NFL = No F&cking Limbaugh!

That acronym has been keeping my lips curled up around the edges since yesterday!  I am ecstatic that the NFL has made what I would call a real, American business decision, one that respects the rights of all Americans to have their own opinion.  One where business appreciates the fact that its success is based on the participation of people of all politcal stripes.  It was an Olympic decision, in that it ignores the politcal climate in the name of sport.  Let's put politics aside and just play ball!  Since the arrival of Rove, politics has been injected into every facet of our lives and any decision a person makes has become political.  These decisions, virtually any decision, are seen as evidence of a person being in one party or another, and this revelation is generally made resembling an insult.  Today, the NFL has made a very clear decision to not perpetuate the notion that everything one does will fly the colors of their party and be a political statement, meaning an affront to anyone who disagrees.

When I was young my father advised me that businesses seldom takes political stands.  The owners might, of their own, but their business would usually be free of any partisan inclinations.  This was because a business could only thrive if it was able to reach customers of both parties, and people of no party, or people from a fringe party.  At the end of the day, the business didn't want to change your mind, they wanted your money.  They valued every customer equally.

Non-partisan existence seems to have evaporated because today every decision gets painted by political alarmists.   Today, many businesses are very clear about whom they support.  But we, the people, have lost our voice by continuing to support these entities.  Despite having an opinion opposed to those espoused by a business, we have continued to support those businesses and now, it seems, there are few businesses that stick to commerce.  A prime example of this is CitiBank, whose recent reported losses are also contributing to a smile on my face. 

Citi had the audacity to channel funds from the Bailout to an organization that opposed organized labor.  They took federal money, money originating in people of all political stripes, and made a partisan stand.  What is most agregious about this is that CitiBank has barely any employees that are part of any union!  Being an institution originating in the NorthEast, they most assuredly have union members' money and owe their past success to those comfortable wages negotiated by unions.  But, if one believes they are too big to fail, then it is problematic for a union to call for their members to remove their monies from this politcal assassin.  Or is it?!?  Maybe it is time we put our money into places that, if they are unable to share our values, can at least respect us enough not to take us for granted.

The NFL has taken a bold step in declaring they will not welcome Limbaugh into their ranks if he insists on broadcasting devisive rhetoric.  The NFL has Republicans in its ranks, mostly at the top with the owners, but it also has its Democrats, mostly on the field, and it probably has a good mixture of asses and elephants among the coaches.  Looking through the stands, it is probably a broad mixture of people in the crowds as well, having teams throughout the nation, in Red States and Blue States.   What the NFL acknowledges and respects, is that its revenues come from everyone, and they are all Americans.  It is a thoughtful reminder of what made this nation great.  The NFL is declaring, in a very real way, that "United We Stand", as we all do when they play the national anthem before the games, and "we" means everyone.      

This is just a quick proposition.  It needs some fleshing out and discussion, and that's what makes TPM worth visiting, the discussion. We hear about the payment schedule of Medicare and how unfair it is, but we seldom talk about the payment schedule of the insurance companies, who set their own prices, reimbursing providers as they see fit and leaving the providers to write off the "loss" or bill the patient, who I will refrain from calling the customer.  Maybe we should call the patient the mark in this con game of insurance.  At any rate, what if the government simply paid the average of the fees paid by the insurance companies, thereby allowing the insurance companies to set the costs based on their own criteria  This would make the government a moderate in the game of insurance when it comes to paying the providers.  Some insurers would pay more, and some less.  If every provider paid the same, then so would the government insurance.  Now how that average was calculated might need some consideration.  Average all prices, or average of all services paid to allow a majority insure'rs quantities to adjust the average with an insurer who seldom provided that same service.

It seems this strategy could help separate the providers from the insurance, because right now, big medical providers and insurance appear to be bedfellows and strange ones at that.  But if the prices for services were related to the prices paid by insurance companies, then any objections  providers would have would need to be made versus the insurance companies rather then the government program  This proposition takes responsibility for prices out of the hands of the government, but still gives the government a fair price.  It would seem to me that the providers would rather argue with the government in this matter then private insurers.  I mean, how successful have they been in naming their own price for their own services?  Insurers have set the prices.  Insurers set the price and the premium deciding who pays them how much and how much they pay others.  It's really a great gig.  I want to buy a car like that.  I just go in and tell them, as I take the keys and drive away, that the "usual and customary" price for the car is $10,000, although the sticker says $17,000 and leave them no recourse from me other then to call my office and leave a message, or write a strongly worded letter.  But I digress.

Efficiencies with a government run program would still enable them to keep premiums down.  The government would not need marketing or exhorbitant CEO salaries, or shareholder profits, or a host of other necessities incumbent on private insurance.  So the program could be economical and related to free market prices, and I laugh as I think of that invisible hand helping consumers by keeping prices down.  Is it one of the "good hands" in the insurance world, I wonder?  At any rate, I think this idea can appear reasonable to the people and something the insurance companies might support or at least have no rational defense, although I do not think that would stop them from objecting.  But the providers might have to reconsider their alliance with the insurers, and it's the oldest strategy known to man, divide and conquer.  We could get a public option, government run program, and leave the providers and insurers to fight among themselves.

We are all asking ourselves, why is the United States not getting its money's worth out of Aghanistan?  I think we can, but we need a draft to really profit from these ventures and a military that is self-sustaining.  What we have instead is this corporate boondoggle that has a one-way benefit for corporations and does nothing for this country, here at home.  Now, before I get accused of being pro-war, please know I am not convinced we need a massive, permanent presence in Afghanistan.  I think we should have our Special Forces doing the work with a few support posts.  We should eliminate Al-quaeda and get Bin Laden.  When he is brought to justice,  we will have completed our mission.  It's clear.  It's concise, and it's really about the only point justifying why we should care about what happens to an unsophisticated, tribal region barely comprising anything representative of a nation in the 21st century.  We should probably care about the drug traffic too, but that's the poison killing Eastern Europe, who has never been warmly received in the US anyway.  Before I get too side-tracked, let's talk about getting our money's worth out of this war.

We have all heard the arguments about World War II and how it was the War that brought this nation out of the Great Depression.  World War II put people to work!  Of course, it was also convenient we were pretty much the only nation with a working industry to rebuild Europe at the time, their having pretty much levelled each other's cities and factories in that conflict.  But whichever reason one chooses, and it was probably both, the means of recovering from the Depession was employment.  So why are we not getting that benefit from our latest war?  I mean, if Reagan could replicate a war-time economy without an actual war, why can't we get it done with two?!?  Ask Thomas Friedman!   

What has happened is that we have shipped traditional military jobs overseas.  Rather then have American military personnel supporting the troops, we have foreign workers providing services.  The bulk of money passing through most companies goes to payroll.  So if we put billions of dollars into a company and they spend the money paying foreign workers to do the work, we get no return on investment for the US. None of the payroll money goes into this economy. In fact, even the companies that were American, as the perfectly reasonable and natural result of being a profit-driven, multi-national corporation, have gone overseas.  So we are losing the entry of those profits into the US economy as well.  Take Halliburton, the company formerly run by our former Vice President whose name causes me to see red and so will go unmentioned.  Halliburton has profited enormously from the wars.  It's raking in so much money in the Middle East, it has opened a "Second" headquarters in the United Arab Emirates, a boutique nation that resembles the Cayman Islans in a lot of ways, but without being an actual island surrounded by the ocean.  This tax shelter is now the home of not just the "Second" headquarters, but also the home of it's CEO.

The greatness of the US was at an apex after World War II because everyone was working, or had worked for a couple years at least during World War II.  Now we have two world wars and no work.  I express the wars as world wars because most of the players in the first two were fighting with us early in these conflicts, except now, due to a complete and total diplomatic collapse, we fight in Iraq alone now, having lost the Coalition of the Willing, and very few nations remain fighting with us in Afghanistan.  To the military industrial complex, the war profiteers, this is most excellent.  They would prefer NOT to share the spoils of war, but to the American people it puts an even greater burden on us, and that burden is soon to be increased exponentially, if we do escalate the war in Afghanistan.

The question I am asking is, since most would agree we are going to turn up the heat in Afghanistan regardless of the public oppositions to it, why don't we spread the wealth around and put the American people to work like we did in the middle of the last century.  Get people into a military that cooks its own food, cleans its own latrines, builds its own bases top to bottom, inside and out, and completely supports itself?  There was a time when getting a military contract meant you won the award because you had the best product.  Getting your hands on any military equipment was getting something of quality.  Today, the award goes to the lowest bidder and getting something from the military is to know that whoever decided buying this piece was worth the money was probably influenced in many spurious ways to come to that decision because the product is blatantly a piece of crap.

It just feels like someone else is fighting these wars, not the American people.  It seems like someone with dogged determination and the time to do so could reveal just how many jobs are given to foreign nationals to fight our wars.  How many contractors are actually American entities and how many are clearly not, and how many are standing on both sides of the For-U-or-Against-Us Line.  Isn't that how Bush described people, as for us or against us?  So is it a stretch to use that measure when looking at these contractors, whether they are helping or hurting the cause by taking more money then they are worth and providing products far from anything resembling quality?  Wasn't the benefit of war related to the money spent fighting that war because those monies circulated into the American economy?

This post rambles a bit and could certainly use a few footnotes and references and so forth, but it's intent is more of a starting point then an all-encompassing piece, to answer the question, "If wars are good for an economy, why are we suffering so greatly when we are involved in two?"  I think the answer is that our only involvement in the wars is only in paying for them and not in actually getting the jobs and profits cycled back to the country of origin, the USA.  It is within that cycle that a nation achieves economic benefits from war, not in sending those jobs overseas.  What we have in this war is a reflection of our present state of affairs with the rest of our commerce.  We have shipped the jobs overseas and the only ones profitting from these enterprises are the wealthy, who now pay less taxes then ever and have probably moved their homes overseas as well.  Of course, this argument presuposes there is a just reason for fighting these wars in the first place, but I am surpassing any moral imperative to make an economic argument, and doesn't economics thrive in a reaml devoid of morality anyway?