A thought on gas prices

            A lot of folks want us to believe that the current spike in petroleum prices is only a supply and demand problem.  The Chinese demand more, so the price goes up.  Representative Davis (R-1st) adds to this situation his claim that we lack refining capacity and that we can reduce the pump price by building new refineries.

            But wait just a minute!  If there is too much demand, and too little refining capacity, then the result should be shortages!  Have any readers noticed OUT OF GAS signs at gas stations lately?  No?  Me neither. 

            Second quarter profit statements ought to be out soon.  It should be interesting to see how much richer Big Oil has gotten off of its $4+ gasoline.  We need to be watching, and seriously considering the possibility of a windfall profits tax.

Our Medical System

For a quarter century conservatives have been hammering home the fear that socialized medicine is a communist-inspired plot against democracy and freedom.  They assert that socialized medical care will place “the government” in charge of your medical decisions; “the government” being viewed as necessarily a terrible thing.  They seem blissfully unaware that “the government” already provides medical coverage for federal workers and elected politicians, military personnel, and senior citizens and that these programs have proven to be very efficient.

 

One writer, pondering socialized medicine, asked “And by the way, since when did health-care become a right?”

 

This question misses the point of socialized medicine entirely.  The question is not whether or not our citizens have a right to good medical care.  The question is whether or not society can afford to have, in its midst, a lot of sick and unproductive citizens. 

 

A parallel example may be helpful.  Americans enjoy socialized police protection.  No matter where you live in this country there are police and/or sheriff’s departments dedicated to protecting the public from a wide variety of potential problems from parking violations to bank robberies to murder.  These officers and deputies are all public employees and we all pay for their services, whether or not we are individually threatened with criminal behavior at any given time.

 

The point is that we all benefit from an orderly society and our law officers do their best to provide it.  And, in precisely the same way, we all benefit from a healthy citizenry.  Our health-care providers should not be constrained from providing it – not just for those who can afford it but for all citizens.

 

A rich man, of course, is free to hire additional security guards if he wishes.  So too he is free to hire a plastic surgeon to perform procedures that are not necessary to his good health.  I think a good yardstick for when a service should be socialized would be that the service benefits all of society without respect to individual need.  The Nation is well served when all of its citizens are healthy, educated, and living without fear.

Mr. Davis’ Morality

            Representative Davis (R-1st) sent an e-mail “newsletter” purporting to inform his constituents of his many wonderful deeds on our behalf.  The “news” in this document was, of course, not news at all but, rather, an extensive campaign speech.  Davis is, after all, up for re-election this fall.  And he has Republican, as well as Democratic, competition this time.

            But one phrase he used caught my attention.  He claimed that he is upholding the “conservative morality” of this district.  I found myself wondering what conservative morality is and how it contrasts (as it must, to be different) with liberal morality.  I have always assumed that morality is relatively neutral with neither political party having a more enlightened grasp of the principle than does the other.  Davis evidently sees it otherwise.  (He surely wouldn’t write something like that simply to pander to conservative voters.  Would he?)

            If we assume that the basis for knowing what is, and what is not, moral is the law (either theological or civil, as they are pretty much the same) then acts or thoughts that reflect poor morals must be pretty much the same.  Lying and stealing are both immoral acts regardless of who does these things.  Murder is immoral too.

            Yet the leader of Davis‘ own party lied to us when he led us into war; he has stolen untold billions of dollars from our children and grandchildren to pay for it; and upwards of four thousand American soldiers are dead as a result.  And we the people have absolutely nothing to show for it.  Now, if that’s conservative morality, I’ll keep my own liberal version, thank you very much.

Children in our midst

I recently acquired a copy of a report titled “Kids Count: The State of the Child”.  It is published by the Tennessee Commission on Children and Youth, is dated 2007, and includes 91 pages of facts and statistics that describe the status of Tennessee’s youngest citizens.  The report is published annually.

 

Much of the data provided is presented by county and I plan, during the next few weeks, to share some of it with readers of this web site.

 

The point of the exercise will be to emphasize the extent to which Unicoi County’s citizens rely on help form outside the county.  We like to think of ourselves as independent and self-sufficient people.  But the facts strongly suggest otherwise.  Our conservative neighbors persistently downplay the importance of social programs, insisting that all we need is to pull on our own bootstraps.  But our children don’t have bootstraps and all too often their parent, or parents, don’t either.  We’ll stroll through the numbers here.

You will learn, for instance, that over 45% of Unicoi’s children are enrolled in TennCare, a federal-state program that pays for medical services and covers Medicaid recipients and uninsured and uninsurable individuals under age 21. 

 

Should you be impatient to learn more, or desire to double-check my figures, you can go to <www.tennessee.gov/tccy>  or to a national site <www.aecf.org/cgi-bin/cliks.cgi>  wherein all the data I’ll be using can be found.

Alexander’s campaign

Senator Lamar Alexander is rarely heard from in Unicoi County.  But he’s now running for re-election, and he has a serious challenger this time.  Mike Padgett is running on the Democratic ticket, so Lamar needs to actually work at getting votes.  I was amused at his May 6 letter to the Editor of the Erwin Record.  In it he grumbles about Democrats’ stalling on appointments to the TVA board.  Good grief!  Ever since Dems took control of Congress in 2006 the Republicans’ sole governance strategy has been to block any initiative the majority party proposes.  But I guess when the other guys do it………….  In any event, Alexander got his few lines of free campaign advertising which no doubt is what he actually wanted.

About health care costs

Polls taken all around the country suggest that Americans regard health care as a top concern. The problem is not one of quality. We all know that American health care providers are as good as any in the world. The problem is accessibility. Too many among us cannot afford to take advantage of the health care services that are out there.Republicans (and not a few nervous Democrats) would have us believe that the answer somehow lies in further subsidizing the insurance industry. Senator Obama would “encourage” us to buy commercial insurance through the provision of subsidies for those who cannot afford to do so. Thus he leaves out all those who choose not to participate. Senator Clinton would make such purchases of commercial insurance mandatory, with subsidies for those who cannot afford to make the purchase. Either way, the insurance companies win with massive subsidies from the Federal Government. And, in case you haven’t noticed, that’s us folks!

Senator McCain, on the other hand, seems to believe that everything is just fine as it is and has no serious plans for changing the current system. He should, of course. As a US senator he has access to one of the finest government sponsored health care systems in the world.

For the rest of us the real answer is so very simple. It is NOT socialized medicine, as conservatives inevitably characterize it, but rather single-payer health care. Doctors and hospitals remain independent. Citizens choose the health care they need, when and where they need it. Everyone is charged a monthly fee (just as seniors on Medicare now do) and the services are paid for out of that fund. In other words, medicare for every man, woman, and child in this great country.

But, without the huge profits that insurance industry executives and share holders currently take from our paychecks.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not opposed to profit for entrepreneurs who provide most discretionary goods and services. But health care is not optional. Society needs for all of us to remain as healthy as possible for the simple reason that we are all more productive that way.

Such a plan could be phased in over some period of time, beginning with our children.

The current issue of “The American Prospect” has a special section devoted to this topic that is well worth reading before you cast your vote in November.

Follow-Up

We now have confirmation of what I wrote last week about the Bush-Cheney administration’s real reasons for going to war with Iraq.  In an Associated Press story, published in the March 19 Johnson City Press, Cheney is described as visiting several sites in Iraq, meeting with Kurdish and Shiite leaders and is quoted as saying “We are certainly counting on President Barzani’s leadership to help us conclude a new strategic relationship between the United States and Iraq, as well as to pass crucial pieces of national legislation in the months ahead.”  These crucial pieces of legislation would be the petroleum production service agreements I wrote about.

 Thus what must be the single most critical reason for our having invaded Iraq has found its way, five years later, into our local mainstream media - on page 4B!  The AP article is longer than I can reprint here, but you can look it up.  It pretty much reinforces everything printed in my last post.

More Thoughts On Iraq

            Like many Democrats, I have frequently indulged in the dubious artifice of viewing the Bush-Cheney administration as simply inept, incompetent, and dishonest. 

            Dishonest they most certainly have been.  But the more we learn of what they are being dishonest about, the more we must conclude that “the Cheney Gang” (as Graham Leonard liked to describe this administration) has been extremely skillful and distressingly successful.

            We now know that, even before the attacks of 9/11, Cheney’s energy task force (the membership of which he has repeatedly refused to reveal) had already decided to seek regime change in Iraq.  The plan was, and still is, to topple Saddam, install a puppet government, and coerce that government into agreements that would give Western petroleum companies easy and long-term access to Iraq’s extensive petroleum reserves.

            The problem they faced was how to convince the American public to support such an extraordinary power and resource grab.

            Then came September 11, 2001!  A bunch of well educated, wealthy, Saudi Arabians, for reasons of their own, highjacked four airliners and caused a great deal of death and destruction in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania.  Over the following year or so we launched an attack on Afghanistan, where the plot was apparently hatched.  The Bush team also launched a huge misinformation campaign designed to persuade Americans that Saddam was somehow responsible for the attacks.  Judging by the number of people who, to this day, believe that lie, we have to admit that it was an effective, if unbelievably dishonest, campaign.

            In March, 2003 team Bush deftly shifted our attention from Afghanistan and mounted a preemptive attack on Baghdad.  They lied to us then about the reasons for the attack, and they’ve been lying to us ever since with one fabrication after another.

            But now we know about the huge, and permanent, Baghdad embassy complex.  We know about the permanent bases that have been built.  We know about the “Declaration of Principles” that was signed by Bush and al-Maliki on Nov. 26, a binding “executive agreement” that neither the U. S. Congress or the Iraqi Parliament get to review.  Wayne M. O’Leary, in the “Progressive Populist” (3/1/0 describes it as the “…mother of all power grabs by an administration that increasingly shows no respect for the U. S. Constitution…”.  Finally, we know about the “Production Service Agreements”, reportedly drawn up in the White House, that would effectively permit American Oil Companies free access to Iraqi oil fields for at least the next thirty years.  That’s thirty years during which American Armed Forces will be required to protect the al-Maliki government and our oil agreements with it.

            While these facts are known, they have not been widely reported by the mainstream media, and they have never been honestly reported by the White House.  So when Bush, and now McCain, insist that we cannot leave until we have “won”, we know what winning means.  It means signed contracts and sufficient security to assure continued protection for al-Maliki and his puppet government.  It has absolutely nothing to do with freedom or democracy for the Iraqi people.

Some Thoughts on Iraq

Some Thoughts on the War in Iraq. Even most conservatives now seem willing to admit that our preemptive war in Iraq was ill-conceived and has been badly carried out by this administration. It’s worth pointing out here that Democrats have been saying that all along and that we are pleased to have those on the right join us. Now the apparent Republican position is that however badly our early invasion was conducted, we are now engaged and must fight to the finish. We must, it is said, keep on until we “succeed”. The trouble with this position is that we are not being told what success will look like when we achieve it. The general claim is that when the Iraqi government is strong enough to defend itself, we can “stand down”. But how strong is strong enough? Republicans won’t answer. How soon will that be? There is no answer to that either. My take on all this is that we’ve never been told the truth about why this president and his neoconservative advisors wanted to achieve regime change in Iraq in the first place. We’ve never been told why we are building the largest and best fortified embassy in the world in Baghdad and a dozen or more permanent (the administration calls them “enduring”) bases throughout Iraq’s oil fields. The answers to such questions, it seems to me, are precisely as Alan Greenspan suggested (after his retirement). This war was, is, and will continue to be about petroleum and American oil company access to it. Put another way, this war is about corporate profit, and we have largely destroyed a country in search thereof. An excellent and authoritative critique can be found at www.multinationalmonitor.org/mm2007/012007/interview-juhasz.html Oh, and lest you think this bit of political discourse is not “local”, check out the price of gas in Erwin these days!

Welcome to my Blog

Welcome to the Democratic entry to “All Politics is Local” blog site. I’m Dave Logan and I’ll be writing in this space for a while. Before we get to the politics of the moment, however, you should know a little something about me. I’ve been an upper east Tennessean since 1979 and have lived in Unicoi County for the past twenty years. I retired from ETSU’s Art Department four years ago after a forty year teaching career. I was raised by people who had suffered considerably through the Great Depression and who therefore thought Franklin D. Roosevelt walked on water. My granddaddy was a union man and believed absolutely that the union allowed him and his to live, and retire, comfortably. So, you bet I’m a Democrat.

As an opening shot for this new venture of mine, I refer you to a statement made yesterday by Mitt Romney as he “suspended” his campaign for the Republican nomination. He repeated a phrase that is part of Republican theology; he said that one key to future prosperity is to end restrictive regulation on business and industry.

Now we have been, during the last few Republican administrations, through a rash of business and industry abuses in an unregulated economic climate that should, by now, have brought us to realize that businesses that can do whatever they want, will. And it will not be self-regulatory. We have the savings and loan disaster, Enron, the current mortgage debacle, and much, much more evidence to prove our point.

My question for your consideration is this: do we really want to trust the Ken Lays of this world to manage our economic system with no oversight? Or might it be better if we the people exercised that oversight through our elected representatives in Congress and the Legislature? Future prosperity for whom, we might ask? What say you?