From the Archives

I found a document that runs a little like this:

Presidential Adviser: Mr. President your policies are criminal and stupid.
President: Gee Bob, ya think? Maybe we should reexamine the premises underlying our whole approach to the situation.

U.S. Adviser to Kurds Stands to Reap Oil Profits

By JAMES GLANZ and WALTER GIBBS

nyt, November 12, 2009

Peter W. Galbraith, a former U.S. ambassador, could earn millions as a result of his ties to the Iraqi Kurds and a Norwegian oil company.

Did Big Oil Win the War in Iraq?

By Antonia Juhasz, AlterNet. Posted November 14, 2009.

"The reform process in Washington has been hijacked by the private health insurance industry"

Democracy Now!

Over 2,200 US Veterans Died in 2008 Due to Lack of Health Insurance

"DR. STEFFIE WOOLHANDLER: Well, we think that the Congress needs to start from scratch on this bill. The reform process in Washington has been hijacked by the private health insurance industry. If you look at the Baucus framework, which was the basis of the Senate bill—it’s on the Senate Finance Committee website. Just right-click on that document, and it turns out the author of the document was Elizabeth Fowler, who’s a former vice president of Wellpoint, the nation’s largest private insurance company, covering 35 million people. So the private insurance industry has hijacked the process. What’s come out of the House, what’s likely to come out of the Senate, is a completely inadequate bill that takes about $500 billion in taxpayer money and hands it over to the private health insurance industry.

...

It’s $500 billion in new subsidies to the private health insurance, millions of mandatory new customers for private health insurance.... I think down the line we’re actually likely to be worse off in handing over so much taxpayer money to what is essentially a private health insurance industry bailout."

Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, professor of medicine at Harvard University and a primary care physician in Cambridge. She is also a co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program. She testified about uninsured veterans before Congress in 2007.

Connections to the Orient

How Eurocentric Are You?

By M. SHAHID ALAM

http://www.counterpunch.org/shahid11062009.html

"At the outset of the classes I teach, I always address the question of bias in the social sciences. In one course – on the history of the global economy – this is the central theme. It critiques Eurocentric biases in several leading Western accounts of the rise of the global economy.

This fall, I began my first lecture on Eurocentrism by asking my students, How Eurocentric is your day? I explained what I wanted to hear from them. Can they get through a typical day without running into ideas, institutions, values, technologies and products that originated outside the West – in China, India, the Islamicate or Africa?"

From Malinowski to Human Terrain Systems

Empires and the Sullying of Anthropology

By ROBERT LAWLESS

http://www.counterpunch.org/lawless11062009.html

"Enter a war zone with the expectation that the heavy armor will coerce the population into electing a favorable head of state; if this fails, then take refuge in your anthropologists, who will find a quick way to ‘nativize’ the war and help you clamber onto the helicopters. The country you have left behind is now more of a humanitarian disaster than when you self-righteously flew in on the wings of humanitarian interventionism."

Robert Reich: Why Unemployment Is More Important Than Health-Care Reform

"While affordable health care is critically important to Americans, making a living is more urgent. Yet the administration's efforts to date on this more basic concern have been neither particularly visible nor coherent."