GOP Shucking And Jiving On Medicare

In an astonishing observation, Rep. Paul Ryan recently declared: "Washington has not been honest with you."

Gosh, Paul, that possibility never occurred to us! What makes Ryan's observation astonishing is the fact that he is Washington – a seven-term Republican insider, House budget chairman, and author of the GOP's ideologically-contrived, budget-whacking plan that kills America's enormously popular Medicare program.

But Ryan didn't mean to point his finger at himself. No, no – he meant those dastardly Democrats who've dared to tell the public about his proposal to replace Medicare with a privatized voucher scheme. Understandably, the public is now angry at Ryan and his Republican cohorts. Hence, he is scurrying around in a shamefully-dishonest PR campaign to accuse the Democrats of – what else? – dishonesty. The Ryan Plan, he asserts, would give seniors "the same kind of [health insurance] system members of Congress enjoy today."

Oh, Paul, pants on fire! We taxpayers cover 75 percent of the payments for the plan that you enjoy, but you would saddle older folks with vouchers that'd cover only a third of their insurance costs, and that share would shrink with each passing year.

Apparently, feeling that telling the truth is unfair in today's politics, Republicans are angry at Democrats for talking about Ryan's Medicare gut job. Sen. John Cornyn, the Texas Republican whose sweeping white pompadour covers a totally empty head, recently ranted in feigned outrage that Democrats are trying to "scare the daylights" out of seniors. "I think that's irresponsible," he bellowed, oblivious to his own absurd scare tactics of only two years ago, when he assailed "Obamacare," direly warning that Obama was turning Medicare into "a health care gulag." They can run all they want, but on this one, they can't hide.
(c) 2011 Jim Hightower's latest book, "If The Gods Had Meant Us To Vote They Would Have Given Us Candidates," is available in a fully revised and updated paperback edition.

Our Safety Net
By Helen Thomas

Why do the Republican lawmakers want to gut the government social programs that help the elderly, the poor, the sick and the disabled? It will be at their own political peril, I hope.

If the Republicans want to solve the $14 trillion deficit problem, they might start by reducing Congressional salaries, perks and pensions. It's the tax payers who bailed out the banks who were too big to fail - without a quid pro quo of bank loans to small businesses and needy individuals. Since then, the banks have paid big bonuses to their top executives. Why?

The new GOP freshmen who swept the last election, thanks to the support of the Tea Party, seem to think they have a mandate to kill the New Deal programs, which were designed to help the helpless. Remember the Tea Partier's caveat in warning that they do not want the federal government to mess with their Medicare. Understand?

The GOP got its comeuppance. In a recent election, Kathy Hochul, the Democratic clerk of Erie County, N.Y., defeated Jane Corwin in a district that had been solidly Republican for over 40 years. Hochul hammered on House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan's proposal to privatize the Medicare program by using vouchers as subsidies. Lawmakers running in the 2012 national elections should take heed against tampering with the Great Society programs to solve the nation's debt problems.

The Ryan proposal will not affect seniors until 2022, but has instilled fear in those who count on the future safety net programs during their old age. The Ryan plan passed the House, but has been blocked in the Senate. It seems the Republican freshmen in the House have a lot to learn about this country. They assumed their election victory was a mandate to kill the safety net programs.

The GOP failed to destroy Social Security during the last Bush administration, which proposed to privatize the program, enacted during the Great Depression, a time of much suffering in the nation. President Franklin D. Roosevelt became aware of the plight of the elderly during those depression years and was moved to do something to assist older Americans.

There are now 47 million Americans most of whom depend on that monthly check to pay for their food and shelter. Since it was enacted in 1935, Social Security has been expanded to include orphans and the disabled.

Medicare was signed into law by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965, in Independence, Missouri, at the desk of President Harry S. Truman. Truman was the first to propose national medical coverage for all Americans. He stood by smiling when Johnson signed the Medicare bill into law, a dream come true.

The Republican leaders in Congress have vowed to vote against any increase in taxes to solve the nation's fiscal dilemma. Without any new revenue, they are also standing firm against wiping out the generous tax breaks. In other words, the burden of the nation's debt has to be carried on those who can least afford it.

Suddenly, the lawmakers are coming to the conclusion that our wars - unwinnable - in Iraq and Afghanistan, cost money. For the first time lawmakers are starting to question the cost expenditures for the 10 year Afghanistan war and the eight years in Iraq. Especially in the wake of Osama bin Laden's death, how can we justify spending $113 billion when we are literally going bankrupt? President Barack Obama has promised to begin some pull out of the troops. The human cost has already been too much for both wars. But at last we are publicly addressing the financial cost.

Ironically, most of the nations of the world, including the western industrialized countries and the underdeveloped, have humanitarian systems for their needy people. Why not America, now in the throws of a very slow recovery from the recession, with millions still jobless and no breakthrough in sight?

President Obama must start creating programs to put millions of people back to work. The economy is expected to be the primary issue in the 2012 election. Are we our brother's keeper? Or are we the providers for the welfare of the nation's bankers and insurance companies? That's the question voters will have to decide.
(c) 2011 Helen Thomas is a columnist for the Falls Church News-Press. Among other books she is the author of Front Row At The White House: My Life and Times.

Why The American Media Is Failing
By James Donahue

Journalism students usually hear about Thomas Jefferson’s quote about the importance of newspapers in relation to government. He said: “Were it left to me whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter.”

Indeed, those words have inspired many a journalist to assume his or her role as a member of the “Fourth Estate” and to work diligently as a watchdog over the actions of elected government representatives, whether in local city or township boards or in the highest levels of office.

What many people don’t know is that Jefferson, like all politicians, was not really that enamored by the press. He also said: “Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.” And he said: “The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.”

It is clear that Jefferson possessed an understanding, even in his day, of just how complex the field of newspaper publishing can be and how pressures experienced by people in elected office can influence printed words in published newspapers.

Indeed, Jefferson recognized the importance of equitable and open-minded journalism and its role in keeping people in elected government jobs working in the best interests of their constituents. But he also knew that newspapers were businesses that were dependent upon advertising revenues for their existence. And this lead to conflicts between what reporters wrote and what the advertisers wanted to see in print.

Even in Jefferson’s day, the big money interests in every community possessed the political power because they maintained control over what appeared in published newspaper print. Because they did this, they controlled what the reading public was allowed to know.

Every journalist that has ever worked a political beat understands clearly how the “system” works and has struggled with the problem of political corruption that often reaches the publisher’s office. No matter how honest and dedicated the reporter may try to be, stories that should be told frequently get altered or they never appear in print at all. Consequently the media plays what can be a somewhat convoluted role in delivering stories of concern to public interest.

There have been many books and reports written by contemporary historians concerning the results of a failure by the media to correctly dig for facts and do the job it was designed to do. A recent book by Greg Mitchell, editor of Editor & Publisher magazine, So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits – and the President – Failed on Iraq, slams the media’s failures in exposing the misinformation that led America to an unnecessary and unprecedented assault on another country.

Several newspapers were working together in 2001 to reveal just what went wrong in the 2000 presidential elections that led to a Supreme Court decision to give the high office to George W. Bush. They were financing a recount of that controversial Florida election and were possibly on the brink of exposing mass election fraud when the nation was slammed with news of the 9-11 attack. Suddenly the attention of the world was shifted and the corruption that put Mr. Bush in office was conveniently buried.

Strangely, the unanswered questions about the 9-11 attacks also have remained topics where contemporary journalists fear to tread. The questions remain, but they are all delegated to the ranks of the “crazy conspiracy theorists” and receive little, if any, established media attention.

The few top journalists that have dared to ask hard and controversial questions have been quickly quashed and driven from their posts by unseen forces. They have been made examples for the other members of the media. Former CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather was driven from his job after becoming embroiled in a disputed news report involving the Bush 2004 presidential re-election. And outspoken reporter Helen Thomas lost her position with the Hearst Newspapers in 2010 after she made a controversial comment about the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands in the Middle East. These were both “untouchable” issues.

The American media has not always been as tethered as it appears to be today. There were great moments, like the memorable work of Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward that uncovered the Watergate scandal and toppled the presidency of Richard M. Nixon. Then there was the work of radio and television reporter Edward R. Murrow whose daring reporting helped topple the dynasty of Communist conspiracy hunter Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s.

Those were good days for the American media. Unfortunately the industry has fallen unto hard times and is more dependent than ever on the advertising dollar for its survival. The media is no longer limited to the printed word in magazines and newspapers, but has expanded to radio, television and most recently, the Internet.

The news reporting sweeping the Internet first began on a limited basis, but has since become a major competitor to printed news publications and even television news. The Internet news can be found from all around the world. Photos and individually shot video footage of major news events are flashed around the world even as things are happening. Even the most sophisticated television news teams can no longer compete against this kind of live stream reporting.

The infamous Wikileaks web site, created by Australian Julian Assange, has opened an interesting new insight as to just how important the Internet can be in providing real journalistic freedoms not only in the United States, but for the entire world. The web site and a number of its mirror sites, publish daily bundles of once “secret” government documents that expose misbehavior by world power brokers. It is not surprising that Assange is now locked up in a Swedish jail on sexual abuse charges. He is under fierce assault by power figures that are willing to do anything to stop this new form of journalism from succeeding.

The Wikileaks case is somewhat akin to the old Bible story of David vs. Goliath. If Assange wins, the world may begin to enjoy the fruits of the very journalistic power that Jefferson once envisioned. It has the potential of operating as a truly “free” press without the shackles its need for financial support created.

Right on cue, legislators in the U.S. are pressing to put a law on the books that would censor any Internet website that dares to publish information that might embarrass or expose misdeeds by people in high government office. The bill, the Protect IP Act sponsored by Senators Patrick Leahy and Orrin Hatch, would allow “any copyright holder” or the Department of Justice the power to force search engines, browsers and service providers to block user’s access to targeted websites and scrub the American Internet clean of any trace of their existence.

The Protect IP Act is presented as a protection against copyright infringement of recorded and filmed material by foreign interests, but the wording includes censorship of Internet sites that dare to blow the whistle on government activities under the guise of protecting national security.

It all boils down to a plan to place government and corporate controls on Internet journalists like Julian Assange who not only dare to throw sunshine into the dark shadows of government, but threaten the future of the old and perhaps outdated television and newspaper communications industries.
(c) 2011 James L. Donahue is a retired newspaper reporter, editor and columnist with more than 40 years of experience in professional writing. He is the published author of five books, all dealing with Michigan history, and several magazine articles. He currently produces daily articles for this web site.

Free Will (And Why You Still Don’t Have It)
By Sam Harris

My last post on free will elicited a very heated response. Many readers sent emails questioning my sanity, and several asked to be permanently removed from my mailing list. Many others wrote to share the Good News that quantum mechanics has liberated the human mind from the prison of determinism. It seems I touched a nerve.

In the hopes of clearing up some confusion, I’ve culled another post from my discussion of free will in The Moral Landscape.

*****

The human brain must respond to information coming from several domains: from the external world, from internal states of the body, and, increasingly, from a sphere of meaning—which includes spoken and written language, social cues, cultural norms, rituals of interaction, assumptions about the rationality of others, judgments of taste and style, etc. Generally, these streams of information seem unified in our experience: You spot your best friend standing on the street corner looking strangely disheveled. You recognize that she is crying and frantically dialing her cell phone. Was she involved in a car accident? Did someone assault her? You rush to her side, feeling an acute desire to help. Your “self” seems to stand at the intersection of these lines of input and output. From this point of view, you tend to feel that you are the source of your own thoughts and actions. You decide what to do and not to do. You seem to be an agent acting of your own free will. The problem, however, is that this point of view cannot be reconciled with what we know about the human brain. All of our behavior can be traced to biological events about which we have no conscious knowledge: this has always suggested that free will is an illusion.

The physiologist Benjamin Libet famously demonstrated that activity in the brain’s motor regions can be detected some 300 milliseconds before a person feels that he has decided to move. Another lab recently used fMRI data to show that some “conscious” decisions can be predicted up to 10 seconds before they enter awareness (long before the preparatory motor activity detected by Libet). Clearly, findings of this kind are difficult to reconcile with the sense that one is the conscious source of one’s actions.

And the distinction between “higher” and “lower” systems in the brain offers no relief: for I no more initiate events in executive regions of my prefrontal cortex than I cause the creaturely outbursts of my limbic system. The truth seems inescapable: I, as the subject of my experience, cannot know what I will next think or do until a thought or intention arises; and thoughts and intentions are caused by physical events and mental stirrings of which I am not aware.

Of course, many scientists and philosophers realized long before the advent of experimental neuroscience that free will could not be squared with an understanding of the physical world. Nevertheless, many still deny this fact. For instance, the biologist Martin Heisenberg has observed that some fundamental processes in the brain, like the opening and closing of ion channels and the release of synaptic vesicles, occur at random, and cannot, therefore, be determined by environmental stimuli. Thus, much of our behavior can be considered “self-generated,” and therein, he imagines, lies a basis for free will. But “self-generated” in this sense means only that these events originate in the brain. The same can be said for the brain states of a chicken.

If I were to learn that my decision to have a third cup of coffee this morning was due to a random release of neurotransmitters, how could the indeterminacy of the initiating event count as the free exercise of my will? Such indeterminacy, if it were generally effective throughout the brain, would obliterate any semblance of human agency. Imagine what your life would be like if all your actions, intentions, beliefs, and desires were “self-generated” in this way: you would scarcely seem to have a mind at all. You would live as one blown about by an internal wind. Actions, intentions, beliefs, and desires can only exist in a system that is significantly constrained by patterns of behavior and the laws of stimulus-response. In fact, the possibility of reasoning with other human beings—or, indeed, of finding their behaviors and utterances comprehensible at all—depends on the assumption that their thoughts and actions will obediently ride the rails of a shared reality. In the limit, Heisenberg’s “self-generated” mental events would amount to utter madness.

And the indeterminacy specific to quantum mechanics offers no foothold. Even if our brains were quantum computers, the brains of chimps, dogs, and mice would be quantum computers as well. (I don’t know of anyone who believes that these animals have free will.) And quantum effects are unlikely to be biologically salient in any case. They do drive evolution, as high-energy particles like cosmic rays cause point mutations in DNA, and the behavior of such particles passing through the nucleus of a cell is governed by the laws of quantum mechanics. (Evolution, therefore, seems unpredictable in principle.) But most neuroscientists do not view the brain as a quantum computer. Again, even if we knew that human consciousness depended upon quantum processes, it is pure hand-waving to suggest that quantum indeterminacy renders the concept of free will scientifically intelligible.

If the laws of nature do not strike most of us as incompatible with free will, it is because we have not imagined how human action would appear if all cause-and-effect relationships were understood. Consider the following thought experiment:

Imagine that a mad scientist has developed a means of controlling the human brain at a distance. What would it be like to watch him send a person to and fro on the wings of her “will”? Would there be even the slightest temptation to impute freedom to her? No. But this mad scientist is nothing more than causal determinism personified. What makes his existence so inimical to our notion of free will is that when we imagine him lurking behind a person’s thoughts and actions—tweaking electrical potentials, manufacturing neurotransmitters, regulating genes, etc.—we cannot help but let our notions of freedom and responsibility travel up the puppet’s strings to the hand that controls them.

To see that the addition of randomness—quantum mechanical or otherwise—does nothing to change this situation, we need only imagine the scientist basing the inputs to his machine on a shrewd arrangement of roulette wheels, or on the decay of some radioactive isotope. How would such unpredictable changes in the states of a person’s brain constitute freedom?

All the relevant features of a person’s inner life could be conserved—thoughts, moods, and intentions would still arise and beget actions—and yet, once we imagine a hypothetical mad scientist dispensing the appropriate cocktail of randomness and natural law, we are left with the undeniable fact that the conscious mind is not the source of its own thoughts and intentions. This discloses the real mystery of free will: if our moment to moment experience is compatible with its utter absence, how can we say that we see any evidence for it in the first place?

None of this, however, renders the choices we make in life any less important. As my friend Dan Dennett has pointed out, many people confuse determinism with fatalism. This gives rise to questions like, “If everything is determined, why should I do anything? Why not just sit back and see what happens?” But the fact that our choices depend on prior causes does not mean that they do not matter. If I had not decided to write my last book, it wouldn’t have written itself. My choice to write it was unquestionably the primary cause of its coming into being. Decisions, intentions, efforts, goals, willpower, etc., are causal states of the brain, leading to specific behaviors, and behaviors lead to outcomes in the world. Human choice, therefore, is as important as fanciers of free will believe. And to “just sit back and see what happens” is itself a choice that will produce its own consequences. It is also extremely difficult to do: just try staying in bed all day waiting for something to happen; you will find yourself assailed by the impulse to get up and do something, which will require increasingly heroic efforts to resist.

Therefore, while it is true to say that a person would have done otherwise if he had chosen to do otherwise, this does not deliver the kind of free will that most people seem to cherish—because a person’s “choices” merely appear in his mental stream as though sprung from the void. From the perspective of your conscious mind, you are no more responsible for the next thing you think (and therefore do) than you are for the fact that you were born into this world.

Our belief in free will seems to arise from our moment-to-moment ignorance of the specific prior causes of our thoughts and actions. The phrase “free will” describes what it feels like to be identified with the content of each mental state as it arises in consciousness. Trains of thought like, “What should I get my daughter for her birthday? I know, I’ll take her to a pet store and have her pick out some tropical fish,” convey the apparent reality of choices, freely made. But from a deeper perspective (speaking both subjectively and objectively), thoughts simply arise (what else could they do?) unauthored, and yet author to our actions.

In the philosophical literature, one finds three approaches to the problem of free will: determinism, libertarianism, and compatibilism. Both determinism and libertarianism are often referred to as “incompatibilist” views, in that both maintain that if our behavior is fully determined by background causes, free will is an illusion. Determinists believe that we live in precisely such a world; libertarians (no relation to the political view that goes by this name) believe that our agency rises above the field of prior causes—and they inevitably invoke some metaphysical entity, like a soul, as the vehicle for our freely acting wills. Compatibilists, like Dan Dennett, maintain that free will is compatible with causal determinism (see his fine books, Freedom Evolves<>/A> and Elbow Room; for other compatibilist arguments see Ayer, Chisholm, Strawson, Frankfurt, Dennett, and Watson here).

The problem with compatibilism, as I see it, is that it tends to ignore that people’s moral intuitions are driven by a deeper, metaphysical notion of free will. That is, the free will that people presume for themselves and readily attribute to others (whether or not this freedom is, in Dennett’s sense, “worth wanting”) is a freedom that slips the influence of impersonal, background causes. The moment you show that such causes are effective—as any detailed account of the neurophysiology of human thought and behavior would— proponents of free will can no longer locate a plausible hook upon which to hang their notions of moral responsibility. The neuroscientists Joshua Greene and Jonathan Cohen make this same point:

Most people’s view of the mind is implicitly dualist and libertarian and not materialist and compatibilist . . . [I]ntuitive free will is libertarian, not compatibilist. That is, it requires the rejection of determinism and an implicit commitment to some kind of magical mental causation . . . contrary to legal and philosophical orthodoxy, determinism really does threaten free will and responsibility as we intuitively understand them (Greene J & J. Cohen. 2004).

It is generally argued that our sense of free will presents a compelling mystery: on the one hand, it is impossible to make sense of in causal terms; on the other, we feel that we are the authors of our own actions. However, I think that this mystery is itself a symptom of our confusion. It is not that free will is simply an illusion: our experience is not merely delivering a distorted view of reality; rather, we are mistaken about the character of our experience. We do not feel as free as we think we do. Our sense of our own freedom results from our not paying close attention to what it is like to be ourselves in the world. The moment we do pay attention, we begin to see that free will is nowhere to be found, and our subjectivity is perfectly compatible with this truth. Thoughts and intentions simply arise in the mind. What else could they do? The truth about us is stranger than many suppose: the illusion of free will is itself an illusion. (c) 2011 Sam Harris is the author of "The End Of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason" and "Letter to a Christian Nation" and is the co-founder of The Reason Project, which promotes scientific knowledge and secular values. Follow Sam Harris on Twitter.

The Impossible Distance

It seems, then, there was a choice for the occupying force. And they made the that choice. The choice to kill, to speak with death and blood across the impossible distance.
(c) 2011 Chris Floyd

The Bernanke Scandal

Assurances of stability to the financial markets, meaning the ability for companies to borrow government funds at a near-zero interest rate without giving anything back to the public in the form of mortgage relief or job creation, have been the overwhelming goal. But even by that standard, as the latest statistics on job creation and construction starts attest, the government’s effort is not working. Putting the bankers first has represented pushing on a string, what Paul Volcker condemns as a “liquidity trap,” a situation in which taxpayer money has been made available to major corporations that invest in job creation that benefits foreigners instead of U.S. workers. Now that’s an obscenity we should be concerned about.
(c) 2011 Robert Scheer is the editor of Truthdig. A journalist with over 30 years experience, Scheer has built his reputation on the strength of his social and political writing. His columns have appeared in newspapers across the country, and his in-depth interviews have made headlines. He is the author, most recently, of "The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America," published by Twelve Books.

Vouchercare Is Not Medicare

So in voting for the House budget plan, Republicans voted to end Medicare. Saying that isn’t demagoguery, it’s just pointing out the truth.
(c) 2011 Paul Krugman --- The New York Times

The Quotable Quote...

They're Calling Me A Biological Terrorist

E.coli 0104:H4 (for the time being)
(c) 2011 Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer, and author. His most recent book - and first novel - is, Only The Super Wealthy Can Save Us. His most recent work of non-fiction is The Seventeen Traditions.

The Rise Of The Second-String Psychopaths

We are a country who has become second-best, even in the quality of our psychopaths.
© 2011 David B. Schwartz, Ph.D practices psychotherapy in Ithaca, NY. His books include Who Cares? Rediscovering Community and the forthcoming The Sidewalk Psychotherapist.

The Dead Letter Office...

Tim gives the corpo-rat salute

One If By Misstatement, Two If By Ignorant
Palin Gets an "F" in American History
BY John Nichols

Why is Sarah Palin touring American historical sites?

Apparently to because she has decided to try and learn some basic details of the country’s founding story.

Unfortunately, the endeavor is not going well.

Even with conservatives cutting education budgets, every schoolchild who has paid even scant attention in history class knows that “the midnight message of Paul Revere” was a warning to the rebels of what would become the United States that the British redcoats were on the march to disarm the dissenters.

But that was news to Palin.

When she got to Boston, with the apparent purpose of recalling Revere’s ride at the Old North Church, the former governor of Alaska started talking about: "He who warned, uh, the British that they weren't going to be taking away our arms uh by ringing those bells and making sure as he's riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be secure and we were going to be free and we were going to be armed."

Ouch.

It is tiresome to pick on Palin. She has taken more than her share of hits on matters of geography, newspaper reading, American allies and favorite founders. Even conservatives ridicule her -- it was Glenn Beck who pressed her on the favorite founder issue.

Truthfully, there is no point to piling on.

Palin is not going to run for president because (as the polling makes abundantly clear) Republicans do not want her to be their candidate, because (as the polling makes even more abundantly clear) Americans would never elect her and because she is not about to give up her lucrative book, broadcasting and speaking fees to go back into public service.

It has ever been the case that Palin’s patriotism extends only so far as it benefits her own self-interest.

What is now equally evident, however, is that her historical bumbling is not a misstep her, a misstatement there. It is a pattern, a pattern of disconnection with and disinterest in the American story. Like so many politicians, she uses American history as a prop, not as inspiration, and certainly not as instruction.
(c) 2011 John Nichols writes about politics for The Nation magazine as its Washington correspondent. He is a contributing writer for The Progressive and In These Times and the associate editor of the Capital Times, the daily newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune and dozens of other newspapers.

Pick Your Poison
By Joel S. Hirschhorn

One of the hardest truths to accept is that for most sources of pain hitting humans there seems to be nothing effective for government to do. Nowadays, those of us who do not gobble various distractions but work to stay connected to reality see two dreadful conditions. Nature seems mad as hell. People are dying or suffering from earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, tornadoes, wildfires, hurricanes, extreme heat, huge snow storms and more. While some idiots keep trying to deny the reality of global climate change, those of us who have lived a long time see firsthand that killer weather events are more prevalent than ever.

While you may be fighting your paranoia about being victimized by foul weather the other ugly reality already devastating the lives of so many people is a dismal set of economic conditions. Contrary to all the usual lies by politicians about the economic recovery, a mountain of data shows non-delusional people that only the wealthy have escaped economic pain.

According to a recent Pew Charitable Trusts poll, 55 percent of Americans still rate the national economy as poor, and just 47 percent believe their kids will have a higher standard of living than they enjoy. If more people paid closer attention to the facts, those percentages should be more like 80 or 90 percent.

The US has recovered just 1.8 million of the nearly 9 million jobs lost in the downturn versus an average 5.3 million job gains in the same period of the 1970s and 1980s recoveries. The number of people with jobs has barely changed since June 2009 — up just 0.4 percent. Many economists say the turnaround shows no signs of generating the 300,000 to 400,000 monthly payroll additions needed to rapidly lower the unemployment rate. There are probably about 50 million Americans who are unemployed, underemployed or no longer trying to get decent jobs, or who are close relatives of them. The rise of the official unemployment rate in May, 2011 (the real level is twice as high) and a paltry new number of jobs just rubbed salt in the wound. There simply is no basis for believing that many millions of new, good jobs will be created for many years.

Add the latest news that the housing market has turned even worse again, leading to the distressful conclusion that a double-dip recession has hit housing, which portends even wider economic pain. Single family home prices dropped in March, 2011 to their lowest level since April 2009. Millions of home foreclosures will be followed by even more. Of all homes with mortgages 23 percent are worth less than what is owed.

And don’t forget that there are enormous numbers of Americans fighting hunger even though 68 percent of Americans are obese or overweight. Forty four million Americans are getting food stamps.

Meanwhile higher prices for key necessities show that inflation is eating away at quality of life and living standards. Gas prices climbed 52 percent over the past two years, according to the Department of Energy, and are only now decreasing a little as many Americans have cut back on their driving. Food costs are also rising just like health care.

Nothing the government has done worked for ordinary Americans. Many billions of dollars spent on reviving the economy have mainly helped the business sector and the rich. Congress and President Obama have shown themselves to be utterly useless. They mostly serve corporate interests.

Both the economic and climate futures look bleak, because they are bleak.

Pick your poison. We are living in a time when natural and economic conditions are out of control and frightening. But wait, there is some good news!

According to a new report by Boston Consulting Group, the number of millionaire households in the world grew by 12.2 percent in 2010, to 12.5 million. Here is how millionaires are defined: Those with $1 million or more in investible assets, excluding homes, luxury goods and ownership in one’s own company. Can you relate? Even better news: The US still leads the world in millionaires, with 5.2 million millionaire households.

An even bigger truth is this: The world’s millionaires represent just 0.9 percent of the global population but control 39 percent of the world’s wealth, up from 37 percent in 2009. Even more truth about economic inequality: Those with $5 million or more, who represent only 0.1 percent of the population, control 22 percent of the world’s wealth, up from 20 percent in 2009. The rich are really getting richer.

If you face reality, remember that Obama promised back in February 2009 that his $830 billion stimulus plan would unleash "a new wave of innovation, activity and construction" and "ignite spending by businesses and consumers." Did not happen.

And in June 2010, Obama announced that the recovery was "well under way" and that it "is getting stronger by the day." More poisonous propaganda.

A couple months later, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner wrote a New York Times op-ed headlined "Welcome to the Recovery." More self-serving garbage.

In reality, two years after the recession officially ended there are few places beyond the stock market and corporate profits that have shown improvement, but even now the stock market is hurting. The rich and powerful have not suffered. But over the past decade, real private-sector wage growth has been a terrible 4 percent, just below the 5 percent increase from 1929 to 1939 during the Great Depression.

The Republicans who grabbed so much power in the last midterm elections show no capacity whatsoever to fix anything. That Sarah Palin just as Donald Trump can grab so much media attention demonstrates how decrepit our nation is.

What is to be learned? No member of Congress or the President deserves to be reelected. Neither does any other Republican or Democrat. Like extreme weather calamities, economic evils will continue to poison our lives. Those who deny climate change and economic injustice are either stupid or delusional. Waiting for divine intervention makes as much sense as anything, except that all the awful stuff happening, if God’s will, suggests such hope is folly. Pass the poison. Or wait for a tornado, home loss, or financial ruin to hit. More bad news is coming. But have you ever seen pictures of tornadoes destroying McMansions?
(c) 2011 Joel S. Hirschhorn observed our corrupt federal government firsthand as a senior official with the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the National Governors Association and is the author of Delusional Democracy - Fixing the Republic Without Overthrowing the Government. To discuss issues write the author. The author has a Ph.D. in Materials Engineering and was formerly a full professor of metallurgical engineering at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

The Cartoon Corner...

This edition we're proud to showcase the cartoons of
~~~ Bill Schorr ~~~