Seven Hundred and Thirty One Nights/Stories of The Sultan - Vol. 1 (Prologue) سلطنة

All the disparate peoples of the First Unified Sultanate were restless and frustrated. The new sultan had risen to power two years ago, seemingly out of nowhere. He seduced both the population and the leaders of the ummah with vague promises of golden nuggets while slowly amassing more and more power until all other competitors fell under his spell and flocked like Zoroastrians to Allah. The Sultan did this so skillfully it seemed almost subconscious. Despite some initial trepidation that immediately followed the fall of the previous regimes, the people were happy with The Sultan. What his people felt when they gazed into his big hazel eyes only the greatest of poets could describe. It was hope! Passion! Love! Not being a poet myself nor having witnessed in person the events of our story or The Sultan, your humble storyteller can only suppose it must have been ecstasy. Things did not remain in this state for long though. The Sultan could be many things. One day he'd be restless, others simply lazy. He also had a cold streak interrupted only by episodic storms of temper. The people were constantly questioning just who The Sultan was.

In spite of the opulent and entertaining nights with choice members of the populace that began following his rise to power, the people began to notice that his nuggets had yet to materialize. The Sultan sent slaves to the far reaches of the known world in search of exotic spices and mysterious recipes. Whole rooms in the palace were filled with these gastronomic secrets, but like the rooms themselves, those epicurean treasures were never opened but were instead hoarded away in dark cool cellars. The pittances he handed out were meager, and his attention was focused solely on himself.

To save the sultanate (not to mention The Sultan himself), The Grand Vizier and His most trusted advisor arranged to have a story told every night before bed. This story would illuminate the problems of the last two years without offending the man with the power over who would live and who would die...

سلطنة

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

The documentary that won't be televised (in the U.S.)...

The Healthcare Post Part Deux

...I knew the care was expensive, but I didn't have to worry about that. I needed the care and I got it.... My family has had the care it needed. Other families have not, simply because they could not afford it....

- Senator Kennedy in Newsweek

Dennis Kucinich has added an amendment in The House that would allow states to run their own single-payer systems, but who knows if that addition will survive all the deal making and compromises that we'll see in the next few months. "Everyone won't be satisfied—and no one will get everything they want," Kennedy writes, but he is optimistic. "If we don't get every provision right, we can adjust and improve the program next year or in the years to come. What we can't afford is to wait another generation." The battle for health care is old, and the arguments against it are tired. Kennedy's piece in Newsweek provides some context. "In 1912, when Theodore Roosevelt ran for a third term as president, the platform of his newly created Progressive Party called for national health insurance," Kennedy notes. "Harry Truman proposed it again more than 30 years after Roosevelt was defeated. The plan was attacked, not for the last time, as 'socialized medicine,' and members of Truman's White House staff were branded 'followers of the Moscow party line.'"

Meanwhile the mudslinging going on is in full force, and the reformers are hitting back. "At this moment -- when 72 percent of the nation supports a public plan option and 14,000 people lose their healthcare every day -- the House Blue Dogs and conservative Democratic Senators are doing just about everything they can to cripple real health care reform," Katrina Vanden Heuvel wrote recently in her blog at The Nation.

'Though issues with The Blue Dogs may be exaggerated, The Finance Committee's compromise bill would cover too few people and shift the costs to the middle class. That bill would certainly sustain the "torment" Senator Kennedy recounts of the individual families who have to sell everything they own to pay for health care in "the richest country in the world."

Most Americans expect the U.S. to lead the other advanced nations. Why are we so far behind in keeping our citizens healthy?

An editorial in The Globe by Paul Dutton proposes France as a model:

Although the French system faces many challenges, the World Health Organization rated it the best in the world in 2001 because of its universal coverage, responsive healthcare providers, patient and provider freedoms, and the health and longevity of the country's population. The United States ranked 37....
Moreover, in contrast to Canada and Britain, there are no waiting lists for elective procedures and patients need not seek pre-authorizations. In other words, like in the United States, "rationing" is not a word that leaves the lips of hopeful politicians....

It's a model that even the insurance industry could get behind:

...Private health insurers are also central to the system as supplemental insurers who cover patient expenses that are not paid for by Sécurité Sociale. Indeed, nearly 90 percent of the French population possesses such coverage, making France home to a booming private health insurance market....

Whether Senator Baucus's vision eventually wins out in The Senate remains to be seen, but an article in The New York Times airs concerns about the economy - "even if a health overhaul does pass, it may not include the tough measures needed to bring down spending. Ultimately, the only way to do so is to take money from doctors, drug makers and insurers, and it isn’t clear whether Mr. Obama and Congress have the stomach for that fight. So far, they have focused on ideas like preventive care that would do little to cut costs."

Do these "tough measures" address the fact that we spend more money than we should (or need to) on health care? Dutton admits health care in France is expensive. "At $3,500 per capita it is one of the most costly in Europe," but the price for our inefficient and broken system is "$6,100 per person in the United States." Kennedy succinctly counters the cynics who fret about the price tag:

What I haven't heard the critics discuss is the cost of inaction. If we don't reform the system, if we leave things as they are, health-care inflation will cost far more over the next decade than health-care reform. We will pay far more for far less—with millions more Americans uninsured or underinsured....

This would threaten not just the health of Americans but also the strength of the American economy. Health-care spending already accounts for 17 percent of our entire domestic product. In other advanced nations, where the figure is around 10 percent, everyone has insurance and health outcomes that are equal or better than ours. This disparity undermines our ability to compete and succeed in the global economy. General Motors spends more per vehicle on health care than on steel....

The United States is the greatest country in the world, but we don't have the best health care. That is an embarrassment. It's a burden on the economy, and it's a burden on families. When millions of Americans cannot afford to be healthy it's injustice. Opponents of reform often talk about freedom and choice. Dutton points out something that these opponents need to remember:

The link between employment and health security is a historical artifact whose disadvantages now far outweigh its advantages. Economists estimate that between 25 and 45 percent of the US labor force is now job-locked. That is, employees make career decisions based on their need to maintain affordable health coverage or avoid exclusion based on a preexisting condition.

That is not a statistic that supports the freedom inherent in a small government role. It's time to mend this crack in our liberty. Universal coverage will expand opportunity in average Americans who aren't lucky enough to be born into a rich family or get elected to Congress and will make the pursuit of happiness much easier. Let's hope this is the year that The Federal Government will finally provide every American the chance to be healthy regardless of the conditions that he or she is born into.

The Death of Rock in Boston?

WBCN is dead. If you're not sure why this is important, The Globe and Herald both give CliffsNotes versions of the history and influence of what Howard Stern called "the most legendary rock station ever" on his show this morning.

The bad guy here is CBS Radio, which has mismanaged it's properties across the country. According to The Howard 100 News, former program director, Oedipus, claims it was "the suits" that ruined 'BCN, and the station could have survived by letting "the inmates run the asylum."

104.1 switched formats from underground to corporate a long time ago, and the station's soul has slowly withered away. The latest by CBS Radio just sweeps away what's left. The saddest part is the music. While New York City has long struggled to support rock formats, the genre has thrived in Boston with three alternative rock (not including New Hampshire's Rock 101) and one classic rock station. A big reason for that is WBCN spawned imitators. At least for a while, however, those imitators did a better job. The obituaries forget to mention how little rock there was at "The Rock of Boston." Stern ruled the mornings, Patriot games were added, and then so were Opie and Anthony. For the year they spent on in the afternoons, the chatty Nik Carter handled mid-days. After Stern moved to Sirius XM in 2006, CBS saddled 'BCN with David Lee Roth and then the Opie and Anthony redux - both failed.

Dan Kennedy is succinct:

Along with alternative papers like the Phoenix, Boston After Dark and the Real Paper, WBCN was my main source of information on leftist politics and the counterculture.

But the station had long since disappeared into the cog of corporate radio. It's not that it won't be missed. It's that the time to miss it expired about 20 years ago.

Although I'm too young to know Danny Schechter, he has a longer and more passionate take than Kennedy. In short:

The station’s legacy and importance–the reason it built a national reputation and worldwide respect– was deliberately buried in the need to meet quarterly revenue projections and serve its corporate masters. Their goal was to compete with commercial drek by becoming commercial drek. And they did.

And where did it take them? To the radio graveyard. Shame.

Both paint an accurate picture of what happened at 104.1, but are stained by a lens of nostalgia. Some of their differences are generational as things had improved recently with the talented Toucher and Rich moving their funny show to the mornings. While the independently owned 'FNX might feel more like the original, I have to admit the corporate 'BCN still played music I loved when I had it on. Sure my generation missed the underground WBCN, but many of us have great memories of the station. They played The Beatles Anthology in its entirety, Radiohead's show at Great Woods, and Nine Inch Nails' radio performance with Peter Murphy (here's one of the songs). Losing 'BCN is losing one more venue for these things to air at the local level. How much of channel's troubles were due to mismanagement, however? The pessimist in me wonders if The Rock of Boston's death is actually the latest casualty in The Death of Rock in Boston.

True Health Care Reform

Most Americans would agree that access to health care is a civil right. Our inalienable right of life isn't possible without it, and the pursuit of happiness is a lot tougher when you're sick. Most if not all would also agree that the system we have is broke. Well, if we want everyone covered with better care while spending less, what kind of system do we create to fix it? The answer is Single Payer. Because our debt as a nation is so high, this is a reform we need to implement now. We are spending too much and getting too little. Joe Conason illuminates in Salon:

Although the public share of health expenditure in the United States is much lower than any other OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) country except Mexico, the public expenditure on healthcare is much higher per capita than in most OECD countries. So we pay a lot more in taxes devoted to medical care -- not including insurance premiums, co-payments, fees, and other health costs -– than taxpayers in those 27 countries that have universal coverage. Our public expenditure provides coverage only for the elderly and some of the poor (through Medicaid and the SCHIP program for children) while other countries provide universal coverage while spending less.

How much less? Nations with comparable standards of living like France, Germany, Sweden, Finland, the United Kingdom, Canada, Norway, and Japan spend roughly between half and two-thirds per capita what we spend annually. They cover everyone and their results are measurably better. And the supposed downsides of universal coverage, such as lack of access to sophisticated medical technologies, are belied in many of these countries. For instance Japan has lower per capita health expenditures than the United States (and universal coverage,) but its citizens have greater access to MRI machines, CT scanners and kidney dialysis equipment than Americans do.

It's clear that health care is one of the areas that the public sector is better than the private. It's cheaper, more effective and based on an American study comparing the health between different races, ethnicities, and education levels, it's also more equitable. What I found most surprising is that we already have a successful model of how all this would work. "The VA hospitals represent the most successful large-scale reform in the delivery of health care that this country has seen in decades," explains Timothy Noah in Slate. So, why is this more effective and more efficient system never brought up?

It... stems from a conviction that has seeped deep into the political culture that anything run by the federal government must be inferior to market-based alternatives. The Obama administration and Congress are utterly terrified that in crafting health care reform they will run afoul of this infantile prejudice. They will therefore move heaven and earth to avoid acknowledging the VA's pioneering use of computerized medical records, its avoidance of the justly lamented fee-for-service model (VA physicians are salaried), and the efficiencies it realizes by treating patients over the long term. The implications of this success are too terrifyingly pinko. The VA is, after all, a system in which the role of insurer, physician, and hospital are all assumed by the U.S. government.

Wow

Divided We Fall

I haven't read all of this article in Salon (it seems pretty boring), but there are a couple golden nuggets that validated my interest.

I've done the skimming:

If Juanita and Chris are casualties of the intensified war of attrition businesses are quietly waging on workers, Rodney represents a deeper unraveling of jobs and job security, thanks to a globalized economy in which the hard-pressed workers in this country are pitted against cheaper labor pools in Latin America, South Asia, China and even the American South. In such a job environment, what is one to do?

Someone I interviewed prior to my job center visit described her reaction when she heard that her company had recently closed a plant in the Midwest: "The first thing I thought, and I felt bad for thinking it," she recalled, somewhat sheepishly, "was that means more work for us -- at least for the time being."
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Her comment speaks volumes, as does her request not to be identified. Who needs union busters, patroling shop stewards, or legions of high-paid lawyers fighting wage and hours claims when a worker is so anxious about job security that she responds positively to the laying off of those she imagines as potential competitors? When employees police their own behavior for fear of the ax -- monitoring their time checking e-mail or using the bathroom -- bad times distinctly have an upside for management....

A look at corporate opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), whose passage in Congress is a central demand of organized labor, offers a glimpse of how persistently companies seek to disadvantage their workers. EFCA would allow workers to form a union when a majority of them sign union cards in a given workplace. "Card check," as it is frequently called, enables them to organize unions without the need for an election. In a November column surveying the business elite's response to the act, Wall Street Journal Op-Ed columnist Thomas Frank wrote: "Card check is about power. Management has it, workers don't, and business doesn't want that to change."

The author concludes that there are two business wars being fought - the second covertly eliminates employees that would otherwise have been retained in better financial times. He asks at what point the press will finally acknowledge this less reported war. Isn't asking how one side is supposed to fight without an army the more important question?