Best of the Blogs

Karl Marx Looks Back

He erred in forecasting a socialist ascendancy but, as Karl
Marx tells historian Donald Sassoon in Britain's Prospect
magazine, his views are still the best means of understanding
contemporary capitalist society. Sassoon, author of a
magisterial study of Western socialism, wittily argues through
the medium of Marx's cranky ghost that his (often
unacknowledged) influence has in practice surpassed that of all
of the classical liberal theorists. It is now commonplace in
decision- and opinion-making circles to interpret events with
reference to economic interests and antagonistic power
relations between classes and groups, and to see the state as
the subordinate creature of the large corporations. Marx's
theoretical failure, which doesn't obscure the power of his
analysis of capitalist society, was to assume that the system
had already exhausted its potential by Victorian times. In
fact, it outlasted the mass socialist movement and, as Sassoon
suggests, it is one of the great ironies of history that the
Marxist-led revolutions of the 20th century appear in
retrospect mostly to have paved the way for the further
development of capitalism in Russia, China, and other parts of
the globe.

To see the rest of this piece-- the fictional interview is really quite well done -- see
Karl Marx
By Donald Sassoon
Prospect
October 2003

posted by John 6:56 PM

Osama in the backyard

He's getting closer. Just like the Dengue fever that's moving up the Rio Grande valley that the CDC doesn't like to talk about. A “secret summit” of 20 heads of intelligence agencies from Latin America, the Caribbean and the Iberian peninsula has concluded that Al Qaeda is now a major terrorist force in the region, particularly in Mexico and Peru, according to Le Monde. Of course, any sit down dubbed a "secret summit" is designed to have maximum PR value.

The summit, which was held in the Colombian coastal town of Cartagena, also cited the Dominican Republic and Colombia as havens for members and helpers of Osama’s network. Ironically, the name Cartagena in Spanish means Carthage.

The region, with its healthy population of ethnic Syrian and Lebanese immigrants who fled the Ottoman Turks a century ago, has always been a magnet for homies who parachute in with violent agendas. Prior to and during World War II, the Nazis worked the broad network of politically influential Syrian and Lebanese social clubs to foment anti-Jewish and anti-US sentiment. Adolf Eichmann had close ties with the Syrian Ba’ath (Nationalist) Party and ran construction businesses in Argentina and in Syria. On a more benign note, the Saudis hooked up with their ethnic “Arab” friends in Brazil and the Hunt brothers in a bonehead attempt to corner the silver market in 1980.

The “Arab” influence in Latin America and the Caribbean took an uptick with the recycling of petrodollars via loans into the region during the 1970s, loans that would precipitate the “Latin debt crisis.” Saudi front man and BCCI perp Gaith Pharaon set up shop in Argentina during that nation’s “dirty war” and Ciudad del Este that straddles the borders of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay became a haven for, among others, Syrians, Libyans, Lebanese and Iranians who had fought in Beirut, and against Israel in southern Lebanon for Hamas, Hizbollah, Islamic Jihad and other groups now all loosely classified by the Bush administration as Al Qaeda or just plain “terrorists.” Key players in the leadership of this nebulous “international brigade” have ties with current Bush-friendly intelligence fabricators Manouchar Ghorbanifar and Sargis Soghanalian. This duo, who were Iran-Contra perps and October Surprise facilitators, have been for two decades buddies with Deputy National Security Council Director Elliot Abrams and Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America (and former Contra shop operator) Otto Juan Reich.

So these nudniks have been hanging around for a while. They’ve been working with the Colombians and the FARC on cross-marketing heroin. And they’ve been working with the Mexicans to grow primo poppy crops in the Sierra Madre Occidental. Maybe Wes Clark or his friend and ex-drug czar Barry McCaffery can weigh in on that.

Funny how we just heard about it yesterday. Funnier still, that we hear it from our friends, the French.

posted by Groom 11:35 AM

Speaking of Screw-Ups

David Rieff has a blistering article in Sunday's New York Times magazine called Blueprint for a Mess in which he lays the blame for the chaos in Iraq squarely on Pentagon planners and the military:

It is becoming painfully clear that the American plan (if it can even be dignified with the name) for dealing with postwar Iraq was flawed in its conception and ineptly carried out. At the very least, the bulk of the evidence suggests that what was probably bound to be a difficult aftermath to the war was made far more difficult by blinkered vision and overoptimistic assumptions on the part of the war's greatest partisans within the Bush administration. The lack of security and order on the ground in Iraq today is in large measure a result of decisions made and not made in Washington before the war started, and of the specific approaches toward coping with postwar Iraq undertaken by American civilian officials and military commanders in the immediate aftermath of the war.

posted by Jerry Bowles 12:20 AM

Friday, October 31, 2003

Major Screw Loose Alert

"We'd venture to say their (the Democrats) loss next year is inevitable, barring a major screw-up by the Bush administration." James Taranto, Opinion Journal, October 31, 2003

Well, thank goodness, there's no possibility of that happening.

posted by Jerry Bowles 6:18 PM

Toasted in Toledo
Calling Shrubby’s war an “arrogant, corrupt, Roman occupation“ columnist Ann McFeatters offers a missal from the heartland that is worth a dozen “scientific” polls. It ran in the Cincinnati Post, a bellwether conservative journal. For the culinary challenged, Cincinnati is also the home of Skyline Chili, the Gold Star chili parlor, and Dixie Chili across the river in Newport, Kentucky, the global mecca for "three-way" chili.

posted by Groom 4:44 PM

“Greasy Thumb” Bremer cooking books in Iraq.

Shrub Club gauleiter fuer Irak Jerrypaul Bremer apparently thinks the best way to run the “Coalition” Provisional Authority is the way the crooks at Enron and MCI might have done it. Shoddy bookkeeping. $4 billion missing and unaccounted for according to the Guardian. Congress needs to know what else counterterrorism expert Bremer is letting slip through the cracks. Even in a middle-income country like Iraq, guerrilla fighters know how to get the best bang for their buck. Heck, Rummy is even saying that our troops have found money on some of these “terrorists” so we know somebody is financing them. He’s waffling on whether it is Saddam, Osama, the Sunnis or the Shiites. Money, Rummy, you know, the stuff Yogi Berra says is the same thing as cash on those AFLAC commercials.

posted by Groom 11:41 AM

So, What Else is New?

InterAction, which represents 160 groups doing overseas relief work, including such well known organizations as Oxfam, CARE, Catholic Relief Services, World Vision, Refugees International and MercyCorps, has released a scathing report charging that the Bush administration's foreign assistance policy is incoherent, politicized and lacks coordination. The full report is here.

posted by Jerry Bowles 10:41 AM

Progressive Internationalism

In an effort to combat the impression among NASCAR dads that Democrats are wusses on matters of national security and the use of military force, the Progressive Policy Institute--a shill organization of the DLC--has produced an impressive document called Progressive Internationalism: A Democratic National Security Strategy that lays out a detailed and persuasive vision of how Democrats would do a better job of keeping Americans safe and restoring America's capacity to lead through engagement with the world:

We begin by reaffirming the Democratic Party's commitment to progressive internationalism -- the belief that America can best defend itself by building a world safe for individual liberty and democracy. We therefore support the bold exercise of American power, not to dominate but to shape alliances and international institutions that share a common commitment to liberal values. The way to keep America safe and strong is not to impose our will on others or pursue a narrow, selfish nationalism that betrays our best values, but to lead the world toward political and economic freedom.

It's a good piece of work--my major concern is exactly how we're going to win back the trust of our allies now that the Bush administration has alienated everybody.

One small criticism. Can we stop prefacing everything by saying that the Iraqi people and the world are a lot better off without Saddam. Some Iraqis--the Kurds, for example--may well be better off. But, millions of Iraqis are not. And unless we do more to stabilize the situation quickly, there's an enormous and bloody power struggle ahead. As for the world's condition, the Middle East has never been more hopeless.

posted by Jerry Bowles 10:18 AM

Halloween disinfotainment

Gotta give it up for the DNC. Their Shrubby Halloween site gives more key message than top gun Terry McAuliffe does on ten Sunday morning talk shows. I just wonder whether Terry would like to trade places with Shrubby in the Halloween suit since he continues to keep "winning the war on terrorism" as the key value of the Democratic potty. This can only mean that Terry, like a lot of other Dems, is bending over and taking Shrubby's Big Lie up the kazoo. Might want to take that stale Campaign 2000 platform off the website and replace it with a war plan to win back America.

posted by Groom 5:24 AM

Blood in the Water? Can't We Hope?

Former Enron Exec Pleads Guilty

HOUSTON, Oct. 30, 2003

A former Enron executive pleaded guilty Thursday to insider trading, acknowledging he was in on a scheme by senior management to manipulate the company's earnings to meet or exceed Wall Street's expectations.

Dave Delainey, chief of Enron Energy Services, agreed to cooperate with federal prosecutors. He left Enron in March.

His indictment, handed up Wednesday and unsealed Thursday, alleges he sold $4.2 million worth of stock while knowing the company was raiding the reserves of its Enron North America subsidiary and disguising the money as income.

"This misuse of reserves in order to manipulate Enron's earnings results was discussed and approved among Enron's and Enron North America's senior commercial and accounting managers," the indictment said.

See the rest of the story at CBS News

posted by John 3:21 AM

Was Shrub Asleep at the Wheel?

With a showdown looming between the White House and Tom Kean's 9/11 commission, Wesley Clark's raising the question of what the President knew and when he knew it may be just the issue he needs to put some distance between himself and the pack and to close the gap with Howard Dean, who is still the man to beat for the nomination. The wingnuts are trying to paint the question as an example of Democrat extremism or desparation but, in fact, it's quite legitimate.

Remember the summer of 2001, Shrub down there at Crawford for the month of August clearing brush and pretending to be some kind of Texas rancher? Maybe the CIA or Condi's crew heard something that didn't seem important enough at the time to bother Junior when he was so busy and all. Maybe, they did tell him but he asked Uncle Dick and Uncle Dick said it could wait until he got back from summer camp. All we know for sure is there is something in those records that is an embarassment to the administration and it has nothing to do with national security and a lot to do with somebody covering somebody's ass. If the Bushies continue to stonewall--and they will, because that's what they do--some voters might conclude that the general is on to something. And, in fact, he could be.

posted by Jerry Bowles 12:53 AM

The Numbness of Numbers

I don't know about you, but I am narcotized by big numbers, especially Washington numbers. The Center for Economic and Policy Research explaining the current and projected deficits in trillions of dollars is a prime example, no doubt an economist's sandbox, but meaningless to me. I have no real idea of how much a trillion dollars is.

I know it is the number one followed by 12 zeros: 1,000,000,000,000. It's also a million millions or a thousand billions, a hard number to visualize: no one walks around with a trillion anything in their pockets or purse.

One way I picture a trillion bucks is to imagine I am paid one dollar for every word I read in the New York Times. At the end of one year I could earn about $29 million. It would take generations of great-grandchildren reading every day for 37,247 years to earn a trillion. If I wanted to haul a trillion dollar bills, say in a train, I could stack about $63.5 million into a 50-foot boxcar. I'd need 15,743 box cars to haul the trillion, making the train about 167 miles long.

The t-word crept into our vocabulary back when Ronald Reagan was president and he ran the deficit down to one trillion for the first time. Clinton got it down from around 5 trillion (the caboose was in Washington, the train engine was somewhere around Chicago) down to zero, taking all the fun out of big numbers. The Bushies, of course have the train back on the tracks, with a half a trillion dollar deficit for this past fiscal year and another half plus for next year.

With the pending add-on of $87 billion for Iraq, this could become another run-away train? Howard Dean was roundly criticized a month or so ago for saying he could raise $20 billion from allies to augment the Iraqi kitty. The critics said Dean was smoking something and it couldn't be done. But the good folks at the Iraq Revenue Watch spell it all out. Don't be tricked by Powell bragging about the allies contribution reaching $13 billion. It's not a lie, but he is forgetting to tell us that it's only a pledge (the check is in the mail) and it's spread out over 5 years. That's another Washington trick: you can get to a big number by running it up over 5-10 years.

posted by Josh 12:18 AM

Thursday, October 30, 2003

Bush in 30 Seconds

The high octaine folks at moveon.org have given us all a change to create and compete in a contest to make a commercial about Bush's lies.

If you are not production saavy, they have a chat option to submit ideas. Winners get picked by year's end and W gets pickled next year when the ads are scheduled to run.

Now that's democracy in action.

posted by Josh 5:39 PM

Cronyism 101

More than 70 American companies and individuals have won up to $8 billion in contracts for work in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan over the last two years, according to a new study by the Center for Public Integrity. Those companies donated more money to the presidential campaigns of George W. Bush—a little over $500,000—than to any other politician over the last dozen years, the Center found.

posted by Jerry Bowles 12:06 PM

It’s still the economy…

Let’s get real about today’s economic statistics. Put out by the Commerce Department, a political arm of the White House. Influenced by massive amounts of campaign contributions pouring into Bush coffers from Wall St., the same kind of money that is funding lobbyists to lean on Democrats to quietly help to slow investigations Then too, economics is a social science.

The spectacular 7.2 percent quarterly increase in GDP. It’s like a one-off poll. Balance it out against the rest of this year so far and the true measure is 3.96 percent. The big driver is national defense spending, which increased at a rate of 45.8 percent in Q2. As they like to say in the Army, “shit rolls downhill.”

Why does the price index for domestic purchases seem to stay low? Because foreign purchases are not included and that hides the “twin towers” of trade deficit and budget shortfall that are turning the US economy into a third world basket case. Not that the International Monetary Fund hasn’t warned us… Real wages, what real wages. All the jobs are moving out of the country and Dick Gephardt is still paying homage to American workers as the backbone of the economy. Try Juan down in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, Dick, he’s earning 54 cents an hour making the Fruit of the Loom t-shirt I just bought at Wal-Mart for $3.99.

According to Dow Jones newswire’s Deborah Lagomarsino, inflation is creeping upward, thanks to an upturn in energy prices. Put that quarterly 7.2 percent GDP spike in perspective with a quarterly inflation rate of 3.4 percent (2.6 percent for the year to date) and watch the energy prices blast off in Q4 thanks to Shrubby’s friends, the Saudis, who control the world’s largest anti-free trade organization, OPEC.

posted by Groom 11:35 AM

Small is Still Beautiful

"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent," E. F. Schumacher once said. "It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction." I don't think Schumacher, who died in 1977, ever met Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney but the author of Small is Beautiful - Economics As If People Mattered was a keen student of human nature.

You don't hear a lot about Schumacher these days. The German-born British economist's notion that behind every complicated problem there is a simple, cheap, effective and safe solution-- so long as the problem is broken into small, human-sized units--seems vaguely quaint in the age of untethered globalization and rampant big government. Schumacher's lifelong quest for “a middle way between materialist heedlessness and traditionalist immobility” and his beliefs in the redemptive powers of decentralization, community-scale planning, non-violence and sustainability marked him as a little too green and socialist for many conservative thinkers. Yet, he shared the right's distaste for NGOs and other professional do-gooders, once describing development aid as "A process where you collect money from the poor people in rich countries, to give it to the rich people in the poor countries."

Some of Schumacher's ideas verge on the silly but mostly he was right--especially his concept of "intermediate" technology. Don't give an African village a fancy new John Deere tractor which once it breaks will never be fixed; give them a simple, small electrical engine, easily repairable, that can be used for a variety of tasks.

I am reminded of all this because of a story in this morning's Washington Post about how the most effective and useful work being done in Iraq today is not through some huge Halliburton multi-million project but through small amounts of Saddam's seized-money being used by American commanders to fund reconstruction and renovation of hospitals, schools and other local projects. The commander's emergency response program, which allows field commanders to immediately address the needs of the communities they oversee, has been one of the few real success stories of the war. If the Bush administration ever gets around to a lessons-learned post-mortem on Iraq, that's one to remember. Small is still beautiful.

UPDATE: Naturally, the program is being killed. It works. InstaPundit has the details.

posted by Jerry Bowles 10:30 AM

Earth to Tom Friedman

In today’s New York Times, Pulitzer-winner and resident Iraq maven Tom Friedman writes that Shrubby’s war is “a war of choice to install some democracy in the heart of the Arab/Muslim world… the most radical-liberal revolutionary war the US has ever launched.”

If it’s a war of choice, Tom, why did Shrubby and his mentors Lord Cheney and Lord Rummy start it with lies and deception? And why are you accepting the impeachable, unconstitutional, illegal lies and the Patriot Act that jacks the Bill of Rights? And why is Wes Clark, who is still waffling on his commitment to the war, not distancing himself from the big lie?

Memo to Doc Martian

A poster to the comments on my take about Harry Truman and New Hampshire, Doc Martian claims that Howard Dean said nasty things to his younger brother who is a cancer victim. He calls the Dean health care policy team a bunch of Nazis and provides some link material. But based on what Doc has offered up, I can’t find the evidence, not even half-truths or conspiracy threads. As an eight year survivor of early onset colon cancer who was given a 23% chance of surviving five years I follow cancer issues closely. We are winning the “war on cancer” about as much as we are winning the “war in Iraq.” Sixty thousand Americans die from colon cancer alone each year, the same number as the body count in the entire Viet Nam war, twenty times the number who perished at the World Trade Center. So Doc, put up or shut up. Turn over your hole cards, por favor.

posted by Groom 6:28 AM

Wednesday, October 29, 2003

Bush-Rice 04

Please tell me this is a joke. Pretty please.

posted by Jerry Bowles 2:59 PM

Clark eating D-Train's dust in New Hampshire

In his New Hampshire campaign, Wes Clark has evoked images of president Harry Truman, suggesting that Howard Dean is light in the sneakers on foreign policy. Funny, that Truman's "point four" plan has been a key component of Dean's foreign policy talking points for some time now. It seems the more Clark's campaign team gets weighted down with old Bill Clinton retainers like former State Department spokesperson James Rubin as top foreign policy adviser, the more Clark's positions try to "cover" the D-train's moves. Generals are supposed to lead, not follow, aren't they?

posted by Groom 9:17 AM

Tomorrow's News Today

He Gave Them to Lib...ur Syria...That's It, Syria Best of the Blogs, March 21, 2003

Official suggests Iraq hid weapons in Syria IHT, October 29, 2003

posted by Jerry Bowles 8:52 AM

Mission Pants-on-Fire

At yesterday’s press conference—a feeble and unusually incoherent (even by Shrub standards) attempt to create the impression that he is actually on top of the self-created catastrophies that are turning him into a one-term president—the Smirking Chimp actually had the audacity to say:

The "Mission Accomplished" sign, of course, was put up by the members of the USS Abraham Lincoln, saying that their mission was accomplished. I know it was attributed some how to some ingenious advance man from my staff -- they weren't that ingenious, by the way. George W. Bush, October 28, 2003

Later the same day, in a different part of the same forest.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan told CNN that in preparing for the speech, Navy officials on the carrier told Bush aides they wanted a "Mission Accomplished" banner, and the White House agreed to create it.

"We took care of the production of it," McClellan said. "We have people to do those things. But the Navy actually put it up."

posted by Jerry Bowles 12:21 AM

Tuesday, October 28, 2003

Why can't progressives talk tough?

On the demsjapan blog, a friend has posted a bit about one of my favorite authors, George Lakoff. She quotes Lakoff as saying,

"...the progressive worldview is modeled on a nurturant parent family. Briefly, it assumes that the world is basically good and can be made better and that one must work toward that. Children are born good; parents can make them better."

I feel that Lakoff is basically right about how many progressives think. I also feel, however, that progressives need to think again. Nothing in my reading of history suggests that the world is basically good or that children are born good. If anything, the indifference of nature to the destruction that natural disasters cause and the long, bloody record of human affairs supports other conclusions.

The good news is that there is no need whatsoever to assume goodness to justify progressive stances on issues like building a strong social safety net, protecting civil liberties, or regulating markets and using progressive taxation to preserve and grow a strong middle class.

The authors of the Federalist Papers got it right. They didn't assume that greed, envy and the lust for power would disappear from human nature. In a manner consistent with Christian theology, they assumed original sin and created a system of checks and balances. In a totally tough-minded way, they assumed that evil will always lurk in human hearts and asked themselves how best to keep it from getting out of hand.

In the process, I believe, they laid the foundations for a powerful case against both market and religious fundamentalism, a case that is infinitely more realistic than any based on the illusion that the world and our children are inherently good.

It is also a case with strong roots in the Christian tradition. When scripture says, "For God so loved the world...." the miracle is that He loves his children in spite of their sins, not because their born a bunch of goody two-shoes in a world that is still Eden. A progressive can point with conviction to "Love thy neighbor as thyself" and be talking about tough love, when tough love is needed.

posted by John 9:46 PM

Sharon is high on the hog

The flexibility of Israel’s senior rabbis on issues of patriotism has been known to me and Jerry for some time thanks to our old friend Richard Ben Cramer, who would entertain us with stories when he would take a breather from covering Israel for the Philadelphia Enquirer way back when. Now the rebbes are being pressed to approve a very outside- the-box scheme that permits border settlements to train and use pigs as guard animals.

According to the Independent, Israeli experts claim that the pig is a better people detector than the dog out on the perimeter and elsewhere. And then, of course, is the issue of porky being unclean to all in the world of Islam. The Israelis view it as a tactic, rather than taking it seriously, as the Islamic troublemakers certainly would.

Taking this construct beyond the Pale, so to speak, the way to end the whole Holy War mess being fronted by Shrubby for the Kompassionate Kristian Konservatives just might be to get hold of a thousand of Arkansas’ best razorbacks and push them out the back doors of some C-130s flying over the mosque at Mecca and those at a dozen other holy places. Not politically correct. Not something the folks at PETA would like. But it would get two thumbs up from Sun-Tzu and General Giap. Sometimes this kind of “shock and awe” is needed to turn the tide in a guerrilla war.

posted by Groom 5:42 PM

Potemkin Villages Anyone?

It figures that a merry band of Kostly Kristian Krusaders (thanks, Robin) who came to power badmouthing "nation-building" as an exercise for liberal wusses and then accidentally backed into the most expensive pile of it since the Marshall Plan, would get it all wrong.

Carnegie Endowment Senior Associate Marina Ottaway argues that much of the $20.3 billion supplemental appropriation proposal for Iraq is not for the essential components of a reconstruction project, but rather non-priority modernization initiatives better suited for Iraqis to decide to finance in a later stage of the country's sovereign development.

Many of the proposed projects are not priorities in a country where much of the population is fed by the UN World Food Program, unemployment is over fifty percent, electricity remains erratic, and water and sewage are in urgent need of improvement.

posted by Jerry Bowles 3:32 PM

Cher on Wounded GIs

Cher called C-Span the other morning to talk about the horribly wounded GIs from Iraq she had visited at Walter Reed Hospital and to wonder why the Bush administration is going to such elaborate lengths to pretend they don't exist. (The host guessed her identity which she acknowledged reluctantly), Via Atrios

I have to say that they had the most unbelievable courage and it took everything that I have as a person to...to not...you know... break down while I was talkin to these guys...but I just think that if there was no reason for this war this was the most heinous thing I'd ever seen... and also I wonder why...why are none of Cheney, Wolfowitz, Bremer, the president, why arent they taking pictures with all these guys? Because I dont understand why these guys are so hidden and why... and why there arent pictures of them because you know, talking about the dead and the wounded...that's two different things but these wounded are so devastatedly wounded...you know...that I think that... the wounded...it's just... it's unbelievable...it's just unbelievable to me

She's right, of course. When is the last time you saw a photo of the President with a wounded soldier. Dick Cheney? Donald Rumsfeld?

posted by Jerry Bowles 9:21 AM

Stonewalling on Enron and White House 9-11 papers moving in lockstep

While he sounds determined to get to the bottom of the quagmire, the mainstream media have forgotten that Kean has been in bed with the Saudi oil people for quite some time

Having taken the Fifth before Congress like every goodfella should, Trilateral shill and Enron kleptocrat “Kenny Boy” Lay is having his lawyers further stonewall the Enron investigation. Lay's lawyers are now seeking to block the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission from obtaining documents in connection with its probe into the energy company’s bankruptcy. “Kenny Boy” says these documents are “personal” and not “business.” Bottom line; he says he will share some documents only if he gets an immunity bath.

Shrubby, for his part, is making nice with the investigative body formerly known as the Kissinger Commission and its replacement leader former New Jersey governor and Saudi oil frontman Tom Kean, offering to “negotiate” access to what he calls “very sensitive documents.” Let your daddy’s friends jack the California energy market, seducing Gray Davis then helping set him up for a pratfall (not that he didn’t deserve one for other reasons). Let your "investment partners," the Bin Laden family, fly out of the country to avoid the blowback when their fellow Saudis attacked the towers and the Pentagon. Businesses and individuals have pledged over $200 million to help retain that kind of an American president. Only a special prosecutor can put an end to the stonewalling. That may be the only Rx for the unmaking of the $200 million man.

posted by Groom 4:25 AM

Daddy’s Little Helpers

Like most Americans with insurance that has a decent drug benefit, I avail myself of the opportunity for better living through chemistry made possible by America’s fine pharmaceutical companies. The prospect of waking up every morning to another day of Shrub’s authentically fake West Texas jibberish without my Prozac is untenable; my cholesterol has never been better thanks to Zocor, the Ranitidine has that old acid-reflux under control and—at 60—I still have a full-head of hair because of a wonder drug called Propecia.

Because I pay only a modest co-payment and a yearly deductible (plus, a ridiculously high premium for myself and my wife since I am self-employed), I have no idea what my drugs actually cost but I suspect it is a lot more than many Americans can afford. I do happen to know what the Propecia costs, however, because my HMO foolishly does not consider normal hair loss to be a medical condition. So, I pony up the $55 a month for 28 1 mg finasteride tablets which wouldn’t bother me since it works except for one small annoying fact—Propecia is actually a lower dosage of another, older finasteride pill called Proscar, which shrinks the prostate gland and sells in 10 mg dosages for about $10 for a month's supply. Exact same drug, bigger pill, cheap. The drug company recouped its investment a long, long time ago.

I mention all this because I’m not sure I agree with argument that the reason prescription drugs cost so much in the United States is because our health system is top heavy with regulations and because America’s drug companies spend so much on research and development. The problem is more likely that the drug companies try to recoup all of their costs and make greater profits in the domestic market, because it is more open than most, before they move on to other countries that have cost controls to protect consumers. We Americans pay for Canada’s free ride. Or, another way of looking at it, is that the Canadian government puts the welfare of its citizens ahead of the interests of large drug companies.

Which, of course, is why a state report released over the weekend showed that Illinois could save up to $90 million a year without compromising safety by buying its drugs in Canada.

posted by Jerry Bowles 12:43 AM

Monday, October 27, 2003

Our other war, in Colombia

With managed news being what it is, it’s hard to figure out how many troops and non-military contract personnel we have operating in support of the “war on drugs” and the “anti-terrorism campaign” being conducted by president Alvaro Uribe, our hand picked butcher boy in Colombia. But things aren’t going to get easier for Uribe or US interests, Le Monde reports. Voters yesterday in a nationwide referendum rejected his right-wing agenda. Voters also disavowed Uribe by electing Luis Garzon, a populist former labor leader, as mayor of Bogota. Uribe still has a majority who back him in Colombia’s national assembly. Expect the volume to be turned up for more US financial assistance… another war we need to go out and mortgage our future for.

posted by Groom 2:19 PM