Pay to Stop Terrorism

The United States spends less money on foreign aid, compared to its GDP, than almost any other nation. Despite the war in Darfur, famines in Niger, and other atrocities occurring, the United States continues to be stingy with its money. This lack of spending, despite the obvious need, is at the core of the reason why the United States continues to spend billions upon billions ever month on the military to fight the "War on Terror."

One of the many things that the United States should have learned from its time in Somalia is that in many of the world’s nations, there is severe poverty. Many nations lack what Americans consider to be basic infrastructure. They do not have telephone lines, sewer systems, paved roads, running water and other things that are taken for granted here. As those nations’ citizens complain about their low quality of life, they continue to blame the United States for their squalor. The blame may not be properly placed, but the US is the most visible nation in the world making it the easiest nation to point at and accuse.

By blaming the United States, terrorist organizations were able to aggressively recruit Somalis to fight against the United States during the US occupation of Somalia. The terrorist organizations argued that it was the US that was to blame for there not being any food to eat and for the crumbling cities. This made sense to the people, so they raised up and successfully fought against the US.

The argument continues today. People all over the world blame the US for the substandard conditions they endure. As they blame the US, they start actively opposing the United States by doing such things as joining terrorist organizations.

If the United States wants to stem this tide of new recruits for terrorist organizations, it must stop being so tight with the purse strings. The United States needs to be in the forefront to forgive foreign debt so nations can stop paying more on the interest for IMF loans than the nation spends on its own well-being. Secondly, the US needs to dramatically increase the amount of money it gives in foreign aid. It needs to provide African, Asian and South American nations significant amounts of money to assist them in building up their infrastructure and improving the quality of life for each of the nations’ citizens. The US needs to also be sure that it gets credit for the funding, so it will be visible that it is trying to improve the lives of everyone in the world.

The more active the United States becomes in foreign affairs and the more the general world population sees the government trying to raise all boats with rising tides, the less reasonable the argument will be that the US is to blame for the conditions of certain nations. If this argument can be undermined, then there will be fewer people buying into its logic and joining terrorist organizations based upon such reasoning. The obvious result to there being fewer people who join terror organizations is that the US will not be required to spend as much money on military actions around the world or on security at home.

Currently, the US is spending $8 - 10 billion per month in Iraq. Surely some of this money could be better spent on preventative measures and foreign aid than on this failed military effort.

X-Judges

In two weeks the confirmation hearings for Judge Alito will begin under the helm of Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA). Specter is known to be a relatively moderate Republican. He often tows the party line; however, he is pro-choice and must get re-elected in a “swing state” in 2010. There was controversy over his receiving the Judicial Committee chairmanship position when he stated that he would use his position as chairman to block “extremist” judges appointed by President Bush. He ultimately retracted this statement, but regardless of his subsequent statements, he made it clear what his position on ideological judges is and will be.

Thanks to Bush’s incompetence, Judge Alito’s nomination did not occur until relatively late in 2005, and the confirmation hearings were scheduled for after the holidays. Had Bush not nominated the unqualified Harriet Miers, it is possible the Alito nomination hearings would have been held by now, and it is likely that a confirmation vote would have resulted in Alito being placed on the high court. Things are different now, however.

Until recently, the only issues that the Judiciary Committee was going to have to address was whether Alito would affirm Roe v. Wade as the Supreme Court has done on at least two occasions and whether Alito can be trusted to recuse himself when he has a conflict of interest with a litigant in a matter he is hearing unlike Justice Scalia who hears cases regardless of a potential conflict of interest. Now, however, thanks to the delay in the confirmation hearing process, a new and potentially devastating issue has cropped up - domestic spying.

Alito wrote a 1985 memo stating that the government has the authority to engage in domestic spying and that even if it did not, the Attorney General should receive immunity for any illegal acts he may commit in the process of conducting domestic spying operations. This appears to be a position that is consistent with the Administration’s actions giving the NSA authority to track domestic communication despite a 1978 law prohibiting it.

This one issue could and should derail Alito’s nomination. The nation is outraged at the idea that our government would conduct domestic spying activities and circumvent the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Under FISA the administration could easily have obtained warrants to conduct legitimate operations; in fact in the history of the Act, only 4 requests have been turned down. The circumvention of the Act indicates that the surveillance was on improper persons and for illegitimate reasons.

Alito’s support for such activities, especially in conjunction with his position on abortion and his refusal to recuse himself when his own personal finances could be affected by his decision, shows that he is an “extremist” judge that must be denied confirmation. This is the very type of judge Sen. Specter said he would block, and it is time that the good Senator made good on his promise.

Only the Healthy Stay Insured

As people continue to be forced to rely upon employer based healthcare insurance anyone who is in the greatest need for healthcare are being shut out and denied the medical access they need.

As the system is currently set up, a person must have a job with an employer which provides healthcare coverage. Alternatively, a person needs to be married or related to a person who holds a job with an employer that provides healthcare insurance. In the day and age when many people are not married to the person they live with or are homosexual and are not allowed to marry their partner, there are a significant number of people who cannot get access to healthcare insurance through their partners.

Even the people who have healthcare insurance are one sickness away from being without any insurance. If a person gets too sick to work for more than twelve weeks, there is no national law which requires that the employer continue paying or providing an employee with healthcare insurance. On the thirteenth week that a person has a serious health condition which prevents them from working is the end of that person’s access to healthcare coverage because they will have been dropped from their employer based health insurance plan.

Federal law requires that when a person leaves a job that the employer offer the employee eighteen months worth of healthcare coverage at the employee’s expense. It is unlikely that many people who lose their jobs due to a serious health condition can pay the premiums for the COBRA coverage, which is likely over $300 per month. If the person is too sick to work, then it is unlikely that they can afford such expensive healthcare insurance.

Ultimately, the person who needs healthcare insurance the most, a person with a serious health condition, is most at risk of losing his/her healthcare insurance because the person is too sick to work and therefore has no access to the insurance. If the person loses their healthcare insurance, then they will likely start being denied the quality healthcare that is necessary for them to get healthy. In the end they are more likely to die or stay sick for a longer period of time than necessary because this nation continues to adhere to the arcane employment based healthcare system.

The irony of the system is that those who need healthcare coverage the least are the people who have the easiest time getting the coverage. The people who are healthy enough to work full-time at a decent job which provides benefits gets the coverage. Many of these people do not utilize it often or at all. From an insurance companies perspective this may be beneficial because they are collecting premiums from people for whom they are not paying large amounts of money to. This translates into profits for the insurance companies.

Health insurance should not be provided only to the people who make the insurance companies the largest profit they can acquire. Most people are trying to do the right thing. They are working hard and providing a roof over their children’s head. They should not be denied access to medical health care when they need it the most, when they acquire a serious health condition.

Employment Based Healthcare Has To End

The United States continues to adhere to its arcane system of providing employer based healthcare. That is to say medical insurance is through a person’s employer opposed to the government or other source. It is too expensive for an individual to go out and purchase healthcare insurance on their own, so we continue to rely upon our employers to purchase the insurance for us and hope that we will only be required to pay a small portion of the total cost.

Many employees do not have the luxury of having an employer who provides health insurance for them. Many headlines have recently focused on the fact that the largest employer in the world, Wal-Mart, provides a minority of its employees with healthcare insurance. While on the other side of the spectrum, GM is arguably sinking into bankruptcy in part due to the total cost of its health insurance coverage for its current and former employees.

Regardless of whether someone believes that an employer should have the option of providing its employees healthcare insurance like Wal-Mart or whether one believes that GM’s financial hardships are due in large part to its health insurance cost is immaterial. What the nation needs to recognize is that employer based healthcare insurance is illogical and detrimental to all involved.

Employers struggle with how to pay for the high cost of health insurance. GM spends approximately one billion dollars per year to pay for its current employees health insurance costs. It could be paying up to four billion dollars to cover all of its retirees and current employees for healthcare costs alone. The fact that so much money is being removed from an employers bottom line and going to only healthcare costs does not make sense in a global economy when many of GM’s competitors are international companies and do not have such overhead costs. Thus, US companies are at a disadvantage in business because they have to spend so much money on healthcare opposed to spending the money on R&D or other required areas of their business.

Employers are also at a disadvantage due to employment based healthcare insurance because whenever employees come to the table to discuss their future employment, they ultimately start discussing who is going to pay for healthcare insurance for the coming year. Spring CWA members are currently striking in part due to the healthcare coverage cost. The grocery stores in California were striking a few years ago because of Wal-Mart moving in and reducing wages and healthcare coverage benefits. GM barely diverted a strike when it finally obtained a compromise with the UAW over medical healthcare coverage. Finally, the New York City MTA is concerned that its employees could start striking this week due to the healthcare coverage issue. Whenever one of these companies has a strike because a compromise over healthcare coverage occurs, these companies are losing a significant amount of money as a result of the strike and have lost a significant amount of money in legal fees leading up to the strike that it would not have had to pay had it not been an issue. Moreover, if the NYC MTA strikes, the amount of money lost due to the economic heartland for the nation, possibly the world, shuts down as a result of healthcare insurance. Billions of billions of dollars around the world could be lost because many Wall Street employees and others will not be able to get to and from work during the strike. This in itself should encourage the nation to start looking at other healthcare insurance systems.

There is no economic benefit to this nation to continue paying the high costs for healthcare insurance, and we are doing business a disservice by requiring that they flip the bill for healthcare insurance when their competitors are not concerned with such issues.

Update: It was reported today (12/13/05) that if the MTA goes on strike, which is illegal but has happened before, it would cost the City approximately $200 million per day due to private companies' employees not being able to get to work and people not being able to travel through the City easily. The last time the MTA went on strike it lasted eight days. In other words, an MTA strike over healthcare insurance could cost New York City companies $1.6 billion. It is a substantial cost to the private businesses for not supporting universal healthcare.

The Cost Of Oil

Oil costs just over $57 per barrel. This seems like a significant drop in price compared to the $65 per barrel that was being paid in August. Considering just two years ago, OPEC sought to maintain the cost of oil at $20 - $25 per barrel because this promoted stability regarding the commodity, the drop in the current oil cost is not significant at all since we are still nearly three times more than OPEC’s preferred price.

The cost of a gallon of gas and heating oil do not reflect the actual cost of oil on the open market. When the cost of oil was only $20 per barrel the cost of a gallon of gas was just over $1.50. For the past couple of years, the costs have slowly increased, but when it hit $65 per barrel we suddenly saw gas costs at over $3 per gallon. Now that the cost of oil has come down a mere $8 per barrel we are again seeing the cost of gas back around $2 per gallon. In fact, the cost at the pump, right before hurricane Katrina, went up three time faster than the cost of crude.* These swings in price do not seem proportionate with one another.

The oil companies have recently announced that they have made record profits. The major oil companies in the US announced that they have made tens of billions of dollars in profits for the first nine months of the year: Exxon-Mobile $25 Billion (the most profitable corporation in the world); Royal Dutch Shell $21 Billion; British Petroleum $15 Billion; Conoco Phillips $10 Billion; and Chevron-Texaco $10 Billion. The high costs of gas coupled with record profits shows that these companies are using their monopoly on the commodity to improperly jack up prices and unjustly reward themselves with unseemly profits.

There are only five major oil companies in the United States today. Since the cost of oil and the cost of gasoline are not moving in proportion to one another, and all of the oil companies have gasoline prices within a few cents of one another, it would appear that there is a coordinated effort to increase the prices collectively. In other words, the oil companies appear to be colluding to increase prices and generate these profits. Such actions, if true, are a violation of the anti-trust laws.

If oil companies are jointly manipulating the cost of gas and home heating oil to improperly maintain artificially high costs and profits, then they are in violation of the law. Anti-trust laws were created to prevent just such a scenario. While we know the US Attorney General, who is an employee of an administration in the pockets of big oil will not go after these trust violators as the federal government did when Teddy Roosevelt was President, we must wonder where the state attorney generals such as Elliot Spitzer are as this price gouging continues.

* As reported by the Energy Information Administration

We Don't Torture?

The Senate recently voted on an amendment to an appropriations bill which would prohibit all United States entities such as the military and CIA from torturing any enemy combatants or prisoners of war. The amendment sponsored by Senator John McCain (R-AZ) passed overwhelmingly (90-9). The White House, however, was opposed to the amendment. The President has said that the United States is following the law, and it is not torturing any of the prisoners or detainees it is holding. For this reason, the White House opposed the amendment and has even threatened to veto the bill in the event the amendment remains apart of the bill. (It should first be noted that this President has not vetoed any legislation to date, so the threat of a veto seems empty at best.) The White House opposed the amendment to the point that it made a point of having VP Cheney go to the Hill to try and whip votes.

It is disingenuous for a White House to say that it is following the law, not torturing anyone, (although it was caught red handed when it tortured prisoners in Abu Gharib), and being opposed to an amendment which requires the administration to continue to do exactly what the administration says it is doing. In other words, the administration says it is complying with the proposed bill. If it is complying with the proposed law, why would the administration be concerned with it becoming law? If what the administration is telling the public is truthful, then the administration is opposed to a law requiring it to continue operating in the exact fashion that it is currently acting.

Opposition to something that would require no change should make people suspect that what the administration is telling the public is not truthful. On this topic specifically, the administration’s credibility is already low. When the War in Afghanistan started and Camp X-ray in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba was first set up, the Administration argued that the detainees were not covered by the Geneva Convention because they did not belong to a national army. Rather, the Administration argued that it was in its own discretion what to do with the detainees. This argument seems to have been, for the most part, died away as the Administration received a significant amount of political pressure from home and abroad. Nonetheless, we know that there were memos circulated within the White House which redefined torture to be only that activity which would cause organ failure or death. It is clear that there is a great deal more that could constitute torture than just these activities. Is this the definition of torture the President uses when he says we don’t torture?

Considering the Administration was opposed to following the mandates of the Geneva Convention from the outset of the military actions, and it has given such an expansive definition to what is permissible, it is unlikely that the Administration is following the Convention regarding torture. It is unlikely that the Senate Amendment would impose any new obligations on the Administration that the Geneva Convention does not already impose. Thus, opposing the amendment is akin to opposing the Geneva Convention, again.

The Washington Post recently reported that there are black-op prisons in various parts of the world including Eastern Europe. The prisoners who are being held there are likely not documented such that the Red Cross can visit them and confirm their health and treatment. (Another requirement of the Geneva Convention). These "ghost detainees" are especially susceptible to being tortured and there is no recourse for them since no one knows of their existence.

It is a disgrace that the Administration opposes following the Geneva Convention and the proposed law. Such opposition establishes the strong inference that a great deal of torture is going on and if this country was appalled by Abu Grahib, then we should prepare ourselves for when the truth comes out about what has been occurring in Gitmo and other detention centers.

Universal Healthcare Is Good For Business and the Economy

As a general rule, Republicans oppose the idea of universal healthcare. They point to anecdotes of Canadians traveling to the United States for medical treatments like transplant surgery. It is claimed that the reason the Canadians have to travel to the United States is because the list for the surgery is too long in Canada due to the universal health coverage. It is unlikely that the reason the people are not receiving kidney transplants is due to the health care system. It is more likely that a population of approximately 30 million people does not have the necessary number of transplantable organs available to accommodate all of the people who are in need of them. In contrast the United States, with approximately ten time the population, is more likely to have organs that match the patient’s criteria.

What the GOP does not point out, and the Democrats do not seem to be doing any better in showing, is that universal healthcare would be good for the economy and benefit businesses. This benefit is a reason that should be put front and center in the argument for universal healthcare.

General Motors recently settled a labor contract with the United Auto Workers. One of the sticking points for the agreement was the amount of money that the employees were going to pay for their healthcare coverage. The UAW agreed to begin paying toward their own healthcare coverage. This is the first time the UAW workers have had to pay anything toward their healthcare insurance. However, GM is still at a severe disadvantage compared to its competition. GM pays approximately $4 billion per year in medical health insurance for its employees. This is a significant amount of money that its competitors, such as Toyota, are not paying. The result is that Toyota is able to spend the money it is saving on research and development and on other areas which make it more competitive and the dominant car company.

Companies like GM should be in the forefront of lobbing for universal health care. Their taxes would go up, but they would shed the burden of paying healthcare costs. They would stop having to extend labor negotiations due to differences in how much the employer and the employee are each going to contribute to healthcare costs. The bottom line is it will save money by having the country go to universal healthcare and those savings can go to becoming more competitive against their international competitors.

Some companies have already determined that healthcare costs are so high that they cannot remain competitive if they pay the high cost. Wal-Mart is famous for avoiding having to pay healthcare costs for its employees. Among the ways it does this is keeping employees’ hours lower than is required for eligibility for healthcare coverage. Wal-Mart also provides its employees information as to how to get onto public assistance for healthcare coverage, which raises the cost to the government for having Wal-Mart continue to grow and place its box stores in communities. Wal-Mart engages in a number of other cost cutting methodologies, but not paying healthcare costs is one major one which saves it a substantial amount of money.

To avoid making our companies uncompetitive to international competition or having companies circumvent providing healthcare coverage all together, the United States needs to implement a universal healthcare system. The cost will fall onto the shoulders of everyone: Corporations and individuals. The tax increase will likely be more than offset by the savings gained from ceasing to pay for healthcare coverage.

The political party that claims it is pro-business should be the party that is out front on this issue. The country will not be competitive in the world marketplace until universal healthcare is instituted and failure to be competitive is bad for the economy.