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“THE SINGLE-PAYER SOLUTION” BY AMY GOODMAN

Amy Goodman is an independent journalist and host of Democracy Now! on Pacifica Radio and Free Speech TV. This entry is from Amy Goodman’s Weekly Column dated April 23, 2008

As the media coverage of the Democratic presidential race continues to focus on lapel pins and pastors, America is ailing. As I travel around the country, I find people are angry and motivated. Like Dr. Rocky White, a physician from a conservative, evangelical background who practices in rural Alamosa, Colo. A tall, gray-haired Westerner in black jeans, a crisp white shirt and a bolo tie, Dr. White is a leading advocate for single-payer health care. He wasn’t always.

He told me in a recent interview: “Here I am, a Republican, thinking about nationalizing health care. It just went against the grain of everything that I stood for. But you have to remember: I didn’t come to those conclusions with lofty ideals of social justice.”

In the early 1990s, his medical group started falling apart. White, a keen student of economics and the business of medicine, determined that it wasn’t just his practice but the system that was broken.

“You’re seeing an ever-increasing number of people starting to support a national health program. In fact, 59 percent of practicing physicians today believe that we need to have a national health program. I mean, that’s unheard of, even 10 years ago. It’s amazing to see a new generation of physicians coming up who are disgusted with our current health-care system. You know, we’re trained to be advocates of patients, we’re trained to save lives, we’re trained to practice medicine. And instead, what we’re doing is we’re practicing Wall Street economics.”

Single-payer is not to be confused with universal coverage, which Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both support. In fact, in a recent debate, when Clinton raised the issue of single-payer, the audience interrupted with applause. She immediately countered, “I know a lot of people favor [it], but for many reasons [it] is difficult to achieve.”

Why? One of the most powerful industries in the country opposes it—the insurance industry. Under universal coverage, insurance profits are preserved. Under single-payer, they are not. Dr. Rocky White, who now sits on the board of the nonprofit Health Care for All Colorado, has switched his political affiliation. He also has updated and reissued Dr. Robert LeBow’s book on single-payer called “Health Care Meltdown: Confronting the Myths and Fixing Our Failing System.”

He described possible solutions: “There are a lot of different types of single-payer systems—you could have purely socialized medicine. That’s kind of like what England has. The government owns the hospitals, the government owns the clinics, the government finances all the health care, and all the doctors work for the government. That is truly socialized medicine, as opposed to the Canadian system, where the financing comes through their Medicare program, but all the doctors are in private practice.”

The economics are complex, but this plain-spoken country doctor explains it clearly:

“You know, this industry is a $2-trillion industry, and the profits in the for-profit insurance industry are so huge and it’s so deeply entrenched into Wall Street … but until we move to a single-payer system and get rid of the profit motive in financing of health care, we will not be able to fix the problems that we have.”

What would it take? Dr. White has spent his life dealing with the high winds on the high plains, from Nebraska to Colorado, and describes the challenge the country faces in familiar terms:

“I think that our current presidential candidates understand that ideally single-payer would be the best, but they don’t have the political will to move that forward. Their job is to feel which way the wind is blowing. Our job is to turn that wind.” 

There is no question about it… our healthcare system is flawed. Excuse me, perverse. No, no, it’s a disaster. Perhaps maybe even a little bit of very corrupt. These were some of the many words used to describe a healthcare system that has taken in a majority of the people in this country. Yet, also designed to leave out an ever increasing amount people in order to secure grotesque profits. Last night, the Rochester, NY chapter of the International Socialist Organization, held a public meeting on the health issues we face today in this country, titled “Healthcare in Crisis: How Can We Fix This Broken System?”

Unlike normal public meetings, where a member of the ISO will give a political argument supported by historical context, the healthcare meeting featured a panel of speakers. Each speaker gave about 5-10 minute speeches supporting the need for healthcare reform based on their individual reasoning/perspective. In attendence were Ed Bender (physician, Physicians for A National Health Program), Frank S. (president, RIT College Democrats), Tim Engstrom (professor of Philosophy, RIT), and Brian Erway (socialist, ISO).

Ed Bender

Mr. Bender was able to clarify how single-pay universal healthcare works. He used examples of how systems manage to provide care for all in countries where there is a national healthcare program.

Franks S.

Frank (Mr. S sounds weird), contributed by explaining the health plan Barack Obama proposes. He described it as a promising upgrade to what we have now. Comparisons were made with current health management and Hillary Clinton’s plan.

Tim Engstrom

Mr. Engstrom, eloquently was able to debunk some arguments against single-payer healthcare and sort of unite the political spectrum under this one issue. He gave reasons for why the right and the left would benefit from universal healthcare.

Brian Erway

Mr. Erway did his best to unravel the socialist case for single-payer universal healthcare to a crowd filled with a number of new faces. He identified the underlying issue: distribution of wealth/resources. The result was an analysis of how a profit system reduces healthcare to a luxury.

With nearly 50 people in attendance, the audience was hungry for discussion. Those Obama/Hillary debates haven’t been satisfying people’s desire for “change.” You could tell within the angry stories of those in the crowd that they already knew the ‘08 Election wasn’t going to deliver on this front. At one point Mr. Engstrom turned to Frank S. and said ‘With all due respect to Mr. Obama and his representative, his plan is half-assed…’ Mr. Erway, I believe, provided us with a story about local school fundraising that aimed to help provide funds for health coverage for an ailing boy. He expressed his disgust with a system that placed school children in a position to hold a “bake sale” to cover healthcare costs. Children doing the government’s job.

Many questions came from the floor:

Will a socialized program look anything like today’s Medicaid?

Realistically, how severe is the healthcare crisis?

Will socializing healthcare lead to socialism?

Why are we the one modern country that has yet to make the transition to universal healthcare?

and many many more.

Some questions were answered very well. In fact all of the one’s listed above were answered except the one that mentions if universal healthcare would lead to socialism. I’d imagine that that question alone merits its own discussion. The military is one institution that has socialized medicine and we all know it provides free universal healthcare to detainees at Guantanamo Bay… tortured or not.

How do we make this change happen!?

Besides the nitty-gritty of what single-payer is, people wanted to know how to get it here. Seeing as our current and future leadership offer what we don’t want, is there a way to convince the leadership? It was suggested a couple of times that we write to our representative in Congress. As pretty as that may sound, these are the same people we’re talking about that for the last couple of decades haven’t listened to their constituency’s phone calls, mail, and email. If ever they cared it was because a massive amount of the voters really demanded it and beat down their door. These are also the same people who continue to keep us in Iraq murdering people every single day. Two members of the ISO placed things in historical context (kind of a habit with these guys), by giving us numerous examples where specific struggles swelled so much that they fought for years to demand justice. It’s the examples of 1968 that Brian L. listed, there were able to remind us that night that during one decade alone movements for justice and equality made significant advances. And Jeff T. added with ideas of what an organized labor force can demand with its power to produce. Unionizing and organizing were the key ideas here. Even the union’s with corrupt leadership and ineffective agendas need to stay in the fight because people within can take the reigns and demand from their union what they expect them to do in the first place.

The meeting was a total success and congratulations are in order. However, I think the goal was to plant the seed for future participation in the healthcare struggle and perhaps even the overall struggle for peace and justice. After the meeting finished, many stayed to speak with panelists, members of the ISO, and student activists of the Campus Antiwar Network and the Global Awareness group. It’s meetings like these that have a diversity of attendance and participation that really get people thinking. Especially for the challenges and goals that the ISO faces, this meeting worked to its benefit as well in being able to show that socialists (not stalinists) work for the same class interests of the working poor.

In solidarity.

“A Torture Debate Among Healers” by Amy Goodman

Amy Goodman is an independent journalist and host of Democracy Now! on Pacifica Radio and Free Speech TV. This entry is from Amy Goodman’s Weekly Column dated April 9, 2008

Imagine, a candidate for president who, a year or so ago, no one would have considered electable. Now the person is the front-runner, with a groundswell of grass-roots support, threatening the sense of inevitability of the Establishment candidates. No, I’m not talking about the U.S. presidential race, but the race for president of the largest association of psychologists in the world, the American Psychological Association (APA). At the heart of the election is a raging debate over torture and interrogations. While the other healing professions, including the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association, bar their members from participating in interrogations, the APA leadership has fought against such a restriction.

Frustrated with the APA, a New York psychoanalyst, Dr. Steven Reisner, has thrown his hat into the ring. Last year, Reisner and other dissident psychologists formed the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology in an attempt to force a moratorium against participation by APA members in harsh interrogations. During the initial phase of this year’s selection process, Reisner received the most nominating votes. He is running on a platform opposing the use of psychologists to oversee abusive and coercive interrogations of prisoners at Guantanamo, secret CIA black sites or anywhere else international law or the Geneva Conventions are said not to apply.

The issue came to a head at the 2007 APA annual convention. After days of late-night negotiations, the moratorium came up for a climactic vote. We saw a surreal scene on the convention floor: Uniformed military were out in force. Men and women in desert camo and Navy whites worked the APA Council of Representatives, and officers in crisp dress uniforms stepped to the microphones.

Military psychologists insisted that they help make interrogations safe, ethical and legal, and cited instances where psychologists allegedly intervened to stop abuse. “If we remove psychologists from these facilities, people are going to die!” boomed Col. Larry James of the U.S. Army, chief psychologist at Guantanamo Bay and a member of the APA governing body. Dr. Laurie Wagner, a Dallas psychologist, shot back, “If psychologists have to be there in order to keep detainees from being killed, then those conditions are so horrendous that the only moral and ethical thing to do is to protest by leaving.”

The moratorium failed, and instead a watered-down resolution passed, outlining 19 harsh interrogation techniques that were banned, but only if “used in a manner that represents significant pain or suffering or in a manner that a reasonable person would judge to cause lasting harm.” In other words, this loophole allowed, you can rough people up, just don’t do permanent harm.

Immediately after the vote, Reisner spoke out at a packed town hall meeting: “If we cannot say, ‘No, we will not participate in enhanced interrogations at CIA black sites,’ I think we have to seriously question what we are as an organization and, for me, what my allegiance is to this organization, or whether we might have to criticize it from outside the organization at this point.”

Reisner and others began withholding dues. Prominent APA members resigned, and the best-selling author of “Reviving Ophelia,” Mary Pipher, returned her APA Presidential Citation award. After several months of bad publicity and internal negotiations, an emergency committee redrafted that resolution, removing the loopholes and affirming the outright prohibition of 19 techniques, like mock executions and waterboarding.

When I asked Dr. Reisner, the son of Holocaust survivors, why he would want to head the organization that he has battled for several years, he told me: “If I have this opportunity to make a change, I have a responsibility to do it. I never had the intention of being involved, but the only way to ensure this be changed was by claiming the democratic process in the name of human rights and social-justice issues. I was hoping that mass withholding of dues and mass resignations would shame the APA to come to its senses. It made them take a big step but didn’t go far enough.”

He expanded: “American people are sick of the reputation of the United States as torturers, as people who abuse prisoners. American people want to see a restoration of values from war to health care. I think what happens in the APA should point to a direction for the whole country.”

The APA’s annual meeting is this summer, in Boston. Expect interrogation to be the major issue confronting the members gathered there. Final voting for the APA president starts in October. The APA and the United States will determine their next presidents at about the same time. In both elections, a thorough debate on torture should be central.

The Rochester, NY chapter of IVAW now has an official website. It is updated frequently with blog entries by members of IVAW. They encourage allies to fill out the Ally application form in order to stay connected with the chapter and help out with any of their organizational efforts. The site also allows you to request a speaker and includes directions on how to donate to the chapter.

Please help support these guys by visiting their site, donating, or becoming an ally.

IVAW: Rochester

Over 20 chapters of the Campus Antiwar Network gathered at Hunter College in New York City this past weekend. Organized by students for students, “Their War. Our World: Building the Student Resistance” consisted of various educational and organizational workshops. Helping to solidify an understanding of CAN, student resistance, and the goals of US imperialism the conference also incorporated forums on GI resistance, US goals in the Middle East, building the student movement, and a history of student protest during Vietnam.

Many thanks to the Conference Coordinating Committee for making the trip to NYC worthwhile. Below’s an account of my experience. Here are some

pictures

.

Friday, April 4

Leaving Rochester, NY

We left Rochester very early in the morning in order to give ourselves time to hang out in New York City. Thanks to traffic that time was cut short, but we managed to devour sinful amounts of Chinese food, let the MTA rape us with its subway fares, and I bought a Dead Kennedy’s vinyl (Bedtime for Democracy).

Registration Party

“What’s your name, again?” That was perhaps the most asked question of the night (at least it felt that way to me). For 2 good reasons: 1) Beer and 2) CAN members from around the country uniting under one roof is very rare. The party was fun and as always political discussions were going on in every corner of the house. Registration parties are always the best for catching up on what other CAN chapters have succeeded and not succeeded in doing. My chapter (RIT Antiwar) last Monday held a meeting on the truth about the surge and the only people that came to the meeting were 7 members of ROTC/military. While the surge really took a backseat, the topic of immediate withdrawal consumed discussions because they disagreed with CAN’s fundamental point of unity. Thanks to some A-game by our membership and the participation of one of our local IVAW members, we were able to defend the need for immediate withdrawal despite the Rumsfeld-reasoning of the attendees.

Saturday

Opening Plenary

The opening plenary was “Student Protest During the Vietnam War” held by Michael Letwin (NYC Labor Against the War) and Professor Franklin. It was an interesting plenary that focused on the role of resistance by students and the rest of the civilian population. Letwin in particular expressed the need for the student/civilian movement in supporting the GI resistance movement and also the Iraqi resistance. Perhaps the most interesting and simplest thing he said in regards to building the student movement was

“People are most open to change in ideas when involved in struggle.”

Educational Workshops

There were a number of workshops to attend (Afghanistan, Palestine, Immediate Withdrawal, Racism In a Time of War, and GI Resistance). I attended The Case for Immediate Withdrawal that was given by the UMASS-Amherst chapter of CAN. The presentation was good. It covered a number of questions that people usually have such as, “What do we mean by Troops Out Now?”, “Will there be civil war?”, and “Who should rebuild Iraq?” The case for immediate withdrawal was driven by debunking the lies of the justification for war. The racist portrayal of Arabs and Muslims, Al Qaeda presence, bringing democracy, regional stability, and oil. Despite a number of interruptions by the elitists members of The Internationalists (a “with us or against us” minded group that claimed to be “socialists” just because they threw around the words “bolshevik revolution” “labor strikes” and “imperialism”), discussion was able to answer many questions and sharpen arguments for new and old CAN members.

The Case of Immediate Lunch!

Delicious cream of broccoli soup! $5 for soup, but what the heck… I was only on the Upper East Side and time’s limited!

Building the Student Antiwar Movement

This forum on building the student movement was interesting because the main debate came down to what was more important, spending most of our time and resources on educating members or becoming the media. Several people were inclined to want CAN to focus more on becoming the media because they believed that selling our ideas and arguments in smart and effective ways would be the main the way of getting the movement to grow. The other side argued that setting a political foundation within each CAN member would help draw more people. Ultimately, the agreement was that an educational foundation or political confidence was essential in providing strong arguments, but that we do need to take on the role of the media and make people aware of what’s not being said. Not only that, arguments were made about “masturbation”… that we needed to start taking more action instead of talking about it and clapping at each other for saying things we already agree with. Cheers to the chair for handling an anxious bunch of students.

Organizational Workshops

The organizational workshop I attended was the Columbia/UVM/Wesleyan workshop on Divestment. Each school had their share of experience presently and in the past with trying to divest against the investments of university endowments in the military-industrial-complex. It was a really popular workshop with a third (40-45) of the conference attendees in that one classroom. Most of RIT CAN was at the Divestment workshop because our university has such strong ties with the DoD, lockheed martin, and other war profiteers. Those presenting were able to provide steps to starting a divestment campaign. While no one has been able to successfully change a university’s investment plans, each school is different in the way it’s tied to these war profiteers. The most attractive thing about a divestment campaign is the fact that its a closer to home type of struggle where as the fight to bring the troops home seems so big and sometimes out of our hands. Divestment also can work as a good way to get people who wouldn’t normally organize against the war, to organize or just be open to the idea. This workshop provided not only details on divestment, but the panelists provided a number of sources and helpful organizations that can aid a campaign.

Dinner Was Fine, But Michael Schwartz Is Better

I heart Michael Schwartz. There’s something about the way he presents thats just very welcoming. Its not hard to get lost. Things make sense the first time around and he’s constantly moving arond the podium. Schwartz has one of the best breakdowns of the US’s goals in the Middle East and especially Iraq. He incorporates historical events debating back to the late 1800’s and places them into perspective. All of the puzzle pieces come together in his lecture. By the time he’s done you have one the clearest pictures of what’s going on in Iraq. At times I could not keep track with the man as I wrote all the notes I possibly could. It wasn’t the first time I heard him speak, but I’m never able to remember everything that he said. Schwartz addressed the intentions of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the roles of Jimmy Carter, Reagan, FDR, Cheney, Bill Clinton and many other previous administrations in seeking out the supply of oil in the middle east. He linked today’s economy to other points in time which the United States was in the same situation. Schwartz also talked about the crisis within Iraq and the fight of the resistance in Basra. We all wanted a piece Schwartz’s time after the panel and our chapter might consider bringing him to speak at RIT. Everyone’s gotta hear him!

No Party Like A CAN Party

Down in the east village CAN members gathered for drinks and music. It was awesome to see so many people just busting a couple of moves on the dance floor without any reservations. Can’t complain about the variety of music. There was all sorts of music playing and even Son of Nun who attended the conference was cranking up his own tune. Sadly the party was over in the blink of an eye, but we needed to sleep if we wanted to get up in time for the last conference forum featuring members of IVAW.

Sunday

Winter Soldier

Members of IVAW spoke about the healthcare crisis, racism, sexism, and war crimes committed while in Iraq.

RIT Antiwar is a project of the RIT Social Action Group and one of the founding chapters of the Campus Antiwar Network.

“Where Do We Go From Here?” by Amy Goodman

Amy Goodman is an independent journalist and host of Democracy Now! on Pacifica Radio and Free Speech TV. This entry is from Amy Goodman’s Weekly Column dated April 2, 2008

It has been 40 years since Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn., while standing on the balcony outside his room at the Lorraine Motel. King was there to support striking sanitation workers, African-American men who endured horrible working conditions for poverty wages. While King’s staff was opposed to him going, as they were scrambling to organize King’s new initiative, the Poor People’s Campaign, King himself knew that the sanitation workers were at the front lines of fighting poverty.

I went to Memphis on Dr. King’s birthday. There I interviewed Taylor Rogers, one of the striking sanitation workers who marched with King. He told me:

“Back in 1968, 1,300 sanitation workers—we were tired of being mistreated, overworked and underpaid. We decided that we were just going to stand up and be men and do something about our condition. And that’s what we did. We stood up, and we told [Mayor] Henry Loeb in the city of Memphis that ‘I am a man.’ ”

While he was organizing against poverty, King also came out forcefully against the Vietnam War, alienating his erstwhile ally, President Lyndon Johnson. Exactly one year before his assassination, on April 4, 1967, King gave his “Beyond Vietnam” speech at Riverside Church in New York City. He said: “A few years ago, there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war. And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.”

He went on, “I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.”

Time magazine called the speech “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.” The Washington Post declared that King had “diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people.”

King made an essential link between poverty at home and war-making abroad. The connection, sadly, is as relevant today as it was the last year of King’s life. A new report from the Institute for Policy Studies, “40 Years Later: The Unrealized American Dream,” lays out key elements of the inequality that African-Americans experience in the United States around education, employment and wealth accumulation.

On education, the IPS report states that African-American college graduation rates will not be on par with white graduation rates for another 80 years. The income gap between blacks and whites will not disappear for more than 500 years at current rates. More than one-third of African-Americans earn less than $20,000 annually, before taxes.

African-Americans are also far behind in the accumulation of wealth. Add to all this higher incarceration, less access to health insurance and shorter life expectancy. King’s Poor People’s Campaign went beyond race, as he reached out to poor whites in places like Appalachia. Today, one in five residents of West Virginia is on food stamps, as is one in 10 Ohioans, and, according Jim Weill, president of the Food Research and Action Center, one in three children in Oklahoma has been on food stamps at some point in the past year. It is clear that Dr. King’s goal of bringing people “to the promised land” is still far off.

THEIR WAR, OUR WORLD:
Building the Student Resistance

The Campus Antiwar Network’s East Coast Spring Conference

April 4-6th at Hunter College, New York City

Come one, come all!  As we enter our 6th year in the occupation of Iraq, our leaders refuse to present an exit strategy or even a truthful representation of what’s happening on the ground.  Through we keep being told violence is down, US air strikes are up, and in 2007 sectarian killings “ethnically cleansed” Baghdad, turning it from 65% Sunni to 75% Shia.  Resistance to the war has emerged on three fronts: Iraqi civilians defending their country against foreign invasion and continued devastation, enlisted US troops refusing to participate in an illegal and bloodthirsty war, and American civilians, particularly the student movement.  As of yet, the US government has refused to recognize these forces of resistance as legitimate, but with continued and heightened pressure in the form of independent, grassroots activism, we can hope to create the change we wish to see.

Join us, the Campus Antiwar Network’s Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions, for our spring regional conference on the US War on Terror and our student movement.  Students from campuses across the East Coast will be convening to share their organizing experiences.  Together, through workshops and plenaries, we’ll try to address some of the issues facing the antiwar movement today, educating ourselves as well as combining efforts to create long- and short-term strategies to end the war.

Endorsements:

Iraq Veterans Against the War - NYC, NYC Labor Against the War, Military Families Speak Out - NY, International Socialist Organization, Radical Women, and World Can’t Wait

Schedule of Events:

Friday, April 4th:
8pm–12am:
Housing Party (28-27 35th Street, Astoria, NY 11103)

Saturday, April 5th:
9am–10am:
Registration

10am–11:30am:
Student Protest During the Vietnam War – Michael Lewtin, Professor Franklin

11:45am–1:15pm:
Educational Workshops
Palestine
Racism in a Time of War
Afghanistan
The Case for Immediate Withdrawal
GI Resistance

1:15pm–2:15pm:
Lunch

2:30pm–4pm:
Building the Student Antiwar Movement Forum

4:15pm–5:45pm:
Organizational Workshops
Art and Protest in Wartime
Civil Disobedience
Divestment Panel
Working with Veterans
Counter-Recruitment
How to Build a CAN Chapter

Break until 8pm for dinner

8pm Evening Panel:
The State of Iraq – Michael Schwartz

11pm–2am:
Party (638 East 6th Street, New York, NY 10009)

Sunday, April 6th:
12pm–2pm:
Winter Soldier Panel (www.ivaw.org/wintersoldier)

Registration:

$10 for NYC residents, $5 for non-NYC residents. To register, contact Akua: agyame@gmail.com

Housing:

Free housing can be arranged.  To sign up contact Whitney: yoursundayshoes@yahoo.com

Transportation:

Many chapters are arranging transportation for their members.  If you need a ride of have a ride to offer, contact Sarah: sarah.lazarewicz@gmail.com

campusantiwar.net