Hollywood's Fix for America's Three and a Half Trillion-Dollar Lobbying Addiction

by Nomiki Konst

In 3rd century BC Rome, actors were considered equal to prostitutes. In 2010, actors and others in entertainment have evolved into a major force behind campaigns and progressive causes. Unfortunately, these efforts resulted in only token reform due to a greater problem in America.

The United States of America has a dirty little secret. We're addicted to a drug. A drug dealt everyday in the halls of Congress, on the streets of Washington and at the exclusive Georgetown soirees. That drug is corruption, pure and simple. And the dealers are lobbyists. The year 2009 was record breaking for the lobbying industry, mostly due to the health care debate, with total spending on all issues at more than $3.47 billion.

Last year, nearly $545 million was spent just on health care. It would sound fabulous if it actually went to caring for people's health. Except it was spent on health care industrylobbyists, whose expensive words and promises were thrown all around Washington. Not a penny was spent on the 56-year-old retired schoolteacher, Lorraine O'Malley's chemotherapy bill. Or 20-year-old college student John Bamberger's emergency appendectomy. Or Karen Toolin's medical costs after a terrible car accident following her layoff from a company she was loyal to for 23 years.

Recently, the Congressional Budget Office estimated the proposed health care plan will cost the United States $94 billion a year over ten years, will reduce the deficit by $138 billion over that time and extend coverage to 32 million more Americans.  

The PR agencies hired by the health care industry told conservative lawmakers that reform will put our country further into debt. Then the conservative lawmakers spewed this message to American people. Are we to presume that the same groups that spend $545 million on health care talk are concerned with the cost of this health care bill?  

Americans are so conditioned to hearing "billions and trillions of dollars" spent on "Operation This" and "Operation That" and the unfathomable amount of money we owe China, that when we hear about $545 million being wasted on words, it's easy to blink once and change the channel.  Continued...

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That Acrid Smell in the Air

by Sherman Yellen

Oh how I hate an ism. Born in the first half of the twentieth century I've lived through them all. That century was cursed with fascism, communism, and McCarthyism. In the twenty first we have Islamic terrorism. 

I must apologize if I am adding to the already overcrowded list of isms -- but with the threats from Republican Congressmen, the bulls-eye targeting of Sarah Palin of the Democrats she disagrees with, and the racist and homophobic curses from the Tea Party ringing in our ears after the passage of the health care bill, I suggest that we take a look backwards at the sad story of Timothy James McVeigh and see the McVeighism that is festering. 

Here was a man so filled with rage and resentment against the government for its Waco and Ruby Ridge raids, and a generalized hatred for American foreign policy, that he used explosives to blow up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal building in April of 1995 killing 168 people, injuring 450 others, nineteen of them small children in a day care center. Continued...

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What is Patriotism?

by Janet Ritz

Calls for patriotism were used during the Bush Administration with the implication that those who did not support them in wartime were unpatriotic. But what about the summer of 2009 with its town hall meetings turned into shouting matches and signs that incited hate?

Webster's Dictionary defines patriotism as: "love and loyal or zealous support of one's country."

Does President Barack Obama love his country? He's put his life on the line to serve it, so, evidence points to a resounding yes. That is not hyperbole. The threats against this president are up 400 percent over his predecessor.

Are there reasons for citizens to be angry? The economy, for Wall Street, has begun to turn around. The problem is that it's not happening for Main Street. We're justifiably frightened by and frustrated with the oligarchy that has intertwined itself like the tentacles of a Jules Verne octopus into congressional reelection coffers. We get it. They are, for the most part, not there for us.

Can the same be said of President Obama? He didn't have to take on the third rail of health care reform. He could have been like all the presidents before him since Truman; talked about reform but never have gotten anything past the special interests that have exposed themselves as more interested in their specialness than in what the country needs as a whole (see definition: patriotism). Continued...

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