Modern Day Charles Dickens Era

In the midst of the bailout crisis, I worried that taxpayers were being played. It looks like my concerns were well-founded. Via Dean Baker:

Remember way back to last week when it was going to be the end of the world if Congress didn't pass the bailout package? Remember the Washington Post's account in which Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson told President Bush, "there is no Plan B."

Well, it looks like the Fed has discovered a Plan B. It turns out that the Fed can buy commercial paper directly from non-financial corporations needing credit to maintain operations. This will keep the credit markets working even if the zombie banks aren't up to the task. In other words, the threat of a complete meltdown in the absence of a bailout was nonsense and the media once again got taken for a ride by the Bush administration.

Adding insult to injury, we now find out that the limits on executive compensation were essentially meaningless too. When do we get our bailout, or do we have to work till we drop over dead? That scenario becomes more probable with each passing day.

Via the AP:

Americans' retirement plans have lost as much as $2 trillion in the past 15 months, Congress' top budget analyst estimated Tuesday.

Public and private pension funds and employees' private retirement savings accounts — like 401(k)'s — have lost some 20 percent overall since mid-2007.

Rep. George Miller, D-California, summed it up best: "Unlike Wall Street executives, America's families don't have a golden parachute to fall back on. It's clear that their retirement security may be one of the greatest casualties of this financial crisis."

Defense contractor loophole closed

According to the AP, President Bush closed a loophole yesterday that defense contractors had been using to avoid paying millions of dollars in payroll taxes. [emphasis mine]

Bush signed into law the Heroes Earnings Assistance and Relief Tax Act, which provides tax relief for military families. Included in the legislation is a provision that would treat foreign subsidiaries of U.S. government contractors as American employers. That means they now have to pay the taxes that finance Social Security and Medicare programs. [...]

Lawmakers wanted to end the practice, which has become widespread among American businesses. The Senate Finance Committee estimates that thousands of companies have registered in the Caymans to dodge taxes. The losers, the committee said, are ordinary Americans who foot a larger share of the bill to pay for programs that benefit the elderly and the disabled.

In an example of how much tax revenue was being lost, the Boston Globe reported in April that Kellogg, Brown, and Root, which receives an estimated $16 billion a year for defense contracts in Iraq, avoided close to $100 million a year in payroll taxes by hiring workers through foreign shell companies. That's a large chunk of the nearly $846 million in revenues that The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates will be brought in over the next 10 years by shutting that loophole.

I'm not sure if this will affect Blackwater Worldwide since they're headquartered in Moyock, N.C., but it should since they're violating IRS laws too according to Rep. Henry Waxman.

In a letter to Erik Prince, the Chairman of the Prince Group, which owns Blackwater, Rep. Henry Waxman wrote:

"I have received documents which suggest that Blackwater may have engaged in significant tax evasion. According to an IRS ruling in March 2007, Blackwater violated federal tax laws by treating an armed guard as an “independent contractor.” The implication of this ruling is that Blackwater may have avoided paying millions of dollars in Social Security, Medicare, unemployment, and related taxes for which it is legally responsible.

And according to McClatchy Newpapers:

Waxman’s staff looked at the most recent State Department contract and estimated that between May 2006 and March 2007, Blackwater avoided paying $15.5 million in Social Security and Medicare taxes and $500,000 in unemployment taxes.

That's a lot of tax money they owe the country, but Blackwater can afford it. Since 2001, they've been granted federal contracts worth more than $1 billion - contracts that are being paid for by taxpayers.

As Sen. John Kerry said earlier this year, "Failing to contribute to Social Security and Medicare thousands of times over isn't shielding the taxpayers they claim to protect, it's costing our citizens in the name of short-term corporate greed."


(Cross-posted at Blogging for Michigan.)

America, Inc.

You can't pick up a paper anymore without reading bad news about our economy, but this headline really got my attention.

Weak Dollar: Airbus, VW Plants in U.S.?

A rising euro and high labor costs are leading at least two European manufacturers to consider building new plants in the U.S. [...]

A recent study by the Center for Automotive Research, completed prior to the recent fall of the dollar, found that autoworkers in Western Europe make almost $10 more per hour than their colleagues in the United States make.

Wonderful. Jobs are being created in this country because we have cheap labor and our dollar isn't worth much. Neither are our homes:

Home prices see biggest drop in 25 years.

Add into that mix the financial crisis and the costs associated with the Iraq war and the picture looks pretty gloomy. It doesn't look like conditions will improve anytime soon. So, who's to blame? Danny Schechter @ AlterNet nails it:

Its probably truthful but not helpful to say that the mismanagement of our economy is an outgrowth of the very corporatist policies that will haunt this country for decades to come, including costly wars, and obscenely high levels of corruption and the list goes on.

This crisis, however is a bit different because it has built in intensity for years without much visibility or attention. It speaks to structural problems in an economy built on the quick sand of debt and delusion.

In order for the economy to function, in order for consumption to continue and profits to keep flowing, people have to believe that everything's all right. They want remedies modeled after Alka Seltzer. Put one tablet in water. It fizzes. You drink and feel better in minutes.

The truth is that confidence is eroding not because "the masses" hate capitalism but because our brand of unregulated capitalism is increasingly not working for them. They know that because prices keep rising and good paying jobs are harder to find. They know that because crime is going up in many cities, and it's harder to make ends meet.

And some even know that the very concept of the masses has been replaced by highly stratifies classes built on growing income inequality.

Greed, Republican corporatism, free market ideology...there's plenty of blame to go around. The American consumer shares part of that blame too. We drank the Kool-Aid. We kept spending. We closed our eyes and ears when good paying jobs were sent out of the country. We voted for politicians who tricked us into believing abortion was the most important issue we faced. Then we voted for them again when they told us terrorism was the most important threat. We were enablers and now we're feeling the pain.

So, what's the prognosis? We shouldn't expect a full recovery:

The pessimism, moreover, isn't momentary but reflects voters' worries beyond the current business cycle. Early last month, a sobering consensus emerged from a focus group of a dozen Republican-leaning voters in the Richmond, Va., area, sponsored by the nonpartisan Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. The participants unanimously agreed that they didn't think their children's generation would be better off than their own -- breaking with traditional American optimism -- largely due to the debt future taxpayers will inherit.

"Who's buying our loans?" said former secretary June Beninghove, 67. "Who's going to own us? We are going to give ourselves to another country because of debt."

And we have reason to believe things will get worse before they get better:

There is a conflict coming, as this problem turns into an issue. It could lead to an economic civil war. Its won't be just a working class led class war either. Says credit expert Robert Manning:

"What we've seen with this kind of financialization of the American economy, where the democratic system and so many democratic institutions have been co-opted and literally bought by the financial service industry, is that we're seeing a big backlash from the American people.

This is what happens when politicians run our country like America, Inc. instead of a Republic. I hope our country can survive the mess they've made.

DeVos Loses Election

Another year, another election loss for Dick DeVos. Only this time it wasn't in Michigan, it was in Utah, where DeVos' All Children Matter PAC put up $255,000 in seed money in 2004 to help the GOP legislature enact the most comprehensive voucher law in the country. A majority of Utahns saw things differently, and the voucher referendum went down in crushing defeat yesterday. More than 60 percent of the voters rejected vouchers.

It wasn't from lack of trying that vouchers lost. DeVos was joined by other big-business donors from outside of Utah, including Wal-Mart's Waltons and Overstock.com CEO Patrick Bryne, who orchestrated much of the late funding himself. The Salt Lake Tribune editorial board called them "Friedmanites," whose stated goal is the privatization of American education. The pro-voucher group didn't hold back:

The voucher crowd mounted a mean-spirited campaign that relied on distortions, dirty tricks, and personal smears. Their campaign of nastiness did not reflect Utahns' COMMON VALUES, our sense of common decency.

In the end, having a common goal made the difference. Parents, teachers, unions and many excellent blogs examined all sides of the argument and presented their cases, and with the exception of one or two, all the major newspapers spoke out against vouchers.

The victory is theirs today, but will scars remain? This blogger is concerned:

And I hope that the real Utah can still be salvaged when this campaign by Parents for Choice in Education is over, when their money from All Children Matter in Michigan is all spent, when their money from the secret donors from Missouri and elsewhere in the county is run out, and when their political operatives and opportunitists have gone back to wherever they came from. They have dragged good people through a nasty political mess unnecessarily and I'll be glad to see them close up shop on November 7.

We've been through the same voucher fight here in Michigan with the same results (voters resoundingly voted NO), so we can identify with that sentiment - we were happy to see them close up shop too. A word of warning though. The pro-voucher, educational profiteers may have been wounded, but they weren't stopped. Just ask Patrick Bryne, who had this to say to the Salt Lake Tribune today:

Byrne said the referendum defeat may have killed vouchers in Utah, but "There are other freedom oriented groups in other states - African-Americans in South Carolina are interested in it."

Be wary, South Carolina. Be very wary.

UPDATE: Maybe DeVos should snap his wallet shut and call it a day. From One Utah:

Vouchers didn’t win in a single county in the state. Not one. Think about that - in the most conservative, Republican state in the nation, after spending millions of dollars of Patrick Byrne’s money and piles of out of state money from the Amway and WalMart families, vouchers didn’t carry a single county.

(Cross-posted at Blogging for Michigan)

The GOP is trying to privatize Medicare

It appears Congressman Dave Camp is rubber stamping the Bush administration by calling for the private sector to take a greater role in health care. From the AFL-CIO Blog:

Two years after the American people rejected the Bush administration’s plan to privatize Social Security, the White House now is trying quietly to privatize Medicare.

Here’s how: The Republican Congress gave big insurance companies that provide Medicare insurance what amounts to a huge subsidy under the so-called “Medicare Advantage” program. These private insurers were supposed to introduce competition into the Medicare system and reduce costs.

But after the private insurers got their hands into the cookie jar, they began taking more than their share. Instead of reducing costs, the new plan means the federal government, on average, is paying private plans 12 percent more than it costs to treat people on traditional Medicare, according to the Congressional Budget Office and the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission.

This year alone, according to the Alliance for Retired Americans, the federal government will overpay the insurance industry $7.5 billion this year and an estimated $160 billion over the next 10 years. [...] [emphasis mine]

As Edward Coyle, executive director of the Alliance, which represents 3 million retirees and seniors, told a Capitol Hill press conference:

Medicare Advantage threatens the solvency of the Medicare Trust Fund. As the Bush administration continues to sound alarms bells about the Trust Fund, they ought to start by ending these egregious subsidies to the insurance industry.

The outrageous waste and abuse in the Medicare Advantage program is part of our larger, misguided privatization of Medicare. We’ve turned too much of Medicare over to Wall Street at the expense of the people who need help on Main Street.

Coyle goes on to point out how that $160 billion overpayment could go a long way toward eliminating the donut hole. Further, by reining in those payments, the federal government could improve benefits for lower-income families and provide coverage to millions of uninsured low-income children.

The Bush administration and Congressman Dave Camp should be concerned about our senior citizens and millions of uninsured instead of the private sector. As Coyle says:

Something is very wrong with our Medicare program—the big drug and insurance companies keep getting more, and retirees keep getting less. It is time to change this. It is time to end the corporate welfare subsidies in the Medicare Advantage program.

It's also time for the Republican Party to back up their "values" claim with action. In case they need their memories refreshed about the definition of values, Michael Moore explains in the DetNews how his Catholic boyhood helped shape the core values that are on display in "Sicko" [emphasis mine]:

"This film comes from a spiritual place," Moore says, "so I wanted to go to the headquarters of the sisters who taught me in my early years. They had a profound impact on me."

The idea that it's about "the we, not the me," came from the nuns. "Instead of calling it 'socialized medicine,' it should be called 'Christianized medicine.'"

"This was one of the ground rules that was laid down by Jesus. He said, 'I'm going to ask you a bunch of questions when you get to the pearly gates. When I was hungry did you feed me? When I was homeless, did you give me shelter? When I was sick, did you take care of me? And if you didn't do these things, and you didn't do these for the least of my people, then I'm going to have to say that you can't come in the big house.'"

Dave Camp on universal health care: Woof-woof

It looks like the 72 percent of Americans who want universal health coverage - and the 63 percent who support universal health coverage even if it requires tax increases - will be ignored again (just like they were about Iraq) if Michigan Congressman Dave Camp (R) is any indication.

According to a link at MI Liberal, Camp believes the solutions to our health care problems lie in the private sector and not in more government programs. From The Hill:

I firmly believe we can and should solve America’s healthcare crisis in an American way. History is a great teacher, and if we choose to go down the path that Western Europe or Canada has, it will be no surprise when we come to the same destination — a universal healthcare system that leaves your family dog with better coverage and care than you get. As the Canadian Supreme Court once opined, “access to a waiting list is not access to care.” [emphasis added]

Really? Then how does Camp explain this recent study:

Health outcomes for patients in Canada are as good as or better than in the United States, even though per capita spending is higher south of the border, suggest Canadian and U.S. researchers who crunched data from 38 studies. [...] [emphasis added]

"In looking at patients in Canada with a specific diagnosis compared to Americans with the same diagnosis, in Canada patients had at least as good an outcome as their American counterparts – and in many situations, a better health outcome," said one of the 17 authors, Dr. P.J. Devereaux, a cardiologist and clinical epidemiologist at McMaster University in Hamilton.

"And that is important because in the United States, they're currently spending a little over $7,100 per individual on health care annually, whereas in Canada we're spending a little over $2,900 per individual annually," he said in a telephone interview from Brantford, Ont.[...]

Researchers began by asking the question: Are there differences in health outcomes (mortality or morbidity) in patients suffering from similar medical conditions treated in Canada versus those treated in the United States?

"Overall, Canada did better, and in fact we found a statistically significant five per cent mortality advantage to people with diagnoses in Canada compared to their counterparts in the United States," Devereaux said.

Or how about these statistics from the Fort Wayne News Sentinel?

France, Germany, Japan and Switzerland have less centralized systems, which provide much better results. They combine universal coverage with easy access to medical care. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, none of these countries have waiting-list problems. Access to medical care tends to be easier in those countries than it is in the United States. [...] [emphasis added]

It is inaccurate to assume that we have the best high-tech care. Japan, which has universal care, has more CT scanners and MRIs per person than the United States. Germany and Switzerland are on a par with us. [...]

Victor Rodwin of New York University finds that on a per-capita basis, the French get more physician office visits and more drugs than their counterparts here.

Heck, even Cuba (gasp!) delivers good health care according to AlterNet:

They [Cubans] live longer than almost anyone in Latin America. Far fewer babies die. Almost everyone has been vaccinated, and such scourges of the poor as parasites, TB, malaria, even HIV/AIDS are rare or non-existent. Anyone can see a doctor, at low cost, right in the neighborhood.

The Cuban health care system is producing a population that is as healthy as those of the world's wealthiest countries at a fraction of the cost. And now Cuba has begun exporting its system to under-served communities around the world -- including the United States. [...]

Many elements of the health care system Cuba is exporting around the world are common-sense practices. Everyone has access to doctors, nurses, specialists, and medications. There is a doctor and nurse team in every neighborhood... If someone doesn't like their neighborhood doctor, they can choose another one.

House calls are routine, in part because it's the responsibility of the doctor and nurse team to understand you and your health issues in the context of your family, home, and neighborhood. This is key to the system. By catching diseases and health hazards before they get big, the Cuban medical system can spend a little on prevention rather than a lot later on to cure diseases, stop outbreaks, or cope with long-term disabilities. [...]

For health issues beyond the capacity of the neighborhood doctor, polyclinics provide specialists, outpatient operations, physical therapy, rehabilitation, and labs. Those who need inpatient treatment can go to hospitals; at the end of their stay, their neighborhood medical team helps make the transition home.[...]

I don't know how dogs fare in Cuba, but the article did say Castro provided scholarships to 90 poor Americans with the understanding that they have to agree to go back and serve their poor communities after graduation. Why the big investment in health?

Even more revolutionary than the right to health care for all is the idea that an investment in health -- or in clean water, adequate food or housing -- could be more powerful, more effective at building security than bombers and aircraft carriers.

That concept is lost on lawmakers like Camp who continue to support the war and their corporate buddies. Building bombs and aircraft carriers is a lucrative business for private contractors in Washington. According to Jim Hightower, government contracting has grown 86% under Bush's Republican administration and now totals nearly $400 BILLION dollars a year. It's no wonder Camp believes the private sector should play a role in health care reform (and get a piece of the pie):

"Too much government-provided healthcare limits private sector opportunities. We should be expanding access in the private sector, not crowding it out."

Never mind the fact that the public gets screwed (think donut holes, Katrina, Walter Reed): Medicare Is Defrauding Seniors

In 2005 alone, taxpayers lost $2.7 billion in overpayments [while i]nsurance companies that sell Medicare Advantage plans are substantially overpaid to market their plans...

And never mind the fact that corporate America is leaning in the same direction as most Americans:

Wal-Mart Stores Inc., AT&T Inc., Intel Corp. and Kelly Services Inc. joined forces with two labor unions in calling for an overhaul of the U.S. health-care system that would guarantee universal coverage by 2012.

I suspect Wal-Mart understands the economics behind universal health care because their business approach is similar. By pooling all Americans (vendors) together in the same pool, the government (Wal-Mart) can use its massive market share to bargain down prices and advocate for their interests.

On the other hand, I suspect Congressman Camp only advocates for the interests of the insurance industries and lobbyists who stand to benefit from expanding private health care.

Forget Blackwater, Stick with the National Guard

Something I read on Libby's blog - The Impolitic - caught my attention. She was talking about Kansas' crippled efforts to conduct a proper search and rescue attempt after their tornado because of their strapped National Guard units, and she concluded with this:

Our National Guard should be here at home doing the job they signed up for, rendering service on the homefront, rather than being sent thousands of miles of away for years on end in the name of imperialistic follies. Instead, when the next disaster strikes a major metro area, the taxpayer will be footing the bill for Blackwater mercenaries at ten times the price.

Libby may be onto something with her comment about Blackwater. Consider this article:

Increasingly a magnet for controversy, Blackwater USA has encountered a bumpy road implementing its national and international expansion plans.

The Moyock, N.C.-based private military company's plans to open an Asian branch in the Philippines have been scrapped and one stateside proposal has drawn considerable heat.

"We are no longer pursuing a facility in the Philippines," Anne Tyrrell, a company spokeswoman, said this week. [...]

Closer to home, Blackwater's drive to open a West Coast outpost has run into a buzzsaw of public opposition. More than half the registered voters of a tiny rural community east of San Diego, the proposed site of "Blackwater West," have signed a petition opposing the project. [...]

Meanwhile, Blackwater's new northern base in Illinois - where the company had no local regulatory hurdles to overcome - opened quietly this week, offering a variety of courses in firearms use, law enforcement and military tactics.

It is curious that the company quietly goes around expanding their facilities when according to an article in the Metro Times they have an extensive training facility in North Carolina.

Blackwater has a private fleet of more than twenty aircraft, including helicopter gunships and a surveillance blimp division. Its 7,000-acre headquarters in Moyock, North Carolina, is the world's largest private military facility. It trains tens of thousands of federal and local law enforcement agents a year and troops from "friendly" foreign nations.

Maybe they're positioning themselves to be accessible as emergencies arise in the south, out west or in the heartland in order to secure government contracts like they did after Hurricane Katrina. Privatization is a big, big story, according to what Jeremy Schahill told Metro Times:

[...] "Blackwater is a company that's engaged to tell a much bigger story. We are living right now in the middle of the most radical privatization agenda in the history of this country," Scahill tells Metro Times. "The Bush administration has used the private sector to essentially double the size of the occupation using troops whose deaths don't get counted in the official death toll and are operating outside the official system of law."

Scahill was reporting on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 when he met several Blackwater "operatives" as he calls them. The company originally said its services were "donated" to the relief effort, but then it was awarded a no-bid contract with the Department of Homeland Security's Federal Protective Services to defend reconstruction projects and several private businesses, Scahill reports. [...]

"I feel like Hurricane Katrina provided us a window into the future of what could happen in this country with natural disasters or national emergencies," Scahill says. "Training and putting arms into the hands of private contractors who are accountable to no one, to me, is a very disturbing trend in this country."

If you don't find that disturbing, consider this statement from Metro Times:

"As one U.S. Congressmember observed, in strictly military terms, Blackwater could overthrow many of the world's governments."

I don't have a problem with privatization if it saves the taxpayer money, provides equal or better service, and is bid on in an open and honest matter. I do have a problem with no-bid contracts that end up costing us more. In Blackwater's case, the company has cost the taxpayers lots more money as I've posted before, and here's another example from Metro Times:

In contrast to active-duty soldiers who are poorly paid, Blackwater's guards were given six-figure salaries. "Standard wages for PSD (personal security detail) pros [in Iraq] were previously running about $300 [per man] a day," Fortune magazine reported at the time. "Once Blackwater started recruiting for its first big job, guarding Paul Bremer, the rate shot up to $600 a day."

I'm not sure what Blackwater's motivation is, but we don't need their services. We have National Guard troops available to help us in national emergencies that could use an infusion of cash to replace their missing equipment. Oh, and if the Bush administration really wants to spend more money, give the National Guard members a raise. They need it more than Erik Prince, millionaire owner of Blackwater.

Republicans neglect our elderly population

My mother was hospitalized last week after a health emergency and she's being moved to a nursing home today. I wish to protect her identity so I won't go into details, but I will tell you she has Alzheimer's, and because of the added health issues she now requires round the clock care for all activities of daily living. As you might imagine,the past several days have been very difficult for us. There's a chance she'll recover enough to come home (she lives with my sister and brother-in-law), but that's a big "if" at this point in time.

Nursing homes can be scary places for patients, and also for families. We've all heard the horror stories of inadequate care or neglect and none of us want to see our loved ones end up in those kinds of places. We only want the best for them. That's what I woke up thinking about this morning. The facility they're transferring my mother to is nice, but my concern is what happens if this becomes a long-term proposition and her Medicare runs out. My mother is almost 90-years-old and outlived her money years ago. She was fortunate to have children she could live with, but none of us is in the position to help her with nursing home expenses. Mom will end up in a Medicaid facility once her Medicare runs out, and we'll just have to keep our fingers crossed that she ends up in a good place. The better nursing homes only take so many Medicaid patients and openings are hard to come by. It's shameful that the level of care an elderly person receives ends up depending on money.

It's also shameful that some insurers have taken advantage of those people who had the means to buy LTC insurance:

Interviews by The New York Times and confidential depositions indicate that some long-term-care insurers have developed procedures that make it difficult — if not impossible — for policyholders to get paid. A review of more than 400 of the thousands of grievances and lawsuits filed in recent years shows elderly policyholders confronting unnecessary delays and overwhelming bureaucracies. In California alone, nearly one in every four long-term-care claims was denied in 2005, according to the state.

“The bottom line is that insurance companies make money when they don’t pay claims,” said Mary Beth Senkewicz, who resigned last year as a senior executive at the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. “They’ll do anything to avoid paying, because if they wait long enough, they know the policyholders will die.” [...]

“These companies have essentially turned their bureaucracies into profit centers,” said Glenn R. Kantor, a California lawyer who has represented policyholders.

Yet these concerns have been ignored by state regulators, advocates say, and have gone unnoticed by federal lawmakers who recently passed incentives intended to promote purchases of long-term-care policies, in the hopes of forestalling a Medicare funding crisis. [emphasis mine]

This is just one more example of privatized services failing to deliver. Washington may be helping the insurance industry by pushing these programs, but they're not helping the people victimized by the system, and they're not helping people like my mother who can't afford the luxury of private long-term care insurance, yet she worked and paid taxes her entire life. In fact, my mother was a "Rosie the Riveter" and worked in a factory during the war. She deserves the same level of care as the next person.

Locally, our state Republicans have shown the same disrespect and disregard for our elderly. Last week, they pushed through a late evening budget plan that would save the state more than $15 million by reducing the wages and hours for people who care for 40,000-plus low-income seniors and the disabled. Pay for home health care aides will be reduced to $7 an hour under their plan, and seniors must find the helpers on their own. They also cut funding to home-delivered meals by $97,000, which as one person said is a small cut, but it's somebody's grandmother who's going to get the phone call saying they can't get meals anymore.

I don't think there's any justification for cutting back services to our elderly or disabled, but that's not how state Republicans see it:

Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop, R-Rochester, said the cuts are "painful" but argued that the GOP plan would adequately fund public safety, education and health care and help turn around Michigan.

"Once you get used to a certain level of government, it's hard to trim it back," Bishop said. "But we also know that we have an obligation to the state, to the citizens that we represent, to downsize government."

Excuse me, Sen. Bishop, but you also have an obligation to our elderly. They're citizens too. They paid taxes and contributed to society their entire lives, and now, when we should be doing for them, you want to kick them to the curb? That's disgraceful.

Put yourself in a poor person's shoes just once. How would you feel if your mother needed her adult diapers changed and you couldn't find someone willing to do it for $7 an hour? In fact, would you change diapers, give sponge baths, and strip dirty sheets for $7 an hour? Add into the equation that old people can be difficult and cantankerous to deal with, especially those with dementia, and the pool of caring people willing to work for poverty wages goes down considerably.

Sen. Bishop, you and your Republican cohorts in Michigan and Washington should be ashamed, most people treat they pets better than you treat our elderly.

Blackwater Security in the News

Last week we read that five civilians employed by Blackwater Security died in the Baghdad crash of a helicopter owned by the company. I've written about Blackwater and its Michigan ties before - here, here and here - so I thought I'd share a couple of articles I ran across, although you won't read this in any of Michigan's GOP-controlled papers.

The first article is from the Seattle PI and the only word I can use to describe it comes from the article itself - appalling:

Private security contractor Blackwater USA is seeking $10 million from the attorney representing the estates of four employees killed and mutilated in Iraq, arguing their families breached the security guards' contracts by suing the company for wrongful death.

Blackwater also has asked a federal court to move the dispute into arbitration, having failed so far in its ongoing efforts to have the lawsuit dismissed.

Arbitration is necessary "in order to safeguard both (Blackwater's) own confidential information as well as sensitive information implicating the interest of the United States at war," attorneys for Blackwater Security Consulting, a unit of Moyock-based Blackwater USA, wrote in a petition filed December 20.

Dan Callahan, a California-based attorney representing the families, called the claim "appalling."

"This is a shock-and-awe tactic," Callahan said Friday. Blackwater's attorneys declined to comment.

The four families, represented by estates administrator Richard Nordan, filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Blackwater in January 2005 in state court. Family members argue Blackwater broke contractual obligations and used cost-saving measures that ultimately led to the deaths of the four men.

Yeah, like telling the men they would provide armored vehicles, but then failing to do so. The company pocketed $1.5 million and those men lost their lives as a result.

The second article comes from Jeremy Scahill writing in the LA Times [emphasis added]:

Bush made no mention of the downing of the [Blackwater] helicopter during his State of the Union speech. But he did address the very issue that has made the war's privatization a linchpin of his Iraq policy — the need for more troops. The president called on Congress to authorize an increase of about 92,000 active-duty troops over the next five years. He then slipped in a mention of a major initiative that would represent a significant development in the U.S. disaster response/reconstruction/war machine: a Civilian Reserve Corps.

"Such a corps would function much like our military Reserve. It would ease the burden on the armed forces by allowing us to hire civilians with critical skills to serve on missions abroad when America needs them," Bush declared. This is precisely what the administration has already done, largely behind the backs of the American people and with little congressional input, with its revolution in military affairs. Bush and his political allies are using taxpayer dollars to run an outsourcing laboratory. Iraq is its Frankenstein monster.

Already, private contractors constitute the second-largest "force" in Iraq. At last count, there were about 100,000 contractors in Iraq, of which 48,000 work as private soldiers, according to a Government Accountability Office report. These soldiers have operated with almost no oversight or effective legal constraints and are an undeclared expansion of the scope of the occupation. Many of these contractors make up to $1,000 a day, far more than active-duty soldiers. What's more, these forces are politically expedient, as contractor deaths go uncounted in the official toll.

The president's proposed Civilian Reserve Corps was not his idea alone. A privatized version of it was floated two years ago by Erik Prince, the secretive, mega-millionaire, conservative owner of Blackwater USA and a man who for years has served as the Pied Piper of a campaign to repackage mercenaries as legitimate forces. In early 2005, Prince — a major bankroller of the president and his allies — pitched the idea at a military conference of a "contractor brigade" to supplement the official military. "There's consternation in the [Pentagon] about increasing the permanent size of the Army," Prince declared. Officials "want to add 30,000 people, and they talked about costs of anywhere from $3.6 billion to $4 billion to do that. Well, by my math, that comes out to about $135,000 per soldier." He added: "We could do it certainly cheaper."

We saw what "cheaper" cost those four men in Falluja, and we've seen Iraq go from bad to worse in spite of help from those private contractors. The only one gaining anything from this arrangement is Erik Prince.

This is What the Republicans Don't Want to Talk About

Michigan's Iraq casualties now number more than 100 as this map so graphically indicates. All those lives lost for what? Lies.

The public wants our troops home and the president claims he has a "timeline for Iraq," but this rhetoric is not accompanied by any change in strategy. The Bush administration has not imposed any consequences and there's been no mention of a drawdown of troops.

In the meantime, the war and all these senseless casualties are taking a backseat to campaigning. Here in Michigan, Dick DeVos keeps steering the discussion to jobs and the economy because he wants to deflect attention away from the fact that his brother-in-law Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater USA, a private security firm currently working in Iraq, is a war profiteer, and DeVos and his family are major supporters of Republican causes. Contrast that with Gov. Granholm who has worked [pdf file] to protect our soldiers' pay, ensure jobs for veterans, protect the parental rights of service women and men, and provide financial assistance to families of soldiers suffering financial hardships.

No, DeVos and the Republicans don't want to discuss the Iraq war because then the public might hear something like this:

An Iraq vet's thoughts on 100 dead Michigan troops.

Supporting the troops is not having a yellow-magnet ribbon on your car. It’s calling your congressman and complaining to them about why they decided to cut VA or TRICARE benefits for Soldiers. It’s making sure that they only go to war because it’s absolutely necessary, and when they do you complain to everyone if they aren’t given the resources to do the job! It’s taking care of the vets when they get home, and making sure they don’t end up broke and homeless. As of this writing over 500 OEF and OIF vets are homeless. Where is the outrage over this? Where are Hannity and Limbaugh, telling our Government to get their shit together and do something to help them? The only conclusion I can come up with is that they just don’t care. While they say “support our troops” they really mean “use our troops as an excuse to further our agenda.”

Supporting the troops is NOT about defending a political stance or an ideology.

Click on the link and read the entire post. This is reality. This is what the Republicans have done to our country and our children.

Update: Several veterans left notable comments at the link above that deserve your attention too.

The Dark Side of Privatization

This is a glimpse of the dark side of privatization:

Meet Lloyd Martell, MDOC prisoner No. 335246. He will die soon of colon cancer that could have been contained had prison doctors treated it 18 months ago.

Martell, 41, a Detroit auto mechanic, caught a small-time case in 2004 -- fleeing from Redford police after they tried to pull him over for a broken rear window. Martell has a history of petty crimes and took off because he had a suspended driver's license. After police arrested him, Martell got one to four years. It turned into a veritable death sentence.

In December 2004, Martell had what he believed was a hemorrhoid lanced in prison. Medical records show it was actually a cancerous polyp. Martell said Dr. Jerome Wisneski, who works for Correctional Medical Services, told him he would be fine.

"He said it was a clean cut," Martell, in a wheelchair with a colostomy bag on his stomach, told me two weeks ago inside the Charles Egeler Center in Jackson. "He said it was all contained in the tumor and I didn't have anything to worry about."

By October of last year, Martell was bleeding from the rectum and unable to walk. He was sent to Foote Hospital in Jackson, which contracts with CMS for specialty services. Doctors told him he had terminal cancer.

An oncology report from Foote in November is damning: "Lloyd Martell is a 40-year-old inmate whose history dates back to December of 2004 when he underwent resection of a polyp that, in fact, did have evidence of adenocarcinoma, but no further intervention was made."

A request for a medical parole, supported by physicians, in December stated that Martell had roughly 20 months to live. Even if broke, Martell could have walked into the emergency room of Detroit Receiving Hospital, or practically any hospital, and gotten better care for his cancer. In prison, he didn't have that choice, and now he's going to die.

With help from family and the media, Martell was released on Tuesday so he could go home to die, a fate he didn't deserve. Unfortunately, Martell is not the only victim of medical neglect while in prison according to the Free Press.

[...]Yet the quality of prison health care seems to have gotten worse since 2000, when the state contracted with Correctional Medical Services Inc. for primary care physicians and other services. It should be getting better. The Michigan Department of Corrections has been under a federal consent decree since 1985 to improve medical care and other conditions at prisons in Jackson.

"The medical neglect seems worse, not better," Patricia Streeter of Ann Arbor, an attorney for the prisoners in the Hadix case, told me. "CMS has not adequately supervised its doctors or made timely specialist referrals, and MDOC appears unwilling or unable to see that it does."

Medical records, court documents and rulings, and interviews with inmates and advocates show a pattern of misdiagnosis, delayed or denied treatment, withheld pain medication and inadequate accommodations for people with disabilities.

This problem is not limited to Michigan. CMS has prison and jail health care contracts in 26 states, with 80 employees in Michigan. State officials say CMS has saved the state nearly $10 million, and they contracted with them for primary care mostly because it could not retain physician employees. However, CMS gets $65 million a year from Michigan taxpayers. Where is the accountability? Taxpayers don't send people to prison to die at the hands of negligent companies.

There needs to be accountability. Our state failed to provide oversight under Republican and Democratic administrations, and CMS itself has been less than transparent - for good reason.

Correctional Medical Services is not merely the nation's largest provider of prison medicine; it is also the nation'’s cheapest provider, a perfect convergence of big business and low budgets. But unlike the traditional HMO, whose risk of a malpractice suit is real, and is felt, and is reflected to at least some degree in the quality of medical care, companies such as CMS have little or no reason to protect themselves. Most juries are reluctant to decide in favor of a convict, and those juries that do favor the convict are often reluctant to award money. Cost-benefit analysis takes on special, human overtones behind bars.

Perhaps even more significantly, private companies such as CMS feel no responsibility, and have no legal obligation, to account to the public for what goes on inside their facilities. So, while CMS receives about $550 million of taxpayer money each year, the company chooses not to provide any accounting of how that money is spent or even how much of it is spent-----and how much unspent, to be pocketed as profit.

In addition to providing poor health care on the taxpayer's dime, CMS is also a union-buster.

According to a June 2000 Associated Press story in the Detroit News, the United Auto Workers Union, which represents doctors, physician's assistants and nurse practitioners employed by the Michigan Department of Corrections, "sued over Michigan's privatizing health care for prison inmates, claiming prisoner health could suffer if the state expands its contract with the for-profit provider scrutinized in several states."

That's an added bonus that must have delighted many right-wingers even though the UAW's concerns proved to be deadly accurate, but providing the best service is not one of the Right's goals. Their goal is to outsource tax dollars to private companies who only care about one thing - the bottom line. So what if somebody dies in the process.

Mercenary Jackpot for DeVos Relative

All that money the DeVos family donates to the Republican Party is starting to pay off, especially for brother-in-law Eric Prince, the right-wing Christian founder of Blackwater USA. Here's the latest from Jeremy Scahill at The Nation [all emphasis added]:

While the Bush Administration calls for the immediate disbanding of what it has labeled "private" and "illegal" militias in Lebanon and Iraq, it is pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into its own global private mercenary army tasked with protecting US officials and institutions overseas. The secretive program, which spans at least twenty-seven countries, has been an incredible jackpot for one heavily Republican-connected firm in particular: Blackwater USA. Government records recently obtained by The Nation reveal that the Bush Administration has paid Blackwater more than $320 million since June 2004 to provide "diplomatic security" services globally. The massive contract is the largest known to have been awarded to Blackwater to date and reveals how the Administration has elevated a once-fledgling security firm into a major profiteer in the "war on terror." [...]

A heavily redacted 2005 government audit of Blackwater's WPPS [Worldwide Personal Protective Service] contract proposal, obtained by The Nation, reveals that Blackwater included profit in its overhead and its total costs, which would result "not only in a duplication of profit but a pyramiding of profit since in effect Blackwater is applying profit to profit." The audit also found that the company tried to inflate its profits by representing different Blackwater divisions as wholly separate companies.

The WPPS contract awarded in 2004 was divided among a handful of companies, among them DynCorp and Triple Canopy. Blackwater was originally slated to be paid $229.5 million for five years, according to a State Department contract list. Yet as of June 30, just two years into the program, it had been paid a total of $321,715,794. When confronted with this apparent $100 million discrepancy, the State Department could not readily explain it. Blackwater's two years of WPPS earnings exceed many estimates of the company's total government contracts, which the Virginian-Pilot recently put at $290 million combined since 2000. Six years ago the government paid Blackwater less than $250,000. [...]

While the WPPS program and the broader use of private security contractors is not new, it has escalated dramatically under the Bush Administration. According to the most recent Government Accountability Office report, some 48,000 private soldiers, working for 181 private military firms, are deployed in Iraq alone. Blackwater, now one of the most prominent and successful companies providing soldiers in Iraq, was relatively unknown until March 31, 2004, when four of its contractors were ambushed and killed in Falluja [see Scahill, "Blood Is Thicker Than Blackwater," May 8]. In the days and weeks that followed, company executives hired ultra-connected lobbyists and were welcomed by powerful government officials as heroes, allowing the firm to solidify its role in the Bush Administration's foreign policy apparatus. [...]

This just goes to show you that huge sums of money can buy prominence and success - at the expense of taxpayers who get the shaft. No wonder Dick DeVos is in favor of privatizing public services here in Michigan. He wants in on some of those "pyramiding profits" too.