"SiCKO" offers activists a cure

What a difference a movie makes. Michael Moore’s “SiCKO” http://www.michaelmoore.com/sicko/ is breathing new life into the movement for non-profit national health insurance: “Enhanced Medicare for All.” Energized by “SiCKO,” Progressive Democrats of America is intensifying its campaign in support of HR 676, which would establish single-payer Medicare for All.

The House bill – authored by PDA advisory board member Rep. John Conyers – was endorsed by Michael Moore at a spirited rally Wednesday on Capitol Hill. HR 676 already has 75 co-sponsors. PDA activists will be out in force this summer leafleting for HR 676 at “SiCKO” screenings nationwide, beginning with sneak previews this Saturday in Los Angeles, Phoenix, Cleveland and many other cities. Contact Tim Carpenter (413-320-2015) for more details.

The Conyers bill/HR 676 is endorsed by dozens of labor, civil rights and consumer organizations, as well as thousands of physicians who have witnessed the takeover of healthcare by private insurance companies.

“Over a period of decades,” said PDA director Tim Carpenter, “we’ve watched Democratic leaders’ commitment to national health insurance decline as campaign donations from insurance corporations have increased.”

Carpenter continued: “SiCKO is a shot in the arm for HR 676, a bill that addresses our healthcare system’s central problem: That for-profit insurers treat and cure nobody while sucking billions of dollars out of the system in bureaucracy, paperwork, advertising, sales commissions and exorbitant profits and executive salaries.”

Movie clips from "SiCKO"

http://www.reelzchannel.com/moviedetail.aspx?movieid=226829

Fast Track demise is celebrated

Public Citizen's excellent blog Eyes on Trade has a clever take on the demise of Presidential 'fast track' trade authority. Let's hope that "Fast Track" stays dead and gone.

http://citizen.typepad.com/eyesontrade/2007/06/long-overdue-fa.html

Long Overdue, Fast Track Finally Passes into History
Millions of Those Harmed by Fast Track-Enabled “Trade” Deals Celebrate
OBITUARIES: Fast Track 1974-1995/2002-2007

After a brief, damaging existence, Fast Track was pronounced dead on June 30, 2007.
The demise of Fast Track allowed the U.S. Founding Fathers to stop rolling in their graves over Fast Track's trampling of constitutional checks and balances. As well, victims of Fast Track-enabled trade agreements welcomed the news, given the anomalous procedure's record of damage despite having been locked up and out of commission for blocks of time since its inception.

In April 1973, America first saw the faint glimmer in Father Nixon's eye that was to become Fast Track when the Nixon administration - always eager to seize power from the legislative branch - dropped the initial Fast Track legislation. The young Fast Track - the product of a broken and abusive home - had an unusually long gestation period, taking over a year and a half to be unleashed by President Ford, who signed the first Fast Track bill into law. Fast Track teethed on federalism and checks and balances, shredding basic tenets of our democracy.

Fast Track delegated away Congress' exclusive constitutional authority over trade - allowing the executive branch alone to choose trading partners, set the substantive terms of trade policy, and even sign trade agreements, all before Congress ever voted. The controversial delegation mechanism allowed Congress only a yes or no vote on trade agreements after they had been negotiated and signed and by its very design shut out public and congressional oversight.
Unleashed again in 1988, the troubled Fast Track became a violent adult with a pathological disregard for the middle class, family farmers and the environment. After enabling the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1993 and the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1994, Fast Track found itself friendless when in 1995 its 1988-granted parole ended.

In 1998, members of Congress explicitly voted to keep Fast Track locked away as the policy and political damage of the Fast Track-enabled NAFTA and WTO began to come home to roost. For only two years of the eight-year, 130-trade-agreement Clinton administration was Fast Track out and about. The facts of President Clinton being able to pass several controversial, major multilateral WTO agreements and the Jordan Free Trade Agreement and China PNTR without Fast Track does not in any way diminish the claim that it is impossible to do trade agreements without Fast Track, said Gucci Loafers, a major K Street lobbyist.

In 2002, after Fast Track had been kept locked up for a quarter of its 27 years, another power-grabbing president, George W. Bush, struggled through a two-year, arm-breaking-for-votes campaign that featured a one-vote margin that unleashed Fast Track one last time.

Fast Track's lifelong philosophy was, "Just trust the president." Even after being kept in chains for much of its existence, Fast Track's legacy includes millions of peasant farmers who have been displaced by fast-tracked trade deals, workers whose wages have remained stagnant since Fast Track's hatching in the mid-70's, millions of Americans made ill by fast-tracked trade deals that required food imports not meeting U.S. safety standards, the evisceration of the U.S. manufacturing base, and much more damage. Many Americans celebrated Fast Track's long overdue demise and joined a national day of prayer for a better procedure that in the future could replace Fast Track to ensure trade agreements would benefit the majority.

Those deeply connected to Fast Track, including President Bush and representatives of the National Association of Manufacturers, the American Chamber of Commerce, Pharma and other corporate lobbies, gathered at board meetings and campaign fundraisers to mourn their loss.

http://www.citizen.org/trade/index.cfm

What is social democracy ?

SOCIAL DEMOCRATS USA

Social democracy represents a "third way" between lasseiz faire capitalism and socialism. The greatest expansion of American prosperity took place during the years from FDR to LBJ when our nation was under a mixed economy which balanced markets with state regulation.

Twelve years ago, Social Democrats USA released the following statement titled "Why America Needs A Social Democratic Movement." I think that this declaration is a relevant today as in 1995. www.socialdemocrats.org/v.html

Social Democrats do not look forward to replacing our existing social and economic institutions with a wholly different system. We do seek change -- in some things, basic change. But we also seek to strengthen and uphold he institutions, traditions and values of today's society that we find decent, just and democratic.

To many, it appears that capitalism has emerged supreme, sweeping away all its predecessors and even its self-described successors. But, in our view, democracy has triumphed, not capitalism alone. While the market economy is surely necessary for political democracy, we do not believe it is sufficient.

In recent times we have again seen that capitalism is vulnerable to slumps, stagnation and crises which deprive people of their livelihoods and dash their dreams. Capitalism alone allows a few to enjoy wealth disproportionate to the value of their labor, and forces many to labor without ever enjoying wealth or even basic economic security. But the inequities and insecurities of capitalism encourage workers and other groups to band together to protect themselves, spawning great democratic movements of the working and middle classes, and the poor.

Social democracy developed in opposition both to laissez-faire indifference to failings of capitalism and to the dogma that capitalism must collapse in a spasm of righteous revolution. Social democracy has in many ways been vindicated by the events of the past few years. But this vindication brings new questions:

Will capitalism evolve into a democratic socialism in which society as a whole, through grass roots democratic government, directs the entire economy?

Is social democracy an obsolete concept, and is a welfare state that serves as a safety net for a dominant private sector and free market all that is necessary?

Or has society already evolved into a "mix" of socialist and capitalist elements -- a mix that today is moving into a "transnational stage of development"?

With the end of the Cold War, it is again possible to address these questions in a civil and open-minded way. Like Eduard Bernstein, we are evolutionists, animated by today's movements for democracy and social justice, rather than by schematic visions of the future. Like Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, we believe in democracy as a way of life -- a guiding moral value.
We are convinced that the way forward is through the extension of democracy at home and abroad, in the social and economic as well as the political spheres. We will not advance through the exploits of omniscient elites who guide the "mindless masses" -- whether these elites are revolutionary "vanguards," sophisticated "think tanks," or Wall Street wizards.

An American citizens' movement for social democracy must be a community of values and a source of mutual aid -- not merely a weapon for class or political conflict. It must be a movement that creates a popular constituency for its values and ideas, not one that makes change through policies administered from the top down.

We are convinced that America needs such a social democratic movement, and that today our fellow citizens will welcome it.