wedge blog

Is Real Health Care Reform Down for the Count?

House lights dim as the Ref grabs the lowered microphone:

“Ladies and Gentlemen! Ladies and Gentlemen! May I have your attention, please?”

“In ‘The Cable TV Championship for Healthcare Reform’ we have, in the upper left corner, former sportscaster and liberal heavyweight Keith Olbermann.
(Keith bashes his blue boxing gloves together, grinning demonically). [

“In the FAR right corner, we have Fox News Pundit and LDS spokesperson Glenn Beck (cheers and boos as Beck, still seated, makes a futile attempt at an obscene hand gesture with a huge red glove).
\

The venue is packed, and just about everyone has a vested interest in the outcome of this Rumble in this Political Jungle. There’s Max Baucus, Senate Finance Committee chair, with an affable lip-licking lisp as promoter Don King; congressional Republicans, waiting lazily with brooms to sweep up votes after the brawl; and that skinny black guy Obama with the microphone in the middle of the ring, trying to dodge premature punches as he explains the rules of a fair fight.

If you’re like me, watching the health care fight on ‘Pay per View’, try turning down the volume. It doesn’t matter who says what: like most Americans, Olbermann and Beck hit the canvas with the same obese thud.

Hey, it’s not that these guys are idiots–in my mind, only one is an idiot, and you’ll have to guess—it’s that by the time they got into the ring, it was too late to save either of them.

Like 66% of Americans (according to the CDC), Olbermann and Beck are pudgy and pasty and about to die. They can barely raise their gloves. Everyone has overlooked the big reason that health care reform will fail: it’s too late. We are so sick that our entire economy has become dysfunctionally vested in disease.

Genuine reform would gut entire industries: Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Archer Daniels Midland, Frito Lay, Coca Cola, Sonic, TV remote manufacturers, Altria (Philip Morris): bye, bye! What would plus-size clothiers and big Pharma do without the cash cows of obesity and diabetes?

We don’t have the courage to admit that we prefer to work at the ass end of health care, rolling up dollar bills and shoving them into that end of the system because real reform means we’d have to work to follow a plant-based diet and walk to work. Can’t someone just give me a friggin’ pill???

We talk about health care reform in this country as if we have a right to plant our widening hineys on the couch and suck down greasy takeout. If aliens from outer space watched prime time TV ads, they might decide to come back in a couple of generations to be spared the trouble of eradicating us from this gift of a planet. By that time our allergies, immune disorders and erectile dysfunctions might have us all down for the count.

Everyone has a right to be treated for what ails them, but many Americans want to cash in on health care without investing in a healthy lifestyle.

Keith, Glenn, are you listening? Take off the gloves, boys, skip the ‘Thrilla in Vanilla’ and make your way from the political boxing ring to the salad bar.

I am a little ‘sick in the head’ about Walter Cronkite’s passing. The literal translation of Cronkite in Yiddish, the most literal of languages, is ‘sickhead’. As a student of language, Walter had to know.

I became a sickhead for news thanks to Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, and from my mom, who insisted on watching CBS and NBC news back-to-back every weeknight. Huntley was a Montana boy made good. All I can remember about David Brinkley is that he seemed to speak through clenched teeth and that he had excellent posture.

Cronkite was a curiously gutsy guy swallowed by a fleshy mustached sound box. He established the CBS tradition of the caring town crier; glee or grief didn’t have to be in the script: we felt privileged to witness the big fella fighting to maintain composure.

JFK had just visited Montana two months before his assassination; I might have only been seven years old, but I’ll never forget when Walter Cronkite took off his dark framed glasses just after telling us John F. Kennedy had died. I knew the world had changed forever: I saw it on Walter Cronkite’s face.

From Cronkite to Dan Rather to Katie Couric, CBS Evening News is still married to a simple, folksy style, for better or for worse. Network news audiences have gone from better to worse, losing an average of *one million viewers every year.

Cronkite’s competitor Chet Huntley died a few months after his return to Montana in 1974, David Brinkley died in 2003. With Cronkite’s passing Friday, network news, once a proud packed three-chimney steam liner, cast off its last anchor and is a dinghy adrift in international shipping lanes–perhaps with Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart at the helm.

The Anchor & Ship

Instead of 23 minutes of news that’s pre-digested, organized and delivered at dinnertime by middle aged white males, there’s an avalanche of fact and opinion, theory and perspective at our fingertips. The wonderful, awful thing is that news and opinion aren’t filtered, boxed and labeled any more. The wrapping changes the contents to suit the specific sickhead who opens the box.

Sometimes I long just to sit down with a Swanson TV Dinner and wait for Walter Cronkite to make sense of the world for me…but that’s just not the way it is today, Saturday June 18th, Two Thousand and Nine.

* http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2009/narrative_networktv_audience.php?media=6&cat=2

Joe Rosetti owns a multimillion dollar company. He has impeccable taste in Western art and an impressive collection of motorcycles. He walks with a swagger and has played the markets for years. In the midst of tough times he built a new headquarters. Joe Rosetti is nobody’s fool.

I’ve been trying for months to convince Joe to put a small percentage of his net worth into some hard assets. I sent what I thought was a very convincing e-mail about using gold and silver as a hedge against possible inflationary times. I thought he’d understand the logic of holding a fistful of private tax-free assets.

Instead, I received a stinging response that gold bugs are basically idiots who are betting on the downfall of western civilization. A tax-free investment that goes from $400 to $900 in 5 to 7 years? So what. “Can that compare to a stock that I bought at $18 a share cashed out at $300 in 18 months?” he almost spit back at me.

I agree with Joe that gold might not be a good investment. And I’d rather not envision the unraveling of our economy, thanks. I just believe that a small amount of precious metals offsets a large portfolio of paper. I presented what I believe to be a logical argument, and Joe responded in kind. We had a simple disagreement, and I stopped trying to pitch him for a lousy 3% commission.

I was surprised when I got an e-mail from Joe recently asking about gold and silver. It was a short message. “I’m looking at precious metals. Now that I’ve seen this You Tube video, I understand the urgency of the situation.”

What did the You Tube guy say that finally swayed my client? After Joe ’s blistering response to my benign inquiry, it must be darn convincing.

It’s worse than convincing. It’s embarrassing. It’s frightening…and just plain weird.

The video, by a discredited Internet radio host, claimed that the US dollar faced extinction and imminent replacement by something he called the ‘Amero’. To prove this point, he claimed personal persecution by the U.S. government as he tapped a poorly made brownish coin on a desktop to prove it was real. “Do you see this tiny letter D?”he asked. “That proves this coin was secretly made by the Denver mint.”

Yeah, right. And the JLo swimsuit I wear means that my girls are as nice as hers.

It was odd that other YouTube videos visible on the website’s sidebar featured different versions of the same conspiracy, often showing entirely different coins. At least these conspirators should get together to decide what the damn thing looks like.
Hal Turner’s YouTube video claims the US government, Canada and Mexico have been conspiring behind everyone’s backs to dismantle currencies in favor of the North American version of the Euro, the Amero. This merger is the first step toward the US, Canada and Mexico erasing our borders: step one to a New World Order.

Can I Order fries with that?

According to Turner, there are 8 hundred million Ameros waiting in China, ostensibly waiting to offset some of our national debt. How were all these coins minted? On the night shift? Assuming each metal coin weighs 1 ounce, how were 27,428,571 tons trucked to waiting cargo ships and secretly loaded and transported, without a peep? Why on earth would a Chinese bank accept them? This insults the nation that invented the abacus (no worries, later Hal Turner insults Jews, too).

Turner forecast that by February 2009 (Note to Hal: revise ticking clock of fiscal doom), the U.S. Treasury secretary would de-monetize the dollar, making it worthless. Your savings, checking, IRA, stocks, bonds, retirement: poof. The commies who run the U.S., Canada, Mexico (and China) will take it away with the stroke of a pen. The only way Americans will get any value, perhaps two cents on the dollar, is if we line up at the bank with wheelbarrows of dollars to exchange for…you guessed it: Ameros.

This solution to our economic woes (explain again how that solves all our problems without creating bigger ones, please?) is aimed squarely at the working class, Turner extolls.

Even more incredible than the Amero is Turner’s advice to Americans. Not only should we buy gold and silver (duh!) but “more importantly, we should transfer whatever funds we have to FOREIGN BANKS and denominate them in British, French or Swiss funds.” Turner never mentions that these currencies are economically tied to the U.S. Dollar and they are also fiat currencies, not backed by precious metals. In an odd caveat, Turner says the Euro is a bad choice, “because it is not backed by anything.” (?)

It frightens me that rational arguments about hedging failed to convince Joe, a man I respect and admire, but a dangerously flawed home movie posted by a discredited reactionary did the trick. When sloppy slogans and scare tactics lure guys like Joe, we are poised for a worse fate than the Amero.

*I changed the name of my client to protect his privacy–his sanity is already in question.

It was midnight in Mumbai as I stepped off the jetway into Chattrapathi Shivaji International Airport last August. I expected vestiges of the British Raj—I just didn’t expect everything to be in English.