This Week:

Quote of the Week

Book Review: "Bleeding the Patient"

Propaganda Watch I: Beam Us Up, George!

The Johnsons Pay Their Taxes

Greetings,

This week I start to ease my way out of my single-issue focus on war and peace of the past several weeks, and offer a brief review of a new book on health care. The war coverage will continue, though, as long as we are at (legal or illegal, declared or undeclared, just or unjust) war. This week it's outer space propaganda. Who knows what's next?

Thanks to all those of you who sent in your entry for the annual Nygaard Notes Free Subscription to Z Magazine. And the five winners are: Rick, Carol, Sue, Mike, and Betty. Congratulations! I'm not sure exactly how soon you will get your first issue, but if you haven't gotten one within six weeks or so, let me know and I'll get on the case. I'm sorry not everybody could win. Maybe next year?

The most common name in the Minneapolis phone book is Johnson. That explains my use of this name in this week's allegorical tale about the United Nations. It is not my intention to besmirch the name of any upstanding members of any Johnson clan who may read Nygaard Notes.

Just a warning: I will be taking another week off (possibly two) toward the end of December, as I have much Nygaard Notes "business" to take care of. It has been suggested to me that, rather than take the week entirely off, I might reprint some of the most popular Notes from the past. Something like a Nygaard Notes "Greatest Hits?!?" Well, it's an intriguing idea; since so many of you have come on board fairly recently, you've missed out on a lot. We'll see what happens.

‘Til next week,

Nygaard

"Quote" of the Week:

"People are feeling vulnerable and unsure. They want concrete information provided in a straightforward way. Now more than ever, consumers want the sense of security and community that comes from emotional linkages with a brand. Let them know that your brand has always been there for them, and always will be."

-- Marian Salsman, global director for strategy and planning at giant advertising agency Euro RSCG, offering advice to marketers drawn from their recent study of the "spending sentiments" of young people around the world. Quoted in the New York Times ("All the News That's Fit to Print") of November 27th, in an article entitled "Research Offers Insights on the Mood of College Students Since September 11."

Book Review: "Bleeding the Patient"

Back in Nygaard Notes #39 I wrote a short piece called "We Need Universal National Health Care: What You Can Do." In it I mentioned a group called Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), and recommended as a good introduction to the issue their 1993 book "The National Health Program Book: A Source Guide for Advocates." I am happy to announce that the authors, well-known national health care advocates Steffi Woolhandler and David Himmelstein, with help from Ida Hellander, have just published a new book on the subject that is up-to-date and excellent.

Entitled Bleeding the Patient: The Consequences of Corporate Health Care, this easy-to-read book is chock-full of useful charts and graphs that answer a host of questions that many Americans may have about our health care system. (Not that many people seem to be thinking about the issue lately, questioning or otherwise. When I looked at Amazon.com to see how popular this book is, it was ranked at number 406,788 in sales. The top-ranked non-fiction book at Amazon currently is "Jack: Straight from the Gut," an autobiography of General Electric CEO Jack Welch. That tells you something about America's reading habits, doesn't it? But, I digress...)

Eleven of the book's twelve chapters start with a brief summary of the main points being conveyed in that chapter, followed by pages of graphic illustrations backing up those points. For example, the first chapter, "Rich Country, Poor Care," includes charts showing such things as the number of people who remain uninsured in the U.S. despite being in families with full-time workers. Other charts illustrate the close link between medical emergencies and personal bankruptcies, and the effects of Americans' lack of insurance on prenatal care.

Far from being a simple list of gripes about American health care, Bleeding the Patient also includes inspiring chapters like "Solutions Are At Hand: Other Nations Do Better." It is reassuring to see graphic evidence that countries as different as Italy, Sweden, and Canada have all figured out how to keep their per-capita health care spending lower than that in the United States while still having healthier citizens.

The chapter entitled "Northern Light: Canada's Experience with National Health Care" documents a plethora of details about the Canadian system—wrongly characterized by many in this country as "socialized medicine"—that will surprise the average reader. Would most Americans guess that our neighbor to the north scores better than we do on a wide variety of public health indicators, including infant mortality and life expectancy? These facts aren't secret, but I'll wager they are unknown to most Americans, 43 million of whom were uninsured even before we stumbled into the current recession.

My conversations with Americans have led me to believe that folks this side of the border have some very strange ideas (if they have any ideas at all) about what a national health plan might actually look like. The final chapter in Bleeding the Patient hits the spot in this regard, giving a brief outline of the comprehensive plan proposed by the authors. As with many proposals in the human services realm, this one will likely seem very radical to American readers, although it is quite moderate by global standards.

Bleeding the Patient is an easy and quick read, filled as it is with charts and graphs, but many will prefer to use it as a handy reference rather than read it cover-to-cover. The sections on HMOs and the pharmaceutical industry, for example, provide up-to-date statistics that are easy to find and use. They will make great building blocks for you to use in constructing the arguments you will be presenting to your legislator when you write her or him about the need for drastic change in our health care system.

Much of the information in the book, including the detailed proposal of the authors (all doctors), can be found on the website of Physicians for a National Health Program, at http://www.pnhp.org/index.html.

The subtitle of Bleeding the Patient is "The Consequences of Corporate Health Care," and the authors' message is clear and straightforward: We need to transform the health care system in the United States from a profit center for corporate America into a public health resource for us all.

Bleeding The Patient is available in paperback from Common Courage Press for $16.95. Call your local independent bookstore and have them order you a copy. Or, see the Website of the Week next week for a great (non-Amazon.com!) on-line book source.

Propaganda Watch I: Beam Us Up, George!

In one of the more extreme and bizarre examples of government propaganda—this one a case of propaganda by the withholding of information—the Pentagon has signed a deal with Space Imaging Inc., a privately held company in Thornton, Colorado, to buy the entire capacity of their high-resolution satellite to take pictures of Afghanistan and nearby countries. According to an excellent, if little-noted, report in the New York Times ("All the News That's Fit to Print") of October 19th, "The Ikonos satellite owned by Space Imaging is the sole commercial satellite that gathers high-resolution images and can discern objects as small as one square meter."

The Pentagon contract, concluded on Oct. 7, means that news media and other organizations outside government will not be able to obtain independently their own high-resolution satellite images of the Afghanistan region. And they'll never be able to, if the Pentagon gets its way. Says the Times, "The contract effectively allows the Pentagon to keep the images it bought out of the public eye forever. None can be released without Defense Department approval."

First Amendment, you say? That has nothing to do with it. "The company said it was principally motivated by financial concerns," reports the Times. "‘For us,' its executive director for government affairs, Mark Brender, said, ‘it is a sound business transaction that brings a lot of value to the government.'" Let's see, now: The company makes money on their monopoly, the government gets to keep its war secret, and the citizens of the world can continue to believe in "surgical strikes" and an antiseptic war. One can't have a much more "sound business transaction" than that, can one?

The Johnsons Pay Their Taxes

Suppose the richest family in your neighborhood—the Johnson family, say—refuses to pay their property taxes because the police and courts won't agree to let them ignore the law. Then suppose their house gets robbed, and they call up and offer to pay their taxes if the police will just come out and participate in a vigilante squad organized and led by the Johnsons. The police agree to participate, since they know that the Johnsons are sufficiently rich and powerful that the vigilante effort will be carried out police or without. (What, you may ask, are the Johnsons doing living in your neighborhood?!? Never mind...) The police know how much it would damage their credibility if they failed to give their blessing, since that would make it obvious that they couldn't stop the Johnsons from doing whatever they wanted.

We Americans are the Johnsons.

Doubtless many people missed the news that the U.S. House of Representatives on September 24th approved the payment of two-thirds of the back dues that the United States owes the United Nations. The Washington Post reported that, after some "behind the scenes" post-September 11 lobbying by the White House (the Free Press on the job!), House conservatives who had blocked the payment of our contractual obligations to the international body decided to "abandon their opposition in light of the strikes in New York and Washington."

These "conservatives" have figured out that it might be difficult to use the United Nations as a tool of U.S. foreign policy if we continue to be a global deadbeat. There is complete bipartisan agreement on this imperialist intent to manipulate what is supposed to be a body promoting a global community of nations. Listen to Jonathan Grella, spokesman for Republican House Minority Whip Tom Delay: "We're not going to deny the president the flexibility he needs in conducting foreign policy." How about the "opposition" party? The Post quotes Representative Tom Lantos of California, the top Democrat on the House International Relations Committee, saying "As President Bush, Secretary of State Powell and our nation's diplomatic corps begin to secure the concrete commitments required to wage this battle against terrorism, they must take advantage of every forum available to reach out to the nations of the world."

Now consider this comment from the same article: "DeLay and other conservatives wanted to link the release of U.N. funds to an amendment exempting American soldiers from the jurisdiction of an international war crimes court and barring U.S. military aid to countries that had ratified the treaty creating the international court." Leave aside for the moment the question of why these people are so worried about being under the jurisdiction of a court of law, and imagine for a moment how this sort of statement might sound to citizens in, say, Colombia, the country with the worst human rights record in the Western hemisphere and also the Western hemisphere's largest recipient of U.S. foreign "aid." How about the Kurds in U.S. ally Turkey, victims of a variety of human rights atrocities paid for, in part, by us, the Johnsons of the world.

As the Post reported, "...both Republicans and Democrats said the United States cannot afford to ignore the U.N.'s needs at a time when Bush administration officials are seeking a broad international coalition to combat terrorism."

The implication—quite accurate, in my opinion—is that the United States can and will ignore the U.N. and any other international body or treaty when it decides it can "afford to" do so. As if to underline the point, just one month after the U.N. dues were paid, the Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!) reported on the U.S. decision to delay some missile tests that would likely violate terms of the 30-year-old anti-ballistic missile treaty between Russia and the U.S: "[Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld has often said the treaty itself is an irrelevant relic of the Cold War and must be discarded. Nonetheless, he said, now is not the time to invite accusations of treaty violations. ‘I do not want to put the United States in a position of having someone raise a question about whether or not something is a violation of a treaty,' he said."

Rumsfeld is, unfortunately, correct. In a world where power is so highly concentrated in the hands of the few, and when those few have no respect for the rule of law, such things as treaties do become "irrelevant." The tragedy is that, in such a world, the only "relevant" issue is violence. And this leaves only one recourse for the powerless, which is to resort to whatever violence they can bring to bear, in an attempt to make it less "affordable" for the wealthy to ignore their needs.

In other words, if the neighbors see that the Johnsons won't pay their fair share of taxes unless they are robbed, some of those neighbors are going to start rooting for the robbers. Or, perhaps, begin to consider becoming robbers themselves.

This is a prescription for fear, insecurity, and instability. And that prescription has been signed by Doctor George W. Bush.