all about the health care

Just after I flew over my handlebars and went head first into the street there was one thought in my head as I was getting up. I hope I don't have to go to the hospital cause I don't have any health insurance. It was one of those moments where the stupidity of the health care system just hits you. The fact that people have to make this decision all the time, weighing financial stability against their health.

A few weeks ago Sensen No Sen, a political blog I regularly read had a great three parter on the health care crisis and how it might change in the years to come. The posts are well researched and cited. The first part addressed the problems with the current system. In 2007 18% of the population has no healthcare, of those 80% being citizens. Yet the United States spends a larger portion of its GDP than any other industrialized nation, while 37th in the World Health Organizations ranking of the world's health systems.

Part 2 looks at the different options on the table, although mentioning how single payer has been rejected, and does not go into it in detail. Most proposals are mandated healthcare from the insurance companies which is far from universal when you're forced to buy a horrible product. The best option on the table is that with a government funded public option, and while it's included in the House Bill, the Senate Bill does not include it.

Part 3 explains how the health care industry is an oligopoly and the reasonings why we will not have low priced, market driven health care. I would have liked to see more analysis on a single payer system. I don't really see it as a realistic option these days with the millions the health care industry spends on lobbying in this country. Where are those lobbying reforms Obama promised us anyway?

the green brief

Don't know why I didn't stumble upon this earlier, but The Green Brief is a very good source of day to day information from Iran. The big news now is that Mousavi supporter Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani is scheduled to lead the Friday prayer. Sources say Mousavi will also attend the prayer.

There was a general strike in Kurdish areas of Iran yesterday. From the Green Brief #27:

Kordestan province and many other Kurdish areas in Iran’s northwest observed a strike today. The strike was held in remembrance of Kurdish political activist, Dr. Abdorrahman Ghasimlo and in protest of the elections. All shops were closed in Saqez, Mahabad, Bokan and Sardasht as well as a few areas in Urumieh. The general strike was so wide-spread in Saqez that even rural areas around that city closed all shops in a show of solidarity. Transportation was completely jammed. No taxis could be seen on the streets of Saqez.

And on the topic of Friday prayers:

It has now been confirmed that Mir Hossein Mousavi, Mahdi Karoubi and Mohammad Khatami will be attending this week’s Friday prayers which will be lead by Hashemi Rafsanjani. In the past three weeks, Rafsanjani didn’t lead prayers in Tehran’s Friday Prayers mosque even though he is one of the four Imams of the mosque who lead prayers there in turns. There are reports that the Sea of Green might use the opportunity to conduct protests, but they remain unconfirmed as of yet.

July 25th is a Global Day of Action for Iran. Check for rallies in your area.

A few weeks ago it was reported that Nokia had sold the Iranian government spying software. As word spread sales of Nokia phones have plummeted. Protesters have also targeted products advertised by state-run TV creating an advertising crisis.

protesters once again hit the streets in Iran

As expected the streets of Iran exploded today on 18 Tir and the 10 year anniversary of a brutal crackdown against student protesters. This information has been gathered from a very reliable twitter source I have been following since near the beginning of the election. I will also update this throughout the day as I get more information so be sure to check back.

There are reports of protests in the cities of Tehran, Rasht, Ahvāz, Shiraz, Mashhad as well as others. Although unconfirmed it is probable shots were fired in various areas of Tehran. It was later confirmed that protesters were shot at in Azadi Square. Many unlinked sources reported that police were turning on the basij para-military force, who have been responsible for most of the violence in the past month. As this happened people began asking additional police forces to join their cause. It was said that police were disarmed early on in the election conflicts due to their compassion toward the protesters. For the first time the basij began retreating the scene, maybe finally frightened by the will of the people. Families also came out into the streets in cities around Iran once again this is a movement of the people not just the young. Cars all over the streets were also honking horns in support of the protesters. Meanwhile the government cracked down further on communications while showing small groups of protests on state TV.

Opposition leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi is expected to appear at a Mosque in Tehran. The movement appears to be moving past Mousavi and political powers and for the people themselves. Also in a remarkable showing of international solidarity, protesters gathered in front of the Chinese embassy in Tehran in opposition of the recent violence against the ethnic group of Uighurs.

Below are a few of the tweet from user oxfordgirl I based much of this information on.

Rasht, Ahvaz, Shiraz, Mashad all seen lge protests. Chants of death to dictator at some, others silent march. #iranelection #gr88

V large protests Shiraz. More reports of protest in almost every city in Iran & arnd the world. Organised by the ppl 4 the ppl

Unconfirmed: shots heard at Azadi squ. helicopters all over tehran - #iranelection #gr88

Avoid Mirdamad, reports clashes and fire. Unconfirmed but better stay safe. #iranelection #gr88

Getting 2 many reports 2 keep up w/. Clashes all ovr Tehran, protests all ovr Iran. Again Mullahs join protest in Mashad #iranelection

Gunshots heard Keshavarz Blvd and Azadi square. Cannot confirm. report fire Mirdamad. Be careful ppl #iranelection #gr88

Unconfirmed reports: Shots heard Azadi squ, reports of several injured. I cannot confirm. #iranelection #gr88

Appears now there HAS been shooting at protesters at Azadi Squ. Be safe, if it is very rough go to nearest mosque. Pray for the dead. #i ...

Shooting reported Azadi and Enghelab. #iranelection #tehran #gr88

Reports; Families coming out together,. Babol , Kerman, Ahvaz , Rasht, Tabriz, Shiraz, Hamadan, kerman #iranelection #gr88

V, V unconfirmed report that police have turned on basij. Treat with caution, but something like this had been expected. #iranelection

Sources: The fire at Mirdamad was at the metro. Some report shop windows smashed - by basij - #iranelection #gr88

Mousavi expected to appear at Mosque in Tehran this evening - have no other details. #iranelection #gr88

I cannot confirm reports police fire on basij, but coming in from many unlinked sources. Would be incredible. #iranelection #gr88

Report : ppl protesting in front of Chinese embassy in Tehran #iranelection #gr88

ppl asking police to join them as news spreads of unconfirmed reports that police fired on Basij in Tehran today #iranelection #gr88

Basij reported to be in retreat for first time, perhaps not happy being led by Khamenei son?! #iranelection #gr88

Gov jamming communications from provinces more effectively that in tehran. #iranelection #gr88

Iran Tv showing this morning footage to show 'no protests' except small group near Uni. We know better #iranelection #gr88

Mousavi dnt giv up, we dont need another political party. Power is always in the hands of the ppl & they will grasp power. #iranelection

No more political parties, step up and lead the ppl Mousavi or they will take power for themselves. This country is on brink #iranelection

Cars everywhere r honking their horns in support of the protesters #iranelection

Iran, Honduras, Immigrants and Marijuana

I've got a number of topics to cover today.

Let's start with Iran. Tomorrow is 18 Tir on the Islamic calendar. It marks the 10th year anniversary of a brutal crackdown on university students protesting the closure of Salem, a reformist paper at Tehran University. Public commemorations of the event are illegal, but this could be another increase in action in Iran. Ahmedinejad gave a public address yesterday calling Iran the elections in Iran the world's freest. In a very interesting type of civil disobedience people were asked to turn on all electronics and appliances to put heavy strain on the power grid. There were reported blackouts in numerous cities including Eastern Tehran.

Vice President Joe Biden made a statement that the United States would not interfere if Israel decided to attack Iran. Obama later said this was not a green light for Israel to attack Iran although while clarifying Biden was not sending a signal Obama said, "I think Vice President Biden stated a categorical fact, which is we can't dictate to other countries what their security interests are. What is also true is that it is the policy of the United States to resolve the issue of Iran's nuclear capabilities in a peaceful way through diplomatic channels." This ignores the fact that the US gives Isreal billions of dollars a year in military aid, and therefore should have a say on how they use it. But as always, this fact was not mentioned by either the president nor vice president.


Nobel laureate and Costa Rican President Oscar Arias will moderate dialog between Honduran President Manuel Zelaya and interim leader Roberto Micheletti of the coup forces. While the Honduran media supports the coup forces despite majority support for Zelaya, similar elements of the media can be seen here on the coverage. Here is a great analysis on the media's handling of the situation. As I wrote last week, even though the US has condemned the coup, their actions are starting to prove otherwise. Even though the event has been called a coup, the administration will not give it the official title cutting off aid to the military forces.


The quote of the day goes to a report by Reason Online in an article discussing how poor, high-immigrant El Paso, just across the border from violent-filled Cuidad Juarez could be one of the safest in the nation. They conclude cities with high immigrant populations usually lead to low violence. The quote:

"Most people in Washington really don't understand life on the border," El Paso Mayor John Cook told the Post. "They don't understand our philosophy here that the border joins us together, it doesn't separate us."

The Marijuana Policy Project has started running ads calling to legalize and tax marijuana in California. The move has been discussed as a way to help with the budget crises. Marijuana is the number one cash crop in the state and a $13 billion a year industry.

Noam Chomsky on the economic crisis, the middle east, the environment and industry in the US

Democracy Now broadcast a great speech by Noam Chomsky last Friday. I highly recommend watching it in its entirety.

Noam Chomsky, the MIT professor, author and dissident intellectual, just turned eighty years old this past December. He has written over 100 books, but despite being called “the most important intellectual alive” by the New York Times, he is rarely heard in the corporate media. We spend the hour with Noam Chomsky. He spoke recently here in New York at an event sponsored by the Brecht Forum. More than 2,000 people packed into Riverside Church in Harlem to hear his address, titled “Crisis and Hope: Theirs and Ours.” In his talk, Chomsky discussed the global economic crisis, the environment, wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, resistance to American empire and much more.

Some excerpts:

Haiti’s first free election in 1990 threatened these economically rational programs. The poor majority made the mistake of entering the political arena and electing their own candidate, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a populist priest. And Washington instantly adopted standard operating procedures: the moving at once to undermine the regime. A couple of months later came the military coup, instituting a horrible reign of terror, which was backed by Bush, Bush I, and even more so by Clinton. By 1994, Clinton decided that the population was sufficiently intimidated, and he sent US forces to restore the elected president—that’s now called a humanitarian intervention—but on very strict conditions, namely that the president had to accept a very harsh neoliberal regime, in particular, no protection for the economy.

[...]

One such inefficiency, now recognized to be one of the roots of the financial crisis, is the under-pricing of systemic risk, a risk that affects the whole system. So, for example—and that’s general, like if you and I make a transaction, say, you sell me a car, we may make a good deal for ourselves, but we don’t price into that transaction the cost to others. And there’s a cost: pollution, congestion, raising the price of gas, all sorts of other things, killing people in Nigeria because we’re getting the gas from them. That doesn’t count when we—we don’t count that in. That’s an inherent market inefficiency, one of the reasons why markets can’t work.

[...]

Well, while Obama’s signaling very clearly his intention to establish a firm and large-scale presence in the region, he’s also, as you know, sharply escalating the AfPak war, following Petraeus’s strategy to drive the Taliban into Pakistan, with potentially awful results for this extremely dangerous and unstable state, which is facing insurrections throughout its territory. These are the most extreme in the tribal areas, which cross the AfPak border. It’s an artificial line imposed by the British called the Durand Line, and the same people live on both sides of it—Pashtun tribes—and they’ve never accepted it. And, in fact, the Afghanistan government never accepted it either, as long as it was independent. Well, that’s where most of the fighting is going on. One of the leading specialists on the region, Selig Harrison, he recently wrote that the outcome of Washington’s current policies, Obama’s policies, might well be, what he calls them, “Islamic Pashtunistan,” Pashtun-based separate kind of quasi-state. The Pakistani ambassador warned that if the Taliban and Pashtun nationalism merge, we’ve had it. And we’re on the verge of that.

[...]

By World War II, there was a significant change. Business leaders and elite intellectuals recognized that the public had won enough rights so that they can’t be controlled by force, so it would be necessary to do something else, namely to turn to control of attitudes and opinions. These were the days when the huge public relations industry emerged in the freest countries in the world, Britain and the United States, where the problem was most severe. The public relations industry was devoted to what Walter Lippmann approvingly called a “new art” in the practice of democracy, the “manufacture of consent.” It’s called the “engineering of consent” in the phrase of his contemporary Edward Bernays, one of the founders of the PR industry.

[...]

And they are the architects of policy. Obama made sure to staff his economic advisers from that sector, which has been pointed out, too. The former chief economist of the IMF, Simon Johnson, pointed out that the Obama administration is just in the pocket of Wall Street. As he put it, “Throughout the crisis, the government has taken extreme care not to upset the interests of the financial institutions or to question the basic outlines of the system that got us here.” And the “elite business interests” who “played a central role in creating the crisis…with the implicit backing of the government,” they’re still there, and they’re “now using their influence to prevent precisely” the set of “reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive.” He says, the economy—“The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against them,” which is no surprise, considering who constitutes and who backs the government.

[...]

The state-corporate program began with a conspiracy by General Motors, Firestone Rubber, Standard Oil of California to buy up and destroy efficient electric transportation systems in Los Angeles and dozens of other cities. They were actually convicted of criminal conspiracy and given a tap on the wrist, I think a $5,000 fine. The federal government then took over. It relocated infrastructure and capital stock to suburban areas and also created a huge interstate highway system under the usual pretext of defense. Railroads were displaced by government-financed motor and air transport.

[...]

So think what’s happening. Spain and other European countries are hoping to get US taxpayer funding for high-speed rail and related infrastructure. And at the very same time, Washington is busy dismantling leading sectors of US industry, ruining the lives of workers and communities who could easily do it themselves. It’s pretty hard to conjure up a more damning indictment of the economic system that’s been constructed by state-corporate managers. Surely, the auto industry could be reconstructed to produce what the country needs using its highly skilled workforce. But that’s not even on the agenda. It’s not even being discussed. Rather, we’ll go to Spain, and we’ll give them taxpayer money for them to do it, while we destroy the capacity to do it here.

[...]

It’s also important to remind ourselves that the notion of workers’ control is as American as apple pie. It’s kind of been suppressed, but it’s there. In the early days of the Industrial Revolution in New England, working people just took it for granted that those who work in the mills should own them. And they also regarded wage labor as different from slavery, only in that it was temporary. Also Abraham Lincoln’s view. There have been immense efforts to drive these thoughts out of people’s heads, to win what the business world calls “the everlasting battle for the minds of men.” On the surface, they may appear to have succeeded, but I don’t think you have to dig too deeply to find out that they’re latent and they can be revived.

United 4 Iran Global Day of Action, July 25th, San Francisco, noon

There will be a mega rally on Saturday, July 25th in front of San Francisco at City Hall Plaza from 12pm to 4pm to support the people of Iran during this remarkable time in their history. This event is to get the entire Bay Area together to stand for Iran. From the organizers:

This is going to be the biggest rally of NorCal Iranians on Ahmadinejad's inauguration day, please invite all your Iranian and non Iranian friends to this event.
There will be live performances by local and out of state artists in support of Iranian's struggle for democracy.
As before we ask you not to bring flags or signs, plain Iran flags with no sign in the middle please.
Let's get United 4 Iran.

If you are on Facebook join the event and invite all your friends.

iran goes on strike

Iran will go on a 3-day strike during a holiday that is usually ignored.

Monday is the start of an unusual three-day Islamic holiday called Itikaf. Sometimes translated as “seclusion” or “retreat,” Itikaf is a time when particularly pious Muslims cloister themselves inside homes or mosques for a period of intense prayer and deep spiritual reflection. It is a practice that the Iranian regime has long encouraged the country’s citizens, particularly the youth, to take part in, usually without much success.

But this year, supporters of Mir Hossein Mousavi, the reformist challenger to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, are planning to take up the government’s appeal for religious observance. Mousavi’s Web site has called on Iranians to use the state-sanctioned holiday to launch a three-day, nationwide strike and boycott of businesses and banks in hopes of re-sparking the popular demonstrations that brought the country to a halt two weeks ago.

Socialism 2009 in San Francisco

This weekend I attended the Socialism 2009 conference put on by the International Socialist Organization in San Francisco. It was an amazing event with talks on topics including racism, sexism, immigrant issues, history, the middle east, the prison system, the environment, science, media, unions, and socialism, Marxism, and revolutionary politics. I highly recommend attending next year in either San Francisco or Chicago, and maybe even New York since it was so successful this year in those two locations. Here are some pictures from the weekend. Also, check out my flickr




Talk on Prop 8 is Going Down: Winning Gay Marriage in California


Sherry Wolf speaking on Prop 8 is Going Down: Winning Gay Marriage in California


Prop 8 is Going Down: Winning Gay Marriage in California


John Pilger speaking on Empire and Obama: Power, Illusion, and America's Last Taboo


Main Auditorium at the Women's Building in San Francisco, Ca


Mark Steel's birthday cake


Richard Brown of the San Francisco 8 speaking for Oscar Grant, San Francisco 8 and the History of Political Repression in America


The record spins during the after party


Panel on Will Socialism Eliminate Sexism?


Final Rally: The Return of Socialism

Reform clerics say Iran's presidential vote invalid

A group of reform clerics came forward disputing a statement from the Guardian Council calling Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the winner of the presidential election.

The pro-reform clerics group said in a statement that the top legislative body, the Guardian Council, no longer had the right "to judge in this case."

In a statement to the press, the Assembly of Qom Seminary Scholars and Researchers said some members of the Guardian Council had "lost their impartial image in the eyes of the public."

I don't know the significance of this. It is important that any clerics are contradicting the Supreme Leader's words, but I'll have to figure out what implications this has in Iran's government.

Meanwhile it's been reported that a handful of protesters have been executed. Prisoners have also been raped. As the government is loosing their grip they use more drastic tactics.

Obama admin control over the press and more on Honduras

Columnist Helen Thomas and CBS reporter Chip Reid criticized White House press secretary Robert Gibbs on the issue of pre-selected questions about health care sent in from email and social networks.

“It feels like the concept of a town hall, I think, is to have an open public forum. And this sounds like a very tightly controlled audience and list of questions. Why do it that way?” asked Reid.

[...]

“We have never had that in the White House,” Thomas said, referring to the degree that press events are pre-scripted in the Obama administration. “I’m amazed, I’m amazed at you people who called for openness and transparency…”

Watch the video. It's dissapointing seeing this type of action from the White House since this was one of the foundations of Obama's campaign.


For more on Honduras check out this article by Socialist Worker and today's Democracy Now!