Hi. These powerful essays outline what we expected from Democrats we just elected, on this opening day of congress. This clearly won't happen without our ongoing, diverse efforts, including those around January 27th. So. California activities are now being planned, and I'll list them as they emerge. Meanwhile, improvise, maybe pass this on with a personal slant, to friends and politicians. Ed
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/01/04/opinion/04herbert.html?th&emc=th Another Thousand Lives By BOB HERBERT NY Times Op-Ed: January 4, 2007 How long can this go on? Saddam is dead. The weapons of mass destruction were a mirage. More than 3,000 American G.I.s and scores of thousands of Iraqis have been killed. Voters in the United States have made it clear that they no longer support American involvement in this exercise in sustained barbarism. Incredibly, the U.S. military itself is turning against the war. And yet the president, against the counsel of his commanders on the ground, apparently is ready to escalate - to send more American lives into the fire he set in Iraq. In a devastating critique of the war, the newsweekly Army Times led its current edition with the headline: "About-Face on the War - After 3 years of support, troops sour on Iraq." The article detailed a Military Times Poll that found, for the first time, that "more troops disapprove of the president's handling of the war than approve of it." Only a third of the service members surveyed approved of the president's conduct of the war, while 42 percent disapproved. Perhaps worse was the finding that only half of the troops believed that success in Iraq was likely. The service members made it clear that they were not attacking their commander in chief personally. His overall approval rating remained high. What has turned them off has been the wretched reality of the war. In the article, David Segal, director of the Center for Research on Military Organization at the University of Maryland, said, "They're seeing more casualties and fatalities and less progress." In other words, they're seeing the same thing everybody else is seeing - except, perhaps, Mr. Bush. On New Year's Day, readers of The New York Times could see the excruciating photo layout of the latest 1,000 American service members to die in Iraq. As in all wars, most of them were young. Many of them were smiling in the photos. All of them died unnecessarily. The war has been an exercise in futility and mind-boggling incompetence, and yet our involvement continues - with no end in sight, no plans for withdrawal, no idea of where we might be headed - as if the U.S. had fallen into some kind of bizarrely destructive trance from which it is unable to awaken. And who is paying the price for this insanity - apart from ordinary Iraqis, who are paying the most grievous price of all? The burden of the war in the U.S. is being shouldered overwhelmingly by a contingent of Americans whom no one would categorize as economically privileged. As Lizette Alvarez and Andrew Lehren wrote in Monday's Times: "The service members who died during this latest period fit an unchanging profile. They were mostly white men from rural areas, soldiers so young they still held fresh memories of high school football heroics and teenage escapades. Many men and women were in Iraq for the second or third time. Some were going on their fourth, fifth or sixth deployment." There is no way that this can be justified. It is just wrong. I've said many times that if a war is worth fighting the way to do it is to mobilize the entire country, drawing the warriors from as wide a swath of the population as possible and raising taxes on everyone as part of an all-out effort to defeat a common enemy. This war is not worth fighting. And if there were ever serious talk about enacting a draft or raising taxes to fight it, you'd see quickly enough that the vast majority of Americans would not find it worth fighting. There must be a leader somewhere who can shake the U.S. out of this tragic hypnotic state, who can see that it is beyond crazy to continue our involvement in this war indefinitely, to sacrifice another 1,000 young lives, and then another thousand after that. All of the tortured, twisted rationales for this war - all of the fatuous intellectual pyrotechnics dreamed up to justify it - have vaporized, and we're left with just the mad, mindless, meaningless and apparently endless slaughter. Shakespeare, in "Henry VI," said: "Now thou art come unto a feast of death." We should end our participation in the feast of death in Iraq. It is criminal to continue feeding our troops into the slaughter. If there were politicians here at home with some of the courage of the troops in the field, we could begin saving lives rather than watching helplessly as the Bush White House continues to sacrifice them. Three thousand and counting is enough. *** http://select.nytimes.com/2007/01/01/opinion/01krugman.html?th&emc=th A Healthy New Year By PAUL KRUGMAN NY Times Op-Ed: January 1, 2007 The U.S. health care system is a scandal and a disgrace. But maybe, just maybe, 2007 will be the year we start the move toward universal coverage. In 2005, almost 47 million Americans - including more than 8 million children - were uninsured, and many more had inadequate insurance. Apologists for our system try to minimize the significance of these numbers. Many of the uninsured, asserted the 2004 Economic Report of the President, "remain uninsured as a matter of choice." And then you wake up. A scathing article in yesterday's Los Angeles Times described how insurers refuse to cover anyone with even the slightest hint of a pre-existing condition. People have been denied insurance for reasons that range from childhood asthma to a "past bout of jock itch." Some say that we can't afford universal health care, even though every year lack of insurance plunges millions of Americans into severe financial distress and sends thousands to an early grave. But every other advanced country somehow manages to provide all its citizens with essential care. The only reason universal coverage seems hard to achieve here is the spectacular inefficiency of the U.S. health care system. Americans spend more on health care per person than anyone else - almost twice as much as the French, whose medical care is among the best in the world. Yet we have the highest infant mortality and close to the lowest life expectancy of any wealthy nation. How do we do it? Part of the answer is that our fragmented system has much higher administrative costs than the straightforward government insurance systems prevalent in the rest of the advanced world. As Anna Bernasek pointed out in yesterday's New York Times, besides the overhead of private insurance companies, "there's an enormous amount of paperwork required of American doctors and hospitals that simply doesn't exist in countries like Canada or Britain." In addition, insurers often refuse to pay for preventive care, even though such care saves a lot of money in the long run, because those long-run savings won't necessarily redound to their benefit. And the fragmentation of the American system explains why we lag far behind other nations in the use of electronic medical records, which both reduce costs and save lives by preventing many medical errors. The truth is that we can afford to cover the uninsured. What we can't afford is to keep going without a universal health care system. If it were up to me, we'd have a Medicare-like system for everyone, paid for by a dedicated tax that for most people would be less than they or their employers currently pay in insurance premiums. This would, at a stroke, cover the uninsured, greatly reduce administrative costs and make it much easier to work on preventive care. Such a system would leave people with the right to choose their own doctors, and with other choices as well: Medicare currently lets people apply their benefits to H.M.O.'s run by private insurance companies, and there's no reason why similar options shouldn't be available in a system of Medicare for all. But everyone would be in the system, one way or another. Can we get there from here? Health care reform is in the air. Democrats in Congress are talking about providing health insurance to all children. John Edwards began his presidential campaign with a call for universal health care. And there's real action at the state level. Inspired by the Massachusetts plan to cover all its uninsured residents, politicians in other states are talking about adopting similar plans. Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon has introduced a Massachusetts-type plan for the nation as a whole. But now is the time to warn against plans that try to cover the uninsured without taking on the fundamental sources of our health system's inefficiency. What's wrong with both the Massachusetts plan and Senator Wyden's plan is that they don't operate like Medicare; instead, they funnel the money through private insurance companies. Everyone knows why: would-be reformers are trying to avoid too strong a backlash from the insurance industry and other players who profit from our current system's irrationality. But look at what happened to Bill Clinton. He rejected a single-payer approach, even though he understood its merits, in favor of a complex plan that was supposed to co-opt private insurance companies by giving them a largely gratuitous role. And the reward for this "pragmatism" was that insurance companies went all-out against his plan anyway, with the notorious "Harry and Louise" ads that, yes, mocked the plan's complexity. Now we have another chance for fundamental health care reform. Let's not blow that chance with a pre-emptive surrender to the special interests. *** Please forward widely! Dear friends of United for Peace & Justice, Momentum is beginning to build for the politically urgent mobilization on Saturday, Jan. 27th. There are already more than 500 endorsements for the demonstration and we are hearing from groups around the country that they are organizing to get people to Washington, DC. In order to send the strongest, clearest message to the new Congress we are working hard to have the largest turnout possible. And we have set another important goal for this mobilization: We want to have at least one person from each of the 435 Congressional districts marching on Jan. 27th to help represent the truly nationwide peace majority. We are inviting you to sign up to be a local coordinator for people coming from your area to Washington, DC. Being a local coordinator means doing the things we hope you are already doing -- spreading the word and encouraging people to come to DC, helping to arrange buses, car caravans or rideshares, hosting a sign-making party -- but it also will mean following up with people in your area who will find you through the coordinator's listing on our website. Many of you are already working on some or all of these activities -- and more! Now we've set up this system to help people in your area connect with your efforts. By signing up as a local coordinator, you will be putting your congressional district on our map that will show that folks are coming from all around the country to stand up for peace! a.. Sign up and/or find out more information about being a local coordinator b.. Ideas and resources for local coordinators c.. Once you sign up, your location and info will show up on this map and people will be able to "RSVP" for whatever you are organizing (car caravan, sign-making party, etc.). You will then be able to log in and change or update your listing as needed, and also contact the people who have RSVP'd for your listing. This is a great way to reach new people in your area, to build your group's membership if you have one, or even to start a new one. If you want to know more about the role of the coordinators before signing up, please get in touch with either Susan Chenelle (susan at unitedforpeace.org) or Leslie Kauffman (lak at unitedforpeace.org); both can be reached by phone at 212-868-5545. If you have other creative ideas for organizing people to come to DC that we haven't listed here or in our materials on the website, please let Susan or Leslie know and we'll share them in future bulletins to member groups. LOGISTICAL INFORMATION Many of the details of the January mobilization are still being worked out, so please keep checking the UFPJ website for updates. Here is the information so far: a.. We have applied for permits to assemble on the east end of the National Mall, the end closest to the Capitol, and for a march route that will allow us to literally march around the Capitol. b.. Tentative times: assemble - 11am to 1pm; march step-off - 1pm; end of march - 4pm c.. Lobby Day: On Monday, January 29th, we will meet with members of Congress and/or their aides; a training for the lobby day will be held on Sunday, Jan. 28th. If you are organizing buses or can offer any kind of transportation to DC, please post the details on our ride board ASAP. (Click here for tips on organizing buses.) We also have a housing board and info on affordable lodging in the DC area. And, of course, we hope everyone will make whatever financial contribution you can to help make this an historic mobilization. Visit www.unitedforpeace.org for further resources and updates on the January 27-29 mobilization. Together we can end this war! -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help us continue to do this critical work: Make a donation to UFPJ today. 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