By Rose Ann DeMoro & Michael Moore

Huffington Post //  September 29, 2009  [print_link]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-moore/why-the-current-bills-don_b_302483.html

Now we know why they’ve stopped calling this health care reform, and started calling it insurance reform. The current bills advancing in Congress look more like rearranging the deck chairs on the insurance Titanic than actually ending our long health care nightmare.

Some laudable elements are in various versions of the bills, especially expanding Medicaid, cutting the private insurance-padding waste of Medicare Advantage, and limiting the ability of the insurance giants to ban and dump people who have been or who ever will be sick.

Here are 13 problems with the current health care bills (partial list):

1. No cost controls on insurance companies. The coming sharp increases in premiums, deductibles, co-pays, co-insurance, etc. will quickly outpace any projected protections from caps on out-of-pocket costs.

2. Insurance companies will continue to be able to use marketing techniques to cherry-pick healthier, less costly enrollees.

CYRANO SAYS: Which will happen sooner?  Hell freezing over or the Democrats growing some spine (and principle) to use it?

4. No challenge to insurance company monopolies, especially in the top 94 metropolitan areas, where one or two companies dominate, severely limiting choice and competition.

5. A massive government bailout for the insurance industry through the combination of the individual mandate requiring everyone not covered to buy insurance, public subsidies which go for buying insurance, no regulation on what insurers can charge, and no restrictions on their ability to decide what claims to pay.

6. No controls on drug prices. The White House deal with Big Pharma, which won bipartisan approval in the Senate Finance Committee, opposes the use of government leverage to negotiate real cost controls on inflated drug prices.

7. No single standard of care. Our multi-tiered system remains with access to care still determined by ability to pay.

8. Tax on comprehensive insurance plans. That will encourage employers to reduce benefits, shift more costs to employees, promote proliferation of bare-bones, high-deductible plans, and lead to more self-rationing of care and medical bankruptcies.

9. Not universal. Some people will remain uncovered, including those exempted, and undocumented workers, denying them treatment, exposing everyone to communicable diseases and inflating health care costs.

10. No definition of covered benefits.

Call on your Congress member to support the vote coming up on the House floor on the Anthony Weiner amendment to protect, expand and improve Medicare for All. Senators have the same opportunity in a vote on Senate bill 703, being offered as a floor amendment by Senator Bernie Sanders.

September 30, 2009

The grand old man of letters Gore Vidal claims America is ‘rotting away’ — and don’t expect Barack Obama to save it—Gore Vidal

•

Interviewed by Tim Teeman, The Times of London ||  [print_link]

A CONVERSATION WITH GORE VIDAL UNFOLDS AT HIS PACE. He answers questions imperiously, occasionally playfully, with a piercing, lethal dryness. He is 83 and in a wheelchair (a result of hypothermia suffered in the war, his left knee is made of titanium). But he can walk (“Of course I can”) and after a recent performance of Mother Courage at London’s National Theatre he stood to deliver an anti-war speech to the audience.

How was his friend Fiona Shaw in the title role? “Very good.” Where did they meet? Silence. The US? “Well, it wasn’t Russia.” What’s he writing at the moment? “It’s a little boring to talk about. Most writers seem to do little else but talk about themselves and their work, in majestic terms.” He means self-glorifying? “You’ve stumbled on the phrase,” he says, regally enough. “Continue to use it.”

He points to an apartment opposite the hotel where Churchill stayed during the Second World War, as Downing Street was “getting hammered by the Nazis. The crowds would cheer him from the street, he knew great PR.”

‘Reagan is not clear about the difference between Medici and Gucci. He knows Nancy wears one of them’

In a flash, this memory reminds you of the swathe of history Vidal has experienced with great intimacy: he was friends with JFK, fought in the war, his father Gene, an Olympic decathlete and aeronautics teacher, founded TWA among other airlines and had a relationship with Amelia Earhart. (Vidal first flew and landed a plane when he was 10.) He was a screenwriter for MGM in the dying days of the studio system, toyed with being a politician, he has written 24 novels and is hailed as one of the world’s greatest essayists.

He has crossed every boundary, I say. “Crashed many barriers,” he corrects me.

Last year he famously switched allegiance from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama during the Democratic nomination process for president. Now, he reveals, he regrets his change of heart. How’s Obama doing? “Dreadfully. I was hopeful. He was the most intelligent person we’ve had in that position for a long time. But he’s inexperienced. He has a total inability to understand military matters. He’s acting as if Afghanistan is the magic talisman: solve that and you solve terrorism.”

America should leave Afghanistan, he says. “We’ve failed in every other aspect of our effort of conquering the Middle East or whatever you want to call it.” The “War on Terror” was “made up”, Vidal says. “The whole thing was PR, just like ‘weapons of mass destruction’. It has wrecked the airline business, which my father founded in the 1930s. He’d be cutting his wrists. Now when you fly you’re both scared to death and bored to death, a most disagreeable combination.”

His voice strengthens. “One thing I have hated all my life are LIARS [he says that with bristling anger] and I live in a nation of them. It was not always the case. I don’t demand honour, that can be lies too. I don’t say there was a golden age, but there was an age of general intelligence. We had a watchdog, the media.” The media is too supine? “Would that it was. They’re busy preparing us for an Iranian war.” He retains some optimism about Obama “because he doesn’t lie. We know the fool from Arizona [as he calls John McCain] is a liar. We never got the real story of how McCain crashed his plane [in 1967 near Hanoi, North Vietnam] and was held captive.”

Vidal originally became pro-Obama because he grew up in “a black city” (meaning Washington), as well as being impressed by Obama’s intelligence. “But he believes the generals. Even Bush knew the way to win a general was to give him another star. Obama believes the Republican Party is a party when in fact it’s a mindset, like Hitler Youth, based on hatred — religious hatred, racial hatred. When you foreigners hear the word ‘conservative’ you think of kindly old men hunting foxes. They’re not, they’re fascists.”

Another notable Obama mis-step has been on healthcare reform. “He f***ed it up. I don’t know how because the country wanted it. We’ll never see it happen.” As for his wider vision: “Maybe he doesn’t have one, not to imply he is a fraud. He loves quoting Lincoln and there’s a great Lincoln quote from a letter he wrote to one of his generals in the South after the Civil War. ‘I am President of the United States. I have full overall power and never forget it, because I will exercise it’. That’s what Obama needs — a bit of Lincoln’s chill.” Has he met Obama? “No,” he says quietly, “I’ve had my time with presidents.” Vidal raises his fingers to signify a gun and mutters: “Bang bang.” He is referring to the possibility of Obama being assassinated. “Just a mysterious lone gunman lurking in the shadows of the capital,” he says in a wry, dreamy way.

Vidal says forcefully that he wished he’d never moved back to the US to live in Hollywood, from his clifftop home in Ravello, Italy, in 2000. His partner of 53 years, Howard Austen, who died in 2003, collated a lifetime’s-span of pictures of Vidal, for a new book out this autumn, Gore Vidal: Snapshots in History’s Glare (an oddly clunky title). The cover shows what a beautiful young man Vidal was, although his stare is as hawkish as it is today.

He observes presidential office-holders balefully. “The only one I knew well was Kennedy, but he didn’t impress me as a good president. It’s like asking, ‘What do I think of my brother?’ It’s complicated. I’d known him all my life and I liked him to the end, but he wrecked his chances with the Bay of Pigs and Suez crises, and because everyone was so keen to elect Bobby once Jack had gone, lies started to be told about him — that he was the greatest and the King of Camelot.”

Today religious mania has infected the political bloodstream and America has become corrosively isolationist, he says. “Ask an American what they know about Sweden and they’d say ‘They live well but they’re all alcoholics’. In fact a Scandinavian system could have benefited us many times over.” Instead, America has “no intellectual class” and is “rotting away at a funereal pace. We’ll have a military dictatorship fairly soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together. Obama would have been better off focusing on educating the American people. His problem is being over-educated. He doesn’t realise how dim-witted and ignorant his audience is. Benjamin Franklin said that the system would fail because of the corruption of the people and that happened under Bush.”

Vidal adds menacingly: “Don’t ever make the mistake with people like me thinking we are looking for heroes. There aren’t any and if there were, they would be killed immediately. I’m never surprised by bad behaviour. I expect it.”

While materially comfortable, Vidal’s was not a happy childhood. Of his actress and socialite mother Nina, he says: “Give her a glass of vodka and she was as tame as could be. Growing up is going to be difficult if the one person you hate is your mother. I felt trapped. I was close to my grandparents and my father was a saint.” His parents’ many remarriages means that even today he hasn’t met all his step-siblings.

He wrote his first novel, Williwaw, at 19. In 1948, he was blacklisted by the media after writing The City and the Pillar, one of the earliest novels to deal graphically with homosexual desire. “You’ll be amazed to know it is still going strong,” he says. The “JT” it is dedicated to is James “Jimmy” Trimble, Vidal’s first love and, he once said, the love of his life. “That was a slight exaggeration. I said it because there wasn’t any other. In the new book there are wonderful pictures of him from our schooldays. He was a great athlete.” Here his voice softens, and he looks emotional, briefly. “We were both abandoned in our dormitory at St Alban’s [boarding school]. He was killed at the Battle of Iwo Jima [in 1945] because of bad G2 [intelligence].”

Vidal says Trimble’s death didn’t affect him. “No, I was in danger of dying too. A dead man can’t grieve a dead man.” Has love been important to him? “Don’t make the error that schoolteacher idiots make by thinking that gay men’s relationships are like heterosexual ones. They’re not.” He “wouldn’t begin to comment” on how they are different.

In 1956 he was hired by MGM, collaborated on the screenplay for Ben Hur and continued to write novels, most notoriously Myra Breckenridge about a transsexual. It is his satires, essays and memoirs — Live From Golgotha, Palimpsest and most recently, Point to Point Navigation — which have fully rounded our vision of this thorny contrarian, whose originality springs simply, and naturally, from having deliberately unfixed allegiances and an enduring belief in an American republic and railing sadness at how that ideal has been corrupted.

Vidal became a supportive correspondent of Timothy McVeigh, who blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 killing 168 people. The huge loss of life, indeed McVeigh’s act of mass murder, goes unmentioned by Vidal. “He was a true patriot, a Constitution man,” Vidal claims. “And I was torn, my grandfather [the Democrat Senator Thomas Gore] had bought Oklahoma into the Union.” McVeigh claimed he had done it as a protest against tyrannical government. The writer Edmund White took the correspondence as the basis for a play, Terre Haute (the jail McVeigh was incarcerated in before he was executed in 2001), imagining an encounter between the bomber and Vidal charged with desire.

“He’s a filthy, low writer,” Vidal says of White. “He likes to attack his betters, which means he has a big field to go after.” Had he wanted to meet McVeigh? “I am not in the business of meeting people,” Vidal says. “That play implies I am madly in love with McVeigh. I looked at his [White’s] writing and all he writes about is being a fag and how it’s the greatest thing on Earth. He thinks I’m another queen and I’m not. I’m more interested in the Constitution and McVeigh than the loving tryst he saw. It was vulgar fag-ism.”

Vidal says that he hates labels and has said he believes in homosexual acts rather than homosexual people. He claims his relationship with Austen was platonic (though they reputedly met at a legendary New York bath-house). He was once quoted as saying that he’d had sex with a 1,000 men by the time he was 25. It must have been a little strange for Austen, Vidal’s life companion, to source those pictures of Trimble, his first, perhaps only, love.

Vidal puts on a scornful, campy voice. “People ask [of he and Austen], ‘How did you live together so long?’ The only rule was no sex. They can’t believe that. That was when I realised I was dealing with a public too stupid by half. They can’t tell the difference between ‘The Sun rose in the East’ and ‘The Sun is made of yeast’.” Was sex important to Vidal? “It must have been yes.”

He is single now. “I’m not into partnerships,” he says dismissively. I don’t even know what it means.” He “couldn’t care less” about gay marriage. “Does anyone care what Americans think? They’re the worst-educated people in the First World. They don’t have any thoughts, they have emotional responses, which good advertisers know how to provoke.” You could have been the first gay president, I say. “No, I would have married and had nine children,” he replies quickly and seriously. “I don’t believe in these exclusive terms.”

Impaired mobility doesn’t bother him — he “rose like a miracle” on stage at the National — and he doesn’t dwell on mortality either. “Either you accept there is such a thing or you’re so dumb that you can’t grasp it.” Is he in good health? “No, of course not. I’m diabetic. It’s odd, I’ve never been fat and I don’t like candy, which most Americans are hooked on.”

There is a trace of thwarted ambition about him. “I would have liked to have been president, but I never had the money. I was a friend of the throne. The only time I envied Jack was when Joe [Kennedy, JFK’s father] was buying him his Senate seat, then the presidency. He didn’t know how lucky he was. Here’s a story I’ve never told. In 1960, after he had spent so much on the presidential campaign, Joe took all nine children to Palm Beach to lecture them. He was really angry. He said, ‘All you read about the Kennedy fortune is untrue. It’s non-existent. We’ve spent so much getting Jack elected and not one of you is living within your income’. They all sat there, shame-faced. Jack was whistling. He used to tap his teeth: they were big teeth, like a xylophone. Joe turned to Jack and he says, ‘Mr President, what’s the solution?’ Jack said, ‘The solution is simple. You all gotta work harder’.” Vidal guffaws heartily.

Hollywood living proved less fun. “If there was a social whirl, you can be sure I would not be part of it.” He does a fabulous impression of Katharine Hepburn complaining about playing the matriarch in Suddenly Last Summer, which he wrote. “I hate this script,” he recalls Hepburn saying . “I’m far too healthy a person to know people like this.” Vidal snorts. “She had Parkinson’s. She shook like a leper in the wind.”

I ask what he wants to do next. “My usual answer to ‘What am I proudest of?’ is my novels, but really I am most proud that, despite enormous temptation, I have never killed anybody and you don’t know how tempted I have been.”

That wasn’t my question, I say. “Well, given that I’m proudest that I haven’t killed anybody, I might be saving something up for someone.” A perfect line: we both laugh.

Is he happy? “What a question,” he sighs and then smiles mischievously. “I’ll respond with a quote from Aeschylus: ‘Call no man happy till he is dead’.”

•••••

SELECTED COMMENTS

Hugh Frazier wrote:

Typical Gore Vidal sloppiness: the “call no man happy until he dead” idea was first attributed to Solon (who lived well before Aeschylus) by Herodotus.

“An unlucky rich man is more capable of satisfying his desires and of riding out disaster when it strikes, but a lucky man is better off than him… He is the one who deserves to be described as happy. But until he is dead, you had better refrain from calling him happy, and just call him fortunate.”

Herodotus, The Histories Bk. 1, ch. 32, pp. 15-16.

October 1, 2009 4:41 PM BST on community.timesonline.co.uk

K Burnu wrote:

I enjoyed Mr. Teeman’s interview with Gore Vidal. I’ve read Mr. Vidal’s novels and many of his essays; I have been profoundly moved by his style, his wit, and how he puts a wrap on his stories. Reading his essays, and certainly his memoirs, one has to take some of what he maintains with a grain of salt – – or perhaps a car full of salt. For instance, the errant details he recalls of Joe Kennedy calling the family together after Jack’s election could be the result of the story’s having been embellished over the years. As any one of us orally recalls past events, we embellish and put our own spin on what we remember; and what we remember may not have been exactly as the event recalled actually happened. It’s excusable. Look how often Reagan was excused, while he was president, for some of his exaggeration and hyperbole when recounting the past. This is not to say I put Mr. Vidal in the same category as Mr. Reagan. I don’t, and I share many of Mr. Vidal’s views of the 40th US President.

I disagree little with Mr. Vidal’s observations of current U.S. culture. I share some of his sentiments. I’m in my 50’s and I work with a lot of young people in their 20’s. What amazes me is how little they know of their own country’s history. Is what was taught to me in my public schools not taught to them? It causes me to wonder: how much have they forgotten what they learned? Also, I am amazed at how much I am misinterpreted – – and I speak as clearly as I can. Perhaps our paying too much attention to what television and radio offers us has much to do with that. Even outside of the discussion of gay or straight relationships, Mr. Vidal’s summation of the public in “They can’t tell the difference between ‘The Sun rose in the East’ and ‘The Sun is made of yeast’” could surely extend to the public’s lack of understanding of so many other concerns.

Yes, it could happen that, in a society as much unaware as Mr. Vidal is observing, a military takeover could occur in the US.

October 1, 2009 4:39 PM BST on community.timesonline.co.uk

Ramesh Raghuvanshi wrote:

Gore Vidal is very credulous person he did not know bit of the human nature, so lifelong he is grumbling for this or that.Another thing is he constantly running for cheap publicity so he always say pompously anything.Man is irrational animal, his only aim is survive in this world in any condition so you cannot make this earth paradise,If Gore Vidal want understand man he must understand first this irrational tendency.

October 1, 2009 4:15 PM BST on community.timesonline.co.uk

michael carmichael wrote:

Vidal is anything but boring. Sadly, I fear that we shall soon see a military dictatorship in the USA — and the repercussions of that will be global — military dictatorships will become planetary in scope not merely threatening democracy but replacing it with corporate fascism predicated on national security concerns fanned by the omnipresent threat of terrorism.

October 1, 2009 3:36 PM BST on community.timesonline.co.uk

Natalie Rosen wrote:

I have ALWAYS loved Gore Vidal. He is BRILLIANT. I agree with most of what he says especially the part of the utter stupidity of too many Americans for my liking. I totally agree about Obama and although I was an ARDENT supporter I am having HUGE doubts now. Health care in the US should be a given. He should have made it happen. He still could but I doubt it. Vidal is so correct and I said it as well, Obama is INEXPERIENCED it is the greatest flaw of his presidency so far or any presidency for that matter.

Power ESPECIALLY in the US in beyond most people’s grasp and understanding. It is HUGE HUGE HUGE monied corporate interests which buy the state and the parties quell the masses by paying lip service to platitudes which they know the people will swallow. It’s the way its always been and the way of the world usually as well.

I do, however disagree with his seeming infatuation of McVeigh without his mentioning the loathsome act he perpetrated killing and maiming so many. No matter who does it its a disgusting act. If Gore is against a fascist state then what did he THINK McVeigh was all about? Still I love Gore’s realism and his curmudgeon personality. I have always loved 99% of what he says. His novels are brilliant.

I fear for my country mainly because of the people’s intellectual deficits. It is sad . I am told the ancient Greeks had a saying:

“The Gods themselves are helpless in the face of stupidity.”

John Pilger compares the current drum-beating for war against Iran, based on a fake "nuclear threat", with the manufacture of a sense of false crisis that led to invasion of Iraq and the deaths of 1.3 million people.

By Black Agenda Report editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

Created 09/29/2009

“Who are you going to believe, Obama or your lying eyes?”

It is hard to understand why thousands of protesters ever bothered going to the G20 summit meeting in Pittsburgh. They foolishly marched about, yelling and carrying signs and demanding action on climate change, health care reform, employment for all, a bailout for the people, and an end to endless war and empire building.

How could they possibly have missed the great largesse of Barack Obama and representatives of the other powerful nations? There must be some new and secret regulations we don’t know about. They must be very secret, because it doesn’t look like anything has been reined in for the global finance system. But what do we know? Obama said something like that is going on, so it has to be true.

“Global capitalism seems to create “bubbles” that devastate the lives of millions of people.”

So you see, global capitalism is kind of a fuzzy thing after all. The capitalism system may appear to be very concrete. It seems to create “bubbles” that devastate the lives of millions of people. It seems to demand that politicians turn over trillions of dollars in public resources. It appears to determine who will win elective office. It all must be a cruel optical illusion. After all, who are you going to believe, Obama or your lying eyes?

“If protesting ‘won’t make much of a difference’ it must be because the president already knows he won’t be listening.”

Obama always says such nice things. Despite telling citizens that they shouldn’t bother protesting because he never did, and after all he was a community organizer, he also said they have a right to waste their time [2]. “One of the great things about the United States is you can speak your mind.”

For a moment there it seemed that speaking one’s mind was problematic to say the least. The president doesn’t think that protesting global capitalism is necessary, because it is so fuzzy and so warm and isn’t the cause of any problems, but what the hell. Knock yourself out if you want. Go ahead and waste time marching if you having nothing else to do with your life.

The Pittsburgh protests should be the last to take place during the Obama presidency. If protesting “won’t make much of a difference” it must be because the president already knows he won’t be listening. Why bother protesting when powerful people let it be known that they aren’t at all impressed in the first place. The point of marching is to make political demands, but if the target of the demand couldn’t care less, well, figure it out for yourself.

It is wonderful that Barack Obama is president. Now we know what we should and should not bother doing. We shouldn’t blame capitalism because it doesn’t really have anything to do with us, and it is really nice, too. Thank you very much Mr. President. You set us straight once and for all.

Margaret.Kimberley@BlackAgandaReport.com.

Source URL: http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/freedom-rider-obama-knows-best

Links:

[1] http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2009909200322

[2] http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090925/ap_on_bi_ge/g20_summit

[3] http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/freedom-rider-obama-knows-best

By BAR executive editor Glen Ford  [print_link]

President Obama attempts to depict proponents of Medicare for all as lefty health care “extremists.” But that’s precisely the kind of “robust” public plan favored by two-thirds of Americans, according to a recent poll. Obama is to the Right of the people, and the GOP is off the map.

“Most people favor a public option that is a lot more “robust” than anything the Congress is offering.”

Despite the infamous Max Baucus Senate committee’s long-anticipated rejection of even a fig leaf of a public health care “option,” public opinion remains remarkably firm in support of allowing everyone access to a comprehensive government health plan. A New York Times/CBS News survey last week provided the best polling evidence in recent months that most people favor a public option that is a lot more “robust” than anything the Congress is offering, aside from straight-up single payer.

The poll once again confirms that something very much like single payer remains an idea whose time has come. After all these month’s of the Obama Administration’s attempts to shrivel into near nothingness the very concept of health care “reform,” and despite the mad howlings of Republicans about the evils of “socialized medicine,” two-thirds of the American people still support a Medicare-like government health care plan. Unlike some recent surveys, the language of the pollsters’ question was straightforward and unambiguous:

“Would you favor or oppose the government offering everyone a government-administered health insurance plan like Medicare that would compete with private health insurance plans?”

That is the definition of a very “robust” public health care option. Sixty-five percent of respondents said they were in favor.

“Americans overwhelmingly endorse expanding Medicare to all who want it.”

It’s a pity that the New York Times and CBS News neglected to ask how the public feels about a full-blown single payer plan, which has for years commanded strong majorities. But the poll does show conclusively that Americans overwhelmingly endorse expanding Medicare to all who want it – and let the private insurers sink or swim on their own.

Still, it is a wonderment that, with all the disinformation from the Hard Right, and almost a year of backroom dealing, backstabbing and dissembling from President Obama and other corporate Democrats, who have mangled reform into a giant subsidy for the privateers, the people still know what they want: Medicare for all, at the very least.

HR 676, the Enhanced Medicare For All single payer bill – but the measure is anathema to President Obama, who spent most of his energies marginalizing Conyers and his allies in the early months of the administration. Obama has consistently (and viciously) tried to depict single payers and their “robust” fellow travelers as the “extremist” lefty mirror images of rightwing “tea-baggers.” Yet at the end of the day, the public center of gravity on health care remains situated in the political realm of the Congressional Progressive and Black Caucuses. Obama is way off to the Right somewhere, in the general vicinity of his soul mate Sen. Baucus, whom the president early on empowered as his health care torchbearer (more like fire-quencher).

“The ‘robust’ public option does not exist in any practical sense.”

The NYT/CBS poll shows the public is not in the least confused about what it wants from the president and the congress on the health care front. Rather, they are befuddled about what Obama wants (55 percent say he has not clearly explained himself), and near-totally up in the air about what the Republicans want (76 percent don’t understand the GOP’s position). The more the people learn about both, the less they’ll like either of them.

Which brings me to the most uplifting aspect of the poll: It is the best recent evidence that Obama has not succeeded in narrowing public perceptions of the scope of health care “reform” to fit his own puny, corporate-vetted positions. The real reform genie is permanently out of the bottle, and he is quite “robust.”

Black Agenda Report executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com .