The health care bill is not about health care. It is about protecting and increasing the profits of the insurance companies. … What the U.S. needs is a single-payer not-for-profit health system that pays doctors and nurses sufficiently. … A private health care system worked in the days before expensive medical technology, malpractice suits, high costs of bureaucracy associated with third-party payers and heavy investment in combating fraud, and pressure on insurance companies to improve “shareholder returns.”
Who wrote this? A good guess: David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler, co-founders of Physicians for a National Health Program.
The U.S. can reduce the budget deficit by hundreds of billion of dollars by ending its pointless and illegal wars in the Middle East, by closing hundreds of overseas military bases, and by cutting an overstuffed military budget. This would require the U.S. to give up its goal of world hegemony, but now that America’s creditors have seen its aggressiveness, they are unlikely to continue financing U.S. militarism. Better to give up an unrealizable goal than to have it yanked away.
Who wrote this? A good guess: The late Chalmers Johnson, Asian studies specialist and author of Blowback and The Sorrows of Empire.
While there is time, the U.S. should give thought to the energy implications of suburban development, perhaps subsidize, if necessary, food production near population concentrations, require development plans to specify the water resources, create public transportation systems that can be run by renewable energy, and otherwise prepare itself for both the exhaustion of nature’s resources and of the U.S. dollar as world reserve currency. If the future is left to take care of itself, organized society in the U.S. could fail.
Who wrote this? A good guess: Richard Heinberg, author of Powerdown, a book about the end of cheap oil.
Yes, you’d think these uncompromising statements were written by well-known advocates (probably liberal) of dramatic policy change. Actually they were all written by Paul Craig Roberts, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Ronald Reagan and recently author of How the Economy Was Lost, a searing indictment of the Republican and Democratic policies that invited the crash from which the country is now struggling to extricate itself.
