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As House Votes to Repeal “Obamacare,” Vermont Moving Toward Single Payer
Margaret Flowers is congressional fellow for the 18,000-member Physicians for a National Health Program; Mark Almberg is the organization’s communications director. Flowers said today: “The Republican repeal of the health law in the House yesterday would initiate a race to the bottom. Their plan to open the sale of insurance across state lines would lead to an administrative nightmare for patients and providers and further lower the quality of health insurance plans. We need a real and simpler solution: improved Medicare for all. Fortunately states like Vermont are picking up where the federal government has failed and are much closer…
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U.S.-Chinese Relations
Henry Rosemont is visiting professor of religious studies at Brown University and author of several books including A Chinese Mirror: Moral Reflections on Political Economy and translations of Chinese classics. He said today: “China is a threat to the United States only if the United States assumes that it is, and pursues an aggressive foreign policy that serves only our own and not China’s interests. The best hope for a less tension-filled world is for both countries to reduce military spending significantly …
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“From Military-Industrial Complex to Permanent War State”
Gareth Porter just wrote the piece “From Military-Industrial Complex to Permanent War State,” which states: “Fifty years after Dwight D. Eisenhower’s January 17, 1961 speech on the ‘military-industrial complex,’ that threat has morphed into a far more powerful and sinister force than Eisenhower could have imagined. It has become a ‘Permanent War State,’ with the power to keep the United States at war continuously for the indefinite future.
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Obama’s New Approach to Regulation Is “Misguided”
President of Public Citizen, Robert Weissman said today: “The dominant fact of American life in recent years has been grossly inadequate public protections. In the past several years, under-regulation and corporate disregard of safety rules have resulted in multiple salmonella and E. coli outbreaks, a flood of lead-tainted toys, a massive and environmentally devastating oil spill, deadly mine disasters and the collapse of our economy, which has cost eight million American jobs. We need to focus most urgently on fixing these problems and others, not burden agencies, which already are overworked and under-resourced, with more internal reviews and red tape.…
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Tunisian Academic: “Will Not Recognize This Band of Thugs”
NOUREDDINE JEBNOUN, [beginning Tues. 2:00 pm ET] Available for a very limited number of interviews with major media outlets, Jebnoun is visiting assistant professor at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University. He said today: “Today, in Tunisia, a new government has been announced and mainly led by the same old guard of criminals from the Constitutional Democratic Rally, which is neither ‘constitutional’ nor ‘democratic’ but an aggregation of thugs and criminals that Tunisian people, who sacrificed themselves for freedom and dignity, must place under trial. …
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Haiti: Return of Jean Claude Duvalier
EZILI DANTO Danto is president of the Haitian La…
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Tunisia: U.S. Backing Dictatorship over Pro-Democracy Movement
CNN is reporting: “Police in Tunisia’s capital city used batons and tear gas to clear a peaceful demonstration on Friday. … [This occurs] after days of riots that have killed at least 21 people.” STEPHEN ZUNES Zunes just wrote the piece “Pro-Democracy Uprising Fails to Keep Washington From Backing Tunisian Dictatorship.” Zunes is professor of politics at the University of San Francisco and senior policy analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus. CHRISTOPHER ALEXANDER Alexander is director of the Dean Rusk International Studies Program at Davidson College in North Carolina and a specialist on Tunisia. He is author of Tunisia: Stability…
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Over 400 Gun Deaths Since Tucson?
Rebecca Peters is a lawyer who was until recently director of the International Action Network on Small Arms, the global movement against gun violence. She said today: “In other countries — Germany, Britain, Canada, Australia, Israel, Finland, Belgium — even a single tragedy of this nature leads to a commission of inquiry and to legal loopholes being closed. … The most recent year for which data are finalized by the CDC is 2007; there were 31,224 total gun deaths in that year in the U.S., averaging to 86 per day. This would lead to an estimate of 428 deaths in…
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Cost of War: Breaking It Down
Jo Comerford is executive director of the National Priorities Project; Chris Hellman is budget analyst for the group, which as part of the re-launch of its website, CostofWar.com, has just issued “What’s at Stake?” — 50 state-level briefs focused on the impact of war spending. Hellman said today: “In state after state, tough decisions are being made about critical programs that touch people’s lives. It’s imperative that we examine the locally-based opportunity costs of federal spending decisions. NPP’s numbers will help people assess the magnitude of war spending and draw their own important conclusions. This is especially important as Vice President…
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Martin Luther King Jr. on Violence
“I knew that 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. … “I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. …
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“With a tiny staff, it has managed to place on the air and in newspapers, points of view otherwise excluded from the national debate.”
Howard Zinn