It never ceases to amaze me how relentlessly the American Medical Association—and, earlier and perhaps today, the Canadian Medical Association—seems to me to oppose, as a group, the idea of a medical care system whose two main conditions are high quality care and care that actually reaches all (or nearly all) people. Yes, even so-called poor people. Even if Medicare-type delivery is cheaper, which it has proven to be, using the cost of the American system as an example—a system that still leaves 47 million people uninsured.

Coming from a family with two doctors therein, I never would have instinctively guessed such an inegalitarian stance to be the instinct of an Association led by doctors (and their rich friends). How naive, evidently.

Some of the early opposition to so-called universal health care was simply racist: for example, the fear of allowing blacks to be treated in the same hospitals as white, let alone with the same care. Indeed, I am sure the question for many was also: why treat them at all?

But check this out, to get a very slight taste of history. In 1961, the AMA created, believe it or not, a program called Operation Coffee Cup. Part of the program was to have doctors’ wives (called the “Women’s Auxiliary”) gather over coffee, with others, to convince said gatherers to write letters to Congress, and on and on.

About what?

Well, the goal of Operation Coffee Cup was, in short, to oppose health insurance for the elderly. More specifically, the expansion of Social Security to include health insurance for the elderly. This, of course, wreaked of socialism (which already wreaked enough). This communism-infected Health insurance ideology for the elderly, by the way, would later become known as Medicare.

At these meetings, doctors’ wives would play an LP album called Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine. At this point, I believe President Reagan was still just a pretty poor actor.

The three parts are here. One, two and three.

I wish human nature was different, and greed and domination wouldn’t overtake any blanket ideology—because blanket ideologies are used for exploitation—but they do. In a way, isn’t it oppressive at least to a degree to make a person live under any system he or she doesn’t wish to live under? We are distinct individuals after all.

Lots of love and health,

Pete xo

PS This just in! Although historically the AMA and CMA have often been against universal health care, I just read this on the Democracy Now site:
Isabel MacDonald [of FAIR]:

“Fifty-nine percent of Americans and 59 percent of physicians support a Medicare for All-type program, or single payer [I'm not sure if that currently means the AMA]. ABC [Television Network] has not had a single advocate of that system on air this year [I wonder if ABC's friends are Health Insurance companies or coalitions of, say, poor people in New Orleans]. So we’re delivering a petition to both ABC and we’re also sending a message to the other TV networks, demanding that they cover single-payer healthcare and stop silencing single-payer advocates.”

“I’m a sucker for free and fair elections. It warms my heart to watch people drop ballots in a box to express their will…”
—Thomas Friedman

Me, too.

Once again, one does not have to agree in full or in part with what Noam Chomsky points out in the following essay—but his points always remind me of the constant coating painted by media, over top of what is generally much closer to the truth.

Thomas Friedman’s celebration of the election in Lebanon and mocking of the same in Iran is given a little more nuance by Noam. In short, yes, Iran’s election is a disgrace, but Lebanon’s is not as lily white as Friedman and others would like peons like myself to believe. To put it mildly, they’re both travesties.

Speaking of which, I still don’t know what happened in Florida in 2000 and 2004. Have those elections been unofficially but strongly labeled corrupt yet? Were they?

Reactions were similar throughout the mainstream. There are, however, a few flies in the ointment. The most prominent of them, apparently unreported in the US, is the actual vote. The Hezbollah-based March 8 coalition [which commentators say work on behalf of Syria and Iran] won handily, by approximately the same figure as Obama vs. McCain in November 2008, about 54% of the popular vote, according Ministry of Interior figures. Hence by the Friedman-Abrams argument, we should be lamenting Ahmadinejad’ s defeat of President Obama, and the “moral authority” won by Hezbollah, as “the majority of Lebanese … took the opportunity” to reject the charges Abrams repeats from Washington propaganda.

Like others, Friedman and Abrams are referring to representatives in Parliament. These numbers are skewed by the confessional voting system, which sharply reduces the seats granted to the largest of the sects, the Shi’ites, who overwhelmingly back Hizbollah and its Amal ally.

But as serious analysts have pointed out, the confessional [think sectarian divisions] ground rules undermine “free and fair elections” in even more significant ways than this. Assaf Kfoury observes that they leave no space for non-sectarian parties and erect a barrier to introducing socioeconomic policies and other real issues into the electoral system. They also open the door to “massive external interference, ” low voter turnout, and “vote-rigging and vote-buying, ” all features of the June election, even more so than before.

Thus in Beirut, home of more than half the population, less than a fourth of eligible voters could vote without returning to their usually remote districts of origin. The effect is that migrant workers and the poorer classes are effectively disenfranchised in “a form of extreme gerrymandering, Lebanese style,” favoring the privileged and pro-Western classes.

And then there’s the ongoing commentary that Honduras has undergone the first removal of a democratic government in Latin America since the early ’90s or, as some newspapers have said, in something like 25 years. Something more truthful, I think, actually occurred to me right away, too: two other coup or coup attempts this decade seem to have been somehow overlooked.

Mainstream commentary described the coup as an unfortunate return to the bad days of decades ago. But that is mistaken. This is the third military coup in the past decade, all conforming to the “recurrent story.”

The first, in Venezuela in 2002, was supported by the Bush administration, which, however, backed down after sharp Latin American condemnation and restoration of the elected government by a popular uprising.

The second, in Haiti in 2004, was carried out by Haiti’s traditional torturers, France and the US. The elected President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was spirited to Central Africa and kept at a safe distance from Haiti by the master of the hemisphere.

What is novel in the Honduras coup is that the US has not lent it support. [Although the non-support is weak, this is still a great thing] Rather, the US joined with the Organization of American States in opposing the coup, though with a more reserved condemnation than others, and with no any action, unlike the neighboring states and much of the rest of Latin America. Alone in the region, the US has not withdrawn its ambassador, as did France, Spain and Italy along with Latin American states.

Anyway, just a couple of interesting expansions on mainstream news reporting. The full article is here.

Love ya,

Pete

Here is some food for thought. There are a lot more things that could have made the list.

For an overview of what’s in Yves’ book, see this and see this.

THE TOP 10 THINGS YOU PROBABLY DON’T KNOW ABOUT CANADIAN FOREIGN POLICY

10. On dozens of occasions since 1915, Canadian gunboats have been deployed to the Caribbean and Central America [speaking of Navy, the Canadian government and business—in particular, I believe, Canadian Steamship Lines, where PM Paul Martin made much of his fortune—relentlessly and shamelessly smashed the Canadian Seaman's Union in post-war Canada, in large part by employing American union breakers/thugs to terrorize organizers. The most notorious thug of all was Hal C. Banks, whose crimes and brutality were greeted with international (Canada and US) impunity].

9. Canada has been the fifth—or sixth—largest contributor to the U.S. war in Iraq.

8. Ottawa asked London for its Caribbean colonies after World War I [London said no].

7. Days after the elected President Salvador Allende was overthrown, Canada’s ambassador to Chile called victims of dictator Augusto Pinochet’s repression the “riffraff of the Latin American Left.” [Henry Kissinger's role in the coup was evident by many actions, including lines like: "I don't see why we have to let a country go Marxist [democratically] just because its people are irresponsible.”]

6. In a number of countries, Canadian “aid” has been used to rewrite mining codes to the benefit of Canadian mining companies [Aid has been used this way forever, and calling such a thing aid is like calling a beating with a stick a deep massage].

5. Canada had between 250 and 450 nuclear-armed fighter jets based in Europe in the 1960s.

4. Washington did not press Ottawa to break relations with post-revolution Cuba because it wanted Canada to spy on the island [the Canadian government was also deeply involved in the coup that shipped democratically elected Haitian President Aristide out of the country?].

3. Throughout Pierre Trudeau’s time in office and before, Canadian companies were heavily invested in apartheid South Africa [I believe it was in the early 1980s when Trudeau also greatly limited the use of trial-by-jury, the free use of which, for obvious reasons, is vital for a vibrant democracy.]

2. Canada helped depose Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, one of Africa’s first independence leaders, who was then killed [early 1960s: Mobutu took his place, a brutal killer and a truly skilled stealer of foreign aid—aid sent to open up business interests].

1. Many commentators, including the world’s leading intellectual, Noam Chomsky, consider Lester Pearson a war criminal because of his significant support for the US war on Vietnam, particularly Canada’s role in delivering US bombing threats to North Vietnam [I believe (but don't have a reference) that Canada's business sector also made more money off the Vietnam war, per capita, then any other country other than the US].

If you know others, please add—and stay vigilant in the name of love and community, and compassion,

Pete

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
— George Orwell

Of course I have no idea what Honduran President Zelaya is really like. I don’t know if he was trying to illegally change the constitution, or if he would become yet another so-called caudillo (Latin American Big Man) or anything else.

All that is certain is President Zelaya was democratically elected, and then ousted by a military coup. For a moment, imagine the same thing happening in the United States or Canada, and imagine how such a reprehensible, illegal smashing of democracy would be justifiably worded in the media (unless, of course, powers-that-be wanted said coup).

Oops, my damn paranoia is showing again.

Anyway, I’ll take just one example of many of how the media subtly or not-so-subtly reshapes an obviously cut-and-dry breach of international law (I read a worse example last week, but then read that the wording from the Reuters article had since been changed: the word ‘caretaker government’ had been dropped!).

Anyway, my friends, read this and weep for Honduran campesinos or even your dreams of democracy. The title is a great indicator:

Isolated Honduras hunkers down, Zelaya vows action

Right away, who’s the bad guy? ‘Isolated Honduras’ sounds noble, when it’s not Honduras as a whole, it’s a military regime in Honduras. It’s a common technique of totalitarian information sources of varying degrees to interchange the people with the State—in a way that spreads out a given crime.

TEGUCIGALPA, July 11 (Reuters) – Politically isolated Honduras braced for months of austerity [a good and noble term. Why not "braced for months of oppression at the hands of a military regime?"] under the specter of economic sanctions after a June 28 coup and ousted President Manuel Zelaya on Saturday vowed actions [he's the democratically elected president!] to help reinstate him.

“We have to think in terms of austerity and we want to ask the people to do the same,” interim president [why not imposed dictator, by definition, via the military regime?] Roberto Micheletti said on Friday. He had asked his finance minister [he has a finance minister! - why not military henchman?] to find ways to cut state spending to ride out the coming months ["cut state spending" - this sounds less severe than freedom-loving Governor Schwarzenegger in California].

The [military imposed] interim [dictatorial] government installed by Congress [Congress, so it must be legitimate!] after widely unpopular [repeat 'widely unpopular' democratically elected] Zelaya was booted out of the country in his pajamas [humiliated and weak] last month by soldiers, has resisted [ah, the noble resistance] international pressure and says Zelaya’s reinstatement is not negotiable.

What a remarkable last sentence! What foul Burson-Marsteller type PR group wrote that? Burson-Marstellar, for the record, does or has done PR for the the brutal Argentinian regime in the 70s, Colombia, Blackwater, Saudi Arabia, Romania, to mention but a few lurid examples of their work.

What PR group indeed. I sound more paranoid than usual. But alas, no, check this from Democracy Now (Honduran Coup Regime Hires US Lobbyists with Clinton Ties):

The New York Times reports the [Honduran military] coup government [regime] has hired a public relations specialist with ties to former President Bill Clinton [oh, a liberal-loving PR group, hooray!]. The specialist, Bennet Ratcliff, was part of the delegation that met in Costa Rica last Thursday [how does a PR group get access?]. According to the New York Times, the delegation, including the installed Honduran president Roberto Micheletti, “rarely made a move without consulting” Ratcliff.

An official close to the talks said Ratcliff wrote or approved every proposal that was submitted at the meeting. Meanwhile, the Honduran branch of an influential Latin American business group has hired Lanny Davis, the former White House special counsel to President Clinton. Davis is leading a lobbying effort to muster up support for the coup on Capitol Hill.

Isn’t that great? The democratic right to support a military coup—if the money is right. It’s repugnant that ’support for the [military] coup’ ousting a democratically elected government could be possible in any way, period, on Capitol Hill. Maybe it should be called Capitol Shill.

shill (n): One who poses as a satisfied customer or an enthusiastic gambler to dupe bystanders into participating in a swindle.

Maybe it’s just good business. And just asking, but couldn’t a military coup be considered a form of terrorism? If I was there, I’d be afraid to speak out.

Why does anybody, for more than a passing dream, believe that the thrust of any nation state—even a democratic nation state—is to push for democracy worldwide? The evidence is so non-existent. The thrust of the State is, by nature, by evolution, by greed, by the commands of God—I don’t know, but by something—to maximize and enforce the interests of the richest and most powerful sectors. It’s so painfully obvious. Everything else, it seems, is a sort of balancing act of varying degrees of freedom, prosperity and autonomy, by those whose ancestors have fought for said things.

Keep up the ancestral vigilance for human rights, with love, community, solidarity, an endless belief in freedom, and defense of the vulnerable,

Pete