Donald Trump has nominated Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, who has made a career of attacking the EPA on behalf of his fossil fuel contributors, to be head of the EPA. Based on his past conduct, including his denial of climate change, Pruitt's mission will be to destroy the EPA, thereby putting the American public at great risk of living in a toxic cesspool, the conditions leading Richard Nixon to create the EPA in the '70's.
Bill Moyers recently gave the keynote speech at Public Citizen's 40th anniversary Gala. In addition to the video of that speech, I have transcribed various excerpts from his excellent speech. During his speech, he made it quite clear that he fully understands the concerns of the occupy Wall Street protesters. Except for the bracketed material each of the following is a quote by Bill Moyers at the Public Citizen 40th Anniversary Gala: While it's important to cover the news, it's more important to uncover the news. One of my mentors at the University of Texas told our class that "news" is what people want to keep hidden; everything else is publicity. And when a student asked the journalist and historian Richard Reeves for his definition of real news, he answered, "The news you and I need to keep our freedoms." - [We now have what historian Lawrence Goodwin has described as] "a mass resignation of people who believe the dogma of democracy at a superficial level, but who no longer believe it privately." - We have a decline of individual self-respect on the part of millions of people. - We hold elections knowing that they are unlikely to produce the policies favored by a majority of Americans. - The property qualifications for federal office that the framers of the Constitution expressly feared as an unseemly veneration of wealth are now openly enforced, and the common denominator a public office, including for our judges, is a common deference to cash. - Barack Obama criticizes bankers as fat cats and then invites them to dine at a pricey New York restaurant where the tasting menu runs to $195 per person. And that's the norm. They get away with it. - Let's name it for what it is: Democratic deviancy, defined downward. - Politics today is little more than money laundering in the trafficking of power and policy. - Why are the occupiers there? They are occupying Wall Street because Wall Street has occupied America - Citizens United: Rarely have so few imposed such damage on so many. - [At the 12 minute mark of the video, Moyers discusses corporate personhood and the laws damaging public welfare resulting therefrom] - The Roberts Court has picked up the mantle: Money first, the public second, if at all. - [At the 14 minute mark: the damage done by Citizens United]
Bill Moyers, Robert Kuttner and Matt Taibbi had a vigorous discussion focusing on the health care "reform" and Wall Street "reform": Moyer's take-home statement from the video:
Truth is, our capitol's being looted, republicans are acting like the town rowdies, the sheriff is firing blanks, and powerful Democrats in Congress are in cahoots with the gang that's pulling the heist. This is not capitalism at work. It's capital. Raw money, mounds of it, buying politicians and policy as if they were futures on the hog market.Robert Kuttner:
[T]hose of us who consider ourselves progressives invested so much in this remarkable figure, Barack Obama. And we read our own hopes into him. We saw him as a potentially great president. We saw this as a potentially transformative moment, I certainly did, where he could've chosen to be the kind of president Roosevelt was. And it turns out that's not who is characteralogically and that's not how he chose to play the moment.Matt Taibbi:
[T]his individual mandate that's going to force people to become customers of private health insurance companies, the Democrats are going to end up owning that policy and it's going to be extremely unpopular and it's going to be theirs for a generation. It's going to be an albatross around the neck of this party . . . The Democrats are in exactly the same position that the Republicans were in once the Iraq War turned bad. All the Republicans have to do now is sit back and watch the Democrats make a disaster out of this health care effort. And they're going to gain political capital whether they're in the right or not. And I think it's a very- it's a terrible thing for the party.
Former CIGNA executive Wendell Potter reports that in the early 1990s health insurance companies devoted more than 95% of every premium dollar to paying doctors and hospitals to reimburse them for health care provided to insurers. Things have changed:
Today, insurers only pay about 81 cents of each premium dollar on actual medical care. The rest is consumed by rising profits, grotesque executive salaries, huge administrative expenses, the cost of weeding out people with pre-existing conditions and claims review designed to wear out patients with denials and disapprovals of the care they need the most.They keep profits high by creatively denying claims, canceling individual policies when insureds get sick, kicking unprofitable insureds out of the insurance pool, and issuing confusing benefit statements to insureds. Potter, with the support of Senator Al Franken, makes the case that Congress should pass legislation requiring health insurers to pay at least 90% of the premiums for real health care. According to Potter, the difference between 81% and 95% is $112 billion a year, which would amount to a significant reduction in premiums or a significant improvement in coverage. Wendell Potter is a voice we can trust when it comes to health care reform. A few months ago, I posted regarding his lengthy interview with Bill Moyers. See, also, Potter's recent interview at MSNBC, indicating that the health care industry owns the U.S. Senate. Potter makes clear that there is no reform taking place with current "reform" legislation.
On Friday's show, Bill Moyers drew upon President Lyndon Johnson's taped phone calls and commentary regarding the Vietnam war, before drawing the following conclusions:
Now in a different world, at a different time, and with a different president, we face the prospect of enlarging a different war. But once again we're fighting in remote provinces against an enemy who can bleed us slowly and wait us out, because he will still be there when we are gone.
Once again, we are caught between warring factions in a country where other foreign powers fail before us. Once again, every setback brings a call for more troops, although no one can say how long they will be there or what it means to win. Once again, the government we are trying to help is hopelessly corrupt and incompetent.
And once again, a President pushing for critical change at home is being pressured to stop dithering, be tough, show he's got the guts, by sending young people seven thousand miles from home to fight and die, while their own country is coming apart.
And once again, the loudest case for enlarging the war is being made by those who will not have to fight it, who will be safely in their beds while the war grinds on. And once again, a small circle of advisers debates the course of action, but one man will make the decision.
The conversations secretly taped by Lyndon Johnson are riveting. They demonstrate that Johnson consistently saw escalation to be a terrible option, yet he ordered it. The entire episode of Bill Moyers Journal can be viewed here.