A Workers' Comp Deal in NY

    New York has had one of the worst workers' compensation systems in the country. For the past 15 years, New York’s maximum weekly benefit stood at $400—lower than every state except Mississippi and Arizona, not to mention the minimum benefit: $40 a week. Regionally, New York ranks last among nine states (from a high of $1,124 in New Hampshire down to New Jersey’s benefit of $691). The value of that $400 benefit is less than $288 in 1992 dollars. Most of New York’s injured workers receive a benefit that puts them below the federal poverty line for a family of four.

    And most businesses take a powder when it comes to paying workers' comp: Fully 20-30 percent of New York State businesses evade worker’s compensation, according to two recent comprehensive studies (one study by the Fiscal Policy Institute (FPI), which found that 20 percent of businesses evaded the system; a second study by Risk Metrics Corp. pegged the number as high as 30 percent). That adds up to a lot of dollars lost: at least $1 billion (fully 15-20 percent of the premiums that should be paid).

    That's why the deal forged yesterday may change the system for the better--though there is a big "if" in all that. The deal struck between government, business and labor would raise the maximum benefit to $500 by next year, $600 in 2009 and $650 in 2010 and, then, the max would reach two-thirds of the average weekly earnings in the state and stay indexed at that level after 2012. The minimum benefit would go from $40 to $100.

    One problem, I see, is that large numbers of workers in the state will never receive the maximum benefit because they simply don't earn enough money.

    The biggest issue is that the deal also caps the number of weeks that a worker, who is partially or permanently disabled, can receive workers' comp. Here's how it was explained in today's story in The New York Times:

In recent years, business groups have pressed to revamp one provision in particular, which allows some workers with partial disabilities, like a back injury, to receive weekly benefits until retirement age. Insisting that these “permanent” benefits inflate costs and insurance premiums, the groups urged Mr. Pataki and then Mr. Spitzer to copy other states that have capped the number of years that workers can receive such benefits.

In yesterday’s proposed overhaul, such caps would be installed. Workers classified as permanent partially disabled would be limited to 225 weeks to 525 weeks of weekly benefits depending on the severity of their injuries. The Business Council estimated that the average permanent, partial claimant would receive 344 weeks of benefits. They would continue to receive lifelong medical benefits, however.

Business lobbyists say capping the duration of benefits will give injured workers greater incentive to pursue rehabilitation and retraining and to return to work. But some experts on workers’ compensation fear that many badly injured workers would not be able to find a job once their benefits end, and would grow desperate, perhaps turning to welfare.

“The part that concerns me is that the people who have very long duration disabilities are the ones who really need workers’ compensation the most,” said Les Boden, an economist at Boston University School of Public Health who has studied workers’ compensation benefits.

    A part of the deal seems to soften that threat:

At the behest of the A.F.L.-C.I.O, the deal aims to protect permanent, partial claimants through several measures. These claimants, for example, would be allowed to apply for extra weeks of benefits if they could not find a job and faced economic distress. Furthermore, the deal proposes to make it easier for permanent, partially disabled workers to be classified as totally disabled.

    Kudos to Denis Hughes, the state federation president, for making sure that that is part of the deal. But, I think we should be uneasy about giving into the idea that injured workers should be penalized for the sake of the old mantra that it's the only way to make business more "competitive." The fact is that it’s the fraud and profiteering in the insurance industry that adds unnecessary costs to the cost of fair benefits for injured workers. In the past decade, the insurance industry has averaged profits of 9 percent per year (excluding 2001)—while premiums have declined at a rate of 3 percent per year.

A quick look inside the executive suites of three of the largest players in the insurance industry in New York paints a stunning picture.
•    AFLAC CEO Daniel Amos took home $12.8 million in pay and other compensation in 2005. It would take a worker being paid the maximum benefit of workers’ compensation 666 years to equal that amount.
•    CEO Martin Sullivan of AIG raked in $13.7 million in pay and other compensation in 2005. If a worker received the full workers’ comp benefit, she or he would have to live a robust 718 years to equal Sullivan’s 2005 check.
•    And the pauper of the group, Chubb CEO John D. Finnegan earned a paltry $6 million—giving any regular worker living on workers’ comp a huge break: she or he would only have to work 316 years to match Finnegan’s take-home pay.

    Why should a deal be made to take away money that is pennies compared to the vast riches being showered on the very executives who are creating much of the problem?

Baseball Disses Marvin Miller Again

    I know this doesn't rise to the level of war and peace...but the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum’s Committee for Baseball Veterans announced balloting results Tuesday for its 2007 election of players, managers, executives and umpires. And Marvin Miller did not make the cut. As a life-long baseball fan (and, to be upfront, a Yankees' season ticket holder...), it is just an outrage that Miller isn't in the Hall.

   For the casual reader, Miller revolutionized the sport. He was elected to head the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA) in 1966. Without question, he turned the MLBPA into one of the strongest unions in America. He managed to pull together a group of players who, by their nature, saw their success tied to their own individual ability--and he convinced them that only a strong union, where the success of each of them would be tied to collective action, would protect their livelihoods.

    Miller came to the union with a long history in organized labor. HE served as a labor economist for the Machinists' Union and my union, the United Auto Workers. He, then, went on to work for United Steelworkers union and quickly, I would say, rose to be one of the union's best negotiators. His only flaw: he was a huge fan of the N.Y. Giants (just kidding...). By 1968, in just two years, Miller succeeded in raising baseball's minimum salary from $6,000 to $10,000 (the first such raise in over two decades), a precedent that cleared the way for baseball salaries to become the envy of all professional athletes. The cool-headed union chief soon gained a reputation throughout the league as a hard, but well respected, negotiator and player advocate.

    In just two years, Miller was able to move players' salaries from a minimum of $6,000 to $10,000--a huge jump in those days. Management hated him with a passion. Of course, his greatest achievements remain winning the right, in 1973, for players to be able to actually have arbitration for grievances and, then, establishing the right to free agency.

    Miller fell just 10 votes shy of garnering the necessary number to be inducted. At 90 years old, I'm worried that he may not make it to the next election for executives (i.e., non-players), which won't be held next until 2011.

    It's obvious why Miller didn't get there: among the voters on the panel are executives in baseball who still despise Miller because he actually empowered players to stand up against the owners. They won't vote for him out of spite.

    But, frankly, as long as Miller remains outside the Hall of Fame, the rest of the inductees are tarnished. Because the Hall is supposed to celebrate those people--players and non-players--who have had a lasting impact on the game. It's hard to think of any single person outside the lines who changed the game of baseball more than Marvin Miller.

    Shame on the Hall for keeping Miller outside its walls.

Even Paraguay Ready To Reject Neo-Liberalism

    Over the course of many months, I've pointed out that many countries in Latin and South American are rejecting so-called "free trade" and the neo-liberal model it promotes. The evidence: the election of leaders who can perhaps be broadly defined as "populist" but mainly stand out in their belief that the global economic model promoted by the U.S. is not working for hundreds of millions of people.

    What seems to me a further indication of what is transpiring can be found in, of all place, Paraguay. The country's ruling party has held tight on to power since 1947. You might remember Gen. Alfredo Stroessner who held the presidency for almost four decades during which he gave safe haven to ex-Nazis. But, apparently, there is a possibility that a populist could win the presidency. In today's New York Times, you can read the story of Fernando Lugo Mendez, who leads all possible presidential candidates in the polls:

No political party currently in power anywhere in the world has governed longer than the Colorado Party here, not even the Kim family’s Communist dynasty in North Korea. But a charismatic Roman Catholic bishop recently suspended by the Vatican is threatening that hegemony and has emerged as the front-runner for next year’s presidential election.

Known as “the bishop of the poor,” Msgr. Fernando Lugo Méndez has been strongly influenced by liberation theology, which emerged in Latin America in the 1960s and contends that the Roman Catholic Church has a special obligation to defend the oppressed and downtrodden. But he is reluctant to position himself on the political spectrum, saying that he is interested in solutions, not labels.

“As I am accustomed to saying, hunger and unemployment, like the lack of access to health and education, have no ideology,” he said in an interview here. “My discourse, my person and my testimony are above political parties, whose own members are desirous of change and want an end to a system that favors narrow partisan interests over those of the country.”

    The church and the government are doing everything possible to keep him off the ballot because they are a man who holds these beliefs:

Monsignor Lugo, 55, is a spellbinding orator in both Spanish and Guaraní, the indigenous language spoken by the peasants and urban poor who make up a majority of the population in this landlocked country of 6.5 million. In speeches, he rails against corruption and injustice, saying, “There are too many differences between the small group of 500 families who live with a first-world standard of living while the great majority live in a poverty that borders on misery.”

    The rest of the story is here. An election to watch.

U.S. Not Credible on Iran--More

    Yesterday, I wrote about doubts international diplomats have about the charges the U.S. is leveling against Iran. The posting yesterday referred to a piece in the Los Angeles Times. Today, The NYTimes mimics the theme. Hey, I'm not complaining--if we can get the mainstream media to not roll over whenever the president makes claims about Iran a la the lies around Iraq, maybe we can avoid another fiasco.

    The piece today relates to a raid that got much attention and was used by the Administration to fuel more saber-rattling against Iran:

A raid on a Shiite weapons cache in the southern city of Hilla one week ago is providing what American officials call the best evidence yet that the deadliest roadside bombs in Iraq are manufactured in Iran, but critics contend that the forensic case remains circumstantial and inferential.

The new evidence includes infrared sensors, electronic triggering devices and information about plastic explosives used in bombs that the Americans say lead back to Iran. The explosive material, triggering devices, other components and the method of assembly all produce weapons with an Iranian signature that has never been found outside Iraq or southern Lebanon, where Hezbollah is believed to have used weapons supplied by Iran, the Americans say.

But critics assert that nearly all the bomb components could have been produced in Iraq or somewhere else in the region. Even if the evidence were to establish that Iran is the source, they add, that does not necessarily mean that the Iranian leadership is responsible.

    The rest of the piece is here. This is the old story of the boy who cried wolf: anything the U.S. says now in terms of claims about Iran will be--and should be--viewed skeptically because of this Administration's fabrications about the Iraq war.

    Here's something I noticed, whether sinister or not: the headline of the print version of the Times
says, "U.S. Says Raid in Iraq Supports Claim on Iran, but Doubt Persists." But, the web version of the article drops the last three words, removing, at least from the headline, words that would cast more doubt on the claim.

Surprise: U.S. Intel on Iran Wrong

    This shouldn't surprise anyone but it's sad that this story in today's Los Angeles Times isn't banner news in every paper:

U.N. calls U.S. data on Iran's nuclear aims unreliable

Tips about supposed secret weapons sites and documents with missile designs haven't panned out, diplomats say.

By Bob Drogin and Kim Murphy, Times Staff Writers

Although international concern is growing about Iran's nuclear program and its regional ambitions, diplomats here say most U.S. intelligence shared with the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency has proved inaccurate and none has led to significant discoveries inside Iran.

The officials said the CIA and other Western spy services had provided sensitive information to the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency at least since 2002, when Iran's long-secret nuclear program was exposed. But none of the tips about supposed secret weapons sites provided clear evidence that the Islamic Republic was developing illicit weapons.

"Since 2002, pretty much all the intelligence that's come to us has proved to be wrong," a senior diplomat at the IAEA said. Another official here described the agency's intelligence stream as "very cold now" because "so little panned out."

The reliability of U.S. information and assessments on Iran is increasingly at issue as the Bush administration confronts the emerging regional power on several fronts: its expanding nuclear effort, its alleged support for insurgents in Iraq and its backing of Middle East militant groups.

    This story will, of course, piss of the Administration because it will undercut its saber-rattling.

 

Hedge Fund Workers Sue

    Most of the attention on hedge funds has focused on the enormous amount of money the funds control--outside any regulation. But, turns out hedge funds are no different than other employers when it comes to treating their workers. Today's Wall Street Journal has a story that describes a number of employment lawsuits (surprise, hedge funds are not unionized):

Hedge-Fund Traders' New Battle: the Boss
As Assets Soar, So Do Employment Lawsuits, Just Like Widget Firms
By ANITA RAGHAVAN and PETER LATTMAN

Hedge-fund managers are known for their rough-and-tumble trading style. They're also getting feisty about fighting employment disputes.

That's what Harry Cohen found out when he sued hedge fund NorOdin Investment Management LP in a Connecticut federal court in July. The portfolio manager alleged that he was unfairly fired and denied part of his bonus for two years.

NorOdin fired back, claiming in an answer to the lawsuit that Mr. Cohen was sacked because of "egregious misuse" of a company laptop computer. The fund said it found data on the computer regarding Mr. Cohen's former hedge-fund employer, including scanned personal documents of its employees such as passports, credit cards and work permits. (Read NorOdin's answer to the complaint.)

    To be clear, the lawsuits described in the story were not brought by the janitor or the secretary but by well-compensated members of the hedge fund. But, it's kind of interesting that employment-at-will doctrines are being tested even in this secretive industry.

Bush Is Over

    I don't need to say much more. Check out this website:

http://www.bushisover.org/gallery.htm

U.S. "Free Trade": Death, Drugs and Despair in Colombia

    Pedro Arenas is not a person that most of the elites in the U.S.—in the mainstream media, inside the Beltway think-tanks, and in elected positions on Congress—would meet in order to understand the real crime of so-called “free trade.” For the elites, so-called “free trade” is an unassailable concept, something that is as natural and obvious as the sun rising in the east and setting in the west. But, for hundreds of thousands of Colombians like Arenas, so-called “free trade” is a question of life and death. And, in our name, our government—Republicans and potentially key Democrats—is pushing to sign death warrants for Colombians in the guise of a so-called “free trade” agreement between our two countries.

 

    This might strike some as a bit hyperbolic. But, the proposed deal would, at the very least, push thousands of farmers off their lands. And, as likely, empower the paramilitary death squads that have flourished, in part through the U.S. financing of the “war on drugs, but also via the strengthening of the powerful business interests who fund some of the most violent political forces in Colombia. Here is the tale, in relative brevity, of the intersection between so-called “free trade,” political violence, economic violence and drug cultivation.

    Background: In 2003, President Bush announced negotiations for something called the Andean Free Trade Agreement, which was supposed to be negotiated with Colombia, Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia. But, new, populist governments in Ecuador and Bolivia ( in November 2006, Ecuadorans elected Rafael Correa as their new president; Evo Morales was chosen to lead Bolivia in December 2005), rejected any further NAFTA/CAFTA-style, so-called “free trade” agreements. So, Colombia and Peru forged ahead on their own. Bush signed the deal with Colombia last November—just two weeks after the elections in which dozens of new Democratic members of Congress were elected, partly on economic platforms that rejected NAFTA-type so-called “free trade.”

    Colombia is the most dangerous place to live if you are a union leader, activist or member: 3,000 have been murdered since 1985, according to an annual survey of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions.

    But, as Pedro Arenas demonstrated to me when I met him in my office in New York, you don’t have to be a trade unionist to be targeted for death. Arenas isn’t a union member but he has been hounded by the para-military death squads a number of times over the past decade. Why? He has worked for many years organizing peasants in the south-central Guaviare region of Colombia—he hails from the town of San Jose, which is at the frontier of the Amazon. He has been at the forefront of the criticism of U.S. military policy in Colombia. He was elected to the San Jose City Council as an independent in 1992, ran and was elected to regional assembly in 1995 and, then in 2002, was elected to Colombia’s National Congress.

    But, he is not running for re-election. Why? Because of the threats from the para-military right wing. He simply does not want to endanger his wife and child. It is the only time in our long conversation that his shoulders dropped, he looked down at the table and his voice changed from firm and animated to weary and solemn.

    The Colombia Free Trade Agreement. What would it do? The FTA’s grant of duty-free U.S. access for flowers and certain other commercial-scale agri-export crops will certainly put pressure on Colombia to expand agribusiness plantations for such exports. These plantations have been a disaster for the regular farmer. Indeed, under pressure in the 1990s from international lending organizations, Colombia implemented a program of “economic openness,” which unleashed a tide of traditional cereals, rice and oats pouring into the country. As a result, 1.1 million hectares of cultivated land were lost. Arenas says that 300,000 farmers, then, turned to cultivating coca. “So, now, with FTA, they want to lower every tariff to zero which will devastate every farmer and make them grow coca,” says Arenas.

    Foreign investor rights—a typical pro-corporate, so-called “free trade,” measure—would tighten the grip that large corporations have on the country’s natural resources and launch a large-scale plundering of those resources such as timber and minerals. Without a government willing to nationalize such resources or, at the very least, make sure that the benefits of the commercial exploitation are widely spread, you can be sure that huge riches will flow to a handful of people, while most of the population is left with pennies.

    The upshot: the so-called “free trade” deal would likely displace hundreds of thousands of poor rural Colombians from their lands, sending them into far deeper economic despair—and forcing many of them to work for the very groups that violently displaced them from their lands. The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs conducted a study of the effects of the 1990s economic “liberalization” and concluded that such a move led to a 35 per cent drop in employment. You can be sure that the proposed so-called “free trade” deal will wreak similar havoc.

    As Public Citizen notes:

“Increased Drug Production is Linked to Past NAFTA-style Agricultural Trade Policies on Which the Peru and Colombia FTAs are Based: We do not need to rely on experts’ opinions regarding how the proposed FTAs will lead to increases in drug production. Unfortunately, there is a factual record demonstrating the phenomena. After NAFTA drove down commodity prices in Mexico and eventually 1.3 million Mexican campesinos were driven out of the business of growing corn and beans, many Mexican farmers turned to illegal drugs to compensate for lost income. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection Office reports that in NAFTA’s first decade, marijuana seizures doubled at the U.S.-Mexico border.”

    Let’s not forget the drug companies. Pharmaceutical companies will get exclusive patent rights, getting 20-year monopoly rights to market drugs in Colombia—the very kind of provisions that have driven up drug prices in the U.S. Generic drugs will effectively be banned for ten years—putting tremendous economic pressure on the health care system in Colombia.

    Put simply, the deal would benefit business and political interests tied to the paramilitary forces. If you have any doubts about the links between the government and these right-wing paramilitary forces, check this out. In November 2006, two powerful senators and two members of Congress—allies of President Uribe – resigned because of evidence they had conspired with paramilitary groups. The Uribe government was rocked this past Monday when its foreign minister resigned: 

The foreign minister of Colombia resigned Monday as the government of President Álvaro Uribe, the Bush administration’s closest ally in South America, struggled with a scandal that has disclosed ties between paramilitary cocaine-trafficking squads and some of Mr. Uribe’s most prominent political supporters.

The resignation of Foreign Minister María Consuelo Araújo came days after Mr. Uribe expressed support for her. But fallout from the arrest last week of five politicians, including her brother, Senator Álvaro Araújo, on charges of working with paramilitary squads in a kidnapping case related to the scandal, made her presence in the cabinet untenable.

Hours after the resignation, the president appointed Fernando Araújo, who recently escaped after six years in rebel captivity, to replace Ms. Araújo. The two are not related.

    This corruption is clearly a threat to the FTA, as well as additional U.S. military support for Colombia.

But the support for Mr. Uribe’s government is coming under fresh scrutiny as the United States Congress weighs approval of a trade agreement and a request from the Bush administration for $3.9 billion in military and antinarcotics assistance for Colombia, which is the largest recipient of American aid outside of the Middle East and Afghanistan.

   

The State of Play: since the November elections, there has been a sense that the Colombia deal was in some trouble, partly due to the Uribe government’s growing scandal regarding ties to drug traffickers and partly due to the election of many new U.S. Democratic Party members who are skeptical of so-called “free trade.” In a letter to U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab that focused mostly on the lack of labor standards in the pending so-called “free trade” deal with Peru, a number of House and Senator members also said that, “Our concerns apply to the Columbia agreement as well.” Human rights organizations believe that the Colombia so-called “free trade” deal will worsen the plight of already besieged citizens.

    The opposition also comes from Afro-Colombian representatives, who wrote to Rep. Charles Rangel:

In Colombia, the problems associated with trade go far beyond labor rights. As the Washington Post recently reported, members of Colombian President Álvaro Uribe’s own political party have been arrested for coordinating massacres of rural communities with illegal armed paramilitary groups. These massacres are directly related to trade. In many cases, these deeds have served to accelerate the concentration of ownership of the best lands in the hands of paramilitary leaders or their front groups and to significantly weaken land rights, facilitate natural resource exploitation, weaken our communities’ environmental rights and facilitate the advance of development projects into our territories.

In the Colombian context, politically powerful export industries such as “African” palm oil, timber, mining and oil interests are directly benefiting from, and undoubtedly funding and coordinating, the systematic use of violent force to displace Afro-Colombian communities from their traditional territories in order to expand their exports to the U.S. Side agreements on labor will not protect us from these abuses.

If the U.S.-Colombia trade agreement were to be ratified without a complete overhaul, including the renegotiation of the agriculture and investment sections, the situation will deteriorate even more rapidly. The investment provisions would embolden export-oriented natural resource extraction corporations, while the agricultural rules would undermine rural economies. This lethal combination would result in the displacement of millions of poor rural Colombians from their lands, worsening their economic and social conditions and leaving them with no option other than to work for those groups that have violently displaced them from their lands and appropriated their natural resources, or to become involved in the informal or even illegal economic sectors. We must break this cycle.

    A coalition of Colombian organizations—the Colombian Action Network in Opposition to Free Trade and FTAA or Recalca) also wrote to Rangel in January  making clear that, “The pitfalls of the agreement cannot be remedied merely by the incorporation of  “side letters” or by a partial renegotiation. We have indicated, and continue to insist, that we oppose seeking competitiveness in world markets at the expense of the deterioration of labor standards and environmental degradation, as the Colombian government is proposing.”

    As chair of the Ways and Means Committee, Rangel plays a central role in the fate of trade deals. To his credit, he has pushed Schwab for stronger labor rights provisions. They agreed to have their staff try to work out an agreement by February 19th—but, according to Inside U.S. Trade (a very pricey subscription-only newsletter), the negotiations collapsed.

    But here is where this gets tricky. Rangel (FWIW, he’s my Congressman) also made clear, according to Inside U.S. Trade that “he sought language on labor rights that would not “damage” the existing U.S. trade agreements, and would set minimal standards to show the United States wants to protect the rights of minors and women. Beyond that general comment, Rangel did not specify what he would consider an acceptable compromise on labor, but he made it clear it would have to be between the positions staked out by business and labor groups.”

    In my opinion, Rangel is seeking a middle position for a situation that does not warrant compromise. You can not make this so-called “free trade” agreement--or any other such deal--better by tinkering around the edges. Pedro Arenas says, “we have to completely reopen the negotiations of the agreement.” Arenas views the deal with Colombia as much worse than NAFTA or the Central American Free Trade Agreement because it is far more sweeping in the invasion of the country’s sovereignty, as I’ve detailed above.

    Is Colombia an extreme example? Advocates of so-called “free trade” will no doubt say, “well, we don’t support death squads but Colombia is not typical.” The problem is that Colombia’s conditions can simply be plotted on a spectrum of bad to worse when it comes to the consequences of so-called “free trade.” There may not be roving paramilitary death squads in Mexico (though political violence is still a fact of life there, too), Guatemala, Honduras, or other countries. But, the underlying dynamic for so-called “free trade” is corrosive: driving down wages and seeking the lowest cost, compliant labor pool possible. Period. And, so, it is troubling that Rangel would be arguing for an approach that does not "damage" existing U.S. trade deals. These are damaged deals--if you are one of the millions of workers here and abroad who have suffered the loss of jobs, declining wages and a work environment where all the power rests with corporations.

    It’s the reason that, as Democrats, we need to drive a stake through so-called “free trade” and engage in a totally different trade policy. Don’t be fooled by the nonsense of the marketing phrases like “free trade” (it doesn’t exist) and “global economy” or the attacks by the economic elites against “protectionists.”

    There is nothing new about trade—we’ve traded among countries and civilizations for the entire course of human history, sometimes by delivering goods that took weeks and months to reach their destination, whereas today such trade can happen in the blink of an eye. What the economic, political and media elites want us to believe is that somehow something magical has happened requiring that we accede to economic realities that are natural and unavoidable.

    But, that is utter nonsense. Economics is not nature. It’s a question of power and politics. And the central question is: what are the rules under which trade takes place? This is not difficult to figure out, if you accept, as I do, two basic principles:

1. The ultimate goal for trade is to improve the lives of communities around the world.

2. If you believe in #1, then, any trade agreement should have at its core, not as after thoughts and “side letters,” the principals of democracy, safe and fair-waged work and the preservation of the environment—for the people of all the countries involved in the deal. Once those principles are laid down as the underpinning of a trade deal, then, we ask how do corporations fulfill those goals. Right now, it’s the exact opposite.

 

    I do not minimize how difficult it will be to reverse the current economic rules. But, if you take a look at what happened in our elections in 2006 and, then, look at the election of many populist leaders in Central and South America who were chosen, in large part, in response to the economic plundering, poverty and inequality that so-called “free trade” and “liberalization” leads to, I am optimistic that we are making some progress in reshaping the debate.

    That is why we must oppose the Colombia so-called “free trade” pact and push for Democrats to scuttle the deal. Not just for the sake of our country’s citizens but in defense of our brethren in Colombia.

Creeping Single Payer? Why Not

    Be careful out there, friends, the bogeyman is lurking: single-payer healthcare. Or so The Wall Street Journal warns its readers today in a piece focused on the inevitable rise in health care costs--inevitable under the dumb system we have today.

As pressure grows for the government to pick up more of the nation's health-care tab, new data show its contribution is already at 45% and is expected to approach 50% within 10 years.

The government's widening role in financing health care stems from the recent expansion of Medicare to include prescription drugs, the growth of relatively new initiatives like the State Children's Health Insurance Program, increased spending by enrollees in programs like Medicaid -- which covers many of the sickest patients -- and cutbacks in employer-sponsored health coverage.

Overall, health spending in the U.S. is expected to double to $4.1 trillion by 2016, consuming 20% of the nation's gross domestic product, up from the current 16%, according to a new federal study. By then, the study predicts, the government will be paying 48.7% of the nation's health-care bill, up from 38% in 1970 and 40% in 1990.

The stark projections come amid increasing ferment over health care in the states and Washington. They could bolster the argument of some analysts that the U.S. is creeping toward a single-payer system in a disorganized, piecemeal way. Under such a system, the government essentially pays for health care and covers the cost by collecting taxes and premiums.

    I added the emphasis. This reminds me of the Red-scare poster, which I have a copy of, that asks ominously, if you are breeding Bolsheviks in your bathroom because of a lack of proper hygiene (an ad for wash towels). Anyway, we wouldn't be in the mess described by the article--that we will consume 20 percent of the gross national product on health care by 2016--if we already had a single-payer system. If that's what the Journal is warning (and the rest of the article has some hand-wringing about the demise of the "free market" system in health care, then, I say let's get cracking now, why wait?

Corruption in Colombia--FTA Doomed?

    The government of Colombia is apparently riddled with people tied to the para-military forces and death squads. Or so it appears from the resignation of a top Colombian official:

The foreign minister of Colombia resigned Monday as the government of President Álvaro Uribe, the Bush administration’s closest ally in South America, struggled with a scandal that has disclosed ties between paramilitary cocaine-trafficking squads and some of Mr. Uribe’s most prominent political supporters.

    This episode, and others surfacing almost daily in Colombia, may slow down the rush to cram another so-called "free trade" agreement down the throats of another country in the Americas. We can only hope.