Author Archives: dave

The Importance of Health Care to the Kansas Economy: Why the Kansas Republican Campaign Against Health Care Reform is a Job Killer

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We need to let ultra-conservative Kansas legislators such as Brenda Landwehr, chair of the House Health & Human Services Committee (if you can believe that), know that government health care dollars are good for our economy and good for the sinking middle class.  Ms Landwehr has been on the Koch billionaire (“Kochtopus”) bus traveling across Kansas with other members of the evangelical, right-wing (of the anti-choice-anti-life variety) legislative delegation in an attempt to keep federal health care dollars out of Kansas (see my e-mail of 11/21, entitled “Mean-Ass Kansas Republican Health Care Proposal”).

Please direct Ms Landwehr’s and her Republican cohorts’ attention to a report issued by the Kansas Hospital Association entitled “The Importance of the Health Care Sector to the Kansas Economy.”  The report can be accessed at http://www.kha-net.org/Communications/MediaReleases/32164.aspx.

Perhaps readers of this blog would think that a report that discusses social accounting matrix analysis (SAM) is a real eye glazer and only for policy wonks of the highest order.  But it isn’t – really, honestly.  Take my word for it.  It is quite fascinating.  The first paragraph should make it clear that the Republican campaign to keep health care dollars out of Kansas is a “job killer.”  It states the following:

“Though the connection between health care services and local economic development are often overlooked, there are at least three important relationships to be recognized.  A strong health care system can attract and maintain business and industry growth, attract and retain retirees, and also create jobs in the local area.” (page 1)

The report can be boiled down to this:  the health care industry is approaching 20% of GDP across this nation and in Kansas.  It accounts for a very large payroll in Kansas and every other state.  How large?  The health care industry in Kansas provides 177,585 direct Kansas health care jobs and, due to a multiplier effect, accounts for a total of 290,728 jobs.  Employees of hospitals, nursing homes, clinics, and other health related institutions purchase goods and services from other businesses.  This is the multiplier effect.

In a state with a work force of slightly less than 1.8 million, a 290,728 (16.4%) job producing segment of the economy is a big deal.  When these Republicans start messing with it, they should be called to account. 

It is my intention to gin up a campaign to not only save but to increase jobs in Kansas by supporting health care legislation that would increase federal tax dollars directed toward coverage of the uninsured and underinsured citizens of this state.  We can most certainly count on Marci Francisco – who receives my post notices – but we need to support her and insure that all Democrat and reasonable Republican representatives (i.e. Tom Sloan) are aware of our concern about this.

My Thoughts About President Obama

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Even though I disagree with some of President Obama’s decisions, and although I find myself disappointed at times with lack of progress toward cherished, progressive goals, I believe he is the best thing that has happened to the Democratic Party since the administrations of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.  He has inherited an ungodly mess from the worst administration in U.S. history.  Furthermore, the Republican Party, backed by right-wing billionaires, now has a single-minded purpose, which is to make this president fail.

President Obama has an almost impossible mission.  Never in the history of this country has one political party, after leaving messes of crisis proportion,  mobilized so totally, thoroughly, and energetically for no other purpose than to make the presidential administration of the other party fail.  The right wing in this country has no interest in supporting any programs of President Obama – even if those programs are in the best interests of the American people and are badly needed to stop deterioration in our quality of life.

I do not want to hear my progressive brothers and sisters talk of a Henry Wallace-Eugene McCarthy-Bobbie Kennedy type of primary challenge in 2012.  That would be self-destructive and self-defeating.  Jean and I expect to be holding our annual celebration of President Obama’s election through 2016.

President Obama’s War Speech

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President Obama ended his war speech tonight by saying, “We as Americans can come together behind a common purpose.”  He also said our “cause is just” and “our resolve is unwavering.”  If these phrases are more than soaring rhetoric, I have a few questions:

When will this military venture become something more than a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight?  

Working class men and women fighting these wars (Iraq and Afghanistan) are either killed or broken mentally and physically through repeated deployment to these god-foresaken battlefields.  I don’t see the upper classes and politicians who are making war decisions sending their children to this particular war.  If  Afghanistan is so important to our national security, then we need to begin the draft now.  I am increasingly disgusted by the sentimentalizing, romanticizing, and patronizing of our “brave men and women in uniform,”  many of whom are in uniform because they needed a job.  Does this self-indulgent society really care all that much about the mental and physical damage and stress experienced every day by the troops on the ground in Afghanistan?  Or is it “out of sight, out of mind?”

When will the upper classes begin paying their fair share of taxes so that our quality of life can stop its decline due to war spending?

If the middle classes and working classes continue to pay a disproportionate share of the taxes needed to fight this war, and the upper classes continue to profit while bearing a lower tax burden, that won’t seem to me to be “coming together behind a common cause.”

What happens if an Afghan Army and Government are not able to pick up the fight in 18 months?

There is an old labor movement refrain to promises from politcians:  “We will get pie in the sky when we die by-and- by.”  It is likely that we will attempt to buy off villagers (the Petraeus approach), sacrifice the lives of several hundred American troops and god knows how many of the villagers.  We will have hundreds of Americans with severe injuries that most of us will never see…and wouldn’t want to look at anyway.  At the end of 18 months, we will be coming out. Yea right.

Fight Privatization of Kansas Government!

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Beware of Privatization of Government Services

In response to today’s editorial, “Privatization caution,” I submitted the following letter to the Lawrence Journal World:

A move is under way to privatize government services and jobs in Kansas.  The so-called Reason Foundation (heavily funded by the Koch Billionaires of Wichita) is pushing this irrational idea.  In pushing their wacky form of right-wing libertarianism, the Koch oil magnates and other far-right billionaires will claim that their purpose is economy and efficiency in government.  Don’t fall for this.

Privatization has historically cost taxpayers more than services provided by government employees and has essentially lined the pockets of executives and investors.  If you don’t believe this, just consider the costs of outsourced defense/war functions.  Logistics and food services provided by KBR are far more expensive than when these services are provided by the military.  One small example:  The Army Times reported on their website on Nov. 1, 2009, that Pentagon auditors are attempting to deal with KBR’s “disjointed processes” and “weak accounting practices.” 

While troop levels are dropping off in Iraq, KBR’s level of employment has remained at the January 2008 level (17,000 employees).  During my service in the Marine Corps in the 1960s, I paid the same dues as every other Marine had paid up to that time.  I served on mess duty.  Cooking and other food services were provided by sergeants, corporals, and privates.  You can bet that this was done far cheaper than it would have been done by KBR.

Consider Medicare Part C (Medicare Advantage Plans).  According to the Center for Medicare Services, the federal government pays private insurance companies on average 14 percent more for providing coverage to Medicare Advantage beneficiaries than it pays for the same services to beneficiaries in the traditional Medicare program (20 percent more in some parts of the country).

Examples of these types of rip-offs of taxpayers abound.  The right-wing, anti-government libertarianism promoted by the Kochs has, as its primary objective, the destruction of government programs.  Furthermore, the main result of privatization is transfer of wealth from the bulk of U.S. taxpayers to the top 5 percent of wealth and income classes.

Legislators are being irresponsible when they hand your government, and in effect your taxes, over to the likes of Halliburton, Cigna Insurance, and the Correction Corporation of America.  One Republican legislator was quoted in the Journal World on Nov. 30 as telling the Reason Foundation representative, “You had me at hello.”  This is a mindless bending to the will of a powerful private interest with selfish motives that are contrary to the best interests of the people of Kansas.

Beware of the Kochtopus!

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If you read the Lawrence Journal World this morning (Nov. 30, 2009), you may have noticed on page 3A that some outfit called the Reason Foundation is pushing Kansas state legislators to “privatize” more public services and, consequently, to privatize more public jobs.  What the article by Scott Rothschild (“Push to privatize is on the table“) failed to mention is that the Koch family billionaires of Wichita (and Park Avenue in New York City) are putting up the money for this nasty little piece of  anti-human libertarianism.

The “Kochtopus” (a term I borrowed from Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas) wants to wrap its blood-sucking, dollar-soaked tentacles even more tightly than they are already wrapped around the Kansas legislature, and, in essence, kill government.  What the Kochs are really all about is enriching themselves at everyone else’s expense.  For instance, the Kochtopus–through its front group, Americans for Prosperity–was a financial force behind the tea bagger movement to kill health care reform.  Americans for Prosperity is one of  many Koch front groups put in motion to transform the United States into a two-tier society…with the Kochs and a few of the other super rich on top, and the rest of us on the bottom, serving them.

A primary objective of this blog is to watch the Kochtopus and to reveal its stealthy goings-on.  If you think that the Koch blob has not been effective, you would be wrong.  One Republican, State Representative Kasha Kelley, was quoted as saying to the Koch apparatchik, “You had me at hello.”  That would probably be correct for practically all of the Republicans in the Kansas State Legislature.

Stereotyping the Elderly

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Creating a dehumanizing, negative stereotype is a precursor to harming a demographic segment of a population.  Lack of respect displayed toward older Americans and blamed heaped on them for everything from traffic jams to bankrupting the health care system are evidence of creeping ageism in the United States.

While teaching a class a number of years ago on racism and groupism in general at Kansas State University, I found a full-page Newsweek  photo of nursing home residents sitting in chairs, holding their arms above their heads.  They were being led in exercises by a young woman.  The caption read, “Geezer Boom.”

These older Americans were characterized in the article as helpless invalids who are a burden to younger members of society.  This kind of portrayal of the elderly is pervasive in the mass media and is becoming fixed in the psyche of the under-65 population.  During the recent debates on health care, we heard “unplugging granny” over and over.  This metaphor is supportive of the notion that the fruits of a long life are, at the end, intubation and ventilation.  As I will discuss with very good evidence in a later post, nothing could be further from the truth.

Epithets are evidence of isms such as racism, sexism, gayism and ageism.  I find myself having to confront friends, students, and relatives for using terms like “geezer,” “codger” and “coot.”  These terms may seem funny but they are disrespectful, harmful and insulting.  I have the same concern about using “granny” in the context of plugging and unplugging.

Ageism is characterized by blaming, epithets, infantilization and neglect.  If older Americans can be reduced to being thought of as nothing more than a “pain in the neck,” it will be acceptable to commoditize them as revenue producing objects to be placed in sub-human, profitable, nursing home conditions.

Are We Setting the Elderly Up for Benefits Reductions, Lower Quality of Life?

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Beginning with the Reagan Administration, there has been a steady, incrementally-successful movement under way to rig the economic and political system against the interests of the bulk of the U.S. population.  People in perhaps the bottom four income quintiles are now paying a disproportionate share of taxes in comparison to the top 20 percent, which amounts to an income redistribution toward the wealthy classes.  At the same time, most Americans are receiving fewer benefits for the taxes they do pay, which is resulting in a lower quality of life as measured by health care availability, educational opportunity, employment income and housing affordability.

At this time, two targets of the plutocratic, ruling class are Medicare and Social Security.  Pay attention to the steady “drum beat” of dire warnings about the coming of the budget-busting, elderly hoard.  It is important for all citizens to inform themselves about the demographics of the U.S. population and the realities of Social Security and Medicare financing.

An Aug. 17, 2009, column by Ross Douthat–one of a bevy of conservative columnists for the New York Times (along with David Brooks and Tom Friedman)–is one good example of the propaganda perpetrated on an unsuspecting public by conservatives. In an ageist, “blaming-the-elderly,” ill-informed, insulting column, “Telling Grandma ‘No,”  Douthat put out the following false information:  “…by 2030, there will be more Americans over 65 than under 18….”

We have to be on watch for this type of propaganda. 

Here is the truth:

According to the Population Division of the U.S. Census Bureau, by 2030, the percentage of our population under age 18 will be 23.51%, while the percentage of those 65 and over will be 19.3%.  After 2030, these percentages will change very little. By 2050, those under age 18 will constitute 23.14%, while those 65+ will account for 20.17% of the U.S. population.  This leaves approximately 57% of the population as potential wage earners who will be funding their own future benefits of Social Security and Medicare.

This should hardly be viewed as a major, unabsorable shock to the U.S. budget. Indeed, it should be much much less of a problem for our country’s coffers than continuing to finance the folly of war, bank bailouts, give-aways to the pharmaceutical industry and the military-industrial complex welfare programs.

(I will write more about the Social Security and Medicare Trust Funds in later posts.)

Blaming Elderly and Poor Americans

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The Nov. 21-27, 2009,  issue of the Economist was devoted to the U.S. budget deficit–its causes and solutions.  I found it disconcerting that this conservative, business-oriented publication chose to focus on programs for the elderly as the main causal factor in our current 13 trillion dollar debt.  For instance, on page 13, an editorial writer had the following to say: 

“America’s deficit problem is in essence a spending problem, so spending must bear the brunt of adjustment.  An aging population and health care inflation are inexorably driving up the cost of the country’s three big entitlements: Social Security (pensions), Medicare, and Medicaid (health care for the elderly and the poor, respectively).”

This is reminds me of the blame for U.S. budget woes heaped on welfare recipients during the Reagan and Clinton Administrations.  And, indeed, a punitive so-called “welfare reform” act was passed during the Clinton Presidency.

Nothing was said in the Economist about spending on the military-industrial complex, the trillion or so that was gifted to Wall Street gamblers, tax cuts for the rich, handouts to the pharmaceutical industry, and on-going wars of choice–just to name a few other drains on the Federal budget.  In terms of adjustments, the Economist might have mentioned some of the current proposals to tax financial transactions, taxing hedge fund managers as employees rather than treating their income as capital gains, increasing the capital gains tax, and so on.  Why does the debt problem have to be solved, again, on the backs of the elderly and the poor?

The DNC, President Obama, and Change We Can’t Believe In

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During the past week, I have received three phone calls from the DNC.  Rather, I have received three phone calls from DNC-hired fundraisers.  They wanted money.  I thought my crankiness during the first call would have been warning enough about me as a difficult customer to give pause to any subsequent caller.  But naively, I failed to realize that I am just a name in a database through which a dialing machine churns– nothing more, nothing less.

Why would I give these people money?  I have already blogged about the “Obama/DNC Listening Tour” that I attended (during which no one was listening).  Now I see that President Obama will be sinking us deeper into the quagmire of Afghanistan.  Did he forget that he is president by virtue of Hillary Clinton’s vote on the Iraq War?  Had it not been for her militarism, she would be president instead of Barack Obama.  He was the anti-war candidate.

President Obama’s tepid support for real health care reform has indeed been puzzling.  Is he willing to make more deals with Blanche Lincoln, Joe Lieberman, Mary Landrieu and Ben Nelson?  Will the DNC be giving these obstructionists to decency and social justice money to run their next campaigns?  I want to know that.  I would rather support  primary candidates against these destructive, pro-Republican turncoats.  Rahm Emanual can tell us that we are f…ing stupid for criticizing another Democrat, which he has said.  Since he is a big part of the problem these days, I would say,  f… him.

Apparently, Emanual has been successful in purging Greg Craig from the Obama Administration.  This is a bad sign.  Craig was one of the members of the president’s inner circle who was pushing for adherence to the spirit of the Obama campaign.  That was a campaign that inspired many of us to give money, walk neighborhoods in Missouri, and heartily celebrate Barack Obama’s election. 

I think we need a very quick and serious course correction by President Obama at this juncture in his administration. 

Remembering Darryl Ringer: Charismatic Farm Activist

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This Thanksgiving, I can truly give thanks for having known and worked with farm activist Darryl Ringer from Quinter, Kansas.  Darryl died in a farm accident in 1993.  At the time he was killed, he had gained national stature as an activist on behalf of farmers who were losing their farms to banks in foreclosure actions.

I am proud to say that I offered my couch to Darryl as a place to sleep as he traveled the state in 1988 and worked with us on the Jesse Jackson campaign.  His charisma, intelligence, and organizing ability were phenomenal.  His death left a gaping hole in the progressive movement.

In memory of Darryl, I suggest that we support the actions of the National Farmers Union, which represents 250,000 farming and ranching families. The Farmers Union is pushing for a strong, viable, government-run, health insurance program.  Farm families are finding the cost of health care out of reach due to the nature of the insurance cartel.  For instance, 69% of health insurance policies in Nebraska are written by two insurance companies.

The other farm organization, the Farm Bureau, is opposing the bill passed in the House of Representatives.  Since the Farm Bureau represents large corporations and the agricorp industry as a whole, it opposes the provision of HR 3962 that requires employers to provide health insurance or pay some rather severe penalties.