I am trying to stay relatively cool in my response to the Des Moines Register's stupid decision not to allow Dennis to debate. We know the reasons for it and yet, we can all be as mad as hell and wondering what to do to change the circumstances of how we receive our election coverage in order to make an informed choice when voting.
For many the chance to vote is slim to nonexistent due to the feeling of total disenfranchisement by a system that seems so geared towards the ones that the corporations and the media jointly agree will serve their own interests best. We see it all the time and it continues despite what we know to be the truth of that statement. Hardly a fact about itself that a democracy should be proud of nor that these candidates who have been annointed by the media/corporate interests should feel proud of.
I have often asked myself a question: What would I do if I were Hillary, Barack, or any of them and saw the way that Kucinich is treated during a debate and/or not let into a debate?
What would you do?
Would I sit there like a lump on the log and not even pay attention to the way he is not given equal time? Would I be thinking well that is just more time for me to say what I want to say? Would I identify with his struggle at all and decide to offer a hand and a voice so that he received an equal share? Would I stop to think, even in some kind of self-serving way that perhaps people are making judgements about me based on how I let this happen and did nothing?
I don't know but I can guess that if the tables were turned and no one was letting Hillary talk or Barack talk, that Dennis would not stand there and act as if someone were not getting a fair shake. I can feel that about him and his sense of how the world should be when I watch him talk to people.
Did you see the video clip where he asked himself a question at the Black and Brown Debate last week? Did you see how he both asked the question of himself with such politeness and then thanked himself for asking the question? Did you see Hillary laughing at it all as if the pet had just stood up and done the most fantastic trick. Well, he is not the pet, but he is the only one who knew how to ask a good question and to answer it fully.
Start getting a bit angry now because we are truly running out of time and we need everyone to get involved and do something to make sure Dennis is our next president. Start with that premise and work backwards as to how you will make that happen.
thanks.
Friday, December 14, 2007
Thursday, December 13, 2007
When Enough is truly Enough
My good friend Kevin wrote to me last night because he was so angry that Dennis had been blocked from participating in the last Democratic Debate in Iowa today. Do you know why the valid presidential candidate was disqualified? The purported reason had to do with where the campaign's headquarters were located.
Perhaps another reason is at the heart of the matter. And it so happens that Kevin's anger and the reason that Dennis was denied the opportunity to speak about his ideas specfically related to health care has to do with who was one of the sponsors of this "debate."
Kevin is a good friend and his health concerns are large because not only is he on disability but his wife has MS. Her illness is a huge drain on their finances. He wrote to me earlier this month about Dennis and what he had to say about health care, that he was in favor of a single-payer, unviversal health care system that was and will never be a for profit delivery system. This bill hich he co-sponsored with John Conyers of Detroit is a vast overhauling of how we would receive our medical benefits. Kevin was quite sceptical as to whether or not this could even be passed in the congress with the kinds of money the insurance industry has and the way they would fight this.
Others too have written about this. You see, they don't ask how Dennis would fund this because that is really a no brainer, they ask how will he get the insurance industry and the pharmaceutical industry with their enormous lobbies to not butcher his ideas and keep them from becoming a reality?
I understand only too well too what it is like to spend and spend on insurance and to never really get what it is you need. The insurers fight you every step of the way. It is a frightening system that causes such awful problems for so many people that it could fill long ledgers of names of people who would benefit if only we could get this type of universal coverage administered the way Medicare is administered now.
But, then there is the huge stumbling block--the insurance industry. Who is one of the largest backers of the organization sponsoring the debate today? The insurance companies, in fact all of them. If you live long enough to join this organization, from the moment you give them the check, your mailbox is flooded with all kinds of insurance forms to sell you anything that can be insured. This organization's whole purpose in life is to be a shill for the insurance companies. In fact, if we all stretch our minds back a year or so ago, it was AARP that had a membership revolt when they found out how that organization that purported to represent their interests was really representing the interests of the pharmaceutical companies when the whole argument about Medicare drug coverage was proposed by the Bush administration.
So, the fact that Dennis Kucinich is in favor of and proposed, in essence, to end our servitude to the insurance companies, is it any wonder that they are in favor of thwarting his efforts to get his message out?
I watch with interest who the companies are that sponsor these debates and for the most part, not one of the companies spending their money to host these events are representative of the interests of the majority of us who work hard, try to save a little bit and are stretched financially in more ways than we care to report to anyone.
I have listened to Dennis answer questions about this plan while following him around in New Hampshire. I can tell you one important lesson I learned from his description of his health care reform ideas is that we don't sit in judgement of what people need. When a person is in need we help because that is what we are here for.
It can be applied to every social service we need to extend to the citizenry of this country and only one person is talking that way and making it clear where he stands and who he represents. That is why Dennis Kucinich is not allowed to speak--because he really does represent us and what we need.
A more humane way of dealing with all of our ills could be possible if we all get out there and elect Dennis Kucinich for president whether his name is on the ballot or not. It is like making a real investment in all our futures.
Perhaps another reason is at the heart of the matter. And it so happens that Kevin's anger and the reason that Dennis was denied the opportunity to speak about his ideas specfically related to health care has to do with who was one of the sponsors of this "debate."
Kevin is a good friend and his health concerns are large because not only is he on disability but his wife has MS. Her illness is a huge drain on their finances. He wrote to me earlier this month about Dennis and what he had to say about health care, that he was in favor of a single-payer, unviversal health care system that was and will never be a for profit delivery system. This bill hich he co-sponsored with John Conyers of Detroit is a vast overhauling of how we would receive our medical benefits. Kevin was quite sceptical as to whether or not this could even be passed in the congress with the kinds of money the insurance industry has and the way they would fight this.
Others too have written about this. You see, they don't ask how Dennis would fund this because that is really a no brainer, they ask how will he get the insurance industry and the pharmaceutical industry with their enormous lobbies to not butcher his ideas and keep them from becoming a reality?
I understand only too well too what it is like to spend and spend on insurance and to never really get what it is you need. The insurers fight you every step of the way. It is a frightening system that causes such awful problems for so many people that it could fill long ledgers of names of people who would benefit if only we could get this type of universal coverage administered the way Medicare is administered now.
But, then there is the huge stumbling block--the insurance industry. Who is one of the largest backers of the organization sponsoring the debate today? The insurance companies, in fact all of them. If you live long enough to join this organization, from the moment you give them the check, your mailbox is flooded with all kinds of insurance forms to sell you anything that can be insured. This organization's whole purpose in life is to be a shill for the insurance companies. In fact, if we all stretch our minds back a year or so ago, it was AARP that had a membership revolt when they found out how that organization that purported to represent their interests was really representing the interests of the pharmaceutical companies when the whole argument about Medicare drug coverage was proposed by the Bush administration.
So, the fact that Dennis Kucinich is in favor of and proposed, in essence, to end our servitude to the insurance companies, is it any wonder that they are in favor of thwarting his efforts to get his message out?
I watch with interest who the companies are that sponsor these debates and for the most part, not one of the companies spending their money to host these events are representative of the interests of the majority of us who work hard, try to save a little bit and are stretched financially in more ways than we care to report to anyone.
I have listened to Dennis answer questions about this plan while following him around in New Hampshire. I can tell you one important lesson I learned from his description of his health care reform ideas is that we don't sit in judgement of what people need. When a person is in need we help because that is what we are here for.
It can be applied to every social service we need to extend to the citizenry of this country and only one person is talking that way and making it clear where he stands and who he represents. That is why Dennis Kucinich is not allowed to speak--because he really does represent us and what we need.
A more humane way of dealing with all of our ills could be possible if we all get out there and elect Dennis Kucinich for president whether his name is on the ballot or not. It is like making a real investment in all our futures.
Monday, December 10, 2007
An Official Announcement
I am not a celebrity but I sure can spot some of them when I am in a restaurant in New York waiting for someone to join me. I cannot name the man I spotted the other day and asked to write for the Kucinich campaign. I have no idea why he refused to help us. Therefore I will not share his name. It would only embarrass him come election night when Dennis takes the presidency and he had not signed on to help. I cannot inflict that kind of pain on someone whose work I admire but who has not yet stepped up to the plate to work for a candidate.
Perhaps, and this is just a wishful thought, he will do so soon and just needs to think a bit more.
Sean Penn certainly stepped up to the plate in a big way last week. I first read the whole speech in its entirety on Commondreams.org and I can tell you, it was a big and happy surprise. The Huffington Post picked it up over the weekend. It gained a lot of peoples' attention who are hungry to hear more about Dennis and to be shown that he is on the minds of lots of people. The complaint level is rising, I think about what is not being reported and what is.
I had a nice little op-ed piece published by opednews.com over the weekend about how Dennis' backers will sink the good ship MSM. I hope that people begin to realize as the MSM does already and as the other corporate interests that back the so-called front runners that their do too that a Kucinich presidency means that business will not be as usual. It means that there will be an actual fair wage for workers and good benefits for all and that this screwy economy that rewards only the rich right now will come to a halt.
Did you ever wonder what it would mean to take on the corporate interests? Did you ever see the parallels between the lack of interest by the MSM in Dennis and the fact that he wants them to be governed the same as you and I are governed? Then, perhaps, it is not such a big mystery why they ignore him. In fact it becomes increasingly clear that his way of seeing how fairness actually does matter will wipe out the kinds of unearned but more truthfully robbed wages the corporate bullies receive while denying to the workers the same kind of largesse.
There is a corporate underbelly to this whole world's economy that no one really wants to expose. Oh, yes, Naomi Klein has been and continues to expose it. Take a good look at her new book, The Shock Doctrine and you will begin to understand why Dennis' ideas are more than an inconvenience to the powers that be. Were this new way of looking at the ultra-rich and their priorities to be revealed and what's more, ended, then there would be a real revolution again here on these shores but not against some foreign or faraway power but against the men and women who are enslaving most of us and have no scruples about it whatsoever.
It is a shame tha this does not get reported in our supposedly free press. But it doesn't and it won't. That same press is owned by these same slave owners. Yes, there are sights and sounds that many people are waking up. That is why, for example, we can read about the real reasons for the stage hands strike on Broadway that you won't read about in the New York Times but can read on alternet.org
So, it is time for us to officially announce our freedom from this tyranny and let our voices get out there and say what is needed and how to go about getting it.
We need to see more leaders like Dennis Kucinich step forward too and say the same things. More voices would be a very positive sign.
Perhaps, and this is just a wishful thought, he will do so soon and just needs to think a bit more.
Sean Penn certainly stepped up to the plate in a big way last week. I first read the whole speech in its entirety on Commondreams.org and I can tell you, it was a big and happy surprise. The Huffington Post picked it up over the weekend. It gained a lot of peoples' attention who are hungry to hear more about Dennis and to be shown that he is on the minds of lots of people. The complaint level is rising, I think about what is not being reported and what is.
I had a nice little op-ed piece published by opednews.com over the weekend about how Dennis' backers will sink the good ship MSM. I hope that people begin to realize as the MSM does already and as the other corporate interests that back the so-called front runners that their do too that a Kucinich presidency means that business will not be as usual. It means that there will be an actual fair wage for workers and good benefits for all and that this screwy economy that rewards only the rich right now will come to a halt.
Did you ever wonder what it would mean to take on the corporate interests? Did you ever see the parallels between the lack of interest by the MSM in Dennis and the fact that he wants them to be governed the same as you and I are governed? Then, perhaps, it is not such a big mystery why they ignore him. In fact it becomes increasingly clear that his way of seeing how fairness actually does matter will wipe out the kinds of unearned but more truthfully robbed wages the corporate bullies receive while denying to the workers the same kind of largesse.
There is a corporate underbelly to this whole world's economy that no one really wants to expose. Oh, yes, Naomi Klein has been and continues to expose it. Take a good look at her new book, The Shock Doctrine and you will begin to understand why Dennis' ideas are more than an inconvenience to the powers that be. Were this new way of looking at the ultra-rich and their priorities to be revealed and what's more, ended, then there would be a real revolution again here on these shores but not against some foreign or faraway power but against the men and women who are enslaving most of us and have no scruples about it whatsoever.
It is a shame tha this does not get reported in our supposedly free press. But it doesn't and it won't. That same press is owned by these same slave owners. Yes, there are sights and sounds that many people are waking up. That is why, for example, we can read about the real reasons for the stage hands strike on Broadway that you won't read about in the New York Times but can read on alternet.org
So, it is time for us to officially announce our freedom from this tyranny and let our voices get out there and say what is needed and how to go about getting it.
We need to see more leaders like Dennis Kucinich step forward too and say the same things. More voices would be a very positive sign.
Thursday, December 6, 2007
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
Are You Keeping Up with the Congressman?
I swear every day it gets harder and harder to keep up with all that there is to report on and to think through when it comes to a Kucinich campaign. I try to keep up and that is what I am supposed to be doing and I am having trouble doing that.
My recent post on the Huffington Post got a number of people excited that Dennis' campaign is both not getting the coverage it should while at the same time we are all so greedy that whenever something does appear, there is a cry for more and a cry to each other that finally someone is talking about him. I feel honored, honestly, to be in the position of being one of those with the ability to write about him.
The writing itself is difficult at times. Waking up each day to write about the campaign or where he has been or what he has said about something is not that easy. There is a certain lag time that may creep in to having to digest what has been said.
Take the Iran issue. There he was first thing the other morning, as soon as the report was made public, he had a response. His response, like most of his responses, had a lot of clarity to it. But if you go back a few days before that NIE came out, what was he saying? That there was no reason to go to war with Iran because there were no nuclear missiles coming at us. We are not a nation that should be engaged in pre-emptive war. That is not allowed. That is why he is trying to impeach the vice-president and then the president.
Let's all think this through. Whether that NIE had come out or not, Kucinich would have been saying exactly what he has been saying and saying it to the students in New Hampshire and saying it on national television, saying it on Kucinichtv.com and elsewhere. In fact, wherever they do allow him to speak.
And speaking of allowing him to speak. Did you see the clip from the Brown and Black Debate for the Iowa caucus where he asked himself a question? If that was not the purest form of Kucinich humor. Straight from the midwest with lots of dignity but a good laugh too because he did actually get to be asked a question he thought was important and to answer it as well and then, being polite, he thanked himself. Even Hillary found the formatting of it funny. Though did she find it funny that the audience went nuts over what he had to say?
That is the thing about listening to him speak. The audience loves him. Give him five minutes or five seconds and he is going to get everyone's attention and they love him.
That also says a lot about someone getting no attention and yet being the darling of so many progressives who know just what Dennis Kucinich stands for and if they are hearing him for the first time, then they are aware of hearing someone speak to them about the issues they care about too, that are about who they are and what their needs are.
More catching up to do.
My recent post on the Huffington Post got a number of people excited that Dennis' campaign is both not getting the coverage it should while at the same time we are all so greedy that whenever something does appear, there is a cry for more and a cry to each other that finally someone is talking about him. I feel honored, honestly, to be in the position of being one of those with the ability to write about him.
The writing itself is difficult at times. Waking up each day to write about the campaign or where he has been or what he has said about something is not that easy. There is a certain lag time that may creep in to having to digest what has been said.
Take the Iran issue. There he was first thing the other morning, as soon as the report was made public, he had a response. His response, like most of his responses, had a lot of clarity to it. But if you go back a few days before that NIE came out, what was he saying? That there was no reason to go to war with Iran because there were no nuclear missiles coming at us. We are not a nation that should be engaged in pre-emptive war. That is not allowed. That is why he is trying to impeach the vice-president and then the president.
Let's all think this through. Whether that NIE had come out or not, Kucinich would have been saying exactly what he has been saying and saying it to the students in New Hampshire and saying it on national television, saying it on Kucinichtv.com and elsewhere. In fact, wherever they do allow him to speak.
And speaking of allowing him to speak. Did you see the clip from the Brown and Black Debate for the Iowa caucus where he asked himself a question? If that was not the purest form of Kucinich humor. Straight from the midwest with lots of dignity but a good laugh too because he did actually get to be asked a question he thought was important and to answer it as well and then, being polite, he thanked himself. Even Hillary found the formatting of it funny. Though did she find it funny that the audience went nuts over what he had to say?
That is the thing about listening to him speak. The audience loves him. Give him five minutes or five seconds and he is going to get everyone's attention and they love him.
That also says a lot about someone getting no attention and yet being the darling of so many progressives who know just what Dennis Kucinich stands for and if they are hearing him for the first time, then they are aware of hearing someone speak to them about the issues they care about too, that are about who they are and what their needs are.
More catching up to do.
Monday, December 3, 2007
Health Care Report from New Hampshire, Part 2
I am sure that most of you saw the hostage situation unfold in New Hampshire on Friday. I did a bit of reading around of the papers and the blogs to see how people responded to the situation. It is unfortunate that the sympathy by and large all goes to the people who were taken hostage and none of it goes out to this poor guy who had no other way to bring attention to the fact that he was in desperate need of real mental health workers who could work with him to end whatever was obviously disturbing him to such a severe degree.
This man, Leeland Eisenberg, didn't take a gun into the Clinton campaign headquarters and he didn't fire at anyone nor did he hurt someone. What he did was make a really bad call for help. What he got was a lot of attention for a problem that is truly huge in these states where the funding has been severely cut or is nonexistent for good mental health services as well as substance abuse programs. I don't have the figures right here but will find them as to what New Hampshire spends on such cases, but it was known to people in Rochester, NH that this man needed help. Why he didn't receive it is a mystery.
The kind of Sherlock Holmes we need right now is the one who actually sees there is no mystery involve. We all need to be covered for our mental health problems just as we need to be covered for our problems with drug abuse and anger management and our depression and our more severe forms of mental illness. Without this type of coverage in place along with the facilities and professionals who are trained to work with this part of the population, we won't have a decent and democratic form of health care. We will continue to maintain a very discriminatory form that is based solely on your ability to pay.
We cannot send our mentally ill to Bangkok for weekly therapy sessions. While many travel there for surgery, the kind of intense and personally involving care a person with a mental illness deserves and requires is quite different. It also means that we as a society must learn to value all humans no matter their ability to perform as we do.
Dennis' comments to the man in New Hampshire about there being those who do not truly deserve health insurance and the benefits in his plan were fair and would have helped Leeland Eisenberg. He would not have had to take a political ad by Clinton and turn it into a personal message to him that he could get her help if he could get her attention.
This man, Leeland Eisenberg, didn't take a gun into the Clinton campaign headquarters and he didn't fire at anyone nor did he hurt someone. What he did was make a really bad call for help. What he got was a lot of attention for a problem that is truly huge in these states where the funding has been severely cut or is nonexistent for good mental health services as well as substance abuse programs. I don't have the figures right here but will find them as to what New Hampshire spends on such cases, but it was known to people in Rochester, NH that this man needed help. Why he didn't receive it is a mystery.
The kind of Sherlock Holmes we need right now is the one who actually sees there is no mystery involve. We all need to be covered for our mental health problems just as we need to be covered for our problems with drug abuse and anger management and our depression and our more severe forms of mental illness. Without this type of coverage in place along with the facilities and professionals who are trained to work with this part of the population, we won't have a decent and democratic form of health care. We will continue to maintain a very discriminatory form that is based solely on your ability to pay.
We cannot send our mentally ill to Bangkok for weekly therapy sessions. While many travel there for surgery, the kind of intense and personally involving care a person with a mental illness deserves and requires is quite different. It also means that we as a society must learn to value all humans no matter their ability to perform as we do.
Dennis' comments to the man in New Hampshire about there being those who do not truly deserve health insurance and the benefits in his plan were fair and would have helped Leeland Eisenberg. He would not have had to take a political ad by Clinton and turn it into a personal message to him that he could get her help if he could get her attention.
Health Care Report from New Hampshire
It has become clear to many in this country how poorly our current health care truly cares for us. While I was in New Hampshire last week, I heard Dennis speak about his plan for a single-payer, not for profit system and how it would work. But first a little scene setting.
We were at Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, NH. The school hosted a Town Hall meeting where a few students had been chosen to ask Dennis questions, which he answered and then he answered questions from the audience. (A report on the following exchange I am about to mention is at the Exeter Times website.) An older gentleman stood up and asked about what Dennis could do for him. It turns out he was a prostate cancer survivor but now his wife was stricken with some form of lymphoma and required an injection every two weeks that cost $10,000 a shot. That is an incredible sum of money and he wanted Dennis to look into this fro him and to see just how the company making this drug could get away with these kinds of charges.
After Dennis promised he would investigate this, another gentleman spoke about what Dennis would do to make sure in his proposed system of health care that there would not be abuses by those who were either malingerers or those who just never took care of themselves.
Dennis, in his own fashion, answered the question. One of the things I came to see was how he would place in context his own reasoning. Answers to questions are not just straightforward rote recitations of facts and figures. There was this constant use of both his own personal experience and how that influenced his ideas. In this case, he spoke of watching his mother die from emphysema. He then moved on to say that of course we would always encourage people to live healthy lives but we would never penalize someone who didn't. According to the world as Dennis sees it, we all could be this woman who ended up with a disease out of the blue that requires this kind of extraordinary treatment. Plus, we are all here for each other. There are those who take excellent care of themselves and something horrible happens. There are those who don't take care of themselves. But the system is there for all of us. This is what a democracy is to Dennis and it made a lot of sense to a lot of people in the room that night.
Then today in the Boston Globe I read the op-ed piece by this doctor who had been assured that his daughter would receive two years of post graduate health insurance on her parents' policy and things didn't work out that way. He said in his piece:
Two important lessons can be learned. First, we need to sever the connection between healthcare and employment. People need continuous, portable coverage that is affordable, comprehensive, and equitable. Second, we cannot depend on the private insurance industry to provide this for us.
Piece-meal reform such as the new law will not work. Both employers and the public support the concept of single-payer healthcare. Big business is starting to realize that a single payer system will be the only affordable way to cover everyone. When will our politicians understand that their political futures will depend on supporting this kind of comprehensive reform?
Michael Kaplan is a family physician and a member of Physicians for a National Health Plan and the board of directors of the Universal Health Care Education Fund.
We were at Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, NH. The school hosted a Town Hall meeting where a few students had been chosen to ask Dennis questions, which he answered and then he answered questions from the audience. (A report on the following exchange I am about to mention is at the Exeter Times website.) An older gentleman stood up and asked about what Dennis could do for him. It turns out he was a prostate cancer survivor but now his wife was stricken with some form of lymphoma and required an injection every two weeks that cost $10,000 a shot. That is an incredible sum of money and he wanted Dennis to look into this fro him and to see just how the company making this drug could get away with these kinds of charges.
After Dennis promised he would investigate this, another gentleman spoke about what Dennis would do to make sure in his proposed system of health care that there would not be abuses by those who were either malingerers or those who just never took care of themselves.
Dennis, in his own fashion, answered the question. One of the things I came to see was how he would place in context his own reasoning. Answers to questions are not just straightforward rote recitations of facts and figures. There was this constant use of both his own personal experience and how that influenced his ideas. In this case, he spoke of watching his mother die from emphysema. He then moved on to say that of course we would always encourage people to live healthy lives but we would never penalize someone who didn't. According to the world as Dennis sees it, we all could be this woman who ended up with a disease out of the blue that requires this kind of extraordinary treatment. Plus, we are all here for each other. There are those who take excellent care of themselves and something horrible happens. There are those who don't take care of themselves. But the system is there for all of us. This is what a democracy is to Dennis and it made a lot of sense to a lot of people in the room that night.
Then today in the Boston Globe I read the op-ed piece by this doctor who had been assured that his daughter would receive two years of post graduate health insurance on her parents' policy and things didn't work out that way. He said in his piece:
Two important lessons can be learned. First, we need to sever the connection between healthcare and employment. People need continuous, portable coverage that is affordable, comprehensive, and equitable. Second, we cannot depend on the private insurance industry to provide this for us.
Piece-meal reform such as the new law will not work. Both employers and the public support the concept of single-payer healthcare. Big business is starting to realize that a single payer system will be the only affordable way to cover everyone. When will our politicians understand that their political futures will depend on supporting this kind of comprehensive reform?
Michael Kaplan is a family physician and a member of Physicians for a National Health Plan and the board of directors of the Universal Health Care Education Fund.
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