.C. Circuit to reconsider its ruling in light of the Supreme Court’s historic decision in Boumediene v. Bush, which held that Guantánamo is de facto U.S. territory and that detainees have a Constitutional right to habeas corpus.

On remand, the D.C. Circuit reiterated its view that the Constitution does not prohibit torture of detainees at Guantánamo and that detainees still are not “persons” protected from religious abuse. Finally, the Court of Appeals held that, in any event, the government officials involved are immune from liability because the right not to be tortured was not clearly established.

A second petition filed with the Court on August 24, 2009 pointed out that the Court of Appeals decision stands in conflict with all of the Supreme Court’s recent precedent on Guantánamo and attacked the notion that the prohibitions against torture and religious abuse were not clearly established in 2002 when the petitioners were imprisoned.

Center for Constitutional Rights Senior Attorney Shayana Kadidal, co-counsel on the case, said, “We are disappointed that the Supreme Court has refused to hold Secretary Rumsfeld and the chain of civilian and military command accountable for torture at Guantánamo, and that the Obama administration sought to block torture victims from having their day in court. Where can these men seek justice now for the terrible things that were done to them? The entire world recognizes that torture and religious humiliation are never permissible tools for a government, yet our highest court seems to think otherwise.”

CCR has led the legal battle over Guantanamo for the last seven years – sending the first ever habeas attorney to the base and sending the first attorney to meet with a former CIA “ghost detainee” there. CCR has been responsible for organizing and coordinating more than 500 pro bono lawyers across the country in order to represent the men at the base, ensuring that nearly all have the option of legal representation, and is representing detainees at Guantánamo before the Supreme Court for the third time this term. In addition, CCR has been working to resettle the approximately 60 men who remain at Guantánamo because they cannot return to their country of origin for fear of persecution and torture.

Baach Robinson & Lewis, a Washington, D.C. litigation firm has been in the forefront of detainee litigation, working on behalf of both Guantanamo and Afghan detainees, since early 2004.

The Center for Constitutional Rights is dedicated to advancing and protecting the rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Founded in 1966 by attorneys who represented civil rights movements in the South, CCR is a non-profit legal and educational organization committed to the creative use of law as a positive force for social change.