Here are my EDITORIALS
“Change your opinions, keep to your principles; change your leaves, keep intact your roots.” - Victor Hugo
A LOOK AT OUR EARLY MARCH TO SOCIALISM
The Westerly Sun, May 4, 2010
In 1803, President Jefferson acquired the Louisiana Territory from France. In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt signed the Food and Drug Act into law. President Eisenhower authorized the Interstate Highway System in 1956. In 1969, the United States fulfilled the national mandate established by President Kennedy in 1961 to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade. In 1983, President Reagan delivered the speech initiating the Strategic Defense Initiative. If we accept Mr. George A. Gardiner’s assertion that socialism results from “expansion of government”, then these policies and hundreds like them since the Washington administration have all contributed to an ongoing effort by Presidents to turn the United States of America into a “socialist” nation.
Another claim cited by Mr. Gardiner of President Obama’s supposed covert attempts to turn the United States into a “socialist” nation is “the government take-over of private industries (e.g. auto and banks)”. However, the government didn’t surreptitiously take over GM, the car companies went to the government and begged the American taxpayers to bail them out. Does Mr. Gardiner think it would have been better for President Obama to let American car companies go bankrupt and to have thrown thousands of Americans out of work or to have handed over the money to GM with no questions asked in order to avoid the highly dubious charge of being a “socialist”?
President Obama's Wall Street bailout actually began in the George W. Bush administration. It was Hank Paulsen, Bush’s Treasury Secretary, who literally begged the U.S. government to use hundreds of billions of Treasury dollars to help banks threatened by the disaster of their own creation, the subprime market meltdown. Mr. Gardiner, was the $160 billion dollar bailout of the Savings and Loan industry in 1989 under the leadership of George H.W. Bush also an example of a government takeover and therefore, in your opinion, another step on the road to socialism?
Mr. Gardiner claims I am “puzzled” and he is right, but not by the so-called “socialist” policies of President Obama. What “puzzles” me is why we didn’t hear concerns about the expansion of health care being raised when Medicare Part D went into effect in 2006 during the administration of President Bush. Why weren’t present day Tea Party members then protesting, among other aspects of this program, the “donut hole” of Part D and the financial devastation it caused so many Americans? Why aren’t Tea Party members now celebrating a health care plan that does away with a plan that required them and their fellow Americans to shell out 100% of prescription drug costs for out of pocket costs between $2250 and $5100 regardless of ability to pay?
Mr. Gardiner’s claim that the government has taken over student loans is yet another misleading statement. The federal government has been making loans to college students since 1965; there is no “takeover” underway. The Obama plan dealt with ending subsidies to companies like Sallie Mae and having the government run the student loan program itself with the goal in mind of saving billions of dollars that could then be used for investing in higher education programs. I hope and trust the Tea Party would not object to that.
If the Tea Party continues to insist on warning us about what they see as the dangers of encroaching socialism under the Obama Administration, then we should soon expect someone in that organization to publicly condemn and urge the elimination of Social Security, Medicare, FDIC, unemployment benefits, Pell Grants and public education. “These widely accepted notions all reflect socialistic values. They fit well with the socialistic premise that government should provide basic security from the cradle to the grave to all of its citizens”, according to Van Gosse, an associate professor of history at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, who has researched socialist movements in the United States and Latin America. (“Ask the Card-carrying Socialists: Is Obama One of Them?” by John Blake, CNN, April 15, 2010)
WHEN ONLY HALF THE STORY IS TOLD
The Westerly Sun, July 19, 2010
“With the economy still sinking” and America facing a multitude of complex problems that have been years, if not decades, in the making, the Tea Party still offers no constructive ideas to benefit the country. Instead, it continues to issue a stream of denunciations whose main purpose is to deceive and mislead for political advantage. The latest example of this political tactic is found in Phil Gingerella’s letter to the editor on July 14.
Mr. Gingerella points out that President Obama used the summer recess to bypass the Senate confirmation process and appoint Dr. Donald Berwick to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Based on his previous letters, Mr. Gingerella is implying that President Obama thereby engaged in subterfuge, but using a Congressional recess to make political appointments has been done by past Presidents. As far as I know, Mr. Gingerella never objected in the Westerly Sun to the 171 recess appointments made by George W. Bush.
As he and others in the Tea Party, including the ubiquitous Sarah Palin, have done many times before, Mr. Gingerella attempts to portray health care reform as a way to impose a “socialistic health care system” on the American people when, according to the Tea Party, we already have a system in place that is working just fine. In particular, the Tea Party claims that “life and death rationing” of drugs and medical procedures is “in store for us under Obamacare” and cites selected portions of comments made by Dr. Berwick during a 2008 speech to British physicians as confirmation of this assertion.
What Mr. Gingerella fails to mention is that, for years, insurance companies have employed de facto rationing of health care when using cost benefit analyses in coverage decisions.
On June 24, 2009, former CIGNA senior executive Wendell Potter acknowledged, when he testified before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, that individuals routinely lose their coverage when they get sick and small businesses are often dropped by their insurers when medical claims exceed expectations. Such testimony, not a socialist vision, is what Dr. Berwick was referring to when he was quoted by Mr. Gingerella: "The decision is not whether or not we will ration care -- the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open. And right now, we are doing it blindly."
The results of “blind” health care are starkly revealed by Erin N. Marcus, M.D., a general internist and associate professor of clinical medicine at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine when she says, “There's the middle-aged mechanic with blood in his stool who can't get a colonoscopy because he lacks the $1,000 needed to pay the upfront cost. The cancer patient waiting months to see the specialist for treatment at the jam packed, over-subscribed charity clinic. The lines of people waiting around the block to see a first year medical student at a health fair because they see this as their only opportunity to get treatment, when the purpose of the fair is really just to offer some basic screening tests.”
Dr. Marcus goes on to cite some of the studies that demonstrate how the system the Tea Party wants to see perpetuated distributes health care to Americans. The Kaiser Health Foundation revealed that “six of 10 respondents said they or a member of their household delayed or skipped care in the past year due to cost.” Johns Hopkins researchers found that “being uninsured increases a hospitalized kid's risk of death by 60 percent versus that of an otherwise similar hospitalized kid with insurance.” Research by the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey found that “adults younger than 65 who lack health insurance are 40 percent more likely to die than similar people with insurance.”
Under the current system in the United States of America, people who cannot obtain adequate health care sometimes die while people with the same condition, who have access to adequate care, more often live.
While the Obama Health Care Plan as it now stands is not perfect, it is a first step in the direction of finally righting this wrong. I believe that is the change America voted for.
TEA PARTY RHETORIC DOES NOTHING TO IMPROVE THE SITUATION
The Westerly Sun, April 26, 2010
In his letter to the editor on Tuesday, April 13, Mr. Phil Gingerella made an appeal for “civil discourse”. However, in that same letter, Mr. Gingerella once again referred disparagingly to the President of the United States as “the dear leader”, the title given to Kim Jong-Il, the tyrannical leader of North Korea. Does Mr. Gingerella really consider such an association to be “civil”?
Based on previous comments from Mr. Gingerella and others in the Tea Party movement, referring to the President as “the dear leader” probably originates in the oft-repeated claim that the President is a “socialist”. Because he has used this claim numerous times as the basis for an insulting comparison of President Obama to the head of a totalitarian state, I would like to ask Mr. Gingerella two questions:
1. What is a specific policy of the Obama administration that is based on socialism?
2. In terms of being “socialist”, how is this Obama policy different from the policies of previous administrations?
The Tea Party, according to Mr. Gingerella and others in this movement, is a group of Americans who are primarily motivated by a sense of patriotism. But how patriotic is it to repeatedly compare the President of the United States to the brutal leader of a despotic nation? Imagine an American referring to President Roosevelt as “the Fuehrer” during World War II. Such expressions of contempt make disingenuous Mr. Gingerella’s protests of innocence regarding the Tea Party’s well-documented inflammatory rhetoric.
In this same letter, Mr. Gingerella urges Ms. Sellins to “reread the U.S. Constitution”. However, if he were to do so himself, he would see that, contrary to his assertion, the words “innocent until proven guilty” are not to be found in that document. It should also be noted that “innocent until proven guilty” is a right that applies to what happens in a court of law, not to what can or cannot be discussed in the pages of a newspaper.
In his April 14 letter, Mr. Gingerella tells us that the core of the Constitution is the Founding Fathers’ delegating of “power to the people”. However, there is evidence in the Constitution that showed that some of the Founding Fathers actually didn’t trust “the people” very much when they included features such as the Electoral College to elect the President, lifetime appointments for judges and the selection of US senators by state legislatures. Citizens could only vote for members of the House of Representatives and then only if they were property owners.
There can be no doubt that reform is much needed in Washington and perhaps the Tea Party will have some role to play in bringing it about. However, in my opinion, as long as the Tea Party makes claims they fail to explain, directs uncivil comments toward the President of the United States, relies on misinformation to make their case, and inflames public passions with unsubstantiated accusations, any influence it now has will disappear from the American political landscape as quickly as it has materialized.
IF ABORTION IS MURDER, WHY NOT PROSECUTE THE MOTHERS?
The Westerly Sun, February 19, 2009
To claim, as Mr. Itteilag does in his latest letter, that he is not referring to a woman’s reproductive system but only to “unborn children” is like referring to fish as if they don’t live in water.
In acknowledging he has “never suggested that women who have had abortions should be prosecuted for murder” Mr. Itteilag makes it clear once and for all that he does in fact make a distinction between a fetus and a fully developed infant to whom a woman has given birth. Would his primary response to first degree infanticide be to consider the murderer a “secondary victim”, to let justice be limited to the “lifelong burden” the killer would now have to bear, and to hope that he or she would be able to find a “program” to deal with the unpleasant personal effects resulting from his or her crime? Yet, this is what he says should be the consequences for women in the event abortion is ever again made illegal in this country. Why does he advocate such different standards of justice for what he claims to be the same crime?
Perhaps, however, Mr. Itteilag finds common ground for those who agree and disagree with his opinion on this matter when he asks why the decision to have an abortion should be “excruciating”. It is painfully difficult precisely because, as he points out, a fetus is more than “just a lump of flesh”. And I’m sure he is correct when he identifies the anguish the decision causes as arising from “pure motherly instinct”. Abortion terminates the potential for a human life to come into existence. It would be a wonderful day if we could go 24 hours without a single abortion taking place in the world. The only thing more wonderful would be for this to also happen the next day.
However, until that day comes, as long as our society continues to respond with different perspectives and practices to death by miscarriage and death by homicide, it is highly unjust and totally unproductive to directly state or to imply that a woman is lacking in moral or ethical standards when she responds to the needs of her physical, psychological and emotional well-being by having a legal abortion under the relative safety of a doctor’s care.
If abortion is, in Dr. Carey-Kuzmic ‘s view, as much “an intrinsic evil” as homicide, then why does she, like Mr. Itteilag, not judge or condemn a woman who has an abortion to the same degree as we may presume she would judge and condemn a murderer? If abortion is “an intrinsic evil”, then does she consider an obstetrician colleague who performs abortions to be morally equivalent to a serial killer? Does she believe there are various degrees of “intrinsic evil” or could it be that she also makes a distinction between a fetus and an infant after all?