I saw this comment on the Institute for Public Accuracy live blog of Obama's speech, which is just starting.

 

Doug Henwood:

A friend pointed out to me earlier today that the market capitalization--the value of all the outstanding stock--of the publicly traded health insurers is about $150 billion. Add a little premium to sweeten the pot and you could nationalize the lot of them for about $200 billion. The total administrative costs of the U.S. healthcare system, which are greatly inflated by all the paperwork and second-guessing of docs' decisions generated by the insurance industry, are about $400 billion a year. Those administrative costs are about three times what a Canadian-style single payer system would cost. So that means we'd save about $250 billion a year by eliminating the waste caused by our private insurance system.

In other words, the nationalization could pay for itself in well under a year.

That's as simple an explanation as you're going to get. America buying healthcare is roughly the equivalent -- in terms of 'common sense' -- of you going down to Rent-A-Center to get your flat screen television at 400 percent interest.

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Today, December 10 2008 is the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Although Americans, particularly Franklin Roosevelt (whose Four Freedoms speech was taken as inspiration), and Eleanor Roosevelt (who regarded it as her greatest accomplishment), were instrumental in the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the United States has never lived up to the aspirations of that December day in 1948.

Aside from our having recently committed torture and conducted an illegal invasion of a country that did not attack us, we have failed as a country to promote the declared rights in the UDHR, and have failed to ratify many of the conventions that would make those rights the highest law of the land. And that is why I wish to remind everyone what is in the preamble, and for you to pay particular attention to the underlined words:

Now, Therefore THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY proclaims THIS UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction.

As I will show, every organ of American society does not keep this declaration constantly in mind, nor strive to teach and educate Americans about their universal human rights.

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My friends, the last President to raise taxes during tough economic times was Herbert Hoover.

-- John McCain, Oct 7 2008

I continue to see this crap repeated, even here, in spite of the fact that using the series of internet tubes we can actually look this stuff up:

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The Guardian UK tells us

One of Britain's most authoritative judicial figures last night delivered a blistering attack on the invasion of Iraq describing it as a serious violation of international law...

Adding his weight to the body of international legal opinion opposed to the invasion, Bingham said that to argue, as the British government had done, that Britain and the US could unilaterally decide that Iraq had broken UN resolutions "passes belief".

As the Guardian mentions, Lord Bingham isn't the only authoritative judicial figure who has stated that the war against Iraq was a serious violation of international law. Another powerful voice expressing the exact same view was Benjamin B Ferencz, one of the prosecutors at Nuremberg. In addition to condemning the Iraq war as a breach of international law, Mr Ferencz recently stated:

The International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg held that aggression was "the supreme international crime" for which leading planners and perpetrators could be held accountable in an international court of law. The legal recognition in 1946 that war-making was not a national right, but an international crime, was the greatest achievement of the trial and the proudest accomplishment of Robert M. Jackson, the highly esteemed United States Supreme Court judge who served as Chief Prosecutor for the United States. Jackson made clear that if law is to serve a useful purpose "it must condemn aggressions by any other nations, including those who sit here now in judgment." The trial was "part of the great effort to make the peace secure." Subsequent Nuremberg proceedings and Tokyo war crimes tribunals confirmed the profound IMT decision...

The most important accomplishment of the Nuremberg trials was the condemnation of illegal war-making as a supreme international crime.  

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There is some discussion this weekend about the government using bailout money to help General Motors and Ford.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said in a letter to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson that the administration should consider expanding the $700 billion bailout to include car companies.

Generally speaking, the right-wing corporate media blames the trouble at GM and Ford on labor unions. I would probably place some of the blame on the fact that GM doesn't build small hybrid gasoline-electric cars, but instead seems to make all of its money off gas-guzzling pollute-mobiles the size of the USS Nimitz.

However, a good case can be made that General Motors and Ford don't make money because the United States is plagued by the greatest bureaucratic waste of money in the history of the world: our for-profit health insurance industry.

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