Sunday, October 19, 2003
. . The core threat to democracy is not in the White House, it's the haters themselves. I get the feeling that some Democrats had so much hatred for Bush that they had no hatred left over for Saddam… – David Brooks, conservative commentator
Wal-Mart- The Reality
Yes, bargains can be had at Wal-Mart, the #1 of the mammoth stores that have swept our big-car culture. It has 1.4 million employees and pulled in $245 billion in revenues last year. Each week 138 million shoppers visit Wal-Mart's 4,750 stores. I’m pleased to be NOT of the 82 percent of American households that bought at least one item there in the past year.
Yet, this “standard” has some notably low standards for our workers. We need to think what this means for those workers and the economy in general.
Its sales clerks average about $8.50 an hour, or about $14,000 a year, while the poverty line for a family of three is $15,060. In California, the unionized stockers and clerks average $17.90 an hour after two years on the job… wages and benefits for Wal-Mart's full-time workers average $10 to $14 per hour less than for unionized supermarket workers.
…big savings for Wal-Mart comes in health care, where Wal-Mart pays 30 percent less for coverage for each insured worker than the industry average. An estimated 40 percent of employees are not covered by its health plan because many cannot afford the premiums or have not worked at Wal-Mart long enough to qualify.
"What this means is, if I'm a Wal-Mart employee and I hurt my hand and go to the emergency room, who's going to pay for it? The taxpayer is," said Mr. Brown, the supermarket executive. "Wal-Mart's fringe benefits are being paid by taxpayers."
Wal-Mart officials say that their expansion will be a boon for California consumers and that their wages and benefits are competitive. Why else, they ask, would 600,000 workers take jobs at Wal-Mart each year?
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/19/weekinreview/19GREE.html?pagewanted=print&position
Support for Single Payer, Universal Health Care
An AP piece appearing in Newsday (Will Lester) describes growing interest in publicly funded universal health care and a general eagerness to embrace new directions to solve our health care problems.
A sizable majority, 70 percent, said it should be legal for Americans to buy prescription drugs outside the United States, according to the ABC News-Washington Post poll. One in eight respondents said they or someone in their home has done just that. Such purchases can save money but they violate the law.
The poll released Sunday found that more than half of Americans, 54 percent, are dissatisfied with the overall quality of health care in the United States while 44 percent are satisfied. That dissatisfaction is 10 percentage points higher than in 2000 and higher than it has been in the past decade when compared with earlier surveys…
The poll found that six in 10 people surveyed say they are worried about being able to afford health insurance in the future. More than one in six said they have no insurance. The government says there were 43.6 million uninsured U.S. residents at some point during 2002, accounting for 15.2 percent of the population.
The poll found that 53 percent of those who are insured say they are worried about losing their insurance because of loss of a job. The percentage of those who have health insurance and are satisfied with the cost, 64 percent, has dropped by 9 percentage points since 1997.
By almost a 2-1 margin in this poll, 62 percent to 32 percent, Americans said they preferred a universal system that would provide coverage to everyone under a government program, as opposed to the current employer-based system.
That support drops significantly, however, if universal coverage would mean a limited choice of doctors or longer waits for non-emergency treatment.
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/wire/sns-ap-health-care-opinion,0,7508449,print.story?coll=sns-ap-nationworld-headlines
Culture Wars:
Frank Rich’s Sunday column addressed the emergence of the new permissiveness, epitomized by Arnold S., aspiring actor-politician.
Rush Limbaugh trades cigar boxes stuffed with cash for his fixes of "baby blues" in Palm Beach. Bill Bennett bets everything but the milk money on the slots in sex-drenched Vegas. A Kennedy-by-marriage movie-star-turned-governor freely admits to a "rowdy" past of soundstage gropings in Hollywood.
Ring-a-ding-ding! The Rat Pack is back!
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/19/arts/19RICH.html?pagewanted=print&position=
With every fiber…
What’s Happening, Iraq: Good news or no news?
It’s requiring more work to determine what is going on in Iraq. Attacks now number 20 a day- up from 15 in late summer- but reports are becoming more occasional. Witness the following from msnbc.com.
Somehow threw a homemade grenade at the Americans, wounding 13 servicemen. According to the Oct. 8 Daily Threat Assessment—the Coalition’s internal casualty report, which was shown to NEWSWEEK—eight soldiers were wounded seriously enough to be evacuated to military hospitals. Yet at a press conference the next day, there was no mention of the attack. Pushed by reporters, U.S. officials would only say the incident was under investigation. It was as if the ambush, and the casualties, had never happened.
In Baghdad, official control over the news is getting tighter. Journalists used to walk freely into the city’s hospitals and the morgue to keep count of the day’s dead and wounded. Now the hospitals have been declared off-limits and morgue officials turn away reporters who aren’t accompanied by a Coalition escort. Iraqi police refer reporters’ questions to American forces; the Americans refer them back to the Iraqis.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/982193.asp?cp1=1
Environmental News: The latest Congressional energy plan is likely to protect the Arctic Wildlife Refuge. But the Refuge has always been a faint: While environmentalists gloat about their stifling the Administration’s initiative, the Administration focuses elsewhere, with much less fanfare, or uses ANWAR as a concession to win other rounds.
This time 9.4 million acres in Alaska’s Beaufort Sea are ‘on the block.’ Energy companies have bought up 75,000 acres of drilling plots.
Meanwhile, the current Bush administration is focused on a very different kind of solution to America's energy independence concerns: plundering every last oil-and-gas-filled crevice of the United States, no matter how iced-over, far-flung, or short-lived its supply may be. Although Bush's Department of the Interior has had trouble weaseling its way into the Arctic Refuge, it has successfully steamrolled into less controversial but similarly remote, vast, and ecologically sensitive areas of the country
There are, of course, likely environmental side effects: Last spring, a report by the National Academy of Sciences warned that seismic exploration and offshore drilling in the area would threaten endangered bowhead whales as well as the livelihoods of traditional Inupiat hunters. Needless to say, that report was overlooked. http://www.gristmagazine.com/cgi-bin/printify-2.pl
Health Care Troubles, II
Sunday’s Washington Post (Gilbert M. Gaul and Mary Pat Flaherty) had a front page study of the U.S. pharmaceutical industry. It wasn’t an upbeat assessment.
For half a century Americans could boast of the world's safest, most tightly regulated system for distributing prescription drugs. But now that system is undercut by a growing illegal trade in pharmaceuticals, fed by criminal profiteers, unscrupulous wholesalers, rogue Internet sites and foreign pharmacies.
In the past few years, middlemen have siphoned off growing numbers of popular and lifesaving drugs and diverted them into a multibillion-dollar shadow market. Crooks have introduced counterfeit pharmaceuticals into the mainstream drug chain. Fast-moving operators have hawked millions of doses of narcotics over the Internet.
The result too often is pharmaceutical roulette for millions of unsuspecting Americans. Cancer patients receive watered-down drugs. Teenagers overdose on narcotics ordered online. AIDS clinics get fake HIV medicines
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A44908-2003Oct18?language=printer
October 25 protest in D.C.
It’s been minimally publicized in Boston, yet the Washington Post (Manny Fernandez) led its “C” section with a substantial article on the upcoming demo. It’s a ‘tough call’ for some, torn between more efficient activism in the local area and adding one’s body to a throng that needs to be large so as to make an imprint.
Protesters from more than 135 cities in 38 states are expected to converge on Washington on Saturday, as busloads of antiwar demonstrators return to the capital for the first time since the fall of Baghdad in April.
ANSWER held a national conference in New York in May that drew more than 850 activists, and United for Peace and Justice sponsored a strategy session in suburban Chicago in June that attracted more than 550. The meetings were designed to focus the movement on charting its future, but the period of relative quiet also allowed some to find new strength to carry on.
The listing of cities organizing bus and car caravans posted on ANSWER's Web site reads like a map of much of the United States: Wilmington, Del.; Harrisburg, Pa.; Savannah, Ga.; Asheville, N.C.; Kalamazoo, Mich.; Cedar Falls, Iowa; and Milwaukee
Organizers said the rally and march will draw tens of thousands from across the United States and Canada. It is the first event of its kind co-sponsored by two major antiwar coalitions, International ANSWER and United for Peace and Justice, both of which coordinated some of the country's biggest peace marches this year. The demonstration will coincide with a rally and march in downtown San Francisco.
New York's union representing 200,000 health and human services employees, 1199 SEIU, is providing free bus transportation to Washington for its members and their families. And ANSWER has reserved 65 buses for the New York area alone.
"The antiwar movement is becoming ascendant again; it's rising once more," ANSWER organizer Brian Becker said. "Our demonstration against the occupation on April 12 drew 30,000 people. We will draw substantially more than that for this demonstration."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A47080-2003Oct18?language=printer
Democratic Feistiness
Slowly, slowly they’re becoming more assertive. The latest example from today’s Washington Post (Helen Dewar).
Democrats may invoke rules under which they can block formation of future conference committees unless Republicans assure Democrats of broader participation in the negotiations.
"Given the very narrow partisan breakdown in our country and in the Congress, it is critical that the voices of both parties be heard," Daschle told reporters Friday in outlining his plans. In an earlier interview, Daschle said Frist told him he would talk to GOP committee chairmen about "restoring some degree of involvement by Democrats." Frist aides said they did not know what, if any, action Frist intends to take.
Later in the day, after passage of the $87 billion spending package for Iraq and Afghanistan, Daschle agreed to a conference on the bill after receiving assurances of "full participation" for Democrats from Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska).
Daschle did not say what legislation his party might target, saying decisions would be made on a case-by-case basis. Democrats could block -- or at least seriously delay -- formation of a conference committee by staging filibusters that would take 60 votes to overcome in the 100-member chamber. That would be a high hurdle for the 51-member GOP majority and a potential threat to any legislation caught up in the last days of a congressional session.
As an alternative to conferences, the House and Senate can amend each other's bills until a consensus is reached, Daschle said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A46695-2003Oct18?language=printer
State vs Defense Department: Another Potent Illustration
The Sunday NT Times led with this item (Eric Schmitt, Joel Brinkley). A State Department study which warned of post-invasion complications was essentially ignored by the Department of War/Defense.
Beginning in April 2002, the State Department project assembled more than 200 Iraqi lawyers, engineers, business people and other experts into 17 working groups to study topics ranging from creating a new justice system to reorganizing the military to revamping the economy.
Their findings included a much more dire assessment of Iraq's dilapidated electrical and water systems than many Pentagon officials assumed. They warned of a society so brutalized by Saddam Hussein's rule that many Iraqis might react coolly to Americans' notion of quickly rebuilding civil society.
Several officials said that many of the findings in the $5 million study were ignored by Pentagon officials until recently, although the Pentagon said they took the findings into account. The work is now being relied on heavily as occupation forces struggle to impose stability in Iraq.
The working group studying transitional justice was eerily prescient in forecasting the widespread looting in the aftermath of the fall of Mr. Hussein's government, caused in part by thousands of criminals set free from prison, and it recommended force to prevent the chaos…
The man overseeing the planning, Tom Warrick, a State Department official, so impressed aides to Jay Garner, a retired Army lieutenant general heading the military's reconstruction office, that they recruited Mr. Warrick to join their team.
George Ward, an aide to General Garner, said the reconstruction office wanted to use Mr. Warrick's knowledge because "we had few experts on Iraq on the staff."
But top Pentagon officials blocked Mr. Warrick's appointment, and much of the project's work was shelved, State Department officials said.
-R
Wal-Mart- The Reality
Yes, bargains can be had at Wal-Mart, the #1 of the mammoth stores that have swept our big-car culture. It has 1.4 million employees and pulled in $245 billion in revenues last year. Each week 138 million shoppers visit Wal-Mart's 4,750 stores. I’m pleased to be NOT of the 82 percent of American households that bought at least one item there in the past year.
Yet, this “standard” has some notably low standards for our workers. We need to think what this means for those workers and the economy in general.
Its sales clerks average about $8.50 an hour, or about $14,000 a year, while the poverty line for a family of three is $15,060. In California, the unionized stockers and clerks average $17.90 an hour after two years on the job… wages and benefits for Wal-Mart's full-time workers average $10 to $14 per hour less than for unionized supermarket workers.
…big savings for Wal-Mart comes in health care, where Wal-Mart pays 30 percent less for coverage for each insured worker than the industry average. An estimated 40 percent of employees are not covered by its health plan because many cannot afford the premiums or have not worked at Wal-Mart long enough to qualify.
"What this means is, if I'm a Wal-Mart employee and I hurt my hand and go to the emergency room, who's going to pay for it? The taxpayer is," said Mr. Brown, the supermarket executive. "Wal-Mart's fringe benefits are being paid by taxpayers."
Wal-Mart officials say that their expansion will be a boon for California consumers and that their wages and benefits are competitive. Why else, they ask, would 600,000 workers take jobs at Wal-Mart each year?
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/19/weekinreview/19GREE.html?pagewanted=print&position
Support for Single Payer, Universal Health Care
An AP piece appearing in Newsday (Will Lester) describes growing interest in publicly funded universal health care and a general eagerness to embrace new directions to solve our health care problems.
A sizable majority, 70 percent, said it should be legal for Americans to buy prescription drugs outside the United States, according to the ABC News-Washington Post poll. One in eight respondents said they or someone in their home has done just that. Such purchases can save money but they violate the law.
The poll released Sunday found that more than half of Americans, 54 percent, are dissatisfied with the overall quality of health care in the United States while 44 percent are satisfied. That dissatisfaction is 10 percentage points higher than in 2000 and higher than it has been in the past decade when compared with earlier surveys…
The poll found that six in 10 people surveyed say they are worried about being able to afford health insurance in the future. More than one in six said they have no insurance. The government says there were 43.6 million uninsured U.S. residents at some point during 2002, accounting for 15.2 percent of the population.
The poll found that 53 percent of those who are insured say they are worried about losing their insurance because of loss of a job. The percentage of those who have health insurance and are satisfied with the cost, 64 percent, has dropped by 9 percentage points since 1997.
By almost a 2-1 margin in this poll, 62 percent to 32 percent, Americans said they preferred a universal system that would provide coverage to everyone under a government program, as opposed to the current employer-based system.
That support drops significantly, however, if universal coverage would mean a limited choice of doctors or longer waits for non-emergency treatment.
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/wire/sns-ap-health-care-opinion,0,7508449,print.story?coll=sns-ap-nationworld-headlines
Culture Wars:
Frank Rich’s Sunday column addressed the emergence of the new permissiveness, epitomized by Arnold S., aspiring actor-politician.
Rush Limbaugh trades cigar boxes stuffed with cash for his fixes of "baby blues" in Palm Beach. Bill Bennett bets everything but the milk money on the slots in sex-drenched Vegas. A Kennedy-by-marriage movie-star-turned-governor freely admits to a "rowdy" past of soundstage gropings in Hollywood.
Ring-a-ding-ding! The Rat Pack is back!
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/19/arts/19RICH.html?pagewanted=print&position=
With every fiber…
What’s Happening, Iraq: Good news or no news?
It’s requiring more work to determine what is going on in Iraq. Attacks now number 20 a day- up from 15 in late summer- but reports are becoming more occasional. Witness the following from msnbc.com.
Somehow threw a homemade grenade at the Americans, wounding 13 servicemen. According to the Oct. 8 Daily Threat Assessment—the Coalition’s internal casualty report, which was shown to NEWSWEEK—eight soldiers were wounded seriously enough to be evacuated to military hospitals. Yet at a press conference the next day, there was no mention of the attack. Pushed by reporters, U.S. officials would only say the incident was under investigation. It was as if the ambush, and the casualties, had never happened.
In Baghdad, official control over the news is getting tighter. Journalists used to walk freely into the city’s hospitals and the morgue to keep count of the day’s dead and wounded. Now the hospitals have been declared off-limits and morgue officials turn away reporters who aren’t accompanied by a Coalition escort. Iraqi police refer reporters’ questions to American forces; the Americans refer them back to the Iraqis.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/982193.asp?cp1=1
Environmental News: The latest Congressional energy plan is likely to protect the Arctic Wildlife Refuge. But the Refuge has always been a faint: While environmentalists gloat about their stifling the Administration’s initiative, the Administration focuses elsewhere, with much less fanfare, or uses ANWAR as a concession to win other rounds.
This time 9.4 million acres in Alaska’s Beaufort Sea are ‘on the block.’ Energy companies have bought up 75,000 acres of drilling plots.
Meanwhile, the current Bush administration is focused on a very different kind of solution to America's energy independence concerns: plundering every last oil-and-gas-filled crevice of the United States, no matter how iced-over, far-flung, or short-lived its supply may be. Although Bush's Department of the Interior has had trouble weaseling its way into the Arctic Refuge, it has successfully steamrolled into less controversial but similarly remote, vast, and ecologically sensitive areas of the country
There are, of course, likely environmental side effects: Last spring, a report by the National Academy of Sciences warned that seismic exploration and offshore drilling in the area would threaten endangered bowhead whales as well as the livelihoods of traditional Inupiat hunters. Needless to say, that report was overlooked. http://www.gristmagazine.com/cgi-bin/printify-2.pl
Health Care Troubles, II
Sunday’s Washington Post (Gilbert M. Gaul and Mary Pat Flaherty) had a front page study of the U.S. pharmaceutical industry. It wasn’t an upbeat assessment.
For half a century Americans could boast of the world's safest, most tightly regulated system for distributing prescription drugs. But now that system is undercut by a growing illegal trade in pharmaceuticals, fed by criminal profiteers, unscrupulous wholesalers, rogue Internet sites and foreign pharmacies.
In the past few years, middlemen have siphoned off growing numbers of popular and lifesaving drugs and diverted them into a multibillion-dollar shadow market. Crooks have introduced counterfeit pharmaceuticals into the mainstream drug chain. Fast-moving operators have hawked millions of doses of narcotics over the Internet.
The result too often is pharmaceutical roulette for millions of unsuspecting Americans. Cancer patients receive watered-down drugs. Teenagers overdose on narcotics ordered online. AIDS clinics get fake HIV medicines
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A44908-2003Oct18?language=printer
October 25 protest in D.C.
It’s been minimally publicized in Boston, yet the Washington Post (Manny Fernandez) led its “C” section with a substantial article on the upcoming demo. It’s a ‘tough call’ for some, torn between more efficient activism in the local area and adding one’s body to a throng that needs to be large so as to make an imprint.
Protesters from more than 135 cities in 38 states are expected to converge on Washington on Saturday, as busloads of antiwar demonstrators return to the capital for the first time since the fall of Baghdad in April.
ANSWER held a national conference in New York in May that drew more than 850 activists, and United for Peace and Justice sponsored a strategy session in suburban Chicago in June that attracted more than 550. The meetings were designed to focus the movement on charting its future, but the period of relative quiet also allowed some to find new strength to carry on.
The listing of cities organizing bus and car caravans posted on ANSWER's Web site reads like a map of much of the United States: Wilmington, Del.; Harrisburg, Pa.; Savannah, Ga.; Asheville, N.C.; Kalamazoo, Mich.; Cedar Falls, Iowa; and Milwaukee
Organizers said the rally and march will draw tens of thousands from across the United States and Canada. It is the first event of its kind co-sponsored by two major antiwar coalitions, International ANSWER and United for Peace and Justice, both of which coordinated some of the country's biggest peace marches this year. The demonstration will coincide with a rally and march in downtown San Francisco.
New York's union representing 200,000 health and human services employees, 1199 SEIU, is providing free bus transportation to Washington for its members and their families. And ANSWER has reserved 65 buses for the New York area alone.
"The antiwar movement is becoming ascendant again; it's rising once more," ANSWER organizer Brian Becker said. "Our demonstration against the occupation on April 12 drew 30,000 people. We will draw substantially more than that for this demonstration."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A47080-2003Oct18?language=printer
Democratic Feistiness
Slowly, slowly they’re becoming more assertive. The latest example from today’s Washington Post (Helen Dewar).
Democrats may invoke rules under which they can block formation of future conference committees unless Republicans assure Democrats of broader participation in the negotiations.
"Given the very narrow partisan breakdown in our country and in the Congress, it is critical that the voices of both parties be heard," Daschle told reporters Friday in outlining his plans. In an earlier interview, Daschle said Frist told him he would talk to GOP committee chairmen about "restoring some degree of involvement by Democrats." Frist aides said they did not know what, if any, action Frist intends to take.
Later in the day, after passage of the $87 billion spending package for Iraq and Afghanistan, Daschle agreed to a conference on the bill after receiving assurances of "full participation" for Democrats from Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska).
Daschle did not say what legislation his party might target, saying decisions would be made on a case-by-case basis. Democrats could block -- or at least seriously delay -- formation of a conference committee by staging filibusters that would take 60 votes to overcome in the 100-member chamber. That would be a high hurdle for the 51-member GOP majority and a potential threat to any legislation caught up in the last days of a congressional session.
As an alternative to conferences, the House and Senate can amend each other's bills until a consensus is reached, Daschle said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A46695-2003Oct18?language=printer
State vs Defense Department: Another Potent Illustration
The Sunday NT Times led with this item (Eric Schmitt, Joel Brinkley). A State Department study which warned of post-invasion complications was essentially ignored by the Department of War/Defense.
Beginning in April 2002, the State Department project assembled more than 200 Iraqi lawyers, engineers, business people and other experts into 17 working groups to study topics ranging from creating a new justice system to reorganizing the military to revamping the economy.
Their findings included a much more dire assessment of Iraq's dilapidated electrical and water systems than many Pentagon officials assumed. They warned of a society so brutalized by Saddam Hussein's rule that many Iraqis might react coolly to Americans' notion of quickly rebuilding civil society.
Several officials said that many of the findings in the $5 million study were ignored by Pentagon officials until recently, although the Pentagon said they took the findings into account. The work is now being relied on heavily as occupation forces struggle to impose stability in Iraq.
The working group studying transitional justice was eerily prescient in forecasting the widespread looting in the aftermath of the fall of Mr. Hussein's government, caused in part by thousands of criminals set free from prison, and it recommended force to prevent the chaos…
The man overseeing the planning, Tom Warrick, a State Department official, so impressed aides to Jay Garner, a retired Army lieutenant general heading the military's reconstruction office, that they recruited Mr. Warrick to join their team.
George Ward, an aide to General Garner, said the reconstruction office wanted to use Mr. Warrick's knowledge because "we had few experts on Iraq on the staff."
But top Pentagon officials blocked Mr. Warrick's appointment, and much of the project's work was shelved, State Department officials said.
-R
