In article <bq467m$2fvb$1@pencil.math.missouri.edu>, Starman says...

Money for nothing
Geov Parrish - WorkingForChange.com

11.26.03 - Tis the season to be greedy.

Tra la-la-la-la, la la, la, la.

One of the most maddening aspects of American media during any
political campaign season is our tendency to cover even the most
serious legislative or societal news through the lens of how it might
affect candidates' election chances. This so-called "horse race"
reporting usually comes at the expense of what actually happened, and
how it will affect people. It's easier and "sexier" -- although not
particularly relevant -- to guess what might happen at the ballot box.

Never has this syndrome been on fuller display than in the coverage of
yesterday's presidential signing of a bill extending prescription drug
coverage -- sort of -- to Medicare-eligible seniors and the disabled.
The bill stinks to high heaven, but all we could hear about was
whether its passage would help George Bush in 2004.

This is sort of like not seeing the forest for the pine needles on the
forest floor. 

Let's review. Why was legislation offering drug benefits needed in the
first place? Because for America's growing number of people facing
serious health issues while on fixed incomes, the cost of prescription
drugs is an urgent crisis that continues to worsen daily. Too many
seniors cannot afford the drugs, cannot afford preventative medical
care, and cannot afford the acute medical care that becomes necessary
when they can't stay on their meds. Many die, unnecessarily, as a
result. 

Why is the cost of prescription drugs such a crisis, and why are
America's drug costs so much higher than those in other industrialized
countries? Largely because drug companies are run by heartless greedy
bastards, and our health care system allows -- no, encourages -- their
worst tendencies. 

So how has President Bush "fixed" this problem?

By pushing hard for, and then signing, marginally beneficial
legislation that will cost taxpayers $400 billion -- some $139 billion
of which, over one third, will go directly into the profit-laden
pockets of those same drug companies.

You bet this bill will help Dubya's reelection bid -- though not
because grateful seniors will line up at the polls. For many, drug
costs will still be a crisis when this bill takes effect, and they
know it. (Seniors are smarter than the White House apparently thinks.)
Instead, the bill will help Bush in 2004 because Bush is trying to
raise a nearly limitless pool of money to run his campaign and flood
us with those attack ads. And grateful Big Pharma execs will now line
up to reinvest a small portion of their new windfalls on another four
years of their best buddy. One percent of one year's extra profits
would come to about an extra $14 million over what they were already
planning to contribute. (Multiply that by every industry Bush is in a
position to help.) Think those wire transfer lines are already
humming? Think it was a coincidence that he signed the bill on the
road, just before holding fundraising events in Las Vegas and Phoenix?

This is a bill designed to raise reelection money for George Bush, at
the expense of seniors' lives. Between this Medicare gift and an even
worse energy bill -- what one Democratic wag labeled the "No Lobbyist
Left Behind" Act -- the season of using staggering amounts of our tax
dollars for craven political catering to big donors has now begun. The
widespread looting going on in Iraq -- and I mean Bechtel and
Halliburton and friends, not poor teenage Iraqi thugs -- has
officially come home. 

Why do we let this happen? And, more importantly, why are so many, in
the media and beyond, so reluctant to connect the dots? (Or decimal
points.) As I noted last week, the $87 billion supplemental
appropriation for Iraq -- to cover some of the cost of the first year
of our occupation alone -- was so laden with pork that Middle East
companies were begging Congress to let them do some of the
reconstructive work at a tenth of the cost being budgeted for those
infamous no-bid contracts going to Dick Cheney's business partners. 
Across the West, public lands and the mineral rights therein are up
for sale for fractions of a penny on the dollar, environmental laws be
damned. "Free trade" restrictions notwithstanding, farm subsidies to
big agribusiness have ballooned in the Bush 43 era. And so it goes.

This has been going on for three years. In the 2000 campaign, Al Gore
could talk seriously about not just maintaining a federal surplus, but
actually paying off the federal debt. The robust surplus Bush
inherited was officially a deficit in only six months, well before
9/11, due less to economic downturn than to the first of Bush's
multiple tax gifts to the rich. Now, the deficit has exploded beyond
our grandkids' wildest dreams, America's already record gap between
rich and poor is now expanding like the Big Bang's aftermath, our
national soul is being outsourced, the oxymoronic  term "jobless
recovery" has entered our language, and the world's economy is being
kept alive by our consumer debt and trade deficits. You know how
foreign debt has crippled the economies of many developing nations?
Think what China will be able to do to the U.S. in 20 years, and then
consider whose TV ads should be questioning which candidate's
patriotism. 

A generous heaping of scorn and outrage has been dogging AARP of late
for supporting Bush's hideous Medicare bill; many are questioning
whether the fact that AARP is in the business of selling health
insurance and drug company advertising influenced their decision.
Well, of course it did; it's hardly news that many of our country's
larger non-profits have sold their soul for corporate funding, and
that it's affected their political stances: anti-cancer groups that
studiously avoid discussing environmental causes of cancer, for
example, or big Green groups that send out those pretty four-color
pictures of wilderness, but never ever talk about reducing America's
destructive infatuation with resource consumption. AARP is no
different.

But AARP's corruption is nearly meaningless when compared to the far
larger, more comprehensive, and vastly more destructive auctioneering
of our public trust and money going on at the White House. Forget the
horse race; for the real story, go to the stables and follow the
smell. 

(c) Working Assets Online. All rights reserved.
URL: http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=16064
____________________
fwd//Starman

On October 28, 2003, Democratic presidential candidate Wesley Clark
sharpened his attack on the Bush Administration's unilateralist
adventurism: "Our military should be used to back international law,
not to replace it." He also said the administration could not "walk
away from its responsibilities for 9/11."
"You can't blame something like this on lower-level intelligence
officers, however badly they communicated in memos with each other. It
goes back to what our great president Harry Truman said with the sign
on his desk: `The buck stops here.' And it sure is clear to me that
when it comes to our nation's national security, the buck rests with
the commander in chief, right on George W. Bush's desk."