The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope (45 page)

While flying the past few weekends, I refused to go through the scanners, which is every passenger’s right, although the option is almost never indicated anywhere (the Collins bill also requires clear signage). I was made to wait while TSA employees were clearly available to conduct what is euphemistically called an “enhanced pat-down.” The agent’s aggressive questioning of my decision to “opt out” was matched only by her aggressive pat-down when I would not give in. Arriving back in New York, a friend who had just flown in from Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport recounted how the TSA agent had her hands down the front of my friend’s pants and said, “Feels like you’ve lost some weight”!

Who gains? The two manufacturers of the full-body scanners have powerful friends. As reported in
The Hill
and the
Washington Post
, L-3 Communications, maker of the millimeter wave scanner, hired lobbyist Linda Daschle, wife of former Sen. Tom Daschle. Rapiscan, the maker of the X-ray backscatter machine, reportedly paid $1 million to the Chertoff Group, run by former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Michael Chertoff, while Chertoff appeared in the media touting the value of the machines. Each machine costs the taxpayer about $150,000, but that is only the purchase; installation, then staffing, costs much more.

TSA agents themselves may face the greatest risks. A recent TSA inspector general’s report recommended that “wing shields be installed to further reduce radiation exposure levels for backscatter operators.” It also noted that TSA employees reported insufficient time for training on the machines. Michael Grabell, a reporter with ProPublica who has written extensively on full-body scanners, told me: “Radiation technicians have told some of the TSA screeners that ‘If I were on these machines, I’d be wearing a radiation badge.’ But the TSA has refused to let them.”

All these concerns have led the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center to sue the TSA and DHS, seeking a halt to the use of the scanners, at least until independent testing of the risks is performed, and the results made public.

Until we know that these full-body scanners are safe, I’m opting out.

April 18, 2012

Obama’s Policies: The Real Scandal in Cartagena

President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign launched its first Spanish-language ads this week, just after he returned from the Summit of the Americas. He spent three days in Colombia, longer than any president in U.S. history. The trip was marred, however, by a prostitution scandal involving the U.S. military and Secret Service. Gen. Martin Dempsey, chair of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, “We let the boss down, because nobody’s talking about what went on in Colombia other than this incident.” Dempsey is right. It also served as a metaphor for the U.S. government’s ongoing treatment of Latin America.

The scandal reportedly involves eleven members of the U.S. Secret Service and five members of the U.S. Army Special Forces, who allegedly met prostitutes at one or more bars in Cartagena and took up to twenty of the women back to their hotel, some of whom may have been minors. This all deserves thorough investigation, but so do the policy positions that Obama promoted while in Cartagena.

First, the war on drugs. Obama stated at the summit, “I, personally, and my administration’s position is that legalization is not the answer.” Ethan Nadelmann, founder and executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, told me that, despite Obama’s predictable line, this summit showed “the transformation of the regional and global dialogue around drug policy. . . . This is the first you’ve had a president saying that we’re willing to look at the possibility that U.S. drug policies are doing more harm than good in some parts of the world.” He credits the growing consensus across the political spectrum in Latin America, from key former presidents like Vicente Fox of Mexico, who supports legalization of drugs, to current leaders like Mexico’s Felipe Calderon, who cited the rapacious demand for drugs in the U.S. as the core of the problem.

Nadelmann went on: “You have the funny situation of Evo Morales, the leftist leader of Bolivia, former head of the coca growers’ union, lecturing the United States about—essentially, sounding like Milton Friedman—that ‘How can you expect us to reduce the supply when there is a demand?’ So there’s the beginning of a change here. I don’t think it’s going to be possible to put this genie back in the bottle.”

Then there is trade. Obama and Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos also announced that the U.S.-Colombian Free Trade Agreement would take full force May 15. Colombian and U.S. labor leaders decried the move, since Colombia is the worst country on Earth for trade unionists. Labor organizers are regularly murdered in Colombia, with at least thirty-four killed in the past year and a half. When Obama was first running for president, he promised to oppose the Colombia FTA, “because the violence against unions in Colombia would make a mockery of the very labor protections that we have insisted be included in these kinds of agreements.” That year, fifty-four Colombian trade unionists were killed. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said the announcement “is deeply disappointing and troubling.” Republicans, on the other hand, are offering grudging praise to Obama for pushing the FTA.

On Cuba, Obama took the globally unpopular position of defending the U.S. embargo. Even at home, polls show that a strong majority of the American people and businesses support an end to the embargo. The U.S. also succeeded, once again, in banning Cuba from the summit, prompting Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa to boycott the meeting this year.

Responding to overall U.S. intransigence, other Western Hemisphere countries are organizing themselves. Greg Grandin, professor of Latin American history at New York University, told me: “Latin Americans themselves are creating these bodies that are excluding the United States, that are deepening integration, political and economic integration. This seems to be a venue in which they come together in order to criticize Washington, quite effectively.”

Grandin compared Obama’s Latin America policies to those of his predecessors: “The two main pillars of U.S. foreign policy—increasing neoliberalism and increasing militarism around drugs—continue. They feed off of each other and have created a crisis in that corridor, running from Colombia through Central America to Mexico. That’s been a complete disaster, and there’s no change.”

It will take more than a prostitution scandal to cover that up.

January 6, 2010

Sick with Terror

The media have been swamped with reports about the attempt to blow up Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas Day. When Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, now dubbed the “underwear bomber,” failed in his alleged attack, close to 300 people were spared what would have been, most likely, a horrible, violent end. Since that airborne incident, the debates about terrorism and how best to protect the American people have been reignited.

Meanwhile, a killer that has stalked the U.S. public, claiming, by recent estimates, 45,000 lives annually—one dead American about every ten minutes—goes unchecked. That’s 3,750 people dead—more than the 9/11 attacks—every month who could be saved with the stroke of a pen.

This killer is the lack of adequate health care in the United States. Researchers from Harvard Medical School found in late 2009 that 45,000 people die unnecessarily every year due to lack of health insurance. Researchers also uncovered another stunning fact: In 2008, four times as many U.S. Army veterans died because they lacked health insurance than the total number of U.S. soldiers who were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan in the same period. That’s right: 2,266 veterans under the age of sixty-five died because they were uninsured.

On Tuesday, President Barack Obama was fiery when he made his public statement after meeting with his national security team about the airline breach: In seeking to thwart plans to kill Americans “we face a challenge of the utmost urgency,” he said. He talked about reviewing systemic failures and declared we must “save innocent lives, not just most of the time, but all of the time.”

This is all very admirable. Imagine if this same urgency was applied to a broken system that causes 45,000 unnecessary deaths per year. Since stimulus funds will now be directed to supply more scanning equipment at airports, what about spending money to ensure mammograms and prostate exams at community health centers?

And then there’s the investigation of who is responsible for the attempted Christmas Day attack and getting “actionable intelligence” from the alleged bomber to prevent future attacks. All good. We actually have “actionable intelligence” on why people die due to lack of health care, and how insurance companies actively deny people coverage to increase their profits, but what has been done about it?

The day before the underwear bomb incident, Christmas Eve, the U.S. Senate passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act by a vote of 60 to 39. Obama described the bill as “the most important piece of social legislation since the Social Security Act passed in the 1930s.” Yet in order to get to that magic number of sixty Senate votes, the already weak Senate bill had to be brought to its knees by the likes of Sen. Joe Lieberman, from the health insurance state of Connecticut, and conservative Democrat Ben Nelson of Nebraska. The Senate and House versions of health insurance reform now have to be reconciled in conference committee.

The conference committee process is one that is little understood in the U.S. In it major changes to legislation are often imposed, with little or no notice. That’s why C-SPAN CEO Brian Lamb sent a letter to congressional leaders December 30 requesting access to televise the process. He wrote, “[W]e respectfully request that you allow the public full access, through television, to legislation that will affect the lives of every single American.” Rather than simply grant access, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi asserted that “there has never been a more open process.”

Yet Pelosi and the Democrats are now saying that the bills won’t even go through a formal conference committee, but rather through informal, closed-door sessions with key committee chairs. While this would circumvent Republican opportunities to filibuster, it would also grant a very few individuals enormous power to cut deals in much the same way that Sens. Nelson and Lieberman did. Since the health insurance, medical equipment, and pharmaceutical industries spent close to $1.4 million per day to influence the health care debate, we have to ask: Who will have access to those few legislators behind those closed doors?

Wendell Potter, the former CIGNA insurance spokesperson turned whistle-blower, says he knows “where the bodies are buried.” Let’s be consistent. If we care about saving American lives, let’s take action now.

May 25, 2011

Single-Payer Health Care: Vermont’s Gentle Revolution

Vermont is a land of proud firsts. This small New England state was the first to join the thirteen colonies. Its constitution was the first to ban slavery. It was the first to establish the right to free education for all—public education.

This week, Vermont will boast another first: the first state in the nation to offer single-payer health care, which eliminates the costly insurance companies that many believe are the root cause of our spiraling health care costs. In a single-payer system, both private and public health care providers are allowed to operate, as they always have. But instead of the patient or the patient’s private health insurance company paying the bill, the state does. It’s basically Medicare for all—just lower the age of eligibility to the day you’re born. The state, buying these health care services for the entire population, can negotiate favorable rates, and can eliminate the massive overhead that the for-profit insurers impose.

Vermont hired Harvard economist William Hsiao to come up with three alternatives to the current system. The single-payer system, Hsiao wrote, “will produce savings of 24.3% of total health expenditure between 2015 and 2024.” An analysis by Don McCanne, MD, of Physicians for a National Health Program pointed out that: “[T]hese plans would cover everyone without any increase in spending since the single payer efficiencies would be enough to pay for those currently uninsured or under-insured. So this is the really good news—single payer works.”

Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin explained to me his intention to sign the bill into law: “Here’s our challenge. Our premiums go up 10, 15, 20 percent a year. This is true in the rest of the country as well. They are killing small business. They’re killing middle-class Americans, who have been kicked in the teeth over the last several years. What our plan will do is create a single pool, get the insurance company profits, the pharmaceutical company profits, the other folks that are mining the system to make a lot of money on the backs of our illnesses, and ensure that we’re using those dollars to make Vermonters healthy.”

Speaking of healthy firsts, Vermont may become the first state to shutter a nuclear power plant. The Vermont legislature is the first to empower itself with the right to determine its nuclear future, to put environmental policy in the hands of the people.

Another Vermont first was the legalization of same-sex civil unions. Then the state trumped itself and became the first legislature in the nation to legalize gay marriage. After being passed by the Vermont House and Senate, then Gov. Jim Douglas vetoed the bill. The next day, April 7, 2009, the House and the Senate overrode the governor’s veto, making the Vermont Freedom to Marry Act the law of the land.