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SICK and WRONG: How Washington is Screwing Up Health Care Reform – and Why It May Take a Revolt to Fix It

Matt Taibbi

Saturday, September 5, 2009

Let's start with the obvious: America has not only the worst but the dumbest health care system in the developed world. It's become a black leprosy eating away at the American experiment – a bureaucracy so insipid and mean and illogical that even our darkest criminal minds wouldn't be equal to dreaming it up on purpose.

The system doesn't work for anyone. It cheats patients and leaves them to die, denies insurance to 47 million Americans, forces hospitals to spend billions haggling over claims, and systematically bleeds and harasses doctors with the specter of catastrophic litigation. Even as a mechanism for delivering bonuses to insurance-company fat cats, it's a miserable failure: Greedy insurance bosses who spent a generation denying preventive care to patients now see their profits sapped by millions of customers who enter the system only when they're sick with incurably expensive illnesses.

The cost of all of this to society, in illness and death and lost productivity and a soaring federal deficit and plain old anxiety and anger, is incalculable – and that's the good news. The bad news is our failed health care system won't get fixed, because it exists entirely within the confines of yet another failed system: the political entity known as the United States of America.

Just as we have a medical system that is not really designed to care for the sick, we have a government that is not equipped to fix actual crises. What our government is good at is something else entirely: effecting the appearance of action, while leaving the actual reform behind in a diabolical labyrinth of ingenious legislative maneuvers. [Emphasis added.]

STEP ONE: AIM LOW

STEP TWO: GUT THE PUBLIC OPTION

STEP THREE: PACK IT WITH LOOPHOLES

STEP FOUR: PROVIDE NO LEADERSHIP

STEP FIVE: BLOW THE MATH

As Rolling Stone’s chief political reporter, Matt Taibbi's predecessors include the likes of journalistic giants Hunter S. Thompson and P.J. O'Rourke. Taibbi's 2004 campaign journal Spanking the Donkey cemented his status as an incisive, irreverent, zero-bullshit reporter. His latest collection is Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire

2009/09/072009/09/07

Journal: Markle Foundation Focuses on Lack of Information–We Focus on Lack of Integrity

Ethics, Government, InfoOps (IO)

Nation At Risk: Policy Makers Need Better Information to Protect the Country

For all the nation has invested in national security in the last several years, we remain vulnerable to terrorist attack and emerging national security threats because we have not adequately improved our ability to know what we know about these threats.

Phi Beta Iota: The Markle Foundation means well, but like most in the two-party tyranny and its circle of “fellow travelers” this report misses two big points: first, Washington does not lack for information, it lacks for integrity. Second, with integrity, there would not only be plenty of money for both Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) within government, and Public Intelligence outside of government, but we would also recognize, as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff recently noted with commendable integrity: it is our mis-behavior that is the threat. We KNOW what the ten high-level threats to humanity are, LtGen Dr. Brent Scowcroft helped prioritize them. INTEGRITY. One word. Without it, no amount of information or intelligence will do. Markle, and everyone else, need a strategic analytic model as well as the proven process for doing decision-support–absent that, an appreciation for the essential role that integrity plays, they are as irrelevant or counterproductive as are all courtiers to any corrupt government.

Tip of the Hat: Docuticker from Secrecy News.

2009/09/072009/09/07

Worth a Look: Secrecy as Fraud (2002)

Media Reports, Methods & Process, Reform, Worth A Look

Secrecy: The Nation's Favored Fraud

Pierre Tristam

Published on Tuesday, November 26, 2002 by the Daytona Beach News-Journal (Florida)

If there is any doubt at all that the terrorists have won – that they have managed with a single day's freakish hits to revamp the most open society on earth into an emerging police state where suspicion and secrecy are the twin watch-towers of government and cowering and conforming the prevailing instincts of an allegedly free press or an even more alleged political opposition – then last week's creation of the Department of Homeland Security should put all such doubts to rest.

. . . . . . .

Secrecy is national security's favored fraud. With rare exceptions, it harms the public interest more than it protects it. Keeping America's atom bomb secret may have been a good idea, but even that failed. Keeping the Pentagon Papers secret, the government's own most damning evidence that the Vietnam War was a known failure even in the early 1960s, needlessly prolonged a needless war at the cost of thousands of American lives (and perhaps a million Vietnamese). Designed around the same principle of prescribing what Americans should and should not know, the new department will incubate just such secrets, covering up what should be known at the risk of prolonging what shouldn't be happening. Substitute Main Street for rice paddies and what's ahead is less reassuring because of the department's existence.

Phi Beta Iota: We testified to the Moynihan Commission, and all of our life's work in the world of secrecy confirms the views of Rodney McDaniel, thenExecutive Secretary of the National Security Council: 90% (we say 80%) of secrecy is bureaucratic turf control (and avoidance of accountability), only 10% (we say 20%) is legitimate portection of sensitive information.

2009/09/062009/09/06

Journal: EarthGame–What DoD & NATO Want, What Can Be Done Faster, Better, Cheaper

Earth Intelligence, Methods & Process, Military, Peace Intelligence, Policies, Policy, Reform, Strategy, Technologies, Threats, Tools

Sentient world: war games on the grandest scale

Mark Baard

23rd June 2007

Perhaps your real life is so rich you don't have time for another.

Even so, the US Department of Defense (DOD) may already be creating a copy of you in an alternate reality to see how long you can go without food or water, or how you will respond to televised propaganda.

The DOD is developing a parallel to Planet Earth, with billions of individual “nodes” to reflect every man, woman, and child this side of the dividing line between reality and AR.

Called the Sentient World Simulation (SWS), it will be a “synthetic mirror of the real world with automated continuous calibration with respect to current real-world information”, according to a concept paper for the project.

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A ‘Second Life’ for NATO Staffers

Katie Drummond

September 4, 2009

This isn’t the first time NATO has toyed with virtual training programs. In February, they requested a computerized replica of Afghanistan, complete with data on Afghan economics, politics and culture, to be used by war planners in decision-making considerations. And two years ago, the Navy asked for the same thing, but with Iraq as the targeted 3D nation.

Phi Beta Iota: EarthGame by Medard Gabel does all this and more, for no more than $2 million a year, with one caveat: it is unaffordable and unachievable if DoD and NATO insist on everything being Top Secret.

2009/09/062009/09/06

Journal: Petition for Peace Engineering

02 Diplomacy, 10 Security, 11 Society, Civil Society, Ethics, Peace Intelligence, Reform, Strategy, Worth A Look

The average American is now in motion. The Independent movement has reached critical mass, and the public recognition that everything the government is doing lacks a strategic analytic rationale as well as–in many cases–a moral rationale, is gathering force.

The below message captured our attention. Note the “social engineering” of the military-industrial complex that has labored for decades to connect jobs to war, patronage to war, bribes to war, high crimes and midemeanors (betrayal of the public trust) to war. The call for social engineering for peace is, in our view, a strong signal that public intelligence is now becoming more commonplace, but we make the observation that the “lag time” between Congressional and Executive high crimes and misdemeanors, and the public discovery, analytis, outrage, and action, is still too great. Public intelligence is going to have to do something secret intelligence cannot do: develop global REAL-TIME and NEAR-REAL-TIME information-sharing and sense-making, and do this across all ten high-level threats and all twelve policies that must be harmonized across all boundaries.

Continue reading “Journal: Petition for Peace Engineering”

2009/08/312011/10/22

Journal: Questions for supporters of the Democrat-Republican duopoly

Collective Intelligence, Ethics, Reform

Questions for supporters of the

Democrat-Republican duopoly

August 31, 7:49 AM

Chad MacInnes

Orange County Independent Examiner

EXTRACT: The fact of the matter is that career politicians will say anything to get re-elected and will do anything to stay in power. This then becomes a classic dichotomy: the politicians say one thing, yet continue to act in ways anathema to what they repeatedly profess they stand for. Yet they are re-elected over and over again. Both Republicans and Democrats alike are equally guilty, and this becomes clear when one simply compares the rhetoric with what they actually do. With very few notable exceptions, Dr. Ron Paul comes to mind, there is no honor, no integrity, no intestinal fortitude among them. They are weak and spinless creatures driven only by an insatiable thirst for power and control, yet fancy themselves saviors, strong and powerful simply by their ability to manipulate the system and ignore the people. The self-serving Democrat-Republican duopoly is symptomatic of our sick republic, and the only medicine that will cure it is to remove this duopolistic tumor.

Phi Beta Iota: INTEGRITY. The Average American has more common sense, decency, and integrity that most serving in Washington as political appointees sworn to a partisan agenda, or as elected officials who have betrayed their constituencies by toeing to the party line. Mr. MacInnes is articulating a broad “pox on both parties” that has been in motion since everyone realized that Al Gore sold out (Warren Christopher carried the offer) in 2000.

Now, having said that, we reiterate our view that President Barack Obama could be the George Washington of this century if he rejects the partisan hacks and the Wall Street hucksters that are looting the Treasury and avoiding responsibility. All he has to do is demand the Electoral Reform Act of 2009 followed by the Smart Nation-Safe Nation Act of 2010, and we will have a Republic again–an informed, secure, sane, responsible Republic.

2009/08/312009/08/31

Journal: Chicago-Style Partisan Corruption & Industrial-Era Organization Killing the USA

Reform, Strategy

The Future of Tech

August 27, 2009, 5:00PM EST

By Adrian Slywotzky

Where Have You Gone, Bell Labs?: How basic research can repair the broken U.S. business model

Name an industry that can produce 1 million new, high-paying jobs over the next three years. You can't, because there isn't one. And that's the problem.

Decline in Lab Funding; Job Creation a Huge Challenge; Rebuild Research Labs; Basic Science Gives Way to Fast Payoffs; How to Reignite Innovation; Strong Leadership is Key; Presidential Support Crucial; Critical Mass of Labs Needed; Tax Incentives Could Help; How to Get Back on Track; A Lesson from RCA Labs

Continue reading “Journal: Chicago-Style Partisan Corruption & Industrial-Era Organization Killing the USA”

Category: Topics (All Other)

Journal: Rolling Stone on Sick and Wrong (Washington Corruption, Health Care Example)