Three more good reasons to Dump Baucus in 2008

GREEN SOLUTIONS by Paul Stephens, CasCoGreens

Baucus continues to shill for the "insurance industry," agribusiness, the oil companies, and gas-guzzling car and truck manufacturers

With Congress in recess, our Senators were back in Montana last week, pushing for an expansion of the CHIP program to "insure" children who don't otherwise have access to health care. Dubya threatened to veto this bill (of which Baucus was the lead sponsor), in order to give his Democrat friends a bogeyman to campaign against, and pretend that they are doing something for Montana's children. In fact, this bill, like all of the health care bills which Baucus has supported in the past (especially the Medicare "drug benefit" plans), is a gift to the insurance industry and corporate medicine in general.
I saw an interesting statistic last week: U.S. consumers, 4.6% of the world's population, buy 43% of the world's drugs. Not that we probably use that much more drugs, but we pay five times or more as much for the same drugs as the rest of the world buys at cost plus a small profit margin - thanks to senators like Baucus in the pay of "Big Pharma" and the corporate media which gets all the advertising revenues. Drug companies now (since the Clinton Administration) spend two to five times more in advertising than what is spent in researching, developing, and testing new drugs.
Blue Cross-Blue Shield, which administers the CHIP program, charged some 30% more than it would have cost to provide these health care services directly under a Medicare/Medicaid model. Meanwhile, federal funding for community clinics, Indian Health Services, and other non-profit providers has been drastically reduced.
During the Tester campaign last year, it didn't take us long to educate him as to the difference between "health care" and "health insurance," and soon he was always speaking in favor of health care and even a "single payer system," instead of more subsidies to the "health insurance industry," or to employers who provide this "insurance" for their employees. In Tester's case, political considerations favored this stance, because his opponent in the primary was actually the State Auditor, who is responsible for regulating insurance companies. Thus, a good share of his campaign contributions came from that source, proving that he had been a faithful corporate servant. So Jon didn't have the same motives as Max in promoting "insurance" during last week's tour, and this difference even came out in some of the televised news broadcasts.
The only real "health insurance" is a healthy lifestyle and a clean and healthful environment
As we've often observed, "health insurance" is a category mistake. There is no such thing. It is, in fact, "insurance" of one's property or savings from being confiscated by medical providers who are legally permitted to charge several times more than their services actually cost or are worth, or what people would voluntarily pay for them. Meanwhile, this exploitative, confiscatory system is defended as "the free market," another category mistake. It has nothing to do with "free markets." All medical supplies and services are provided by regulated (or more often, self-regulated or de-regulated) monopolies, protected by the legal system and the state. Even charitable, non-profit hospitals and other providers are allowed to shift costs and legally force people to pay for services they never received or didn't need in the first place.
Lawyers and insurance companies, collection agencies, and the like have thus been able to confiscate up to half or more of our health-care dollars, while the real health care providers are driven out of business and made to waste a third or more of their time and other resources in bill-collecting and insuring themselves against lawsuits. For a doctor to make only $100,000 a year is considered penury, and beneath their dignity as "professionals" with the power of life and death over those unfortunate enough to fall under their "care." Ironically, everything good about our health care system is attributed to "competition" and "freedom of choice," (which have been almost entirely eliminated except for the very wealthy), while all the evils we experience now are blamed on "socialism" or "government regulation."
The best we can do at this point is to abolish private health insurance, regulate all costs and prices, and either institute a universal "fee for services" system like Canada's, or establish a National Health Service like Britain's and most other countries, where most (if not all) health care providers are civil servants like postmen and forest rangers. There are also "hybrid" systems which do both, depending on the kind of medical services being offered, with allowances for the very wealthy to purchase taxed, for-profit services while still having to pay taxes to support the universal system. Any of these would be far cheaper and better for everyone, including the very wealthy. The Green Party Platform goes far beyond these simple reforms, addressing wellness and overall public health, drug law reform, eliminating corporate monopolies, and many other aspects of healthcare and social justice.
http://www.gp.org/platform/2004/socjustice.html#999378
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Gasoline taxes to fix bridges? Not on your life!

Later in the week, Max came out strongly against an increase in the gasoline-diesel tax, even though this was to be dedicated to repairing bridges, highlighted by the recent disaster in Minneapolis-St.Paul, after which it was determined that to bring all of the nation's bridges up to acceptable safety standards would cost some $180 billion. Where is this money supposed to come from? Baucus claimed it should come from other sources, or out of general tax revenues.
Higher gasoline taxes have been offered as a panacea for all sorts of problems since the 1970's, and the rest of the world averages somewhere between $3-$5/gallon in gasoline taxes in order to maintain their trade balances, encourage conservation, higher fuel-efficiency, less air pollution, subsidize public transportation, and encourage more local food production and manufacturing, instead of shipping almost everything we use thousands of miles, or even half-way around the world.
Back in the 1980's, The Economist regularly advocated a $1/gallon tax on gasoline, showing that it would reduce the federal budget deficit by $1billion for each cent of tax, or $100 billion (then, approximately the same as the entire budget deficit as well as the trade deficit, which would also be significantly reduced by reducing foreign oil imports, and increasing the cost of shipping imported goods). But then, as now, the oil and automobile lobbies were so strong (bolstered by their Democrat-supporting unions) that there was no organized resistance to them. The last time it was even attempted, with a "windfall profits tax," was during the Carter Administration.
Surely Max understands how vital it is to reduce our oil consumption as well as balance the federal budget, and a higher tax on gasoline consumption is certainly the best way to go about it. It is no secret that the Iraq War (fought on borrowed money, finally costing American taxpayers $2 trillion or more, not to mention destroying two or more countries and a million or more lives) is "all about oil," and had we cut our oil imports by half in the 80's and 90's, as we easily could have done, none of these wars would have happened.
Even though in real terms, gasoline is now cheaper than it's ever been in Montana, people complain about the price, and carmakers insist on continuing to build gas guzzler SUV's which they've lobbied to have excluded from higher fuel efficiency standards. Obviously, it won't help to elect Democrats instead of Republicans from Michigan or "oil-coal states" like Montana and Wyoming, Louisiana, Texas, Alaska, or Oklahoma. Even Sen.Tester, with his support for biofuels and "clean coal," bodes ill for the environment and food supply. Most of these crops are genetically engineered, and they will either ruin the soil for food crops, or make food production much more expensive and unsafe than it already is. There is no point in producing some small percentage of our fuel needs from ethanol and oil crops while we continue to waste half or more of the fuel we use on private automobiles and SUV's, high-intensity monocrop chemical farming methods, etc. And "coal to liquids" technology, which Tester (in Schweitzer's footsteps) has supported in the past, actually produces twice as much CO2 per unit of delivered energy as simply refining and burning petroleum, or generating electricity from coal. Instead of subsidizing the coal, oil, and nuclear industries, we need a national initiative for clean, renewable energy, public transporation systems, efficiency, and conservation. It's all there on the Green Party websites. Get real! -- PHS
http://www.gp.org/platform/2004/ecology.html#771441
http://mtgreens.org/node/67
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Guess who is being funded by the National Association of Broadcasters?

As if to add insult to injury, Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) seems to be making a play for the massive campaign contributions which Sen. Burns received as Chairman of the Senate Telecommunications Sub-committee, before and after the Telecommunications Act of 1996 which gave away $80 billion worth of broadcast spectrum, and allowed most of the print, film, and broadcast media to be divided among 6 giant media monopolies, of which Rupert Murdoch and Gannett are two of the largest. Burns was one of the largest pork-brokers from one of the least populous states, and it was always a sore-spot with Baucus Democrats (he being the senior senator, and born here as part of the ruling elite, not a parvenu like Burns) that Burns had better connections in Washington, and was better-liked back home. Baucus was courting Leo Giacometto, a former Burns staffer and now one of the largest K-Street influence peddlars, even before Burns was defeated by Jon Tester, another "real Montanan" and elected as such, but with a somewhat different agenda. http://www.counterpunch.org/frank11092005.html
Max appeared in a statewide "media buy" last week warning against "internet predators", and paid for by the National Association of Broadcasters. The campaign against pornography and "illicit sex" is a perennial feature of the fascists/Stalinists who want to suppress free speech and any organized political opposition, while filling the prisons with liberal intellectuals, journalists, poets, artists, birth control and abortion advocates, gays and lesbians, and others whose sexual lives don't conform to Biblical prescriptions. But why, we might ask, are liberal, pro-choice candidates joining up?
Last week, I happened to read a long article in Playboy Magazine from November, 1997 which chronicled the suppression of "vice" and sexual promiscuity during World War II. This was concurrent with the research and publication of the Kinsey Report, which showed that probably 80% of sexually-active adults were committing felonies on a regular basis. Most of these laws against "sodomy" and "fornication", not to mention sexually explicit literature and films, advocating birth control, extra-marital sex, or even sex education, were subsequently repealed (subsequent, that is, to the "sexual revolution" largely promoted by Playboy Magazine and the various liberation movements of the 1960's). Meanwhile, we were a nation of outlaws, and respect for the law reached a low ebb in our national history.
It is even lower, today, and our prison population continues to increase according to the military-industrial-prison complex's plans and strategies. The crusade against Eros and sexual freedom has returned with a vengeance. Under current Montana law, possession of a Maxfield Parrish print could get you 20 years in prison if you admitted to being "aroused" by it. (And Parrish was Charlie Russell's favorite contemporary artist!) It is particularly telling that a liberal Democrat, Rep. Parker, should have promoted this agenda in the Montana legislature, with nearly unanimous consent. Hatred, dehumanization, and punishment of children and those who love them and find them esthetically pleasing has never been more widespread.
By pandering to these puritans and bigots, Democrats will reap the whirlwind. But they already have. They are done as a political party, but they are the only ones who don't yet seem to recognize it. By betraying the peace and justice movements, the environmentalists and civil libertarians, universal healthcare, and virtually every other Progressive who advocates even a little bit of taxpayer support for the arts and culture, or even a social safety net, who exactly do the Democrats think will vote for them? The fascists and warmongers? The corporate elite? To be sure, the Bush-Cheney voters support their agenda, but only under a Republican banner. Karl Rove was on TV yesterday, explaining how Hillary Clinton has the highest negative polling data of any front-runner in history. He hoped, obviously, that she would get the Democratic nomination, thus assuring an easy victory for the Republicans! QED.
As Truman said, "When the choice is between a real Republican and a Democrat pretending to be one, the voters will choose the real Republican every time." But of course Baucus isn't a Democrat pretending to be a Republican. He's a Republican pretending to be a Democrat. And the same could be said for Hillary. According to Cindy Sheehan, they're not just Republicans. They're Neo-cons. -- Paul Stephens