I'm not sure that if you encourage narcissism, short-sightedness in the marketplace that this can have zero affect on the person in the public square.

Posted at July 23, 2008 1:05 AM in response to Not the Marketing Model

Can you please repost reformatted with the random line breaks eliminated. Cut and paste into a word processor (there are free ones around), spot the line breaks, the past pack into your edited post. If you are posting from a smart phone, you might want to try editing on a more old fashioned computer. I think you have spotted something worth discussing; I don't think it is new, but I agree there is an upswing. You may want to look at how much of the money from Plan Columbia is required to be spent on U.S. mercenaries to get another piece of the puzzle. But PLEASE REFORMAT.

Thanks

Posted at July 20, 2008 12:35 PM in response to Disinformation Campaign by DEA Intended to Threaten Venezuela?

For instance, you write, "In a country founded on black slavery and native genocide..." But these tragic historical elements were not foundational building blocks of the nation. Could we have become a functioning democracy without slavery? And if the Indian Wars had never occurred? Well... yes. Was the country created to advance slavery and persecute Native Americans? No.

Umm we started as 13 colonies and ended as fifty states. Don't know how that gets to NOT be foundational. One of the grievances against England was their blocking the westward expansion.

As to slavery, our being a democracy may not have depended on it, because we were not particularly democratic through much of our history. (Some would argue we still are not. ) But our existence did depend on it. The colonies that were to become America had tobacco, and sugar grown by slaves at the core of their economy. The Northern colonies that did not have huge slave filled plantations depended on raw material from them, and on profits from transporting slave themselves. The triangle trade and all that.

Without slavery or genocide whatever countries were in the geographical space we current occupy would not be called the United States of America. It would consist of multiple nations, possibly with an alternate Mexico that would still have Texas, California and other parts to the Southwest. Our constitution would be different. Our culture would be fundamentally different; it is shaped by slavery and the Indian wars in a million different way. Any counterfactual on these issues is fundamentally different, probably a lot more different from today's U.S. that a Canada that has been heavily influenced by the U.S. presences (and often threat) on their border. Dude, how is that not fundamental, not foundational?

Posted at May 31, 2008 10:02 AM in response to Slippery politics

>Moreover, as I discussed on www.healthbeatblog.com in December, the money that we now pay private insurers to cover their administrative costs, advertising , marketing, exorbitant executive salaries and profits for shareholders adds up to just 4.5 percent of the nation’s $2.2 trillion health care bill.

This is a half truth. Private insurers are like cockroaches. It is not what they eat. It is what they spoil. Our medical system puts in huge efforts filling out multiple insurance forms, fighting insurers for covering stuff they already agreed to cover, pushing medical staff to treat in a profitable rather than unprofitable way by driving patients whose treatment expense exceeds their coverage away. So total administrative savings in switching to single payer are more like 15%. We spend about 30% of our total medical dollar on administration compared to most other nations which spend between 10% and 15% of their healthcare dollar on administration. That is a huge savings.

Posted at April 11, 2008 10:19 PM in response to The Politics of Health Care Reform – Part 2