As progressives have watched in horror and disbelief—can it be possible that the same right-wing fools who gave us Bush/Cheney, the war in Iraq, and its related bag of lies, fraud, raiding of the public treasury and outright criminality, have regained the initiative?—the alleged movement for health care reform has been chopped to pieces and is now threatening to collapse altogether into some fraud tailored to the specifications of big Pharma and big Healthcare. Sarah Palin has accused the new Democratic proposals of providing “death panels” to threaten the life of her Down’s syndrome child (has there ever been so shameless a public figure, willing to use her handicapped child to score political points?), while health care companies like United Health have urged their employees to mob the Democrats’ vaunted town hall meetings and shout them down with their slogans. To top it off, several of these yahoos have shown up at town meetings packing guns—one yo-yo at a recent Obama event with an assault rifle slung over his shoulder was featured in every newscast.
The coup de grace came this week, with both Obama himself and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius saying that the “public option” wasn’t really essential to health care reform, and that co-ops could be a way to go. This was mightily pleasing to both Republicans and that “key” senator from the crucial state of North Dakota, Kent Conrad, who characterized co-ops as a workable compromise that could pass the Senate.
In the midst of the sinking feeling that whatever does emerge as health care reform will be so gutted as to be meaningless (or worse: it turns out that Obama has already made a deal with big Pharma that his health care plan won’t, repeat WILL NOT use the government’s bargaining power to get lower prices for drugs!), two recent proposals seem worth considering. One was posted by Thom Hartmann on Common Dreams August 17. In the form of a letter, it suggested to the president that a simple solution would be: let all who choose to buy into Medicare. No new program to invent. No nonsense about forcing people into something they don’t like. Simply amend Medicare so that
“any American citizen can buy into the Medicare program at a rate to be set by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which reflects the actual cost for us to buy into it….To make it available to people of low income, raise the rates slightly for all currently non-eligible people under 65, to cover the cost of below-200%-of-poverty people. Revenue neutral.”
Seems like a plan to me. Nearly everyone who has Medicare seems to be quite satisfied with it (even the morons who have been ranting at town-hall meetings that they’re dead set against government-controlled health care, most of whom actually have Medicare!). Hartmann’s point is, why limit it to just people over 65? Let everyone buy in, pay for their own coverage until they reach 65, and thus cover everyone who’s dissatisfied with the Health-Care pirates.
The other is a brilliant piece by renowned linguist and activist George Lakoff, who analyzed what’s wrong with the Obama approach so far. In a piece titled “The PolicySpeak Disaster for Health Care,” (commondreams.org, 8/20/09), Lakoff points out what he’s been trying to drum into Democrats for years, the importance of “framing.” The Republicans, by imitating marketing techniques, have long since mastered this stuff. The Democrats seem to think it’s manipulating the public and try, instead, to employ Policy Speak to appeal to the public’s reason. According to Lakoff, this is based in 17th century views that “if you just tell people the policy facts, they will reason to the right conclusion and support the policy.” In other words, rational discussion and logic will persuade people of the rightness of liberal democratic principles. WRONG. As Lakoff points out, even though 80% of the public wants a public plan, calling it the “public option” is a disaster. As cognitive neuroscientists have discovered—and marketers and Republicans, unlike Democrats, have taken into account—you have to appeal to people as they really think, in a way that resonates with them, and inspires them to act. Emotions are a big part of this, and emotions as well as the moral sense must be appealed to (Republicans appeal to emotions in the most calculating, irrational, and truly nefarious ways: “death tax,” “death panels,” “socialized medicine,” even Obama with a Hitler mustache—at the same time he’s accused of being a Commie).
Accordingly, Lakoff suggests a simple narrative, using a simple patriotic title: The American Plan. It would tell the truth, but tell it simply, without fear of appealing to morality:
“Insurance company plans have failed to care for our people. They profit from denying care. Americans care about one another. An American plan is both the moral and practical alternative to provide care for our people.
“The insurance companies are doing their worst, spreading lies in an attempt to maintain their profits and keep Americans from getting the care they so desperately need. You, our citizens, must be the heroes. Stand up, and speak up, for an American plan.”
Lakoff also recommends using other simple, but emotional/moral language and slogans instead of boring “policy speak”: Doctor-patient care; Coverage is not Care; Insurance Company profit-based plans ration care; Doctors care, insurance companies don’t; and so on.
Lakoff also punctures the simple-minded Democrat attempt to avoid the dreaded accusation, “culture wars.” As he notes, the culture war is already on and can’t be ignored. Call the villains and liars out, in public. The president has the biggest bully pulpit in the land. He has to start using it, instead of continuing to make a vain attempt to achieve some longed-for spirit of bipartisanship. He needs to demonstrate some passion, if for no other reason than to counter the evil passions being stirred up by his opponents, and that includes so-called moderates like Senator Chuck Grassley. Grassley displayed no reluctance at all to suggest, on the Newshour recently, that Obama’s plan was a government takeover of all health care and equivalent to socialism. There’s no way to make nice or use logic with such people. Use the power of the presidency, and the power of the Democratic majority, letting the Republicans know that if they wish to come along, fine, but if not, they will be accused of placing their corporate constituents ahead of the majority’s welfare.
I would also add that it’s time the administration started to play hardball with the so-called Blue Dog Democrats. Why should these refugees from conservative districts, along with a few white-bread legislators from small-population states like Montana and North Dakota shape and control the most important legislation of our time? Every Democrat should know that a “public option” (finding another name for it) is critical, that it must be included in any bill that the president will sign, and that failure to support it will be dealt with by means of all the patronage tactics available to the party’s leadership.
Short of these course corrections—and it’s not too late, though the fight now, if Obama has the political and moral courage to engage it, will be long and dirty—the signature initiative of the Obama presidency will go down in flames. With it will go the hopes that the United States might be saved from the military/corporate/privatizing corruption that has engulfed it these last thirty years.
Lawrence DiStasi
Friday, August 21, 2009
Saturday, August 1, 2009
Why Lobbyists Love Health Care Reform
The more we learn about the Democrats’ plan for health care, the more it seems that, though it might help to cover more people—which would be good—it really won’t address the underlying problem. That problem is simply put: as long as health care is a multi-billion dollar industry run not to care for people but to make huge profits, the profit makers will find ways to continue to drive themselves into profit Valhalla, and the public into sickness and ruin.
As confirmation, we have a recent report, by the Associated Press no less, informing us why there will indeed be a health care bill this year, even though the industry, and their Republican (and Democratic) stooges would prefer to keep things as they are. The report—“Lobbyists the silver lining in health care storm?” by Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar—tells us why “the drug industry, the American Medical Association, hospital groups and the insurance lobby are all saying Congress must make major changes this year.” What? THEY want health care reform? How could this be?
The answer is elementary. First, they see the writing on the wall: Joe Sixpack can’t afford health care any more. Second, government programs have “gotten increasingly friendly to private insurance companies,” giving them “major roles as middlemen” in Medicare and Medicaid. You know, like Bush’s great prescription-drug boondoggle for Medicare, called, cynically, Medicare Advantage.
But the real bonanza for these guys is the central requirement, in both House and Senate plans, to require health care for all. That is, the new plan will require everybody to buy coverage. And what will this do? Why it will “guarantee a steady stream of customers subsidized by taxpayers not only for insurers, but for all medical providers.” In other words, 47 million more customers will now have to procure health insurance. And if they can’t afford it—otherwise, why wouldn’t they have it in the first place—good old Uncle Sam, which is the taxpayer, will help them to pay for it. No matter how high the costs go.
Dr. Marcia Angell, who was a guest on Bill Moyers’ show last Friday, said essentially the same thing. Unless, she said, there’s a change in the system—the economic system of unfettered capitalism willing to sacrifice anyone and everything for profit—all President Obama’s health care reform will do is increase the profits for private health care companies, doctors, and hospitals by presenting them with a CAPTIVE MARKET—i.e., of Americans now REQUIRED to buy health care.
The thing is, we already know how this turns out. Massachusetts and a half dozen other states have already enacted this kind of reform, giving subsidies to the poor in order for them to buy insurance from the private health industry. And it has turned out to be more expensive, not less. So it appears that the only way our obscene medical costs will ever be reduced is by means of a government-run plan (the so-called “public option” the Republicans have tried to characterize as, ugh, socialism!), or, even better, a single-payer plan like Medicare. It would be a real plan that, by virtue of the numbers enrolled and the government’s power of mass purchasing, for instance from drug companies, but also from doctors and hospitals, would be able to reverse the trend of ever more expensive treatments for the ever more numerous conditions the industry can soak us for. Without that—and it is not clear at this moment if a “public option” will survive the congressional bartering and lobbying process—the sharks will remain in business, with the predators growing ever fatter, and thus ever more able to bludgeon our so-called representatives in our so-called representative democracy (including the President himself) into doing their multibillion-dollar bidding.
Lawrence DiStasi
As confirmation, we have a recent report, by the Associated Press no less, informing us why there will indeed be a health care bill this year, even though the industry, and their Republican (and Democratic) stooges would prefer to keep things as they are. The report—“Lobbyists the silver lining in health care storm?” by Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar—tells us why “the drug industry, the American Medical Association, hospital groups and the insurance lobby are all saying Congress must make major changes this year.” What? THEY want health care reform? How could this be?
The answer is elementary. First, they see the writing on the wall: Joe Sixpack can’t afford health care any more. Second, government programs have “gotten increasingly friendly to private insurance companies,” giving them “major roles as middlemen” in Medicare and Medicaid. You know, like Bush’s great prescription-drug boondoggle for Medicare, called, cynically, Medicare Advantage.
But the real bonanza for these guys is the central requirement, in both House and Senate plans, to require health care for all. That is, the new plan will require everybody to buy coverage. And what will this do? Why it will “guarantee a steady stream of customers subsidized by taxpayers not only for insurers, but for all medical providers.” In other words, 47 million more customers will now have to procure health insurance. And if they can’t afford it—otherwise, why wouldn’t they have it in the first place—good old Uncle Sam, which is the taxpayer, will help them to pay for it. No matter how high the costs go.
Dr. Marcia Angell, who was a guest on Bill Moyers’ show last Friday, said essentially the same thing. Unless, she said, there’s a change in the system—the economic system of unfettered capitalism willing to sacrifice anyone and everything for profit—all President Obama’s health care reform will do is increase the profits for private health care companies, doctors, and hospitals by presenting them with a CAPTIVE MARKET—i.e., of Americans now REQUIRED to buy health care.
The thing is, we already know how this turns out. Massachusetts and a half dozen other states have already enacted this kind of reform, giving subsidies to the poor in order for them to buy insurance from the private health industry. And it has turned out to be more expensive, not less. So it appears that the only way our obscene medical costs will ever be reduced is by means of a government-run plan (the so-called “public option” the Republicans have tried to characterize as, ugh, socialism!), or, even better, a single-payer plan like Medicare. It would be a real plan that, by virtue of the numbers enrolled and the government’s power of mass purchasing, for instance from drug companies, but also from doctors and hospitals, would be able to reverse the trend of ever more expensive treatments for the ever more numerous conditions the industry can soak us for. Without that—and it is not clear at this moment if a “public option” will survive the congressional bartering and lobbying process—the sharks will remain in business, with the predators growing ever fatter, and thus ever more able to bludgeon our so-called representatives in our so-called representative democracy (including the President himself) into doing their multibillion-dollar bidding.
Lawrence DiStasi
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Goldman Returns
“I read the news today, oh boy….”
That old Beatles’ line ran through my head as I heard that dear Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street banking/trading firm which the late Secretary of the Treasury, Hank Paulson used to head (he apparently left with a $500 million golden parachute) has just posted its greatest profits ever: second quarter net income of $3.44 billion. And the Dow of course rocketed higher, and many pundits were allowing as how this meant the financial crisis was over.
Not everyone was so sanguine, though. My favorite commentator, after Katherine Austin Fitts (heard Wednesdays on KPFA’s “Flashpoints” and blogging regularly on solari.com; she spoke about the scam Goldman has been running getting U.S. Treasury money at 1% interest or less, and making a killing with it), was financial analyst Max Keiser. In a video posted by above-mentioned solari.com, Keiser made several delicious observations, pointing out that though these “financial terrorists” at Goldman have engineered a “financial coup d’etat” wherein they now control the United States government (I gather by holding the United States hostage, through Paulson, to compel it to use taxpayer dollars to bail out the financial system or be responsible for a global financial collapse), they still only paid 1% in taxes last year. Moreover, he accused Goldman of “literally stealing $100 million a day…they’re front-running every single trade on the New York Stock Exchange with this high-frequency trading.”
When I looked into said “high-frequency trading,” it turns out the recent scandal involves a former Goldman employee, a computer specialist who designed their high-frequency trading platform which allows Goldman, in microseconds, to make decisions about trading information before everyone else on Wall Street can. The former Goldman employee was found to be stealing parts of the high-frequency system he designed for Goldman, and using it on behalf of his new employer in Chicago.
But to me, this seems a diversion. The real scandal involves Goldman’s use of government funds to continue its high-risk business model, which was what caused the financial collapse in the first place. As Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor under President Clinton, put it in a recent column:
“Goldman is still wagering its capital and fueling giant bets with lots of borrowed money. While its rivals have pared back risks, Goldman has increased them. And its renewed success at this old game will only encourage other big banks to go back into it….Meanwhile, Goldman is still depending on $28 billion in outstanding debt issued cheaply with the backing of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Which means you and I are still indirectly funding Goldman’s high-risk operations.”
I guess this is what Katherine Austin Fitts meant when she spoke of Goldman’s taxpayer-financed heist—borrowing money from the Federal government for practically nothing, and charging its customers 10 or 15 or 30 times that—when it’s not, that is, investing and leveraging these taxpayer- donated funds at ridiculous margins to play its Wall Street games.
Paul Krugman adds to this story in a recent column, “The Joy of Sachs” (pun intended, with us as the Sachs-ees.) What Krugman points out is not that Goldman Sachs is not a very competent financial outfit—which it is—but rather that they are part of, or perhaps the main proponents of the "financialization" of America. What this involved was the directing of huge sums of capital by the likes of Goldman Sachs into the “construction of unsellable houses and empty shopping malls. They increased risk rather than reducing it, and concentrated risk rather than spreading it. In effect the industry was selling dangerous patent medicine to gullible consumers.” What Goldman did that was different, according to Krugman, was to refrain from buying into “its own hype.” That is, rather than investing in the commodities they knew were toxic (yet they urged consumers to buy them), Goldman sold the securities backed by sub-prime mortgages—“and then made a lot more money by selling mortgage-backed securities short, just before their value crashed.” All of this was legal, says Krugman, but the “net effect was that Goldman made profits by playing the rest of us for suckers.” And now, having taken over the government—if Keiser is right—Goldman is lobbying heavily against any sensible new regulations that would prevent them from doing the same damn thing all over again, only this time with far worse consequences.
David Paul, in a new piece on HuffingtonPost.com, “The Greening of Goldman Sachs,” explains a bit more how Goldman did it. Not only did it receive $10 billion in TARP funds, it also managed to “convert itself into a commercial bank and member of the Federal Reserve system, gaining access to low or zero cost capital at the Fed Discount window and access to federally guaranteed borrowing through the FDIC Temporary Liquidity Guaranty Program.” This access to government funds literally saved Goldman Sachs, according to Allen Sloan of CNN.com: “By giving Goldman access to vast amounts of money…the Fed ended panicky demands from Goldman customers that the firm immediately return the cash and securities it was holding for them. That was the equivalent of a run on the bank, which no institution can survive.” The worst part is that the boys at Goldman are now trying to screw the very government that bailed them out by lobbying to buy “the stock purchase warrants it gave the government as part of the TARP deal” at bargain basement prices—something like $500 million for stock warrants worth around $1 billion. Turn a profit on everything and everyone, especially the suckers who saved your ass, seems to be Goldman’s motto.
So here’s the deal folks. Goldman Sachs, thanks to all the poor fools known as Mr. and Mrs. U.S. Taxpayer, is back bigger than ever, now with the U.S. government (the Obama administration and Congress) and our money in its hip pocket. Screw the unemployed. Screw the working stiffs. Screw those who’ve lost their pensions and savings and everything else. And most especially, screw those foolish enough to show you mercy. It’s bonus time on Wall Street once again.
Isn’t it also time for John Q. Public to get really pissed off?
Lawrence DiStasi
That old Beatles’ line ran through my head as I heard that dear Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street banking/trading firm which the late Secretary of the Treasury, Hank Paulson used to head (he apparently left with a $500 million golden parachute) has just posted its greatest profits ever: second quarter net income of $3.44 billion. And the Dow of course rocketed higher, and many pundits were allowing as how this meant the financial crisis was over.
Not everyone was so sanguine, though. My favorite commentator, after Katherine Austin Fitts (heard Wednesdays on KPFA’s “Flashpoints” and blogging regularly on solari.com; she spoke about the scam Goldman has been running getting U.S. Treasury money at 1% interest or less, and making a killing with it), was financial analyst Max Keiser. In a video posted by above-mentioned solari.com, Keiser made several delicious observations, pointing out that though these “financial terrorists” at Goldman have engineered a “financial coup d’etat” wherein they now control the United States government (I gather by holding the United States hostage, through Paulson, to compel it to use taxpayer dollars to bail out the financial system or be responsible for a global financial collapse), they still only paid 1% in taxes last year. Moreover, he accused Goldman of “literally stealing $100 million a day…they’re front-running every single trade on the New York Stock Exchange with this high-frequency trading.”
When I looked into said “high-frequency trading,” it turns out the recent scandal involves a former Goldman employee, a computer specialist who designed their high-frequency trading platform which allows Goldman, in microseconds, to make decisions about trading information before everyone else on Wall Street can. The former Goldman employee was found to be stealing parts of the high-frequency system he designed for Goldman, and using it on behalf of his new employer in Chicago.
But to me, this seems a diversion. The real scandal involves Goldman’s use of government funds to continue its high-risk business model, which was what caused the financial collapse in the first place. As Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor under President Clinton, put it in a recent column:
“Goldman is still wagering its capital and fueling giant bets with lots of borrowed money. While its rivals have pared back risks, Goldman has increased them. And its renewed success at this old game will only encourage other big banks to go back into it….Meanwhile, Goldman is still depending on $28 billion in outstanding debt issued cheaply with the backing of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Which means you and I are still indirectly funding Goldman’s high-risk operations.”
I guess this is what Katherine Austin Fitts meant when she spoke of Goldman’s taxpayer-financed heist—borrowing money from the Federal government for practically nothing, and charging its customers 10 or 15 or 30 times that—when it’s not, that is, investing and leveraging these taxpayer- donated funds at ridiculous margins to play its Wall Street games.
Paul Krugman adds to this story in a recent column, “The Joy of Sachs” (pun intended, with us as the Sachs-ees.) What Krugman points out is not that Goldman Sachs is not a very competent financial outfit—which it is—but rather that they are part of, or perhaps the main proponents of the "financialization" of America. What this involved was the directing of huge sums of capital by the likes of Goldman Sachs into the “construction of unsellable houses and empty shopping malls. They increased risk rather than reducing it, and concentrated risk rather than spreading it. In effect the industry was selling dangerous patent medicine to gullible consumers.” What Goldman did that was different, according to Krugman, was to refrain from buying into “its own hype.” That is, rather than investing in the commodities they knew were toxic (yet they urged consumers to buy them), Goldman sold the securities backed by sub-prime mortgages—“and then made a lot more money by selling mortgage-backed securities short, just before their value crashed.” All of this was legal, says Krugman, but the “net effect was that Goldman made profits by playing the rest of us for suckers.” And now, having taken over the government—if Keiser is right—Goldman is lobbying heavily against any sensible new regulations that would prevent them from doing the same damn thing all over again, only this time with far worse consequences.
David Paul, in a new piece on HuffingtonPost.com, “The Greening of Goldman Sachs,” explains a bit more how Goldman did it. Not only did it receive $10 billion in TARP funds, it also managed to “convert itself into a commercial bank and member of the Federal Reserve system, gaining access to low or zero cost capital at the Fed Discount window and access to federally guaranteed borrowing through the FDIC Temporary Liquidity Guaranty Program.” This access to government funds literally saved Goldman Sachs, according to Allen Sloan of CNN.com: “By giving Goldman access to vast amounts of money…the Fed ended panicky demands from Goldman customers that the firm immediately return the cash and securities it was holding for them. That was the equivalent of a run on the bank, which no institution can survive.” The worst part is that the boys at Goldman are now trying to screw the very government that bailed them out by lobbying to buy “the stock purchase warrants it gave the government as part of the TARP deal” at bargain basement prices—something like $500 million for stock warrants worth around $1 billion. Turn a profit on everything and everyone, especially the suckers who saved your ass, seems to be Goldman’s motto.
So here’s the deal folks. Goldman Sachs, thanks to all the poor fools known as Mr. and Mrs. U.S. Taxpayer, is back bigger than ever, now with the U.S. government (the Obama administration and Congress) and our money in its hip pocket. Screw the unemployed. Screw the working stiffs. Screw those who’ve lost their pensions and savings and everything else. And most especially, screw those foolish enough to show you mercy. It’s bonus time on Wall Street once again.
Isn’t it also time for John Q. Public to get really pissed off?
Lawrence DiStasi
Canadian Health Care
The following piece was written by a family friend of my friend, Ninette Bavaro-Latronica, who just returned from visiting relatives in Toronto. She has long been impressed with Canada's 40-year-old universal coverage. As an intro, Ninette pointed out that her cousin, ill with cancer, has benefited from one aspect of the free Canadian plan: a nurse visited his home for 4 hours each day to care for him. In the U.S., such visits would bankrupt many people; in Canada, they are part of the free plan. One final note: a recent column noted that Canada has had problems with funding, and proposes that one possible solution would be to keep the overall plan, but have wealthier Canadians (earning over $100,000/year) pay co-payments for some services, up to about $2500 a year. That would still be far far less than U.S. plans which run up to $15,000 a year. What follows is the article by Ninette's Canadian friend.
As Canadians, our American family and friends have been asking a lot about Canadian health care the past week with all the talk of bringing in government health care in the U.S.A.
As a Canadian I have to say that I am taken back in a very bad way by all the false videos coming on-line this past week about the Canadian health system and painting it as a third world mess.
So I thought I would post some stats and info for our American friends on the Canadian health system so you can see what it is all about.
Before I start with the stats, I want to point out that just like the American health system, the Canadian system is not perfect. It has issues that need to be addressed. But overall the system works great.
THE CANADIAN HEALTH SYSTEM
Canada's health system operates under a government insurance plan. All Canadians regardless of age or income receive the same health coverage, paid for by the government. This Canadian government health coverage covers
services such as:
Visits to a doctor
Diagnostic services
Treatment for injuries or illnesses
Hospital care
Government health care does not cover dental care, eye care, eye glasses or services that are not medically necessary, for example, cosmetic surgery.
In the Canadian system you are allowed to
-Choose your own doctor
-Choose the hospital you want to go to
-Decide to seek other opinions from other doctors or hospitals
Under no circumstances does the government choose which hospital or doctor you go to.
The system basically operates like the private health system in the USA, just the government health insurance pays your bills instead of private insurance.
The Canadian health system is one of the most up to date in the world, and several world reknown hospitals are located here. These include Toronto General Hospital, Toronto Sick Kids Hospital, and many others. The Toronto General Hospital actually was just in the news for creating a special device to help lung transplant patients live longer while waiting for a lung transplant. This device will now be used in American and other world hospitals.
Another question we get asked is about wait times.
The Canadian health system works on how urgent your need is. If you have an illness that needs to be addressed you will get the care fast. But if you have a minor issue such as a small cut and go to the emergency room, than you will wait a little.
That being said, Canada does have an issue with wait times in some hospitals, and the government is addressing this issue now, by expanding emergency rooms and providing more funding to fix these bottlenecks.
Another issue that is being addressed is the lack of new doctors in some parts of the country. This has to do with funding cuts to universities in the 1990's that saw less students entering medical school. The government is addressing this issue now and funding is coming back on-line for universities.
There are lots of videos floating around on the net saying that the Canadian system rations things from tetanus shots, to heart bypass surgery. This is not true. Other claims floating around are that Canada has no medical clinics open on weekends or at night, etc. That is also false.
Overall Canadians receive the same top notch health care Americans get, the difference is that when they ask for your health card, Canadians pull out a Government Health Insurance card(called OHIP in Ontario), and Americans pull out cards from insurance companies or pay on their own.
This is what our health cards look like. This is for Ontario the province we live in. Every resident carries a card like this. You just present this card and receive medical care. Want to know why we have pictures on our cards? Because Americans were coming up to Canada and using their Canadian family members cards to get health care, when our cards had no photos.
(photo I.D. for Canadian plan--much like a U.S. driver's license)
Some stats.
Life expectancy
Canada: 80.4 years
United States: 77.8
Infant mortality Rate
Canada: 5.4 per 1,000
United States: 6.9 per 1,000
Per capita expenditure on health (USD)
Canada: $3,678
United States: $6,714
Healthcare costs as a percent of GDP
Canada: 10.0
United States: 15.3
Basically the U.S.A. spends a higher percentage of tax dollars on health care each year than Canada does, yet everyone is not covered like in Canada.
As Canadians, our American family and friends have been asking a lot about Canadian health care the past week with all the talk of bringing in government health care in the U.S.A.
As a Canadian I have to say that I am taken back in a very bad way by all the false videos coming on-line this past week about the Canadian health system and painting it as a third world mess.
So I thought I would post some stats and info for our American friends on the Canadian health system so you can see what it is all about.
Before I start with the stats, I want to point out that just like the American health system, the Canadian system is not perfect. It has issues that need to be addressed. But overall the system works great.
THE CANADIAN HEALTH SYSTEM
Canada's health system operates under a government insurance plan. All Canadians regardless of age or income receive the same health coverage, paid for by the government. This Canadian government health coverage covers
services such as:
Visits to a doctor
Diagnostic services
Treatment for injuries or illnesses
Hospital care
Government health care does not cover dental care, eye care, eye glasses or services that are not medically necessary, for example, cosmetic surgery.
In the Canadian system you are allowed to
-Choose your own doctor
-Choose the hospital you want to go to
-Decide to seek other opinions from other doctors or hospitals
Under no circumstances does the government choose which hospital or doctor you go to.
The system basically operates like the private health system in the USA, just the government health insurance pays your bills instead of private insurance.
The Canadian health system is one of the most up to date in the world, and several world reknown hospitals are located here. These include Toronto General Hospital, Toronto Sick Kids Hospital, and many others. The Toronto General Hospital actually was just in the news for creating a special device to help lung transplant patients live longer while waiting for a lung transplant. This device will now be used in American and other world hospitals.
Another question we get asked is about wait times.
The Canadian health system works on how urgent your need is. If you have an illness that needs to be addressed you will get the care fast. But if you have a minor issue such as a small cut and go to the emergency room, than you will wait a little.
That being said, Canada does have an issue with wait times in some hospitals, and the government is addressing this issue now, by expanding emergency rooms and providing more funding to fix these bottlenecks.
Another issue that is being addressed is the lack of new doctors in some parts of the country. This has to do with funding cuts to universities in the 1990's that saw less students entering medical school. The government is addressing this issue now and funding is coming back on-line for universities.
There are lots of videos floating around on the net saying that the Canadian system rations things from tetanus shots, to heart bypass surgery. This is not true. Other claims floating around are that Canada has no medical clinics open on weekends or at night, etc. That is also false.
Overall Canadians receive the same top notch health care Americans get, the difference is that when they ask for your health card, Canadians pull out a Government Health Insurance card(called OHIP in Ontario), and Americans pull out cards from insurance companies or pay on their own.
This is what our health cards look like. This is for Ontario the province we live in. Every resident carries a card like this. You just present this card and receive medical care. Want to know why we have pictures on our cards? Because Americans were coming up to Canada and using their Canadian family members cards to get health care, when our cards had no photos.
(photo I.D. for Canadian plan--much like a U.S. driver's license)
Some stats.
Life expectancy
Canada: 80.4 years
United States: 77.8
Infant mortality Rate
Canada: 5.4 per 1,000
United States: 6.9 per 1,000
Per capita expenditure on health (USD)
Canada: $3,678
United States: $6,714
Healthcare costs as a percent of GDP
Canada: 10.0
United States: 15.3
Basically the U.S.A. spends a higher percentage of tax dollars on health care each year than Canada does, yet everyone is not covered like in Canada.
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Nuclear Treason
When one reads Seymour Hersh’s material (The Samson Option, Random House: 1991) on Israel’s pursuit of, manufacture of, and testing of nuclear weapons in a program which began in the late 1950s, and America’s response to it, one has no choice but to consider the word “treason.” That is because for decades, starting with the late days of the Kennedy Administration, and continuing through Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and beyond, successive American Presidents, intelligence officials and Cabinet members have all had a hand in a clandestine policy to keep the increasingly conclusive proof that Israel had succeeded in producing nuclear weapons a secret. A secret from the American public. A secret from U.S. allies. A secret from the world—even as the United States loudly and overtly banged the drum promoting the Non-Proliferation Treaty it had a major hand in writing, and from its beginnings, enforcing. It has vociferously protested when any nation but the big 5 (the U.S., the Soviet Union, France, England, and China) has made moves to acquire nuclear weapons. It has accused nations such as India and Pakistan of endangering the world, and more recently North Korea and Iran of violating their commitments under the NPT. It has called them everything from liars to frauds to criminals to Hitlerian dictators threatening other nations and worldwide conflagration.
And yet, when it came to Israel, the American political establishment bent (and still bends) over backwards (or perhaps forwards) to look the other way: see no evil, hear no evil, and definitely speak none. And there has been one overriding reason for this: fear of the protests that would arise from the American Jewish community if the United States revealed Israel’s dirty secret. Fear that the big money coming to American politicians from that same community would be cut off. One of John F. Kennedy’s major contributors, for example, was a hosiery and apparel mogul named Abraham Feinberg. His financial donations had rescued Harry Truman’s presidential campaign in 1948 by financing Truman’s whistle-stop train campaign. Feinberg then managed to collect a huge campaign chest for the Kennedy campaign as well, and thereby secured direct influence in that White House. Having raised many millions of dollars needed to help Israel build its nuclear facility at Dimona, Feinberg’s zeal to protect “his” facility ran into conflict with Kennedy’s commitment to nonproliferation and desire to get IAEA inspections of it. Feinberg “fought the strongest battle of my career to keep them from a full inspection” by getting his message to the President (he met directly with Defense Secretary Robert McNamara): an inspection of Dimona would result in less support in Kennedy’s 1964 presidential campaign. Though unable to fight off an inspection completely, Feinberg was able to cripple it: instead of the IAEA, Washington agreed to send an American inspection team, one that would schedule its inspection visits in advance, with Israeli’s permission. This gave Israel time, as Hersh puts it, to build a “Potemkin Village” to deceive their American visitors (p. 111). In other words, the Israelis built a false control room showing that no chemical reprocessing plant (and hence no conversion of spent nuclear fuel to bomb-grade plutonium) was operating, and the American team dutifully reported that Israel had only a “standard reactor.”
President Lyndon Johnson continued this charade (American inspections of Dimona took place each year on schedule, always finding nothing, including the time in 1963 when Israel’s reactor “went critical”—meaning it was producing 70 megawatts of power, far more than the alleged 24 megawatts needed for electricity, and enough to start producing plutonium.) As Hersh writes:
“By the middle 1960s, the game was fixed: President Johnson and his advisers would pretend that the American inspections amounted to proof that Israel was not building the bomb, leaving unblemished America’s newly reaffirmed support for nuclear nonproliferation.” (p. 143).
The American CIA knew full well what the Israelis were doing: “Everybody knew” about the Israeli missile, one CIA analyst said, “but nobody would talk about it.” This allowed President Johnson to make statements, after China exploded its first nuclear weapon on October 18, 1964, such as: “Nuclear spread is dangerous to all mankind…We must continue to work against it, and we will.” (p. 149.) After the Israeli victory in the Six-Day War of 1967, the intentional ignorance became even more pronounced, as the White House sided more openly with Israel. Israel was importing yellowcake (uranium ore) from South Africa in great quantities, and it was monitored by IAEA. As one U.S. official monitoring nuclear developments said, “We knew about the yellowcake, but we weren’t allowed to keep a file on it. It simply wasn’t part of the record. Anytime we began to follow it, somebody in the system would say, ‘That’s not relevant.’”
But the most overt piece of pandering to his American Jewish supporters—and specifically to the same Abe Feinberg mentioned above—by Lyndon Baines Johnson took place just before LBJ left office. As Hersh describes it, the CIA by this time knew for certain that Israel had manufactured at least four nuclear weapons (it had actually made many more). But Israel wanted American F-4 Phantom jets—a high performance airplane that could carry nuclear weapons on a mission to Moscow (which Israel was determined to, and did target to dissuade the Soviets from aiding Egypt and other Arab nations). Many in the Johnson administration wanted to use this Israeli hunger for the F-4 as a bargaining chip to get Israel to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Paul Warnke, assistant secretary of defense, to that end called Yitzhak Rabin, Israel’s American ambassador, to his office and questioned him about Israel’s nuclear program. Rabin refused to answer, and Warnke leveled him with a long overdue tirade: “Mr. Ambassador, we are shocked at the manner in which you are dealing with us…You, our close ally, are building nuclear bombs in Israel behind our back.” Rabin of course denied it, but was so outraged that he not only lied about the encounter (he said in his memoirs that the whole encounter was about the F-4, and Warnke’s attempt to blackmail Israel by insisting on complete on-site supervision of all Israeli arms manufacturing and research), but also activated all of Israel’s supporters in Congress to oppose the NPT inspections. Most tellingly, Rabin called upon Abe Feinberg. Feinberg recalled Rabin complaining that “Everything you (Feinberg) have done about Phantoms is going down the drain. Clifford (Clark Clifford, Secretary of Defense and Warnke’s boss) is insisting on the NPT.” Now Feinberg had just recently met the President and Walt Rostow, his National Security Adviser, and remembered the President saying there would be “no conditions” to the sale of the planes. Hersh narrates the rest:
“So I picked up the telephone,” he said, “called the White House, and asked for Rostow.” The national security adviser was having dinner at Clifford’s house, and Feinberg, who was well known to the White House switchboard operators, was patched through. “Walt gets on the telephone,” continued Feinberg, “and I say, ‘Walt, you and I and the President were together and Johnson said ‘no conditions.’ Walt agrees. I say, ‘When you get back to the table, tell that to Clifford.’”
Clifford apparently got the message. For when Paul Warnke “arrived at a later meeting of his staff, all of whom favored tying the F-4 sale to Israeli acceptance of the NPT, he dramatically drew his hand across his neck. The NPT was out.” Harry Schwartz recalled Warnke’s account of the Clifford-Johnson dialogue: “Clifford called Johnson and LBJ said, ‘Sell them anything they want.’
“‘Mr. President, I don’t want to live in a world where the Israelis have nuclear weapons.’
“‘Don’t bother me with this anymore.’ And he hangs up.” (pp. 190ff)
So there it is. "Don’t bother me with this anymore," says the President of the United States. Nevermind hypocrisy. Nevermind being taken for a fool by another nation whom the United States has supported and continued to support in the face of worldwide opposition, and without which support this nation could not last a day. Nevermind being spied on, lied to, hijacked, and, in at least one instance, being attacked by this same nation that seems immune to criticism (I refer to the now-infamous "Liberty" incident, wherein Israeli aircraft fired upon an American telecommunications ship in international waters during its 1967 Six-Day War, killing 34 Americans and wounding 171.) LBJ, like Kennedy before him, felt constrained to honor his commitment to a major American Jewish donor, regardless of the fact that nuclear nonproliferation, which the President believed in as sincerely as he believed in anything and on which, arguably, depended the fate of the entire world, was openly mocked and endangered thereby.
Nor was this the end. This same kind of intentional blindness, this same massive hypocrisy, this same kowtowing to the organized might of American Jewry has continued almost unabated ever since, through every President and every administration, up to and including the administration of Barack Hussein Obama. CIA reports have been buried. Public accounts of Israel’s nuclear activities have been ignored by the world’s media: for example, in April 1976, Time magazine reported that shortly after the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel’s war hero Moshe Dayan had secretly ordered the building of a reprocessing plant. The report came from David Halevy, an Israeli citizen. Nothing happened. Ten years later, this time in 1986, the London Sunday Times ran an explosive story, based on the testimony of Israeli defector Mordecai Vanunu, detailing the inside story, with photos, of the huge Isaeli nuclear operation, including the fact that the Israeli nuclear stockpile now totaled more than 200 warheads, including some of the most sophisticated weapons in the nuclear arsenal such as advanced missile delivery systems targeting the Soviet Union, and “suitcase bombs” capable of infiltrating any country. Again, there was no reaction, other than a widespread Israeli disinformation campaign, much of which was organized by the rival Sunday Mirror of London by its pro-Israeli owner, Robert Maxwell.
Of course, some might say, ‘No one should worry. Israel is an ally, a sane and rational democracy, whose leaders would never employ such weapons.’ But that would be to forget the zealots who are in charge of this “democracy,” and what they have said, and done already. In the aftermath of the 1956 Suez War, for example, in which the Israeli leader David Ben Gurion considered President Eisenhower’s refusal to back Israel as a dastardly betrayal, one Israeli official is quoted by Hersh as saying: “We got the message. We can still remember the smell of Auschwitz and Treblinka. Next time we’ll take all of you with us.” (p. 42) It was at this point that Israel initiated its secret plan, with French aid, to go nuclear. And by the time of Israel’s 1973 Yom Kippur war with Egypt and Syria, it was not only nuclear, but deadly serious about acting. Most Americans, consumed with their own domestic drama known as Watergate, could never have known how close the world came at this time to Armaggedon, and worse (if anything could be worse than nuclear destruction), how the Israelis used that threat of Armaggedon to blackmail its patron and ally, the United States of America.
Hersh devotes an entire chapter, and more, to this episode. For the truth is, in the early days of the war, Israel was in a panic. Its famed commander, Moshe Dayan, having been totally surprised by the Arab attack, was virtually conceding defeat to the advancing Egyptian and Syrian armies which had destroyed 500 of Israel’s tanks and 400 planes, including 14 F-4 Phantom jets. An October 8 cabinet meeting resulted in three related decisions:
“Israel would rally its collapsing forces for a major counterattack; it would arm and target its nuclear arsenal in the event of total collapse and subsequent need for the “Samson Option” [i.e. bringing down “all of you with us”]; and finally, it would inform Washington of its unprecedented nuclear action—and unprecedented peril—and demand that the U.S. begin an emergency airlift of replacement arms and ammunition needed to sustain an extended all-out war effort.” (p. 225).
All three of these plans were implemented. Israel did counterattack, and managed to salvage the situation. But it also went on nuclear alert, readying its nuclear weapons not once, but twice in the course of the Yom Kippur war. It did this openly, partly to impress the Americans, but partly also to scare the Soviet Union into persuading their Arab allies not to advance beyond the pre-1967 borders. Apparently this warning to Egypt was given, according to Mohammed Hiekal, editor of Al Ahram, the leading Egyptian newspaper, warning the Egyptians that the “Israelis had three warheads assembled and ready.”
Finally, the blackmail was also implemented by the nuclear arming. Israel was already outraged that Henry Kissinger was taking his time in resupplying the Israeli military with the weapons that had been lost. Without the assurance of immediate delivery of such American weapons, Israeli commanders would be hampered in their vital counterattack. According to Hersh, a call on Kissinger by Simcha Dinitz, Israel’s ambassador to Washington, changed Kissinger’s mind. Confirmation of this comes, not from Kissinger’s memoirs, which omit any mention of Israeli nuclear capability (though they do mention the replacement of its war losses by October 9), much less its threat; but from Hermann F. Eilts, the American ambassador to Egypt. Eilts maintained that at the end of Kissinger’s tenure as Secretary of State, he brought up the 1973 war, and casually referred to the nuclear option: “Henry threw in that there was a concern that the Israelis might go nuclear. There had been intimations that if they didn’t get military equipment, and quickly, they might go nuclear”(p. 230). James Schlesinger, Secretary of Defense, concurred that “Kissinger just turned around totally. He got a little hysterical” in urging an immediate and massive resupply of weapons to Israel in October 1973. Schlesinger added that “there was an assumption that Israel had a few nukes and that if there was a collapse, there was a possibility that Israel would use them.” Finally, Anwar Sadat, then leader of Egypt, told Mohammed Heikal that Kissinger had said at the time: “It was serious, more serious than you can imagine.”
Before the war was over, Russia would threaten military intervention to get Israel to abide by the cease-fire, the United States had put the 82nd Airborne Division, B-52s carrying nuclear weapons, and the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy on alert, and Israel responded by going on nuclear alert one more time. Hersh cites one more confirmation of the episode—more dangerous by far than the Cuban Missile Crisis about which we’ve heard so much—in a March 10, 1980 addendum to a column by Jack Anderson. Anderson wrote as follows:
“Locked in secret Pentagon files is startling evidence that Israel maneuvered dangerously near the edge of nuclear war after the 1973 Arab assault. The secret documents claim that Israel came within hours of running out of essential arms. ‘At this crucial moment, the possibility of nuclear arms was discussed with the U.S,’ declares one report. American authorities feared the Israelis might resort to nuclear weapons to assure their survival. This was the most compelling reason, according to the secret papers, that the United States rushed conventional weapons to Israel.” (p. 236)
If all this doesn’t make your flesh crawl, I don’t know what will. Read The Samson Option and you’ll see that this is only a sketch of a much more detailed and disturbing story. This is so especially in the light of President Obama’s trip, this week, to try to re-invigorate the START Treaty with Russia, to delimit the nuclear stockpiles of the two major nuclear states even further. All of which is admirable. So is the United States’ continuing attempts to end nuclear proliferation. But all the fine words of statesmen and politicians seem like so much horse shit when viewed in the light of the half-century of dissimulation, deception and outright treason when it comes to Israel’s still-unacknowledged nuclear secrets. I mean think of it: Israel rants and raves about the alleged nuclear plans of Iran. It attacks and destroys Iraq’s Osirak reactor, to unanimous applause. It threatens a similar attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. It bellows and wails about terrorists who are plotting to infiltrate its borders, or those of the United States, with a suitcase bomb. And all along, it has been the lying, guilty party, doing the same thing, and much much worse. Possessed of hundreds of weapons and advanced rocketry to deliver them, it has threatened the world with nuclear conflagration more than once, and made known that it would do it again. What is a rational person to make of this? What are we to make of our leaders—who have known of this massive deception, of the spying of Jonathan Pollard who forwarded 500,000 pages of incredibly sensitive documents to Israel—and who have at the same time carried on with their hypocritical fulminations against nations like Iran and Korea for their “deceptions.” What are we to make of the political calculations of presidents—not one but several—who are willing, for political purposes, for continued campaign contributions to assure their own re-election, to put the entire world at risk of nuclear armaggedon? Can we call this anything other than despicable? anything other than treason?
Lawrence DiStasi
And yet, when it came to Israel, the American political establishment bent (and still bends) over backwards (or perhaps forwards) to look the other way: see no evil, hear no evil, and definitely speak none. And there has been one overriding reason for this: fear of the protests that would arise from the American Jewish community if the United States revealed Israel’s dirty secret. Fear that the big money coming to American politicians from that same community would be cut off. One of John F. Kennedy’s major contributors, for example, was a hosiery and apparel mogul named Abraham Feinberg. His financial donations had rescued Harry Truman’s presidential campaign in 1948 by financing Truman’s whistle-stop train campaign. Feinberg then managed to collect a huge campaign chest for the Kennedy campaign as well, and thereby secured direct influence in that White House. Having raised many millions of dollars needed to help Israel build its nuclear facility at Dimona, Feinberg’s zeal to protect “his” facility ran into conflict with Kennedy’s commitment to nonproliferation and desire to get IAEA inspections of it. Feinberg “fought the strongest battle of my career to keep them from a full inspection” by getting his message to the President (he met directly with Defense Secretary Robert McNamara): an inspection of Dimona would result in less support in Kennedy’s 1964 presidential campaign. Though unable to fight off an inspection completely, Feinberg was able to cripple it: instead of the IAEA, Washington agreed to send an American inspection team, one that would schedule its inspection visits in advance, with Israeli’s permission. This gave Israel time, as Hersh puts it, to build a “Potemkin Village” to deceive their American visitors (p. 111). In other words, the Israelis built a false control room showing that no chemical reprocessing plant (and hence no conversion of spent nuclear fuel to bomb-grade plutonium) was operating, and the American team dutifully reported that Israel had only a “standard reactor.”
President Lyndon Johnson continued this charade (American inspections of Dimona took place each year on schedule, always finding nothing, including the time in 1963 when Israel’s reactor “went critical”—meaning it was producing 70 megawatts of power, far more than the alleged 24 megawatts needed for electricity, and enough to start producing plutonium.) As Hersh writes:
“By the middle 1960s, the game was fixed: President Johnson and his advisers would pretend that the American inspections amounted to proof that Israel was not building the bomb, leaving unblemished America’s newly reaffirmed support for nuclear nonproliferation.” (p. 143).
The American CIA knew full well what the Israelis were doing: “Everybody knew” about the Israeli missile, one CIA analyst said, “but nobody would talk about it.” This allowed President Johnson to make statements, after China exploded its first nuclear weapon on October 18, 1964, such as: “Nuclear spread is dangerous to all mankind…We must continue to work against it, and we will.” (p. 149.) After the Israeli victory in the Six-Day War of 1967, the intentional ignorance became even more pronounced, as the White House sided more openly with Israel. Israel was importing yellowcake (uranium ore) from South Africa in great quantities, and it was monitored by IAEA. As one U.S. official monitoring nuclear developments said, “We knew about the yellowcake, but we weren’t allowed to keep a file on it. It simply wasn’t part of the record. Anytime we began to follow it, somebody in the system would say, ‘That’s not relevant.’”
But the most overt piece of pandering to his American Jewish supporters—and specifically to the same Abe Feinberg mentioned above—by Lyndon Baines Johnson took place just before LBJ left office. As Hersh describes it, the CIA by this time knew for certain that Israel had manufactured at least four nuclear weapons (it had actually made many more). But Israel wanted American F-4 Phantom jets—a high performance airplane that could carry nuclear weapons on a mission to Moscow (which Israel was determined to, and did target to dissuade the Soviets from aiding Egypt and other Arab nations). Many in the Johnson administration wanted to use this Israeli hunger for the F-4 as a bargaining chip to get Israel to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Paul Warnke, assistant secretary of defense, to that end called Yitzhak Rabin, Israel’s American ambassador, to his office and questioned him about Israel’s nuclear program. Rabin refused to answer, and Warnke leveled him with a long overdue tirade: “Mr. Ambassador, we are shocked at the manner in which you are dealing with us…You, our close ally, are building nuclear bombs in Israel behind our back.” Rabin of course denied it, but was so outraged that he not only lied about the encounter (he said in his memoirs that the whole encounter was about the F-4, and Warnke’s attempt to blackmail Israel by insisting on complete on-site supervision of all Israeli arms manufacturing and research), but also activated all of Israel’s supporters in Congress to oppose the NPT inspections. Most tellingly, Rabin called upon Abe Feinberg. Feinberg recalled Rabin complaining that “Everything you (Feinberg) have done about Phantoms is going down the drain. Clifford (Clark Clifford, Secretary of Defense and Warnke’s boss) is insisting on the NPT.” Now Feinberg had just recently met the President and Walt Rostow, his National Security Adviser, and remembered the President saying there would be “no conditions” to the sale of the planes. Hersh narrates the rest:
“So I picked up the telephone,” he said, “called the White House, and asked for Rostow.” The national security adviser was having dinner at Clifford’s house, and Feinberg, who was well known to the White House switchboard operators, was patched through. “Walt gets on the telephone,” continued Feinberg, “and I say, ‘Walt, you and I and the President were together and Johnson said ‘no conditions.’ Walt agrees. I say, ‘When you get back to the table, tell that to Clifford.’”
Clifford apparently got the message. For when Paul Warnke “arrived at a later meeting of his staff, all of whom favored tying the F-4 sale to Israeli acceptance of the NPT, he dramatically drew his hand across his neck. The NPT was out.” Harry Schwartz recalled Warnke’s account of the Clifford-Johnson dialogue: “Clifford called Johnson and LBJ said, ‘Sell them anything they want.’
“‘Mr. President, I don’t want to live in a world where the Israelis have nuclear weapons.’
“‘Don’t bother me with this anymore.’ And he hangs up.” (pp. 190ff)
So there it is. "Don’t bother me with this anymore," says the President of the United States. Nevermind hypocrisy. Nevermind being taken for a fool by another nation whom the United States has supported and continued to support in the face of worldwide opposition, and without which support this nation could not last a day. Nevermind being spied on, lied to, hijacked, and, in at least one instance, being attacked by this same nation that seems immune to criticism (I refer to the now-infamous "Liberty" incident, wherein Israeli aircraft fired upon an American telecommunications ship in international waters during its 1967 Six-Day War, killing 34 Americans and wounding 171.) LBJ, like Kennedy before him, felt constrained to honor his commitment to a major American Jewish donor, regardless of the fact that nuclear nonproliferation, which the President believed in as sincerely as he believed in anything and on which, arguably, depended the fate of the entire world, was openly mocked and endangered thereby.
Nor was this the end. This same kind of intentional blindness, this same massive hypocrisy, this same kowtowing to the organized might of American Jewry has continued almost unabated ever since, through every President and every administration, up to and including the administration of Barack Hussein Obama. CIA reports have been buried. Public accounts of Israel’s nuclear activities have been ignored by the world’s media: for example, in April 1976, Time magazine reported that shortly after the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel’s war hero Moshe Dayan had secretly ordered the building of a reprocessing plant. The report came from David Halevy, an Israeli citizen. Nothing happened. Ten years later, this time in 1986, the London Sunday Times ran an explosive story, based on the testimony of Israeli defector Mordecai Vanunu, detailing the inside story, with photos, of the huge Isaeli nuclear operation, including the fact that the Israeli nuclear stockpile now totaled more than 200 warheads, including some of the most sophisticated weapons in the nuclear arsenal such as advanced missile delivery systems targeting the Soviet Union, and “suitcase bombs” capable of infiltrating any country. Again, there was no reaction, other than a widespread Israeli disinformation campaign, much of which was organized by the rival Sunday Mirror of London by its pro-Israeli owner, Robert Maxwell.
Of course, some might say, ‘No one should worry. Israel is an ally, a sane and rational democracy, whose leaders would never employ such weapons.’ But that would be to forget the zealots who are in charge of this “democracy,” and what they have said, and done already. In the aftermath of the 1956 Suez War, for example, in which the Israeli leader David Ben Gurion considered President Eisenhower’s refusal to back Israel as a dastardly betrayal, one Israeli official is quoted by Hersh as saying: “We got the message. We can still remember the smell of Auschwitz and Treblinka. Next time we’ll take all of you with us.” (p. 42) It was at this point that Israel initiated its secret plan, with French aid, to go nuclear. And by the time of Israel’s 1973 Yom Kippur war with Egypt and Syria, it was not only nuclear, but deadly serious about acting. Most Americans, consumed with their own domestic drama known as Watergate, could never have known how close the world came at this time to Armaggedon, and worse (if anything could be worse than nuclear destruction), how the Israelis used that threat of Armaggedon to blackmail its patron and ally, the United States of America.
Hersh devotes an entire chapter, and more, to this episode. For the truth is, in the early days of the war, Israel was in a panic. Its famed commander, Moshe Dayan, having been totally surprised by the Arab attack, was virtually conceding defeat to the advancing Egyptian and Syrian armies which had destroyed 500 of Israel’s tanks and 400 planes, including 14 F-4 Phantom jets. An October 8 cabinet meeting resulted in three related decisions:
“Israel would rally its collapsing forces for a major counterattack; it would arm and target its nuclear arsenal in the event of total collapse and subsequent need for the “Samson Option” [i.e. bringing down “all of you with us”]; and finally, it would inform Washington of its unprecedented nuclear action—and unprecedented peril—and demand that the U.S. begin an emergency airlift of replacement arms and ammunition needed to sustain an extended all-out war effort.” (p. 225).
All three of these plans were implemented. Israel did counterattack, and managed to salvage the situation. But it also went on nuclear alert, readying its nuclear weapons not once, but twice in the course of the Yom Kippur war. It did this openly, partly to impress the Americans, but partly also to scare the Soviet Union into persuading their Arab allies not to advance beyond the pre-1967 borders. Apparently this warning to Egypt was given, according to Mohammed Hiekal, editor of Al Ahram, the leading Egyptian newspaper, warning the Egyptians that the “Israelis had three warheads assembled and ready.”
Finally, the blackmail was also implemented by the nuclear arming. Israel was already outraged that Henry Kissinger was taking his time in resupplying the Israeli military with the weapons that had been lost. Without the assurance of immediate delivery of such American weapons, Israeli commanders would be hampered in their vital counterattack. According to Hersh, a call on Kissinger by Simcha Dinitz, Israel’s ambassador to Washington, changed Kissinger’s mind. Confirmation of this comes, not from Kissinger’s memoirs, which omit any mention of Israeli nuclear capability (though they do mention the replacement of its war losses by October 9), much less its threat; but from Hermann F. Eilts, the American ambassador to Egypt. Eilts maintained that at the end of Kissinger’s tenure as Secretary of State, he brought up the 1973 war, and casually referred to the nuclear option: “Henry threw in that there was a concern that the Israelis might go nuclear. There had been intimations that if they didn’t get military equipment, and quickly, they might go nuclear”(p. 230). James Schlesinger, Secretary of Defense, concurred that “Kissinger just turned around totally. He got a little hysterical” in urging an immediate and massive resupply of weapons to Israel in October 1973. Schlesinger added that “there was an assumption that Israel had a few nukes and that if there was a collapse, there was a possibility that Israel would use them.” Finally, Anwar Sadat, then leader of Egypt, told Mohammed Heikal that Kissinger had said at the time: “It was serious, more serious than you can imagine.”
Before the war was over, Russia would threaten military intervention to get Israel to abide by the cease-fire, the United States had put the 82nd Airborne Division, B-52s carrying nuclear weapons, and the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy on alert, and Israel responded by going on nuclear alert one more time. Hersh cites one more confirmation of the episode—more dangerous by far than the Cuban Missile Crisis about which we’ve heard so much—in a March 10, 1980 addendum to a column by Jack Anderson. Anderson wrote as follows:
“Locked in secret Pentagon files is startling evidence that Israel maneuvered dangerously near the edge of nuclear war after the 1973 Arab assault. The secret documents claim that Israel came within hours of running out of essential arms. ‘At this crucial moment, the possibility of nuclear arms was discussed with the U.S,’ declares one report. American authorities feared the Israelis might resort to nuclear weapons to assure their survival. This was the most compelling reason, according to the secret papers, that the United States rushed conventional weapons to Israel.” (p. 236)
If all this doesn’t make your flesh crawl, I don’t know what will. Read The Samson Option and you’ll see that this is only a sketch of a much more detailed and disturbing story. This is so especially in the light of President Obama’s trip, this week, to try to re-invigorate the START Treaty with Russia, to delimit the nuclear stockpiles of the two major nuclear states even further. All of which is admirable. So is the United States’ continuing attempts to end nuclear proliferation. But all the fine words of statesmen and politicians seem like so much horse shit when viewed in the light of the half-century of dissimulation, deception and outright treason when it comes to Israel’s still-unacknowledged nuclear secrets. I mean think of it: Israel rants and raves about the alleged nuclear plans of Iran. It attacks and destroys Iraq’s Osirak reactor, to unanimous applause. It threatens a similar attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. It bellows and wails about terrorists who are plotting to infiltrate its borders, or those of the United States, with a suitcase bomb. And all along, it has been the lying, guilty party, doing the same thing, and much much worse. Possessed of hundreds of weapons and advanced rocketry to deliver them, it has threatened the world with nuclear conflagration more than once, and made known that it would do it again. What is a rational person to make of this? What are we to make of our leaders—who have known of this massive deception, of the spying of Jonathan Pollard who forwarded 500,000 pages of incredibly sensitive documents to Israel—and who have at the same time carried on with their hypocritical fulminations against nations like Iran and Korea for their “deceptions.” What are we to make of the political calculations of presidents—not one but several—who are willing, for political purposes, for continued campaign contributions to assure their own re-election, to put the entire world at risk of nuclear armaggedon? Can we call this anything other than despicable? anything other than treason?
Lawrence DiStasi
Monday, June 22, 2009
Self-Model and World-Model
Most of us go through life pretty much assuming that what we “are” is evident (I am that which perceives, acts, feels and makes my own decisions), and that what the world “is” is also evident (the world is that which I perceive “out there”—land, trees, water, sky, mountains, buildings, animals, other people, objects). Now along comes a book by Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel, (Basic Books: 2009) which, basing itself on the neuroscientific studies of recent years, turns these “obvious” assumptions upside down. It turns out, according to philosopher Metzinger, that what we “are” and what the world “is” are both based on models conjured up by the brain. We each have what Metzinger calls a “phenomenal self model” (PSM)—the conscious model of our organism as a whole that is activated by the brain. As for the world “out there,” it is also a model fed to us by our limited sensory equipment (eyes, ears, nose, taste, touch) and processed by our brains into “a low-dimensional projection of the inconceivably richer physical reality surrounding us and sustaining us.” So consciousness, for Metzinger and neuroscience, takes place in two related and interrelated steps: “First, our brains generate a world-simulation, so perfect that we do not recognize it as an image in our minds.” This specific world-simulation has been refined over evolutionary time to provide us with precisely what we need to survive. Then, “they [i.e. our brains] generate an inner image of ourselves as a whole.” This latter is the phenomenal Ego—the internal image of the person-as-a-whole, as it appears in conscious experience. Neither one of these models puts us “in direct contact with outside reality or with ourselves.” But since we are essentially blind to the fact that both are models, we have the experience of “seeing” reality and being ourselves fully and completely in that real world. This is what Metzinger means by the Ego Tunnel of his title: far from realizing that we are perceiving models created by our brain cells, we are in a kind of tunnel that totally precludes us from realizing this. It is only scientific experiments done in collaboration (to get beyond the tunnel that keeps each individual blind) that provide us with evidence of this counter-intuitive situation. (We should always remind ourselves that the earth as a globe spinning in inconceivably vast space was also counter-intuitive for most of human history.)
The first experiment Metzinger describes is one done in 1998 by University of Pittsburgh psychiatrists Matthew Botvinick and Jonathan Cohen. It’s a kind of play on the oft-reported phenomenon of the phantom limb, where patients who have had an arm or leg removed persist in “feeling” sensation in the absent limb. Botvinick and Cohen contrived a kind of obverse experiment:
“Subjects observed a rubber hand lying on the desk in front of them, with their own corresponding hand concealed from their view by a screen. The visible rubber hand and the subject’s unseen hand were then synchronously stroked with a probe. After a certain time (a mere 60 to 90 seconds when Metzinger tried this himself), the famous rubber-hand illusion emerges. Suddenly, you experience the rubber hand as your own, and you feel the repeated strokes in this rubber hand. Moreover, you feel a full-blown “virtual arm”—that is a connection from your shoulder to the fake hand on the table in front of you.” (p. 3)
The lessons of the rubber-hand experiment, as well as the later out-of-body experiences and experiments Metzinger describes, are profound. For in these situations, the existence and malleability of the PSM or phenomenal self-model, as a model, comes to light. Our brain, that is, creates a model of our bodies that is usually very accurate and immensely useful. But it can be fooled, as it is in the rubber hand experiment, into thinking that a rubber hand is part of itself. Therefore, we come to understand that what we consciously think of as “me,” is really only a model conjured by the brain. We also see that it can be manipulated in such a way that a rubber hand (a fake me) becomes a part of “me,” becomes “mine,” with feelings and sensations. Metzinger then poses a startling question: “Could one create a full-body analog of the rubber-hand illusion? Could the entire self be transposed to a location outside of the body?” (Normally, we think of our “self” as residing somewhere inside our heads.)
His answer is “yes.” In out-of-the-body experiences (OBEs), which Metzinger himself has had (and which Olaf Blanke, a neurologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Lausanne, has triggered in patients by directly stimulating their brains with an electrode), the conscious subject of experience (what I consider “me”) is located in the double. That is, in an OBE, there are typically two representations: the visual one (you see your body lying on a bed, or on an operating table); and the felt one, where you feel yourself hovering above your “body.” This latter hovering you is the “double,” and it is here that the phenomenal self model (“me,” or my “ego”) seems to be located. Hence the term, “out of the body:” “I” am out of my body.
What this means, first and most importantly, is that being conscious means literally creating models—both of what is “out there,” and what is “in here.” We have brain-generated images of what the world “is” and what we “are”, and they work quite well in most cases; but they are not “real” in the sense we think they are—i.e. that “we” are in direct contact with what “is”. They are “virtual,” models that create a center for us, a center we experience as ourselves, as our first person perspective, and which we use to great advantage to do everything needed to survive. And the second and related meaning is that these models can and have been manipulated in scientific experiments, thus revealing their reality as models. That is, if we had a true and enduring picture of ourselves, we would not be fooled by rubber hands, phantom limbs, or OBEs. If we had a true and enduring picture of the world, we would not think that an evening sky is apricot-pink. As Metzinger notes, “there are no colors out there in front of your eyes. The apricot-pink of the setting sun is not a property of the evening sky; it is a property of the internal model of the evening sky, a model created by your brain. The evening sky is colorless. The world is not inhabited by colored objects at all…out there, in front of your eyes, there is just an ocean of electro-magnetic radiation, a wild and raging mixture of different wavelengths….What is really happening is that the visual system in your brain is drilling a tunnel through this inconceivably rich physical environment and in the process is painting the tunnel walls in various shades of color…For your conscious eyes only.” Neuroscientists have evidence of this because of a type of brain injury called “apperceptive agnosia.” This injury prevents the brain from forming a coherent visual model of the outside world, even though the patient’s visual apparatus is intact. So though they can “see,” patients with this injury cannot recognize what it is they are looking at. Their modeling equipment is disabled.
I don’t know about you, but this gives me a kind of vertigo.
So do statements like: “No such things as selves exist in the world.”
Now the Buddha said this, over and over. Indian philosophy and religion talk about this and the related idea that what we take to be “real” is a dream, an illusion. But unless one experiences this “selfless” state for long periods of time, or consistently, this is something most people take on faith, if at all. But now, neuroscientists can refer to something like Cotard’s syndrome, a kind of selfless experience caused by brain malfunction. In it, patients stop using the first-person pronoun and, actually claim that they do not really exist. Metzinger mentions one patient who described herself as “Madame Zero.” The idea seems to be that, again, some part of the self-modeling apparatus is disabled. Metzinger follows this with another key idea: in order to have the feeling of “being someone,” you have to feel that you “own” your body, its sensations, and so on. And this too, is malleable: sports figures like skiers, race car drivers, and others often relate the sensation that their consciously sensed “body” at times is extended to include their skis, the cars they drive, and so on.
What, then, is the essence of selfhood? Again, ownership seems to be the minimal condition (Metzinger demonstrates that neither a “seeing self”, emotions, will or thoughts are necessary—shut your eyes and your sense of self remains.) His theory then becomes something like this:
Minimal self-consciousness is not control, but what makes control possible. It includes an image of the body in time and space (location) plus the fact that the organism creating this image does not recognize it as an image (because of the ‘tunnel’). But the important part is that “we discover that we can control the focus of attention. That we can actively control what information appears in our mind.” And then, taking off from experiments demonstrating that monkeys can control robots (called “slave” robots) by means of their thoughts, Metzinger hits us with this zinger:
“The conscious experience of being a subject arises when a single organism learns to enslave itself.” That is, when it feels as if “I” control myself, or my body-slave.
There are insights and mind-bending statements like this in every part, almost every page of Metzinger’s book and they are too numerous to recount. I will end this discussion, therefore, with Metzinger’s reflections on the notion of “free will.” To begin with, much prior brain research has already established the fact that subpersonal brain events (those that specify action goals and assemble motor commands) arise and begin actions before you are conscious of having the idea to “do” something. But since they do at some point become “conscious,” and thus become bound into the self-model active in your brain, you “experience them as your own thoughts, decisions, or urges to act—as properties that belong to you, the person as a whole.” Thus, it feels as if we are able to simply think about doing something, and then have our bodies make it happen. “We” control our bodies. Metzinger describes this as “the appearance of an agent”—i.e. someone who makes something happen, someone who is in control of his own actions. And free will depends intimately on this idea of “agency.” We feel we are able to do what we want to do, or rather, that what we do is done because we, our conscious selves, our PSM, want to. Moreover, this freely willing self-model is not a production of our minds alone; it involves the social life we engage in around us. Free will is like that: it is a social institution. Metzinger then discusses the implications of the fact that free will, or agency, is only an appearance in our model of ourselves:
"The assumption that something like free agency exists, and the fact that we treat one another as autonomous agents, are concepts fundamental to our legal system and the rules governing our societies—rules built on the notions of responsibility, accountability, and guilt. These rules are mirrored in the deep structure of our PSM, and this incessant mirroring of rules, this projection of higher-order assumptions about ourselves, created complex social networks. If one day we must tell an entirely different story about what human will is or is not, this will affect our societies in an unprecedented way. For instance, if accountability and responsibility do not exist, it is meaningless to punish people (as opposed to rehabilitating them) for something they ultimately could not have avoided doing." (p. 128)
Think about this. Virtually every religion and ethical/legal system known to humanity depends on the idea that people are responsible for their actions, and therefore must be held responsible. “You committed murder. You knew what you were doing, you thought it up and wanted to do it, and decided to do it knowing the consequences, and therefore you must pay.” But what brain research seems to be showing us is that, though we cannot really comprehend it ourselves, most of what we do is already decided by our body/brains before our “conscious selves” or models think about it, and “decide” to do it, and rationalize it. Indeed, that these “conscious selves” are models that are useful illusions, but not really free agents in the strict sense of the word. What then?
This is only one of the mind-bending conundrums raised by this book. For anyone who finds this type of deep contemplation fascinating, I recommend that you search out Metzinger’s book, read it, cogitate on it. I think I can safely say you’ll never be quite the same.
Lawrence DiStasi
The first experiment Metzinger describes is one done in 1998 by University of Pittsburgh psychiatrists Matthew Botvinick and Jonathan Cohen. It’s a kind of play on the oft-reported phenomenon of the phantom limb, where patients who have had an arm or leg removed persist in “feeling” sensation in the absent limb. Botvinick and Cohen contrived a kind of obverse experiment:
“Subjects observed a rubber hand lying on the desk in front of them, with their own corresponding hand concealed from their view by a screen. The visible rubber hand and the subject’s unseen hand were then synchronously stroked with a probe. After a certain time (a mere 60 to 90 seconds when Metzinger tried this himself), the famous rubber-hand illusion emerges. Suddenly, you experience the rubber hand as your own, and you feel the repeated strokes in this rubber hand. Moreover, you feel a full-blown “virtual arm”—that is a connection from your shoulder to the fake hand on the table in front of you.” (p. 3)
The lessons of the rubber-hand experiment, as well as the later out-of-body experiences and experiments Metzinger describes, are profound. For in these situations, the existence and malleability of the PSM or phenomenal self-model, as a model, comes to light. Our brain, that is, creates a model of our bodies that is usually very accurate and immensely useful. But it can be fooled, as it is in the rubber hand experiment, into thinking that a rubber hand is part of itself. Therefore, we come to understand that what we consciously think of as “me,” is really only a model conjured by the brain. We also see that it can be manipulated in such a way that a rubber hand (a fake me) becomes a part of “me,” becomes “mine,” with feelings and sensations. Metzinger then poses a startling question: “Could one create a full-body analog of the rubber-hand illusion? Could the entire self be transposed to a location outside of the body?” (Normally, we think of our “self” as residing somewhere inside our heads.)
His answer is “yes.” In out-of-the-body experiences (OBEs), which Metzinger himself has had (and which Olaf Blanke, a neurologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Lausanne, has triggered in patients by directly stimulating their brains with an electrode), the conscious subject of experience (what I consider “me”) is located in the double. That is, in an OBE, there are typically two representations: the visual one (you see your body lying on a bed, or on an operating table); and the felt one, where you feel yourself hovering above your “body.” This latter hovering you is the “double,” and it is here that the phenomenal self model (“me,” or my “ego”) seems to be located. Hence the term, “out of the body:” “I” am out of my body.
What this means, first and most importantly, is that being conscious means literally creating models—both of what is “out there,” and what is “in here.” We have brain-generated images of what the world “is” and what we “are”, and they work quite well in most cases; but they are not “real” in the sense we think they are—i.e. that “we” are in direct contact with what “is”. They are “virtual,” models that create a center for us, a center we experience as ourselves, as our first person perspective, and which we use to great advantage to do everything needed to survive. And the second and related meaning is that these models can and have been manipulated in scientific experiments, thus revealing their reality as models. That is, if we had a true and enduring picture of ourselves, we would not be fooled by rubber hands, phantom limbs, or OBEs. If we had a true and enduring picture of the world, we would not think that an evening sky is apricot-pink. As Metzinger notes, “there are no colors out there in front of your eyes. The apricot-pink of the setting sun is not a property of the evening sky; it is a property of the internal model of the evening sky, a model created by your brain. The evening sky is colorless. The world is not inhabited by colored objects at all…out there, in front of your eyes, there is just an ocean of electro-magnetic radiation, a wild and raging mixture of different wavelengths….What is really happening is that the visual system in your brain is drilling a tunnel through this inconceivably rich physical environment and in the process is painting the tunnel walls in various shades of color…For your conscious eyes only.” Neuroscientists have evidence of this because of a type of brain injury called “apperceptive agnosia.” This injury prevents the brain from forming a coherent visual model of the outside world, even though the patient’s visual apparatus is intact. So though they can “see,” patients with this injury cannot recognize what it is they are looking at. Their modeling equipment is disabled.
I don’t know about you, but this gives me a kind of vertigo.
So do statements like: “No such things as selves exist in the world.”
Now the Buddha said this, over and over. Indian philosophy and religion talk about this and the related idea that what we take to be “real” is a dream, an illusion. But unless one experiences this “selfless” state for long periods of time, or consistently, this is something most people take on faith, if at all. But now, neuroscientists can refer to something like Cotard’s syndrome, a kind of selfless experience caused by brain malfunction. In it, patients stop using the first-person pronoun and, actually claim that they do not really exist. Metzinger mentions one patient who described herself as “Madame Zero.” The idea seems to be that, again, some part of the self-modeling apparatus is disabled. Metzinger follows this with another key idea: in order to have the feeling of “being someone,” you have to feel that you “own” your body, its sensations, and so on. And this too, is malleable: sports figures like skiers, race car drivers, and others often relate the sensation that their consciously sensed “body” at times is extended to include their skis, the cars they drive, and so on.
What, then, is the essence of selfhood? Again, ownership seems to be the minimal condition (Metzinger demonstrates that neither a “seeing self”, emotions, will or thoughts are necessary—shut your eyes and your sense of self remains.) His theory then becomes something like this:
Minimal self-consciousness is not control, but what makes control possible. It includes an image of the body in time and space (location) plus the fact that the organism creating this image does not recognize it as an image (because of the ‘tunnel’). But the important part is that “we discover that we can control the focus of attention. That we can actively control what information appears in our mind.” And then, taking off from experiments demonstrating that monkeys can control robots (called “slave” robots) by means of their thoughts, Metzinger hits us with this zinger:
“The conscious experience of being a subject arises when a single organism learns to enslave itself.” That is, when it feels as if “I” control myself, or my body-slave.
There are insights and mind-bending statements like this in every part, almost every page of Metzinger’s book and they are too numerous to recount. I will end this discussion, therefore, with Metzinger’s reflections on the notion of “free will.” To begin with, much prior brain research has already established the fact that subpersonal brain events (those that specify action goals and assemble motor commands) arise and begin actions before you are conscious of having the idea to “do” something. But since they do at some point become “conscious,” and thus become bound into the self-model active in your brain, you “experience them as your own thoughts, decisions, or urges to act—as properties that belong to you, the person as a whole.” Thus, it feels as if we are able to simply think about doing something, and then have our bodies make it happen. “We” control our bodies. Metzinger describes this as “the appearance of an agent”—i.e. someone who makes something happen, someone who is in control of his own actions. And free will depends intimately on this idea of “agency.” We feel we are able to do what we want to do, or rather, that what we do is done because we, our conscious selves, our PSM, want to. Moreover, this freely willing self-model is not a production of our minds alone; it involves the social life we engage in around us. Free will is like that: it is a social institution. Metzinger then discusses the implications of the fact that free will, or agency, is only an appearance in our model of ourselves:
"The assumption that something like free agency exists, and the fact that we treat one another as autonomous agents, are concepts fundamental to our legal system and the rules governing our societies—rules built on the notions of responsibility, accountability, and guilt. These rules are mirrored in the deep structure of our PSM, and this incessant mirroring of rules, this projection of higher-order assumptions about ourselves, created complex social networks. If one day we must tell an entirely different story about what human will is or is not, this will affect our societies in an unprecedented way. For instance, if accountability and responsibility do not exist, it is meaningless to punish people (as opposed to rehabilitating them) for something they ultimately could not have avoided doing." (p. 128)
Think about this. Virtually every religion and ethical/legal system known to humanity depends on the idea that people are responsible for their actions, and therefore must be held responsible. “You committed murder. You knew what you were doing, you thought it up and wanted to do it, and decided to do it knowing the consequences, and therefore you must pay.” But what brain research seems to be showing us is that, though we cannot really comprehend it ourselves, most of what we do is already decided by our body/brains before our “conscious selves” or models think about it, and “decide” to do it, and rationalize it. Indeed, that these “conscious selves” are models that are useful illusions, but not really free agents in the strict sense of the word. What then?
This is only one of the mind-bending conundrums raised by this book. For anyone who finds this type of deep contemplation fascinating, I recommend that you search out Metzinger’s book, read it, cogitate on it. I think I can safely say you’ll never be quite the same.
Lawrence DiStasi
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Irrational Economics
As a follow-up to my last blog about General Motors, I wanted to add some thoughts about economics in general. This is not because I know all that much about the subject, but because recent events have forced us all to question the part economic theory plays in our lives, and whether or not it makes sense. A recent BBC documentary by Adam Curtis called “The Trap”, for instance, pointed out that particularly since the Reagan presidency, a notion has taken root suggesting that political solutions by governments are no longer necessary; just let the genius of the free market determine everything. This would mean, assuming it were fully implemented, the dominance of corporations and those who head them—something which, up until a year or two ago, essentially prevailed. Money and markets and the lobbyists for both have been all-pervasive and all-powerful in determining not just who gets elected, but how lives are lived, how products are grown, mined, produced, marketed, and disposed of, and how the planet is managed. The result has been a growing sense of things out of control, of imbalance, exploitation, looming catastrophe.
The heart of this idea to “let markets and economists run things” lies in the standard economic model that assumes that humans who make economic decisions are rational actors. This model runs on the notion that we know all the relevant information about the decisions we make, that we can figure the value of different options, and that we can intelligently weigh the implications and results of each of our choices. It is on the basis of such assumptions that economists draw conclusions about consumer trends, laws that govern economic behavior (and by implication, all behavior), and policies made by governments. A recent book by behavioral economist Dan Ariely, “Predictably Irrational” (HarperCollins: 2008), provides evidence that such assumptions are false. Even the law of supply and demand, Ariely maintains, is false, because “what consumers are willing to pay can easily be manipulated, and this means that consumers don’t in fact have a good handle on their own preferences and the prices they are willing to pay for different goods and experiences.” Ariely describes some of his own experiments to prove this.
Take the “decoy effect.” Marketers have learned to always include a high-priced decoy offer in the range of choices they make available to consumers. This is designed to get the customer to choose what appears to be the “cheaper” option, when, in reality, it’s the choice the marketer wanted him to make in the first place. Ariely cites as an example an offer to buy the Economist magazine. Consumers are offered three “choices”: a) an internet-only subscription for $59; b) a print-only subscription for $125; c ) a print-and-internet subscription for $125. Most people go for the $125 offer that gives them both print and internet (it seems like a bargain—nevermind whether it’s needed or not—compared to the $125 for the print-only option.) The con is revealed when the $125 print-only option (the decoy) is eliminated; in this case, fewer take the print-and-interent option at $125, and more choose the internet-only offer at $59. Why? Because there is no “decoy” to persuade them of the “good deal” they’re getting. This same decoy effect can be observed again and again.
Ariely explains this via his concept of “arbitrary coherence.” The idea is simple: the initial price we are willing to pay for an item is in large part arbitrary. But once that price is fixed in our minds, it will determine not just how much we’ll pay for that item today, but also in the future. That is, the price becomes a coherent standard, or anchor. Even more astonishing, experiments show that just getting subjects to think of a high number (as for instance, asking them to write their social security number) “establishes a median price in their minds.” Then when asked how much they’d pay for a bottle of wine, those with higher social security numbers were willing to pay more than those with lower social security numbers! The completely irrelevant social security number became the “anchor” for what people were willing to pay. Ariely’s conclusion: most of have no idea what most things are worth, so we depend on some “anchor” to guide us. And who usually provides the anchor? You guessed it: the one trying to sell us the goods.
Ariely then makes his astonishing claim: the hallowed law of supply and demand, which says that the supply of a thing measured against how many people want it (demand) determines prices, is false. In the real world, anchoring (the price we use as a standard of a thing’s worth) is manipulated by the marketer: manufacturer’s suggested retail price, advertised prices, promotions, product introductions, and so on. “Instead of consumers’ willingness to pay influencing market prices (demand), the causality is somewhat reversed and it is market prices themselves that influence consumers’ willingness to pay.” One can test this with gasoline prices: a few years ago, paying $2 per gallon seemed outrageous. Last year, with prices steadily increasing, most of us found ourselves lining up if a station advertised unleaded at $3.75 a gallon, and thinking it was a bargain!
Ariely also investigates the influence of belief on our willingness to pay. For example, if a pain reliever called “Veladone” (really Vitamin C) is priced at $2.50 per pill, subjects who receive an electric shock report considerable pain relief from the pill. But if the “Veladone” is priced at 10 cents a pill, only half the patients report relief. The “placebo effect” is the common name for the mechanism at work here. The idea is that in experiments, a certain percentage of subjects are given placebos—useless pills, often sugar. Yet many of those given sugar pills heal just as well as those given the real medicine. Ariely cites a 1993 study showing that even in surgeries like arthroscopic knee surgery, the placebo had its effect: of 180 patients with osteoarthritis, the placebo group (no surgery) got equal relief from pain and the ability to walk as those who got the actual surgery. One of the study’s authors, Dr. Nelda Wray, questioned “whether the $1 billion spent on these procedures might be put to better use.” According to Ariely, two mechanisms are at work in placebos: 1) belief, i.e. our confidence in the drug or doctor; 2) conditioning, the expectancy built up in the body after repeat experience, which releases chemicals to prepare us for the future (this latter is a bit like the saliva released in Pavlov’s dogs by a bell announcing food).
Ariely concludes: “we are all far less rational in our decision-making than standard economic theory assumes. Our irrational behaviors are neither random nor senseless—they are systematic and predictable. We all make the same types of mistakes over and over, because of the basic wiring of our brains.”
It is interesting to note, incidentally, that John Nash (of “A Beautiful Mind” fame), the man who invented game theory (one of the most highly respected economic theories of recent years, based in rational decision-making) did so when he was a paranoid schizophrenic. As a coda to this debunking, it is interesting to note that the only people who have been found to consistently make rational economic decisions are economists themselves, and schizophrenics. And lest we are inclined to wish that somehow we could all become as rational as Spock, it might be well to remember what brain researcher Antonio Damasio has found: our emotions are necessary for decision-making. Patients with brain damage that incapacitates their emotions but leaves their reasoning ability intact find it impossible to make decisions.
In sum, we would all do well to understand both how our own economic decisions are made, and what clever hucksters do to influence them. What Ernest Hemingway once said about the necessary equipment for a writer is equally applicable to any potential consumer: come equipped with a 100% built-in shit detector.
Lawrence DiStasi
The heart of this idea to “let markets and economists run things” lies in the standard economic model that assumes that humans who make economic decisions are rational actors. This model runs on the notion that we know all the relevant information about the decisions we make, that we can figure the value of different options, and that we can intelligently weigh the implications and results of each of our choices. It is on the basis of such assumptions that economists draw conclusions about consumer trends, laws that govern economic behavior (and by implication, all behavior), and policies made by governments. A recent book by behavioral economist Dan Ariely, “Predictably Irrational” (HarperCollins: 2008), provides evidence that such assumptions are false. Even the law of supply and demand, Ariely maintains, is false, because “what consumers are willing to pay can easily be manipulated, and this means that consumers don’t in fact have a good handle on their own preferences and the prices they are willing to pay for different goods and experiences.” Ariely describes some of his own experiments to prove this.
Take the “decoy effect.” Marketers have learned to always include a high-priced decoy offer in the range of choices they make available to consumers. This is designed to get the customer to choose what appears to be the “cheaper” option, when, in reality, it’s the choice the marketer wanted him to make in the first place. Ariely cites as an example an offer to buy the Economist magazine. Consumers are offered three “choices”: a) an internet-only subscription for $59; b) a print-only subscription for $125; c ) a print-and-internet subscription for $125. Most people go for the $125 offer that gives them both print and internet (it seems like a bargain—nevermind whether it’s needed or not—compared to the $125 for the print-only option.) The con is revealed when the $125 print-only option (the decoy) is eliminated; in this case, fewer take the print-and-interent option at $125, and more choose the internet-only offer at $59. Why? Because there is no “decoy” to persuade them of the “good deal” they’re getting. This same decoy effect can be observed again and again.
Ariely explains this via his concept of “arbitrary coherence.” The idea is simple: the initial price we are willing to pay for an item is in large part arbitrary. But once that price is fixed in our minds, it will determine not just how much we’ll pay for that item today, but also in the future. That is, the price becomes a coherent standard, or anchor. Even more astonishing, experiments show that just getting subjects to think of a high number (as for instance, asking them to write their social security number) “establishes a median price in their minds.” Then when asked how much they’d pay for a bottle of wine, those with higher social security numbers were willing to pay more than those with lower social security numbers! The completely irrelevant social security number became the “anchor” for what people were willing to pay. Ariely’s conclusion: most of have no idea what most things are worth, so we depend on some “anchor” to guide us. And who usually provides the anchor? You guessed it: the one trying to sell us the goods.
Ariely then makes his astonishing claim: the hallowed law of supply and demand, which says that the supply of a thing measured against how many people want it (demand) determines prices, is false. In the real world, anchoring (the price we use as a standard of a thing’s worth) is manipulated by the marketer: manufacturer’s suggested retail price, advertised prices, promotions, product introductions, and so on. “Instead of consumers’ willingness to pay influencing market prices (demand), the causality is somewhat reversed and it is market prices themselves that influence consumers’ willingness to pay.” One can test this with gasoline prices: a few years ago, paying $2 per gallon seemed outrageous. Last year, with prices steadily increasing, most of us found ourselves lining up if a station advertised unleaded at $3.75 a gallon, and thinking it was a bargain!
Ariely also investigates the influence of belief on our willingness to pay. For example, if a pain reliever called “Veladone” (really Vitamin C) is priced at $2.50 per pill, subjects who receive an electric shock report considerable pain relief from the pill. But if the “Veladone” is priced at 10 cents a pill, only half the patients report relief. The “placebo effect” is the common name for the mechanism at work here. The idea is that in experiments, a certain percentage of subjects are given placebos—useless pills, often sugar. Yet many of those given sugar pills heal just as well as those given the real medicine. Ariely cites a 1993 study showing that even in surgeries like arthroscopic knee surgery, the placebo had its effect: of 180 patients with osteoarthritis, the placebo group (no surgery) got equal relief from pain and the ability to walk as those who got the actual surgery. One of the study’s authors, Dr. Nelda Wray, questioned “whether the $1 billion spent on these procedures might be put to better use.” According to Ariely, two mechanisms are at work in placebos: 1) belief, i.e. our confidence in the drug or doctor; 2) conditioning, the expectancy built up in the body after repeat experience, which releases chemicals to prepare us for the future (this latter is a bit like the saliva released in Pavlov’s dogs by a bell announcing food).
Ariely concludes: “we are all far less rational in our decision-making than standard economic theory assumes. Our irrational behaviors are neither random nor senseless—they are systematic and predictable. We all make the same types of mistakes over and over, because of the basic wiring of our brains.”
It is interesting to note, incidentally, that John Nash (of “A Beautiful Mind” fame), the man who invented game theory (one of the most highly respected economic theories of recent years, based in rational decision-making) did so when he was a paranoid schizophrenic. As a coda to this debunking, it is interesting to note that the only people who have been found to consistently make rational economic decisions are economists themselves, and schizophrenics. And lest we are inclined to wish that somehow we could all become as rational as Spock, it might be well to remember what brain researcher Antonio Damasio has found: our emotions are necessary for decision-making. Patients with brain damage that incapacitates their emotions but leaves their reasoning ability intact find it impossible to make decisions.
In sum, we would all do well to understand both how our own economic decisions are made, and what clever hucksters do to influence them. What Ernest Hemingway once said about the necessary equipment for a writer is equally applicable to any potential consumer: come equipped with a 100% built-in shit detector.
Lawrence DiStasi
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