Editorial page, Atlanta Journal-Constitution
June 20, 2004

Profit motive is health’s loss

In a country where capitalism is the state religion, it’s hard to get people to admit that the profit motive doesn’t improve every enterprise. Americans seem to think there is no problem that cannot be solved by some resourceful entrepreneur.

But we’re experiencing a crisis of faith in at least one area — health care. The soaring cost of hospitals and medicines suggests that capitalism is sometimes at odds with the common good.

Not many of us have the nerve to say that aloud yet. It’s heresy.

Besides, the last time any public figure made a serious effort to reform health care, the result was near excommunication. Hillary Clinton’s complex system of rules and regulations was easily caricatured by opponents, and the blowback was enough to keep any self-respecting politician away from health care for years. But in the coming decade, the soaring cost will force Congress and state legislatures to confront the problem.

We now have a health care system whose primary mission is not delivering
health care. Instead, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, medical device manufacturers and, in fact, many hospitals exist to make money. That’s their first priority, and also their second and third priority. The product they sell happens to be improved health. But they jack up the prices on the product and restrict it to those who can afford it.

In this enterprise, a little profit motive goes a long way. And in health care, it has gone too far.

Just take a look at what has happened recently to prices of some pharmaceuticals used by elderly patients. The prices shot up just as the new drug discount cards were released, ensuring that drug companies will earn just as much on products for ailments such as hypertension and arthritis as they did before. So those retirees who have struggled to pay for their medications will be no better off — even with discount cards. The prices of the 30 drugs used most often by retirees rose more than four times the rate of inflation from January 2003 to January 2004, according to consumer advocacy group Families USA.

In the United States, capitalism works as well as it does because businesses compete for customers. And there is usually a business willing to make any product available for a cheaper price. If a motorist can’t afford a Mercedes, he can buy a Mazda. If you can’t afford the $15,000 plasma TV, you can settle for the $500 cathode-ray tube model. But who wants to see the discount cancer doc?

Insurance companies have tried to hold down costs by reimbursing physicians at a standard rate for common procedures. But that has not kept health care costs from rising faster than the rate of inflation. Perhaps that’s because medicine is one of those mysterious enterprises where the average consumer can never be sophisticated enough to know what he’s actually buying. Most of us find a physician we like and do what he or she dictates. It’s simply not the same as buying a toaster or a dining room table. You don’t wait for a good sale to get your angioplasty.

There is also this difference with the average consumer product: Most Americans believe that access to doctors and hospitals is a right, not a privilege that comes with money. We don’t say that out loud either. Not yet. But federal regulations already guarantee treatment in case of an emergency. If you have pneumonia and need to see a doctor, a public hospital may not turn you away, even if you don’t have insurance.

But guaranteeing access to emergency room treatment has helped to push the cost of medicine even higher. It would be far cheaper to guarantee every American preventive care — regular check-ups for hypertension and diabetes, immunizations for school-age children, medications for routine illnesses such as ear infections.

As more and more working Americans find themselves without health insurance, our faith in the ability of capitalism to provide a fundamental asset of American life is being sorely tested. Sometime in the next decade, we’ll be forced to admit that government will have to step in and shore up the safety net by guaranteeing basic health care to all Americans.

The old-time religion will have some new hymns.
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Cynthia Tucker is the editorial page editor. Her column appears Sundays
and Wednesdays.

Scrooge & Marley, Inc. — The True Conservative Agenda
by Thom Hartmann
 
“That liberty [is pure] which is to go to all, and not to the few or the rich alone.”
–Thomas Jefferson to Horatio Gates, 1798.

There is nothing “normal” about a nation having a middle class, even though it is vital to the survival of democracy.

As twenty-three years of conservative economic policies have now shown millions of un- and underemployed Americans, what’s “normal” in a “free and unfettered” economy is the rapid evolution of a small but fabulously wealthy ownership class, and a large but poor working class. In the entire history of civilization, outside of a small mercantilist class and the very few skilled tradesmen who’d managed to organize in guilds (the earliest unions) like the ancient Masons, the middle class was an aberration.

If a nation wants a middle class, it must define it, desire it, and work to both create and keep it.

This is because a middle class is the creation of government participation (conservatives call it “interference”) in the marketplace, by determining the rules of the game of business and of taxation, and by providing free public education to all. And it wasn’t until 1776, when Thomas Jefferson replaced John Locke’s right to “life, liberty and property” with “life liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” that the idea of a large class of working people having the ability to “pursue happiness” – the middle class – was even seriously considered as a cornerstone obligation of government.

(That was also the first time in history that “happiness” had ever appeared in any nation’s formative documents. As Jefferson wrote in 1817 to Dr. John Manners, “The evidence of this natural right, like that of our right to life, liberty, the use of our faculties, the pursuit of happiness is not left to the feeble and sophistical investigations of reason, but is impressed on the sense of every man.”)

Thomas Jefferson laid out in an 1816 letter to Samuel Kerchival what today would be a blistering attack on the conservative/corporate war on labor and Bush’s union-busting planned privatization of over 700,000 government positions.

“Those seeking profits,” Jefferson wrote, “were they given total freedom, would not be the ones to trust to keep government pure and our rights secure. Indeed, it has always been those seeking wealth who were the source of corruption in government. No other depositories of power have ever yet been found, which did not end in converting to their own profit the earnings of those committed to their charge.”

He added: “I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich, are our dependence for continued freedom. … We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. … [Otherwise], as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, … and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow sufferers.”

A totally “free” market where corporations reign supreme, just like the oppressive governments of old, Jefferson said could transform America “…until the bulk of the society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering. Then begins, indeed, the bellum omnium in omnia, which some philosophers observing to be so general in this world, have mistaken it for the natural, instead of the abusive state of man.”

As Jefferson realized, with no government “interference” by setting the rules of the game of business and fair taxation, there will be no middle class.

Although this may come as a sudden realization to many, we’ve really known it all our lives.

For example, every year, millions of Americans revisit Charles Dickens “A Christmas Carol” about Ebenezer Scrooge and Bob (and Tiny Tim) Cratchit. Yet somehow Americans fail to realize the subtext of the story (and so many of Dickens’ other works). That subtext is that the middle class is not a normal thing: exploited workers are the norm. In fact, in the six-thousand-year history of the “civilized” world, a middle class emerging in any nation has been such a rarity as to be historically invisible.

As Dickens pointed out, Cratchit lived the typical life of that day’s English working poor. He couldn’t afford medical care for Tim, dooming his son to death or a lifetime of deformity. He had no idea where his Christmas dinner may come from, let along how to get gifts for his children, and always lived on the edge of the terror of unemployment and homelessness. Although he had a full-time job at Scrooge & Marley, Inc., he was so desperately anxious to keep his job that he worked weekends and evenings and put up with years of daily abuse from his employer.

This demonstrates the true liberal/conservative divide. Conservatives believe what business does is business’s business, and government should keep its nose out of it, even when it leads to centuries of Tiny Tims and terrified-of-job-loss employees. As the Wall Street Journal noted in 1997, Alan Greenspan sees one of his main jobs as being to maintain a high enough level of “worker insecurity” that employees won’t demand pay raises and benefits increases, thus provoking “wage inflation.” (“CEO inflation” is fine with the cons.)

Liberals, on the other hand, subscribe to the notions of the founder of today’s Democratic Party — Thomas Jefferson — that if the government doesn’t actively participate in regulating how the game of business is played, the middle class (what in Jefferson’s day were the “yeomanry”) would vanish.

The United States has had two great periods of what we today call a middle class. The first was from the 1700s to the mid-1800s, and was fueled by virtually free land for settlers. People owned the means of their production (their farms), could sell their surplus, and had time to be among (as deTocqueville pointed out) the most well-educated, politically active “non-aristocrats” in the world.

As big business grew in the 1800s after the Civil War, the farm-based middle class collapsed, in large part because the early progenitors of companies like today’s Cargill or ADM came to control the sale and distribution of farm produce. Middle class farmers rose up, created the Grange movement as part of their own way of competing with the big ag companies, and — seeing that their “representative government” was being taken over by the largest corporate interests — launched the Populist and Progressive movements.

Step one was to limit the size of corporations to limit their power — thus the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1881 (still law, but unenforced for all practical purposes since Reagan.)

Step two was to take Teddy Roosevelt’s advice that, “We must drive the special interests out of politics. The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have themselves called into being. There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains.” Progressives pushed hard, and in 1907 a law was passed (still on the books) making it illegal for corporations to give money to politicians. It needs to be expanded.

The last parts of the progressive agenda included a direct election of the U.S. Senate (Senators had been pointed by political machines in the states) so the progressives may get more democracy and representation, and the hope that when women voted (besides it being the morally right thing) they may help break up the old boy’s club of big business. (These goals were achieved in 1913 and 1920.) And, even in the face of corporate violence that often escalated to murder, Americans struggled to bring together the budding union movement.

But the middle class of the farmers never really again recovered their middle class status in America (although there are dying pockets of it still about, supported by Willie Nelson, Farm Aid, and other groups), and the Gilded age saw a very Dickens-like America — a small group of very wealthy business and land owners and a very large class of desperately poor workers.

It took the leadership of FDR for government to again take a hand in creating a middle class, this time via industrialized labor instead of land (times change, and we’d taken about all the land we could from the Native Americans).

The Wagner Act of 1935 guaranteed Americans the right to form a union and bargain collectively with their corporate employers. Combined with the later G.I. Bill that sent millions of young men and women to college and technical schools in the late 1940s and early 1950s, not only did America recover its prosperity, but a second great middle class began forming. A middle class that wouldn’t have existed without “government interference” in the game of big business.

(Some say WWII was the stimulus out of the depression, and it was an economic stimulus from which many, like the Bush family benefited [even to the extent of helping out Hitler], but the real events of the 1930s and 1940s that set the stage for a second American Middle Class were primarily the Wagner Act, the G.I. Bill, and tax changes ranging from raising the top rate on the most rich to 90 percent to offering an emerging middle class home interest tax deductions. Spending money on weapons that serve no useful purpose after they’re used doesn’t stimulate an economy the way building roads, bridges, houses, or domestic consumer industries, which “keep on giving,” does.)

And to stimulate that domestic economy, we instituted progressive taxation, which gave workers more to spend, thus stimulating demand for more goods and services.

Progressive taxation has a long history: As Jefferson said in a 1785 letter to James Madison, “Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise.”

But the conservatives — who since the days when John Adams called working people “the rabble” and Alexander Hamilton suggested they should play no (or only a token) role in government — fought back. A true middle class represented a threat to the aristocrats and pseudo-aristocrats of America’s conservatives. They may have to give up some of their power, and some of the higher end of their wealth may even be “redistributed” – horror of horrors – for schools, parks, libraries, and other things that support a healthy middle-class society but are not needed by the rich who live in a parallel, but separate, world among us.

At the height of early participation in the newly empowered union movement (at one point 35 percent of American workers were union members), in 1947, over Truman’s veto, congress passed the Taft-Hartley Law that significantly weakened union protections defined (and working well) under the 1935 Wagner Act. Taft-Hartley was (and still is) a powerful weapon for employers over employees (banning sympathy strikes, etc.), and was used, although most aggressively in the southern states (who declared themselves “right to work” states under another provision of Taft-Hartley) until Reagan declared a national war on unionization with his attack on PATCO in 1981.

The cons had first launched their attack on labor in 1947, and Reagan brought it to full fruition: education was next.

Today, although there are still some educational benefits to GI’s (Jessica Lynch joined the army to get financial aid to go to college to become an elementary school teacher, for example), they’re minimal and hard to both accumulate, track, and take advantage of (and must be paid for in most cases). Although Jefferson started the University of Virginia with the notion that part of building a middle class (necessary to a democracy, he said) would require people with some education, and advocated a national program of free education up to and including university levels, the last state to fall from that ideal was when Governor Ronald Reagan ended free enrollment in the University of California system.

Jefferson said, in an 1824 letter: “This degree of [free] education would … give us a body of yeomanry, too, of substantial information, well prepared to become a firm and steady support to the government.”

The attack on higher education was being won (and continues with cuts in college grant programs), and the cons moved to attack the third requirement for a society to produce a middle class: progressive taxation. This, of course, infuriates the elite cons who seem to truly believe that a CEO actually works 500 times harder than his employees (or is 500 times smarter).

But history shows that the third pillar of creating a middle class requires a modest control of how wealth is distributed. The richest, who benefit the most from our society, pay proportionately more, so the middle class can have home interest deductions, child tax credits, free public education, and health care. Progressive taxation has helped create every middle class in the First World, and without it the middle class will vanish (to Steve Forbes delight, apparently).

As Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison in 1784, “Taxes should be proportioned to what may be annually spared by the individual.” And, as earlier noted, as wealth rises, so should taxes — “geometrically.”

But as president, Reagan cut the top tax rate for billionaires from 70 percent to 28 percent, while effectively raising taxes on working people via the payroll tax and using inflation against a non-indexed tax system. It was another hit to the already-beginning-to-shrink middle class, to be followed by more “tax cut” bludgeons during the first three years of the W. Bush administration.

Nonetheless, a never-ending parade of conservative economists and commentators march through our living rooms daily via radio and TV, assuring us that it is good for American workers to go along with the Wal-Martization of America, accept lower pay and few benefits, and fear for their health, so multinational corporations can “level the playing field” for labor.

They say it will create winners in the system, and they are right. The winners are the multinational corporations, and the losers are the rest of us. No matter, say the TV commentators — nearly all millionaires themselves. “Free trade” sounds sexy; “protectionism” sounds downright selfish. And it’s all too complicated to explain in 20 seconds, even quoting Jefferson.

But, unless we repeal Taft-Hartley; start enforcing the Sherman act, provide free education for Americans (and not just Iraqis); abandon WTO/GATT and NAFTA; restore progressive taxation (including on dividend income); force corporations to pay their fair share; and go back to selective tariffs to protect domestic industries and stop offshoring to explicitly bring home the ability for us to make our own clothes, furniture, autos, and electronics, the conservatives will have won and the middle class — and, thus, democracy — will lose.

As Jefferson warned in an 1826 letter to Will B. Giles, even then some conservatives “now look to a single and splendid government of an aristocracy, founded on banking institutions, and moneyed incorporations under the guise and cloak of their favored branches of manufactures, commerce and navigation, riding and ruling over the plundered ploughman and beggared yeomanry. This will be to them a next best blessing to the monarchy of their first aim, and perhaps the surest steppingstone to it.”

Jefferson’s vision rose to fruition in the Gilded age, was fought back by FDR, and again rose its antidemocratic head under Reagan, the first Bush, GATT/NAFTA Clinton, and Dubya.

If conservative economics are allowed to continue, and we fully revert to the way life was lived by the average person in America in 1890 or Dickens’ England (over 40 million in America already have, by the way, many in the past 3 years), there will be no more middle class, just a few more rich CEOs and Bushies, and a lot more terrified workers living in slavery to debt and terrified of unemployment or a serious health crisis.

It’ll be a marvelous thing for the profits of the multinationals (including those who supply our “news”), but the end of a way of life in America, and possibly around the world, since so many nations imitate our lead. And only you and I – the ploughman and yeomanry – can stop them and restore an America where it’s possible to raise a family on one income and still have enough for housing, transportation, food, education, vacations, health care, and a decent retirement.

The middle class is not a “normal” thing: it’s just the core that holds together democracy and an informed, healthy, and active citizenry.

To bring it back from its steady decline since the Reagan era is going to take a lot of active work spreading the word (call talk radio, blog, forward this article and similar ones, write a letter to the editor to your local paper), and participation in or contact with elected officials at all levels (writing elected officials, joining and volunteering to help your favorite local political party or activist organization, showing up for rallies, etc.). We must get out the vote and remove the whole con bunch from the White House and Congress, repeal Taft-Hartley, get corporate money and lobbyists out of our governmental processes, restore progressive taxation, rebuild our schools, return to the tariff system that protected American industries (and jobs and communities) from 1786 until 1996, strengthen Social Security, and turn Medicare into a universal single-payer health system (among other things).

Are you willing to join? Or would you prefer to re-read “A Christmas Carol” to your children, so they can understand the future America that conservatives have in mind for them?

Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show that runs in 57 markets from coast-to-coast. www.thomhartmann.com. His most recent books are “Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights,” “The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight,” “We The People: A Call To Take Back America,” and “What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return To Democracy.”

The People’s Media Reaches More People Than FOX Does
by Jim Hightower
 
While Big Media is “simply in the business of selling products, the people’s media reaches more people than FOX does.

Democratic reformer Henry Adams, who decried the decline in democracy as the robber barons rose to power in the nineteenth century, did not mince words about the failure of the news media of his day: “The press is the hired agent of a monied system,” he wrote, “and set up for no other purpose than to tell lies where the interests are involved.”

Imagine the verbal scorching Henry would give to today’s media barons, who are not merely hired agents of monied interests‹they have become the interests, fully corporatized, conglomerated and well-practiced in the art of journalistic lying to perpetuate the power and profits of the elites.

A handful of self-serving corporate fiefdoms now controls practically all of America’s mass-market sources of news and information. GE now owns NBC, Disney owns ABC, Viacom owns CBS, News Corp. owns Fox, and Time Warner owns CNN; these five have a lock on TV news. Of the 1,500 daily newspapers, only 281 are independently owned – three companies control 25 percent of the daily news circulated in the entire world.

These aloof giants openly assert that meeting their own profit needs is the media’s reason for existence – as opposed to meeting the larger public’s need for a vigorous, democratic discourse. Lowry Mays, honcho of Clear Channel Inc. (which owns more than 1,200 radio stations – a third of all the stations in America), opines that: “We’re not in the business of providing news and information We’re simply in the business of selling our customers’ products.”

The web gives us the means to bypass the corporate media, creating our own low-cost, decentralized network of news that, say, The New York Times does not consider “fit to print.”

In addition to hundreds of specialized news sites, there are “aggregators” that amount to news services for progressive content – credible outfits like Alternet.org, TomPaine.com, Buzzflash.com, and CommonDreams.org.

This single-minded mercenary focus combines with general corporate arrogance to bloat the egos of media chieftains, leading them to think that they really are the infallible gods of our daily newsfeed, with no need to be accountable to the public: “We paid $3 billion for these television stations,” said an executive with a Fox affiliate in Tampa; “We decide what the news is. The news is what we tell you it is.”

Crude, corporate censorship of our news by these boardroom types is less common than the subtle, internal self-censorship done by general managers, top editors, and some reporters who avoid topics and dilute stories that the corporate hierarchy might find offensive or simply not comprehend. A 2000 survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that a third of local reporters admit softening a news story on behalf of the interests of their media organizations. A fourth say they have been told by superiors to ignore a story because it was dull, but the reporters suspected that the real motivation was that the story could harm the media company’s financial interests. And that’s only the reporters who confess!

If you detect a corporate bias in your news, don’t feel lonely. Two-thirds of Americans told pollsters last September that they believe special interests or a self-serving corporate-political agenda infect news coverage. We can all wring our hands and wail about this corporate, monopolistic grasp on our news sources, but here’s a better idea: Let’s do something about it. A grassroots flowering

A grassroots flowering

The Austin Motel is a refurbished, New Deal-era business on South Congress Avenue near my home. It has an old brightly-lit marquee out front that proudly boasts the credo of the current owners: “No additives, No preservatives, Corporate-free since 1938.”

Wouldn’t that make a fine slogan for a new democratic media for America?

Oh, you say, Hightower, don’t toy with us. It would take billions and billions of dollars to build a broad-based media network outside the established TV, radio, and newspaper conglomerates, so that’s just a pipe dream. Well, yes, it would take those impossible billions if we set out merely to duplicate the media Goliaths. But what if we wanted to develop a David ú a sprightly, nimble network of media outlets that are not capital-intensive and not burdened with either multimillion-dollar salaries or voracious conglomerate bureaucracies?

I have good news for you: This is already happening! Thousands of hardy, grassroots people have been working steadily and creatively over the years in every area of media, and the result of their combined efforts is that a new media force is now flowering coast to coast ú a force of hundreds of media outlets that is unabashedly progressive, fiercely independent, diverse, dispersed, and democratic. Some of these outlets are nationally known, others only locally known; some are brand new, others have been plugging away for decades. But the significant thing is that, collectively, they are a force to be reckoned with, celebrated, strategically deployed and deliberately expanded.

I’ve known and worked closely with many of these varied outlets my entire political life, but it was only last year that I realized what can happen if we learn to connect the various components and tap into the full power that they offer.

The occasion was a most modest one: The launch of my book, Thieves in High Places. In addition to being about the monied kleptocracy that has seized our people’s democratic power, the heart of this book is about the deeply-encouraging rise of you grassroots Americans out there who’re battling the thieves – and often beating them. These are inspiring stories of democratic activism that the media establishment largely ignores, and I wanted as many people as possible to know about the stories, so that others might take heart and battle on.

Call me cynical, but I knew from experience that the barons of media power were not likely to rush forward to embrace and disseminate my antiestablishment message. I was right ú none of the morning TV shows (“Today,” “Good Morning America,” etc.) allowed me to talk about it; no evening newsmagazine show (“20/20,” “Dateline,” etc.) would touch it; there were no reviews in the mass-market newspapers and magazines (New York Times, Newsweek, etc.) and even NPR and public television gave it the cold shoulder. It was a case of libra non grata. Yet, a funny (and fun) thing happened: Thieves rose into the top 10 of nearly every best-seller list across the country, including the New York Times list. You could almost hear the incredulous compilers of sales data asking: “How the hell did this thing get on our list?”

It got there, quickly reaching a mass-market audience, by way of your and my very own rag-tag, patchwork media network, which most of us don’t even know we have. I stumbled on the breadth and depth of this network because Sean Doles and Laura Ehrlich in my office had organized a guerrilla campaign to get the word out about the book. Working with community-radio stations, alternative newsweeklies, independent bookstores, web-active organizations, progressive (and aggressive) magazines, websites and publications of grassroots organizations, local organizing groups, some upstart television rebels – and, of course, you scrappy Lowdowners – we found that progressives are not voiceless in a corporate-media wasteland after all if only we recognize that we have powerful media assets of our own.

My book doesn’t matter, but the concept of connecting this patchwork of assets does matter greatly. Any particular piece of this progressive media patchwork is small (and too often scoffed at by progressives themselves as “insignificant”). But add the pieces together and we have a far-flung network of outlets that – each and every day – is reaching tens of millions of people.

Also, the people who are tuning in to our progressive outlets are not just cumulative numbers to be sold to advertisers; mostly they’re readers, listeners, online clickers, and viewers who give a damn and are looking for action. We saw an example last year of what can happen when even some of these components connect. The FCC, led by laissez-faire nutball Michael Powell, was ramming through a rules change that effectively would allow one or two media conglomerates to control the TV, radio, and newspaper outlets in every U.S. city.

Essentially, this unregulation of media ownership would lead to the full-scale monopolization of our news sources. Corporate lobbyists and government lawyers had holed up in a dark back room to whisper sweet legalese to each other, and we Joe and Joline Schmoes would have known nothing about it until after the fact, when we would’ve heard that wet, smoooooooching sound coming from Washington that tells us – uh-oh – another dirty deed has been done to us.

This time, though, was different. Several public-interest organizations picked up on the FCC’s back-room move and alerted such grassroots groups as Common Cause, which sent up red flares to engage its 200,000 members. Then, like the pamphleteers of old, dozens of community- radio stations plastered on-air broadsheets all across the country, translating the FCC’s regulatory gobbledygook into straightforward rallying cries. They pounded the issue day after day. Next came the Web-active group MoveOn.org, which gave this growing grassroots opposition the mechanism it needed for a targeted response – and some 170,000 emails poured into Washington.

The result was that, last July, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 400 to 21 in favor of an amendment by Rep. David Obey to stop the FCC’s media-monopolization rule. The decisive 400 House votes were from Congress critters (Democrats as well as Republicans) who had taken buckets full of campaign cash from the very media barons they suddenly decided they had to vote against.

The battle is not over, but the fact that this arcane issue of media-ownership regulations could, in such a short time, ignite a prairie fire of popular rebellion is a testament to the power at our disposal.
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Radio

As I’ve learned from the past dozen years of on-air experience, radio can be a very democratic little box‹in part because it’s ubiquitous (in our bedrooms, cars, showers, etc.), and also because people tend to hear what’s said on radio, as opposed to TV, where they get an image but don’t much follow the story being told. The bad news is that the radio dial is fast being bought up by Clear Channel and a couple of other conglomerates. The good news, however, is that we still have hundreds of extremely important stations in our hands, beaming out a steady progressive message to millions every day.

Since 1993, my own two-minute radio commentaries (“little pops of populism,” we call them) have aired every weekday, now being heard on a mix of 130 commercial and community stations coast to coast, plus Alaska, Hawaii, and – get this – Armed Forces Radio, as well as on the web (www.jimhightower.com). But I’m the least of it. From Amy Goodman’s sassy Democracy Now to Working Assets Radio with Laura Flanders, from New Dimensions to Latino USA, from Counterspin to RadioNation, from ACORN Radio to Alternative Radio with David Barsamian, from Media Matters with Bob McChesney to The World – there’s a wealth of national and local broadcasters putting forth progressive issues and insights every day.

Because of the corporate bias of its owners, commercial radio is the hardest nut to crack, but we have such voices as Enid Goldstein at KNRC in Denver, Sly Sylvester on WTDY in Madison, and Mitch Albom on WJR in Detroit. And now, Air America is making a bold play to bring 17 hours a day of progressive talk radio through its burgeoning network, broadcasting such live-wire hosts as Al Franken, Janeane Garofalo, Randi Rhodes, Chuck D, and Rachel Maddow. This brand-new upstart is already in 15 cities, and is drawing millions more listeners each day on the web (www.airamericaradio.com).

Then there are our community owned stations. Many people assume that these are little one-watt nothings, but that’s nonsense. Indeed, some are powerhouse blasters in big cities, such as the Pacifica Network’s five flagship stations in Berkeley, New York City, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, and Houston. Pacifica’s KPFK in LA, for example, is 110,000 watts, reaching from San Diego to Santa Barbara and stretching inland to San Bernardino. Likewise, the independent community station WMNF in Tampa is a 70,000- watt treasure that reaches from Sarasota on the Gulf Coast almost to Orlando in the middle of the state.

Even the small-town community broadcasters pack a punch. WERU in Blue Hill, Maine (pop. 700), for example, reaches clear to the state capital in Augusta and is a beloved rallying point for the whole Penobscot Bay area (“We-are-you” is how the station pronounces its call letters). The same with KAOS in Olympia, KBOO in Portland, KGNU in Boulder, and so many more‹people don’t just tune in, they count on these stations, trust them in a way no one would trust Clear Channel, and are willing to act on the information they receive.

The web

A democratic tool that Jefferson, Madison, and the other Bill of Righters could not have imagined, but would gleefully embrace today, is the world wide web. This computerized architecture of interconnected hubs and spokes allows us to link our thoughts and actions instantly in virtual space and produce tangible political results that would have taken months before.

Every progressive group (even Luddites like me) now has lively, interactive web sites through which we can share a gold mine of information, forge coalitions, hold “meetings,” and mobilize mass actions (from local to global).

The growth of the net is explosive – 68 billion emails per day, for example, and 10 million daily blogs by everyone from the kid next-door to famous pundits to me! MoveOn.org, TrueMajority.org, and the Howard Dean campaign have shown the phenomenal potential of the web, not only for fund-raising and blitzing Congress with citizen opinion, but especially for organizing people for action (a breakthrough that you’ll hear more about as the Lowdown itself develops a web-active program to link all of us Lowdowners into more grassroots civil action).

The web gives us the means to bypass the corporate media, creating our own low-cost, decentralized network of news that, say, The New York Times does not consider “fit to print.”

In addition to hundreds of specialized news sites, there are “aggregators” that amount to news services for progressive content – credible outfits like Alternet.org, TomPaine.com, Buzzflash.com, and CommonDreams.org

Some are creating their own virtual newspapers. Check out iBrattleboro.com. For more than a year now, this Vermont website lets the readers be the reporters on what’s really going on in town. Anyone can contribute, and anyone can comment on the contributions. In a town of 12,000, the virtual pages of iBrattleboro are getting 260,000 viewers a year.

Alternatives galore

If reading the daily press depresses you, get a lift by going beyond your “Daily Blather” newspaper to such spunky journals as The Nation, Mother Jones, The Progressive, In These Times, American Prospect, Ms., Harper’s, and The Progressive Populist. Also, Utne rounds up articles every month from more than 2,000 alternative media sources. And two groups, the Independent Press Association (indypress.org) and the Alternative Press Center (altpress.org), give you access to magazines, newsletters, and ‘zines that cover every political and cultural issue imaginable.

Chances are your own town has one or more independent weekly newspapers offering detailed coverage of progressive issues and events that the monopoly dailies miss or avoid. The Association of Alternative Weeklies (aan.org) plugs you into 120 of these local voices that, collectively, reach 17 million readers a week. Even television, the feeblest member of our democracy’s media mob, is perking up a bit. PBS’s Now with Bill Moyers has been a blast of fresh air (though its direction is uncertain now that he has announced his retirement), and C-SPAN continues to do a great public service by simply clicking on its cameras and letting us see events without edits or editorializing. And you can forget the network news and go directly to The Daily Show for Jon Stewart’s irreverent, on-target satires, broadcast on Comedy Central.

Especially encouraging in TV-land are the insurgents of the air, including Free Speech TV and WorldLink TV, reaching a combined 20 million homes. Grassroots rebels are also making their own TV, thanks to Cable Access Television, available on some 600 public-access channels, as well as a feisty group of Independent Media Centers (indymedia.org) that are particularly good at streaming raw footage of protests and other actions, with their media activists taking their web-driven videocams right into the center of things, bringing you news as it happens.

Finally, don’t discount the power of face-to-face networks. On any given day, thousands of people are gathered in various-sized groupings to listen, learn, discuss, interact, strategize, and organize. These forums include the nation’s 2,200 independent bookstores, which are not merely book peddlers, but also community meeting places and informal bulletin boards (go to booksense.com to find ones near you). Public libraries, progressive speakers’ series, pot-luck suppers, conversation cafes and progressive festivals (Greenfest, Bioneers, Rolling Thunder, etc.) are also part of this vibrant, high-touch outreach that goes on daily in practically every city and neighborhood.

Years ago, my momma taught me that two wrongs don’t make a right – but I soon figured out that three left turns do. We must apply that same kind of street savvy if we’re ever to find our way around the media blockages that the corporate interests have put in place to shut out our voices.

Let’s not get tangled up in America’s red tape
By ANDRÉ PICARD
PUBLIC HEALTH REPORTER
Thursday, June 10, 2004 – Page A21

It is fashionable these days to badmouth public services, and medicare in particular. From pothole repair through to open-heart surgery, it is virtually accepted as gospel that taxpayer-funded services are second-rate, delivered grudgingly by underworked fat cats comfortably ensconced in a bloated bureaucracy.

Bring in some market discipline, the rallying cry goes, and medicare’s woes will disappear: There will be no more wait lists, costs will plummet and services will be delivered with a smile to a society of satiated Methuselahs. Contrast the dream with the findings of two studies published during the past week. The first, a head-to-head comparison of U.S. and Canadian health indicators, found that, despite markedly different delivery systems, health outcomes and satisfaction rates are virtually the same in the two countries.

The second, conducted by researchers at McMaster University, found that the costs of services delivered by for-profit hospitals were 19-per-cent higher than those in not-for-profit facilities. At the same time, the death rate in private, for-profit institutions was about 8-per-cent higher. Sandwiched between these two research papers was the annual compilation of health spending from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development that showed the U.S. spends $5,297 (U.S.) per capita on health care, compared to $2,931 per capita in Canada — $2,366 more per person.

So why does Canada’s supposedly stodgily bureaucratic system get so much more bang for the buck than the lean, mean entrepreneurs who control the U.S. free-market health system?

The answer—at least one answer—can be found in a paper published last year in the New England Journal of Medicine, research that got virtually no attention because it was released during the SARS crisis.

The study, by Harvard University professors Steffie Woolhandler and David Himmelstein, concluded that the much-vaunted U.S. health system is choking in red tape.

The authors found that, in 1999, Americans spent $1,059 per capita on health-care administration, compared to $307 per capita for Canadians. Put another way, bureaucracy gobbles up 31 per cent of U.S. health dollars, compared to 17 per cent in Canada.

The authors of the Harvard study said this was due to a number of factors. For example, with Canada’s single-payer system, doctors bill a single provincial insurance plan using a single simple form, and hospitals receive lump-sum payments. In the United States, a hospital can deal with up to 800 insurance plans.

Private insurers, which dominate the U.S. system, have overhead costs averaging 11.7 per cent. That compares to 3.6 per cent for U.S. Medicare, and 1.3 per cent for provincial health plans in Canada. And for-profit institutions must provide a healthy return to investors, so they charge more. They also pay large bonuses to administrators.

Dr. Himmelstein said the stark differences between the U.S. and Canada were driven home during a visit to Toronto General Hospital. He searched long and hard for the billing office—a prominent feature of all U.S. hospitals—before locating two people whose job it is to bill U.S. patients who need treatment while visiting Toronto.

According to the authors, if the U.S. were to adopt Canada’s single-payer system, it would save approximately $286-billion a year in administrative costs ($982 per capita). The thorny problem of 43 million Americans without health insurance—whom it would cost about $69-billion a year to insure—could be eliminated, with money to spare.