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Time for change's Journal
Health care is too important to the well being of the American people to entrust it to for-profit corporations.
A 2004 report by the Institute of Medicine noted the amazingly ironic fact that, although the United States leads the world in spending on health care, it is the only wealthy country in the world that does not offer universal health care to its citizens. The report noted 18,000 unnecessary American deaths every year resulting from lack of access to health care. There are currently 47 million Americans without any health insurance, and the health insurance carried by a large portion of the more than a quarter billion Americans who are insured is woefully inadequate. To understand why our country’s mostly privately run health care system is so inadequate, let’s start by looking at the issue of health care fraud. A brief look at health care fraud in “fee for service” systems in the United States An excellent discussion of health care fraud in the United States is provided by Malcolm Sparrow’s 1996 book, “License to Steal – Why Fraud Plagues America’s Health Care System”. Though somewhat outdated, the good majority of principles discussed in Sparrow’s book are as valid today as they were then. On the scope of the problem, Sparrow has this to say: The proportion of the nation’s health care budget lost to fraud and abuse remains unknown. Conventional wisdom, crystallized in a 1992 Government Accounting Office (GAO) report, puts it at 10%. But the 10% figure has no basis in fact. The GAO report merely says, “Estimates vary widely on the losses resulting from fraud and abuse but the most common is 10%... of our total health care spending…” The 10% estimate has been politically useful: high enough to be credible in the face of continuing media revelations about fraud and to justify the “get tough on fraud” rhetoric, yet low enough not to disturb the medical profession too much. The truth is, of course, that nobody knows the true figure, because nobody systematically measures it… The true level of fraud losses could be lower than 10%, or it could be significantly higher. None of that has changed in the 11 years since Sparrow wrote it. There has still been no systematic measurement of the fraud problem, in spite of a multitude of evidence that it is massive. Why is there so much health care fraud Sparrow spends several chapters detailing the many reasons for health care fraud, and those details are beyond the scope of this post. The general principle can be gleaned by asking yourself if you would ever leave your wallet containing several hundred dollars unattended in public. Regardless of how positive a view we have of our fellow citizens, few people would answer yes to that question. It simply would present too tempting of a target. Our health care system can be looked at in the same way. It presents too tempting of a target to individuals or corporations whose main purpose for existence is to make as large of a profit as possible. I don’t know what percent of corporations are honest. But any system as complex and non-transparent as health care requires great vigilance in order to prevent fraud. Unless that vigilance is routinely exerted (which has never been the case) the system provides an open invitation to fraud. The so-called “free-market” principles that right wing ideologues believe always are fair and work to benefit everyone simply do not apply to health care. In order for free-market principles to be fair, among other factors, people have to understand what they’re buying. Health care is way too complicated for that. If you buy a car and it breaks down a month later, it’s a pretty good bet that the car was defective. The same cannot be said about health care because there are way too many other factors that influence people’s health. Nobody can understand the value of the health care (or health care insurance) that they purchase unless they are highly intelligent and spend tremendous amounts of time analyzing it. Few people have that much time. We need a federally run Food and Drug Administration because ordinary people do not have the capacity or time to evaluate the safety of every food and drug that they need. The same thing can be said about health care. Health care fraud in “managed care” capitation systems When Sparrow wrote his book our country was in the initial process of turning towards “managed care” capitation systems for health care. This change was driven largely by the awareness of health care fraud. Under managed care capitation systems, money (premiums) is paid up front to the corporation, which is then responsible for supplying medical care to the customer, as needed. Thus, the corporation serves as an insurance carrier, and at the same time it is also a provider of health care – though the health care may be sub-contracted out to others. Since the money is paid up front at the beginning, the need for billing separately for each service or drug is largely or totally eliminated. Since a major type of health care fraud under “fee for service” systems had been billing for services that were not needed or not even provided, it was recognized that capitation systems would eliminate that type of fraud. Thus, it was widely believed that capitation systems would eliminate the great majority of health care fraud. But such a belief was very naïve. It is of course true that under capitation systems corporations cannot commit fraud by billing for services that are not needed or not provided, since the corporations do not bill for services under these systems. But rather than eliminate health care fraud, capitation systems merely change the way that it’s perpetrated. Instead of billing for services that they don’t provide, fraudulent managed care systems merely refuse to provide services that have already been paid for up front. They have all sorts of tricks for doing that, and it’s extremely difficult when it happens to prove that it’s fraud, rather than mere incompetence or “clerical error”. Therefore, whereas fraud under “fee for service” systems manifested as additional costs (for taxpayers or individual patients), fraud under capitation systems is manifested as the withholding of needed medical care. Sparrow saw all this coming before it happened: Under fee-for-service, the most damaging forms of fraud are perpetrated by providers, at the financial expense of payers. Under managed care, most fraud will be perpetrated by the middle layer of intervening corporations, and the victims will be the patients. Not only will the new forms of fraud be more damaging to human health; they will be extraordinarily difficult to detect. My personal experiences with health care fraud I relate my personal experiences here just to give an example of how it’s done and how widespread health care fraud is. Anyone who saw Michael Moore’s great documentary, Sicko, will recognize this type of situation. Sicko revealed in much detail how some insurance companies utilize processes such as rejecting all claims above a certain amount of money, in order to increase their profits. Here’s a recent example. There doesn’t have to be any basis in reality for rejecting the claims, other than the corporation’s desire to make large profits. The insurance company might even routinely cave in easily in certain types of cases to customers who complain. But there will always be those who don’t complain, so the potential for profit can be tremendous. And there is no penalty to the insurance company for initially rejecting valid claims, unless it can be proven in court that they committed fraud – which is extremely difficult to do. In the early 1990s I had health insurance through the state of Pennsylvania (which contracted with private insurance companies), which was supposed to be pretty good, relatively speaking. Yet a great many, if not the majority of my valid insurance claims were initially rejected. One rule my insurance company appeared to have was that whenever medical care was received from a provider who was not an “approved provider” the claim would be rejected unless it was a medical emergency. I had two occasions to test that rule with respect to my children, whom I had to take to emergency rooms on one occasion each. On one occasion I took my son in for treatment for a migraine headache, and on another occasion I took my daughter in for evaluation of symptoms that were indistinguishable from appendicitis. Both migraine headache and appendicitis are medical emergencies – there can be no question about that. Migraine headache is a medical emergency mainly because the pain is typically so severe that it is tantamount to torture. And appendicitis is a medical emergency because if untreated the appendix can rupture and lead to a fatal infection. Yet my insurance claims in both of these instances were rejected, on the basis of my insurance company’s assertion that they did not represent medical emergencies. The claim that the migraine headache was not a medical emergency was patently ridiculous, since the emergency room physician documented “migraine headache” in my son’s emergency room medical chart. Furthermore, my son was having unbearable pain, so even without a diagnosis of a condition known to constitute a medical emergency, the pain alone should have been considered a medical emergency. In the case of my daughter’s suspected appendicitis, it turned out after blood tests were drawn and after extended observation that she didn’t have appendicitis after all. However, on the basis of what I knew when I took her to the emergency room, she was having a medical emergency. Therefore, it was a medical emergency. Her symptoms were identical to those of appendicitis. I immediately recognized the fraudulent nature my insurance company’s assertions that these two instances did not constitute medical emergencies, since I am a physician. Consequently I wrote lengthy letters of outrage in both cases, appealing the insurance company’s decision to reject my claims. In both cases they must have recognized that they wouldn’t have a leg to stand on if they were taken to court, and they quickly reversed their decision and paid up. But how would most people who aren’t medical professionals respond to an insurance company’s assertion that a medical emergency was not a medical emergency? I imagine that many or most people would simply reason, “Oh, I guess my insurance company knows what a medical emergency is”. And that’s how many insurance companies make much of their profit. How many? Nobody knows. The case for universal federal government sponsored health care 18,000 unnecessary deaths per year in our country due to lack of access to needed medical care speaks of a dire need for a health care system that provides access to care for all Americans. One of the most ridiculous objections that the right wing ideologues / wealthy conservative elites frequently bring up with respect to government sponsored health insurance is cost. Certainly these people must be aware that market-driven health care is far more expensive than government provided health care, due to all the bureaucratic administrative costs required for any multi-player system. It has been estimated that one third of health care spending in our country goes towards administrative costs. Nobody knows how much of that is lost in fraud or efforts to control fraud, but it’s undoubtedly quite a bit. But in a health care system provided by the federal government the motive and opportunity for fraud is greatly reduced (unless we have a Bush/Cheney type of Executive Branch that refuses to comply with Congressional subpoenas AND Congress lacks the will to respond appropriately to executive tyranny). Without the involvement of corporations, the profit motive, and hence the driving force for fraud, is absent. Civil service health care professionals who work in government are generally trained and indoctrinated to provide high quality health care, rather than to produce profits for their employer. Their whole approach towards the issue is different than what we see with much corporate health care. Thus, any rise in taxes to pay for a government sponsored health care system will be more than compensated for by the money that people will save by not having to pay out-of-pocket expenditures for health care. Another objection we often hear from the right wing ideologues is that government provided health care is “socialized medicine”.  Spreading the fear of “socialized” anything is always good for fighting the passage of programs that benefit ordinary people, such as Medicare or Social Security, or any of the multitude of New Deal programs that FDR used to lift so many people out of poverty. But hey. If Congress dislikes “socialized medicine” so much, why do all of our Congresspersons receive it? Closing comments Though the United States spends 53% more per capita on health care than the next highest country, its health care is ranked only 37th among the world’s nations by the World Health Organization. That is just plain sick, and signifies an urgent need for radical changes in our health care system, especially with regard to improving access to care. Dennis Kucinich, alone among 2008 presidential candidates, has drawn up plans for a single payer universal health system. There is no reason at all why we shouldn’t adopt such a system – except that our corporate media will be sure to parrot right wing talking points if it looks like it might be enacted into law. Although John Edwards’ health care plan doesn’t go as far as Kucinich’s towards eliminating unnecessary corporate for-profit components from our health care system, he does propose a universal health care plan, along with a surefire way to get Congress to pass it: If Congress refuses to enact a health care plan that will ensure universal access to health care for the American people, he promises to take away their federally funded health care program from them. Edwards and Kucinich have the right idea. In today’s corporate for-profit U.S. health care system, fraud doesn’t just cost us a lot of money. It prevents thousands of people from getting the medical care that they need to live or remain healthy. Getting that fraud under control is a monumental task which has never been attained and isn’t likely to be attained any time in the foreseeable future unless the problem is attacked at its roots. By far the best option for doing so is to simply remove the root cause of that fraud – provision of medical care by corporations whose main goal is to make huge profits – from our health care system. |
U.S. Democracy in Crisis
Time for change  The Democratic Underground was born on one of the worst days in U.S history – The day that the worst President in U.S. history took office. Now, here we are 8 years later, and we’ve managed to remove that cancer from our nation and replace it with something much better. Notwithstanding my many ambivalent feelings towards President Obama, I have no doubt that he will be infinitely better for our country than his predecessor. Yet despite that, our country has been terribly scarred from the events of the past eight years, and it continues to suffer from all of the root problems that brought us the worst President in our history in 2000 and 2004. Therefore, it is worth taking a look at the root problems that brought us to this sorry state of affairs. MAJOR IMPEDIMENTS TO DEMOCRACY IN THE UNITED STATES One thing that we must keep in mind when considering our current problems is that they are not new. They were greatly exacerbated by eight years of Bush administration misrule, but they did not start with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Money in politics All but the most naïve of the American citizenry know that the wealthy and powerful in our country routinely influence our local and national elections through huge campaign contributions. And they also know that they are generally well rewarded for their “contributions”. And they also know that bribery is presumably against the law in our country. Yet, on the rare occasion that our politicians are actually accused of bribery, our news media makes a great big deal over it, as if bribery is actually a rare event in American politics. The end result is that a great many of our politicians do everything they can to make their wealthiest constituents happy with them, at the expense of everyone else. They do that with the knowledge that the voters they lose in doing so will be more than compensated for by the disinformation that will be paid for by their wealthiest constituents. I discuss this situation in more detail here, here, and here. There are a few dots to connect here, but any reasonable assessment of American politics tells us that bribery is routinely used to buy and sell elections in our country. So routine is it that it is actually built into our system and legalized. But that fact is never overtly spoken of. To do so would imply that our system of government is as much or more an aristocracy than it is a democracy. Bill Moyers, in his book “Moyers on Democracy”, explains the situation bluntly: We have lost the ability to call the most basic transaction by its right name. If a baseball player stepping up to home plate were to lean over and hand the umpire a wad of bills before he called the pitch, we’d call that a bribe. But when a real estate developer buys his way into the White House and gets a favorable government ruling that wouldn’t be available to you or me, what do we call that? A “campaign contribution”. Let’s call it what it is: a bribe. The legality of contributing money to political candidates, with the implicit (though not explicit) understanding that that money will buy political favoritism, has been defended by both our courts and our Congress by sanctimoniously pointing to the free speech provisions in the First Amendment to our Constitution and claiming that money is speech. But the absurdity of that contention should be obvious to anyone with some primary school education. Speech is of value from a political standpoint (or any other standpoint) only when it is heard. But if one billionaire has one thousand times as much opportunity to speak through a medium which reaches millions than several thousand other people added together, the speech of that one billionaire will drown out the speech of most other people, thereby interfering with their right to free speech. Election fraud Electronic vote switching with DRE (direct-recording electronic) machines poses a great danger to the integrity of our election system – by virtue of its ability to switch a voter’s vote without being noticed by the voter. In other words, someone tries to vote for John Kerry, and the machine registers a vote for George Bush instead. What makes matters worse is that many or most of these machines don’t even produce a piece of paper with the vote on it, which can then later be used for a recount. So, if fraud is suspected there is no recourse. And worse yet is the fact that most of these machines use proprietary (secret) code to determine who the voter voted for. We know for a fact that vote-switching occurred in the 2004 election. One study, based on voter reports to the national Electronic Incident Reporting System (EIRS), showed that vote switching incidents favored Bush over Kerry by a ratio of 12 to 1 nationally. A similar study showed that these vote switching incidents that favored Bush were 9 times as common in the heavily contested “swing states” than in non-swing states. To make the point that the EIRS reports represent only a small fraction of actual Election Day problems, an investigation by the Washington Post identified about 25 electronic voting machines in Youngstown, Mahoning County, Ohio, that were said to have been switching votes all day long. Yet only eight incidents of this nature from Mahoning County (all in favor of Bush) were reported to EIRS that day. Clint Curtis, a computer programmer working in Florida prior to the 2004 election, testified before the Democratic staff of the House Judiciary Committee that he was requested in 2000 by his boss (at the request of a high level Republican operative, Tom Feeney) to “develop a prototype of a voting program that could alter the vote tabulation in an election and be undetectable”. Curtis’ testimony was followed by the death of Raymond Lemme, who while investigating Curtis’ allegations was found dead in a Georgia hotel room, just a couple weeks after telling Curtis that he had traced the corruption “all the way to the top”, Another type of election fraud is the illegal purging of registered voters from the voter rolls. Like vote switching, the increasing computerization of voter registration is no doubt making it much easier to perpetrate this type of fraud on a mass basis. This article describes a great deal of evidence that voter registration fraud played a major role in the 2004 presidential election, and in fact was probably the deciding factor in Ohio, which gave George Bush his electoral victory. Similarly, although the 2000 presidential election was stolen by a variety of means, voter registration fraud was quantitatively the most important method used. In 2000, the Florida Governor’s office used a computer program to purge tens of thousands of mostly black and Democratic voters. There are many other means of election fraud that have been used in our country to destabilize our democracy. I discuss this issue in more detail, along with means for preventing election fraud, in this post. Our corporate news media If cash donated to their political campaigns is not enough to carry them through to victory, and if election fraud doesn’t happen to play a significant role, the corporate news media serves as another valuable tool for those seeking to sabotage our democracy. This problem overlaps with the role of money in politics, since those who own and control the corporate media are uniformly wealthy, and since it was their money that led to the acts that enabled our corporate media to become what it is today – Ronald Reagan’s veto of Democratic legislation to enforce the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, and the Telecommunications Act of 1996. This legislation allowed the monopoly consolidation of our news media to the point where today it is controlled by a very small number of extremely wealthy individuals. Several excellent books have been written about the extent to which wealthy corporate interests control our news media today. I would highly recommend “Lapdogs – How the Press rolled Over for Bush”, by Eric Boehlert, “What Liberal Media – The Truth About BIAS and the News”, by Eric Alterman, and “Into the Buzzsaw – The Myth of a Free Press”, edited by Kristina Borjesson. And I have ranted about pseudo-journalists such as Tim Russert, who have made a largely successful, but hypocritical effort to appear unbiased to their viewers. The bottom line, as Bill Moyers points out, is that the protection offered us by our First Amendment is based on the assumption of a separation of our government and a free press, which is supposed to protect us from government abuses. Moyers wrote this during the Bush administration: What would happen, however, if the contending giants of big government and big publishing and broadcasting ever joined hands, ever saw eye to eye in putting the public's need for news second to free-market economics? That's exactly what's happening now under the ideological banner of "deregulation". Giant media conglomerates that our founders could not possibly have envisioned are finding common cause with an imperial state in a betrothal certain to produce not the sons and daughters of liberty but the very kind of bastards that issued from the old arranged marriage of church and state. Consider the situation. Never has there been an administration so disciplined in secrecy, so precisely in lockstep in keeping information from the people at large and -- in defiance of the Constitution -- from their representatives in Congress. Never has the powerful media oligopoly ... been so unabashed in reaching like Caesar for still more wealth and power. Never have hand and glove fitted together so comfortably to manipulate free political debate, sow contempt for the idea of government itself, and trivialize the peoples' need to know. Secrecy in government Democracy suffers terribly when a nation’s citizens are uninformed – especially when they are uninformed with respect to the actions and motivations of their own government. If we don’t know what our government is doing, then how can we be expected to vote them out when they do something that we would consider deeply immoral had we known about it? Consider war for example. If Americans understood the real motivations for its nation’s wars, they would probably be much more likely to strenuously object to those wars. That would make war much less politically feasible, and our country would therefore be led into war much less frequently than it has been in the past. That is why I so hate the “national security” excuse for withholding information from us, the American people – which has become so routine that it is willingly or passively accepted by the good majority of Americans. I very much doubt that the “national security” excuse for withholding information from the American people has anything to do with national security more than 5% of the time. Rather, the reason for withholding such information from us is almost always something totally different. It is to blind us to the real reasons for war or other nefarious acts, so that we will accept them and willingly support or even risk our lives in their cause. Rampant U.S. nationalism and the GAME Two months ago I wrote a DU post that I titled “The GAME”, which I began by discussing “Unmentionable things in U.S. politics” – including such things as the stealing of a U.S. presidential election, calling American military or covert actions immoral rather than merely “misguided”, and imputing bad intentions rather than mere incompetence to a U.S. president. I find this to be terribly repressive, not because I personally can’t mention these things, but because our elected representatives are under tremendous pressure not to discuss them. We elect them to represent us and our nation, and except for some rare courageous exceptions such as Dennis Kucinich, Cynthia McKinney, and Robert Wexler, they refuse to even talk about some of our very most important issues. It has occurred to me that this provides the backdrop for a huge GAME that has been foisted upon us. A prerequisite of the GAME is to create an alternate reality that must be believed by a critical mass of people in order for the GAME to proceed. Why is that necessary? I believe it’s necessary because the reality is so terrible that if enough people consciously recognized it they would rise up and simply refuse to play the GAME. Although the GAME’s masters set the rules, there are two related character traits of many Americans that cause them to play along: Rampant nationalism and a propensity for denial. Rampant nationalism is the attitude that our country is inherently better than any other country – so much so that it can do no wrong. This attitude is drummed into the American people from the time that most of us learn how to talk. We are made to feel that to believe or speak otherwise demonstrates a dangerous lack of “patriotism”, which makes us deserving of being shunned – or worse. The other character trait that persuades too many Americans to play the GAME is denial. Believing terrible things about one’s country can be very painful. Accepting reality as it is, rather than as one would like it to be, can be very painful. To make this point, in a recent post titled “12 Things that Never Happened in American History”, I discuss the following official stories that we have been told (or not told): The U.S. is not an imperialist country; FDR’s New Deal was not instrumental in ending the Great Depression; the Cold War was just about fighting totalitarian Communism; JFK was assassinated by a lone gunman; bribery is infrequent in American politics; Iran-Contra was not a criminal abuse of presidential power; U.S. presidential elections cannot be stolen; Bush and Cheney did everything they could to protect us against the 9/11 attacks; the Bush administration’s crimes are not serious enough to warrant impeachment or prosecution; and, we’re barely told about our nation’s killing of more than a million Iraqi civilians, the October Surprise, or Operation Northwoods. CONSEQUENCES These impediments to democracy work together to surrender great amounts of power into the hands of a small number of elites, who use that power in the cause of increasing their wealth and power at the expense of everyone else. It is a vicious cycle that is very difficult to break. Here are some of the major tragic consequences. Rampant militarism and illegal aggression against sovereign nations We are so often told how good and pure our nation and its people are that only a minority of Americans are aware of the extent of our many illegal and immoral activities. Many or most who aren’t aware of these activities would be shocked to learn about them and quite resistant to accepting that information as the truth. In myriad instances we have overthrown or assisted in the overthrow of sovereign nations. In the good majority of these instances we have substituted a repressive right wing government for one that was much more responsive to the needs and desires of the nation’s citizenry. Sometimes genocide was used to accomplish our goals. The purpose of these activities has most often been to create a government that is friendlier to the desires of American businesses or corporations – though we always have some sort of rationalization for our actions. In “Excuses for War” I discuss many of the phony excuses that the United States government has used to lead us into war, including its Indian wars, the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, and the Vietnam War. In “The Roots and Consequences of U.S. Overseas Imperialism” I note or discuss our covert and overt illegal and immoral overthrowing of the sovereign nations of Hawaii (1893), Cuba (1898), Puerto Rico (1898), the Philippines (1899-1902), Nicaragua (1910), Honduras (1911-1912), Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), South Vietnam (1963), Chile (1973), Grenada (1983), Panama (1989), Afghanistan (2001), and Iraq (2003). In “The Meaning of U.S. Imperialism, Genocide and Militarism” I note U.S. perpetrated genocides, as described in “State of Darkness” by David Model, including our atomic bombing of Japan (1945), those perpetrated against Guatemala (1954), Vietnam (1954-73), Indonesia (1965), Cambodia (1970-75), Laos (1969-74), and East Timor (1975), and our two wars against Iraq. Other atrocities include our invasion of Cuba in 1961; U.S. Marine invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965 to put down a rebellion against their repressive right wing government; U.S. military support of Haitian tyrant and mass murderer, Francois Duvalier; and numerous brutal interventions in several Latin American and African nations. Massive Income and wealth inequality Inequality of wealth in the United States is truly astounding – and it is increasing at a fast rate. In the United States in 2001, 1% of the population controlled 38% of the wealth, whereas the bottom 40% owned just 1%. That means that, on average, individuals in the top 1% owned about 1,500 times more wealth than individuals in the bottom 40%. The rising level of income inequality in our country recently exceeded the point where it stood just prior to the stock market crash of 1929, which led to the worst depression in U.S. history. There are many who see a connection between the income inequality preceding that depression and our current situation. This graph, which plots income inequality measured as the ratio between the average income of the top 0.01% of U.S. families compared to the bottom 90%, over time, makes that point. I discuss the subject of income and wealth inequality here, here, and here. The loss of the rule of law During the Bush Presidency I often argued that he should be impeached for his many crimes. Now that he can no longer be impeached, I have argued that our Justice Department should prosecute him for those crimes, and if it fails to do so then the International Criminal Court (ICC) should step in. While Bush was still President, President Obama weighed in against impeachment, saying that impeachment should be reserved for only the most serious crimes. Now that he is President he has thus far given little or no indication that he intends to have his Justice Department prosecute George Bush or any other high level Bush administration official for their crimes. But if widespread torture, an illegal war of aggression, spying on American citizens, suspending of the right of habeas corpus, and numerous other violations of our Constitution don’t constitute serious crimes, then what does? What would people say if a prosecuting attorney failed to prosecute a rapist and murderer simply because he had high level political connections? Who would accept that? Then why when far more serious crimes are committed by a President of the United States are there so many people who seem to think that it is ok to sit passively by and make no attempt to hold the perpetrators accountable for their crimes? I’ll tell you why. It’s like I said earlier in this post. Saying that a former U.S. President might be guilty of prosecutable crimes is simply against the rules of the GAME. Given that and the failure to hold the Reagan administration accountable for its Iran-Contra crimes, George Bush and Dick Cheney connected the dots and thought that they might be able to get away with just about anything. Testing that assumption by moving ahead with prosecutions might be politically risky for the Obama administration. The Republican Party would no doubt raise holy hell if there was an attempt to prosecute high level Bush administration officials. Consequently, we live in country in which, protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, certain people are indeed above the law. That fact, taken together with all of the impediments to democracy discussed in the first part of this post, means that democracy and the rule of law in our country are in grave danger. Indeed, some believe that we narrowly averted a military coup perpetrated by the Bush administration. The American people and their leaders need to reassess what our country stands for. Is our democracy important enough to take steps to remove the role of money in politics, reform our election system, break up the corporate monopoly on our news media, require government actions to be much more transparent than they now are, and dare to look more objectively at who we are and what we do? Can we give up imperialism and warfare for the sake a world in which nations live and work together to further the cause of peace and justice? Can we make our nation one in which all of its citizens truly have the opportunity for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? And do our laws apply to all people, not just to those who lack the political influence to avoid them? If we think that these things are important we have a great deal of work to do, lest our country sinks into a tyranny from which it may never recover. Profile Information Time for change
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