Today's Stories

September 4-6, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Deeper Into the Tunnel

Carl Ginsburg
Saving New Orleans' Charity Hospital

Jonathan Cook
The Missing Link in Israeli Organ Theft?

George Wuerthner
The Unintended Consequences of Wolf Hunting

Marc Levy
The Bling They Curse and Carry

Ray McGovern
Holbrooke's Afghan Benchmark

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
It Happened in Miami

Joe Paff
Organizing the Mission

Gareth Porter
Taliban's Tank-Killing Bombs Came From CIA, Not Iran

Devin Beaulieu
Scaremongering About Bolivia and Islam

David Ker Thomson
Love and Dekes in Utopia

Don Fitz
The Case of the Biodevastation 7: What the Police Won't Apologize For

Jim Goodman
Why Honor Organized Labor?

Wajahat Ali
Domestic Crusaders: Making Muslim American Theater

Ron Jacobs
Agitator Journalism: Remembering Ramparts

John V. Walsh
Obama to Cindy Sheehan: Get Lost

David Yearsley
Cameron Carpenter's Amazing Organ Transplants

September 3, 2009

Marcus Rediker
Inside Auburn Prison

Ron Jacobs
Embedded With the Taliban

Mike Whitney
How Bad Will It Get?

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Untold Story of the Cuban Five: Indictment À La Carte

Saul Landau
Moby Dick and Asian Typhoons

Anat Matar
Israeli Academics Must Pay a Price to End Occupation

Tanya Golash-Boza
How Immigration Enforcement is Weakening National Security

Dave Lindorff
Which Side Are You On?

Andy Worthington
The Story of Gitmo's Two Syrians

Website of the Day
Plundering Appalachia

September 2, 2009

John Ross
Mexico's Plagues

Vijay Prashad
Hey Ram, the Things the Financial Times Group Does!

Rev. Jim Rigby
Why is Universal Health Care "Un-American"?

Joanne Mariner
What the Inspector General Found

Missy Beattie
Hejira: At Martha's Vineyard with Cindy Sheehan

Soren Ambrose
Multilateral Money

Diane Farsetta
Water: the Newest Wave of Corporate "Social Responsibility"

Nadia Hijab
Mulling Mullen's Message

Shamus Cooke
How to Lower the Deficit Without Killing Social Security

Charles R. Larson
Is Dick Cheney Running Scared?

Website of the Day
Inside the Egg Hatchery

September 1, 2009

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Wolf at Trout Creek

Paul Craig Roberts
Why Not Sanctions for Israel?

Mark T. Harris
The Whole Foods Boycott: It's About More Than CEO Hypocrisy

Dean Baker
Bank Profits Are Up: Did You Hear Anyone Say, "Thank You"?

Jeffrey Buchanan
Ending the Human Rights Crisis in KatrinaRitaVille

Robin Mittenthal
A Sea of Monocrops: Old MacDonald Never Had a Farm Like This

Ellen Brown
Mercury Mischief

Martha Rosenberg
Vytorin Marketing is Back

Website of the Day
Crazy Town Hall Protester Interviews

August 31, 2009

Pam Martens
Madoff and the SEC's Revolving Door

Anthony DiMaggio
What Obama Isn't Telling You About Afghanistan

Bouthaina Shaaban
Israeli Bodysnatchers

Ray McGovern
The Press and Torture: Covering for Cheney?

Joseph Shansky
Scenes of Resistance in Honduras

Greg Moses
The Dying Dillos of Austin

Brian McKenna
Pig Sacrifice and Swine Flu Panic

David Macaray
The Tender Trap

Brenda Norrell
Uranium Mining in the Grand Canyon

Paul Craig Roberts
The Environment Loses a Champion

Beth Sherouse
Why I'm Going to the Big Gay March in Washington

Website of the Day
The Failure of the Left Antiwar Movement

August 28-30, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Teddy Kennedy the Hollow Champion

Joshua Frank /
Jeffrey St. Clair
From the Ledge to the Edge: How Tre Arrow Became America's Most Wanted Environmental "Terrorist"

Steve Early
Kennedy's Sins Against Labor

Michael Hudson
Learning About Financialization the Hard Way

Carl Ginsburg
Bernanke in Obamatime

Saul Landau
The Nuclear Gang Rides Again

Dave Marsh
Trapped Again: Michael Jackson's Crossover Dream

Mike Whitney
Band-Aids for the Recession

Dave Lindorff
Obama's War

José Pertierra
A Decision in the Posada Case

Joe Bageant
Obama's Fake Fight for Reform

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Spies Without Espionage

Lee Sustar
On Strike for Health Care Justice

David Ker Thomson
Life in the 'Shed

David Rosen
The Silent Slaughter: Sex Wars and Nation-Building in Iraq

Alison Weir
Israeli Organ Harvesting

Ron Jacobs
Will There be Free Speech in Pittsburgh?

David Swanson
Bush Tortured

Udi Aloni
An Appeal to Israeli Filmmakers

Charles R. Larson
Children During Wartime

Kim Nicolini
District 9: Science Fiction of the Now

David Yearsley
The Wagner Cult in Seattle

Lorenzo Wolff
Riding the Rails with King Curtis

Poets' Basement
Three Poems by Marc Beaudin

Website of the Weekend
The Hidden History of Katrina

August 27, 2009

Andrea Peacock
Bearly Making It: How Many Biologists Does It Take to Count a Dead Grizzly?

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Incapacitating the Cuban Five

Ray McGovern
Closing in on the Torturers

Gideon Levy
The Last Refuge: Neve Gordon and the Boycott of Israel

Shamus Cook
World Bankers Agree: the Recession is Over ... Maybe

Norman Solomon
The Afghanistan Gap

Marshall Auerbach
We Already Have a Public Option

Benjamin Dangl
Reclaiming a Continent

Kathryn Gray
The Water Privateers

David Macaray
Please Buy Our Beer (And Join Our Union)

Website of the Day
Stop the Privatization of Ocean Fisheries

August 26, 2009

Gareth Porter
The Leaking Game: Planted News Stories About Iran and Nuclear Weapons

Dave Lindorff
Getting Away With Torture: Holder's Limited, Modified Hangout

Dean Baker
The Reappointment of Bernanke

Laura Carlsen
The Coup and Honduran Women

Paul Craig Roberts
When the Government Comes First

Laura Raymond /
Bill Quigley
Haiti One Year After the Hurricane

Jordan Flaherty
Still Homeless, Still Struggling in New Orleans

Jonathan Cook
The Long Struggle to Reclaim Beersheva's Great Mosque

Robert Bryce
Bamboozled About Energy

Danny Weil
The Future of Charter Schools

Cindy Sheehan
Farewell, Senator Kennedy

John V. Walsh
Cindy Sheehan's Lonely Vigil in Obamaland

Website of the Day
The President's Laugh Line

August 25, 2009

Gabriel Kolko
Israel: A Stalemated Action of History

Danny Weil
The Charter School Hype and How It's Managed

Martine Bulard
China's Wild West

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
The Cuban Five: The Face of Impunity

Bélen Fernández
Why Didn't the Leopard Eat Tom Friedman?

August 24, 2009

Danny Weil
Obama and Duncan's Education Policy: Like Bush's, Only Worse

Neve Gordon
Stopping the Apartheid State
Boycott Israel

John Ross
Mexico's Supreme Court Tosses a Bombshell into Chiapas

Open Letter to Kenneth Roth
Why Has Human Rights Watch Fallen Silent on Honduras?

Dan Bacher
A Burston-Marsteller Greenwash:
Westlands Hoards Surplus Water While Farmers Suffer

August 21-23, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Right Wing's Prince of Gonzo

Patrick Cockburn
The Truth About Afghan Election

Ray McGovern
Unwritten CIA Death Contract Awarded to Blackwater

Carl Ginsburg
Paycheck President

Dave Lindorff
American Justice is Not Blind, But it is Truly Sick

M. Shahid Alam
An "Abnormal" Nationalism

Ron Jacobs
The Continuing Story of Camp Ashraf

Eric Walberg
Russia/Georgia/U.S. One Year Later
Who Came Out Ahead

No War on the Moon!
In Defense of the Dark Side of the Moon

Gilad Atzmon
The Hostage Dream: Loving Oneself at the Expense of Another

Crawdad Nelson
What It's Like to Die

David Yearsley
Why I Chose to Play Scarlatti on Bainbridge Island

Justin Frew
Grim Times for Irish Travelers

Website of the Day
Picket Whole Foods Friday!

August 20, 2009

Eugenia Tsao
Inside the DSM:
The Drug Barons' Campaign to Make Us All Crazy

Dave Lindorff
The Worst and the Best Thing to Happen to the Democratic Party in Years

Yonatan Preminger
The Strategy Behind Israel's Migrant Labor Policies

Wajahat Ali
The Detention of Shah Rukh Kahn

Website of the Day
How to cope with flu pandemics

August 19, 2009

David Michael Green
Guess What? He's a Terrible President

Paul Craig Roberts
Americans: Serfs Ruled by Oligarchs

Marshall Auerback
Debt Revolt? Tax Strike? There are a Lot of Angry People Out There

Franklin Lamb
AIPAC Sends in the Clowns

John Ross
Three Amigos Summit

Marjorie Cohn
Legendary Lawyer Doris Brin Walker Dies; Represented Angela Davis, Smith Act Defendants

August 18, 2009

Michael Hudson
The Specter of Debt Revolt Is Haunting Europe?

Mary Lynn Cramer
Obama-Fraud: Don't Confuse Medicare with Single-Payer

Jonathan Cook
U.S. Turns Blind Eye to Israel's New Separation Policy

Uri Avnery
Whose Acre?

Ralph Nader
Block Obama's Abject Surrender to Insurance and Drug Companies

Bill Quigley & Davida Finger
Katrina Pain Index - 2009

August 17, 2009

Ray McGovern
Can the Washington Post Save Dick Cheney?

Andy Worthington
Bagram Isn't the New Guantánamo, It's the Old Guantánamo

Patrick Cockburn
Life and Death in Baghdad as Americans Leave

Don Fitz
The True Story of Fox's Hero, Kenneth Gladney

P. Sainath
Drought of Justice, Flood of Funds

Helena Cobban
Zionist Pioneer Renounces Zionism

August 14-16, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Health Plans and Death Plans

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Fall of the House of Stanford

Peter Linebaugh
The Commons, the Castle, the Witch and the Lynx

Esam Al-Amin
What Actually Happened in Fatah's Elections?

Marshall Auerback
Why a Debtor's Revolt Would Work

Mike Whitney
Bulletins From Clunkerville

Paul Krassner
Woodstock at Forty

Saul Landau
Health Care and the Seeds of Disunity

Nikolas Kozloff
Colombian Elites Fear Bolivaran Revolution

Henry A. Giroux
Politics After Hope

John Ross
Sleepwalking Through the Minefield

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Land Sale

Isabella Kenfield
Monsanto's Man in the Obama Administration

David Rosen
Sexual Torture, Yet Again

Ron Jacobs
Unconditional Negotiations, Now!

Wajahat Ali
Obama's Immigration Reforms: Neither Humane Nor Thoughtful

David Macaray
Prison Games

Greg Moses
Down in South Texas: the Geometries of Bob Dylan

Charles R. Larson
Egyptian Economics 101

David Yearsley
Stalked by Bill Evans' Ghost: Kind of Blue at Fifty

Lorenzo Wolff
There Ain't Much to Country Livin': the Drive-By Truckers and the Fine Print

Kim Nicolini
Class, Race and Clint

Poets' Basement
Reiss, Ford and Moser

Website of the Weekend
Timidity and Transparency

August 13, 2009

Eduardo Galeano
I Hate to Bother You

Joanne Mariner
Letting Cheney Off the Hook

Michael Donnelly
Burning Forests for Electricity

Norman Solomon
When the Dead Have No Say

Russell Mokhiber
Boycott Whole Foods

Tim Wise
Sick Heil! The Hitlerizing of Obama

Brian M. Downing
Succession and the Pakistani Taliban

Dave Lindorff
Single-Payer and Medicare

David Manning / Miriam Cotton:
Iran Versus Honduras: a Subtle Difference

Martha Rosenberg
John Hughes, Gone With Only 59 Candles

Website of the Day
Congress Can't Find Their As-teroids

August 12, 2009

Michael J. Watts
Nigeria on the Brink

Bouthaina Shaaban
Where are the Arabs to Stand Up for the Hanoun and Ghawi Families?

Ricardo Alarcón
The Cuban Five: Justice in Wonderland

Binoy Kampmark
Terror Australis

Paul Craig Roberts
Concocting the Appearance of Recovery

Alan Farago
Going Down Absurd: the Future of Florida Bay

James Ridgeway
Ghostwriting Your Meds

Dave Lindorff
10 Questions to Ask If You Find Yourself at an ObamaCare Town Hall Meeting

David Macaray
Labor and the Conventional Wisdom

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Assimilation of Niranjan Ramakrishnan

Website of the Day
A Petition in Support of Janice Harper

August 11, 2009

Ricardo Alarcón
Forbidden Heroes

Marshall Auerback
America's Biggest Economic Problem?

Reza Yavari
Inside Iran's Most Infamous Prison

Winslow T. Wheeler
How Congress Pays For Its Pork

Tim Wise
Red-Baiting and Racism

Uri Avnery
A Moral Person

Deepak Tripathi
Getting Away With Torture

Greg Moses
Time to Plan for the Worst

Benjamin Dangl
Boycotting Big Beer

Dave Lindorff
Hecklers Unite! Why Aren't Progressives Disrupting ObamaCare Town Halls?

Website of the Day
What Bush Told Chirac About the Iraq War

August 10, 2009

David Price
Trial by FBI Investigation

Mike Whitney
There is No Recession; It's a Planned Demolition

Alan Farago
Seeds of Destruction: How the National Economy was Wrecked by the Politics of Deregulation in Florida

Conn Hallinan
The Honduran Coup: a U.S. Connection

Russell Mokhiber
Health Care: In Defense of Disruption

Paul Krassner
The Mystery Behind the Manson Murders

Sousan Hammad
Orgy of the Dead: the 2009 Fatah Conference

Jonathan Cook
Israeli School Apartheid

Ira Glunts
Netanyahu's Sister-in-Law Detained by Israeli Police; Calls Evictions an Unjustified Folly

George Wuerthner
Dead Tree Hysteria

Website of the Day
Conyers: ObamaCare is Crap

August 7 - 9, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
It Pays to Have a Nuke

Mike Whitney
Economy on a Scaffold

Elaine C. Hagopian
Obama's Israel Albatross

Carl Ginsburg
RX For Healthcare

Miguel Tinker Salas
Honduras is Only Part of the Story: the Conservative Counter-Attack in Latin America

Saul Landau
The Kidney Broker and the Money Laundering Rabbis

John Ross
The Mexican Genome: Big Science in the Service of Indian Genocide?

Anthony DiMaggio Obama and the Israel Lobby: Origins of Power

John Stanton
Expanding Human Terrain Systems?

Christopher Brauchli Legal Absurdities: Outing Three Strikes

Wajahat Ali
A Muslim American Hero: an Interview with Dave Eggers on "Zeitoun"

Ron Jacobs
As Long as the Wars Continue, We Must Resist Them

Franklin Lamb
Sunday Morning on the Dunes: Cleaning "Free Gaza Beach"

Bruce E. Levine
Protect Us From Our Friends

Michael Winship
Neighborhood Watch for Planet Earth

David Macaray
Glimmers of Hope for Labor?

Stephen Fleischman
Suicide Squad

Robert Bryce
Unplugging the Next Big Thing: the Hype Over Electric Cars

Robert Dodge, MD: Hiroshima and Nagasaki Remembered

Mark Seth Lender
The Message of the Glossy Ibis

David Yearsley
Vaucanson's Faun and the Duck in the Attic

Ben Sonnenberg
Chris Fuller's Brilliant Debut

Lorenzo Wolff
When Music's the Character

Poets' Basement
Dominguez and Corseri

Website of the Weekend
Warren Buffett's Betrayal

August 6, 2009

Ishmael Reed
Let's All Have a Beer

Paul Craig Roberts
The Expiring Economy

William Blum Assassinations and Coups: Keeping Track of the Empire's Crimes

Michael Donnelly
Rod Coronado: the Hardest Working Man in Animal Rights "Terrorism"

Jonathan Cook
Rabbis Ban Marriage for Israeli "Untouchables"

Dave Lindorff
The Health Care Reform Sell-Out

Ellen Brown
The Public Option in Banking

Website of the Day
Ellsberg on Hiroshima

August 5, 2009

Dedrick Muhammad /
Barbara Ehrenreich
The Destruction of the Black Middle Class

Norman Solomon
The Incredible, Shrinking Health Care Plan

William Blum
The Myths of Afghanistan: Past and Present

Gareth Porter
The ISI and the Taliban: US Officials Are Protecting Pakistani Aid to Taliban

Mary Lynn Cramer
The Myth of Medicare for All

Jim Goodman
Obama Needs to Take a Stand on Trade

Nadia Hijab
Playing From Strength in the Middle East

Gretchen Kroth
Guatemala's Garbage Dump Education System

Steve Macek /
Scott Sanders
Privatizing the Airwaves

Sarah Lazare
Inside G.I. Resistance

Website of the Day
The Locavore Myth

August 4, 2009

Mike Whitney
Bernanke's Shell Game

Dave Lindorff
The Recession Isn't Over, By a Long Shot

Patrick Cockburn
Did British Bomb Attacks in Iran Provoke Hostage Crisis?

Jonathan Cook
Israel's Campaign to Silence Human Rights Groups

Jeff Sher
Making a Mess of Health Care Reform

Dean Baker
Why Don't We Globalize Health Care?

Andy Worthington
Gitmo as Hotel California

Uri Avnery
A Jeremiad

Mark Weisbrot
U.S.-Brokered Mediation in Honduras Has Failed

Alvaro Huerta
Hold That Dustbin! So Much for the "End of Racism"

Website of the Day
Pentagon to Ban Facebook and Twitter?

Weekend Edition
September 4-6, 2009

The Crimes and Misdemeanors of Teddy Kennedy

The Lion Sleeps Tonight

By HELEN REDMOND

Spoiler alert: this is not a fawning, gushing, lie-filled eulogy of Saint Edward Kennedy. Read no further if you believe the “Liberal Lion” or as I prefer to call him, the “Lion King,” actually made this country a healthier, more equitable place to live in. You have been warned….   

*Conflict of interest, almost full disclosure: I grew up in Massachusetts and spent several weeks each summer in Buzzards Bay, Cape Cod at my aunt’s house. There were yearly treks to Hyannis Port to pay respects to slain President John F. Kennedy and to gaze forlornly at his eternal flame. We gaped slack jawed though, at the massive, sprawling and luxurious “Kennedy compound” with stunning ocean views. I was taught to believe the Kennedy clan was royalty, a little piece of Camelot in the Yankee Bay State. Portraits of Kennedy family members were embossed on everything from mugs to rugs.  

This is the anti-eulogy, the antidote to the reams of press coverage proclaiming Kennedy - the spawn and scion of one of America’s most wealthy and powerful families – to be the most effective, spectacular lawmaker in the history of the Senate, a man who worked on behalf of the poor and downtrodden. This latter characterization of Kennedy makes me crazy. He cared about the poor and oppressed when it was politically expedient and when pushed by events happening around him. And it was always about him, about advancing his career and individual and family notoriety for supposedly doing good deeds, of getting yet another piece of legislation or building named ‘Kennedy.’ In fact, Saint Edward knew very little of the lives of the oppressed and disenfranchised in America. He shuttled decade after decade between the secluded and secured, exclusive enclave of the Kennedy Compound in Massachusetts and the inner sanctums of the “Millionaires Club,” er, the United States Senate in Washington, DC. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Teddy was the seventh richest member of Congress weighing in at over $100,000 million.  

Kennedy never worked to get anything: his career in politics was handed to him the old fashioned way, via family connections. Nepotism. Moreover, name recognition and the family fortune bought him a lifetime seat in the Senate that the Kennedy clan always believed was their personal property and birthright. 

Much was made of the Lion King’s “unbridled appetites,” in particular for women and booze. That rich and powerful playboy men have numerous wives, girlfriends, mistresses, liaisons, and messy affairs is not surprising. Membership in the good ole’ boys club of rich and powerful men bestows that right. That Kennedy drank heavily for most of his life is not surprising, either. Think about it: when you are caught cheating at Harvard and are humiliated and expelled; when you’re dodging the draft and at a loss as to what to do with your pampered and privileged life and daddy gets you a cushy, do-nothing NATO job in Paris for a couple of years; when you feel inferior to your older, smarter brothers (one, of course, made it all the way to the highest office in the land) and then both are murdered, shot in cold blood; when one night you drive your car off a bridge into the sea and are responsible for your passenger drowning to death and you head home and go to sleep and the next day your first instinct is to call your closest political advisors; when a sister and nephew die in plane crashes; when you almost die in a plane crash, well, there are more than a few reasons to drink. Night after night, year after year Teddy had a lot of reasons to hit the bootleg scotch daddy trafficked in. I could almost forgive and forget Kennedy all those mistakes and tragedies because despite the silver spoon in his big Brahmin Boston brogue of a mouth, Teddy was curiously, stubbornly, human.  

What I cannot ever forgive or ever forget is Kennedy’s record on health care. He called it “the cause of my life.” Even a cursory glance at the senator’s record shows he was a colossal failure at the cause of his life. How is it that the American mainstream media and even some left-wing media get away with promoting Kennedy as successful reformer of health care when the country is facing a health care crisis of staggering proportions? Two statistics speak volumes: 50 million uninsured and at least 20,000 people die every year due to lack of access to health care. If Kennedy was so committed to the plight of the uninsured and making health care accessible to everyone in the 46 years he was in the senate, why the hell is the health care crisis killing so many, swelling the ranks of the uninsured every day, and threatening to crash the economy? Here’s why: decades ago Kennedy sold out to the blood sucking, profit-hungry, killer insurance corporations.

It’s hard to believe looking back now, but the Lion King started out with the right idea. In1971, Kennedy, along with Representative Martha Griffiths (D-Mich.), supported the Health Security Act. It eliminated the role of the commercial insurers entirely and created a single-payer, government financed health care system. The Kennedy-Griffiths bill, as it came to be called, was a watershed in American politics and would have, if passed, made health care a human right and divorced health care from employment status for good. He had solid backing from the labor movement. Kennedy faced off against evil President Richard Nixon’s health care plan and charged that it “would provide the insurance industry with a windfall of billions of dollars annually.” Teddy was right.

Then between 1971 and 1974, Kennedy gave up, he completely abandoned single-payer, national health care and became the great compromiser. His next piece of health care legislation was the Mills-Kennedy Bill. It was the opposite of Kennedy-Griffiths. It maintained the link between employment and insurance, didn’t include the entire population and required those with coverage to shoulder much of the expense of basic medical care through high deductibles and co-pays. Labor refused to endorse the Mills-Kennedy bill and in a meeting with members of the Committee for National Health Insurance, Kennedy reportedly was furious and belligerent and said he resented the charge made against him that he was “selling out on the health issue.” Consumer advocate Ralph Nader and his organization Public Citizen Research Group also criticized Kennedy for selling out and caving to the insurance industry. But that’s exactly what Kennedy did and he never fought for single-payer health care again.

In 1979, Kennedy submitted to Congress the mistitled Health Care for All Americans Act, which became known as the Kennedy-Waxman bill. It was another rotten compromise that didn’t uproot the fundamental problems at the core of the health care system. It required employers to pay up to 65 percent of employee health insurance premiums. The legislation went nowhere and the number of uninsured increased.

Fast forward to 1993. Kennedy was an ardent supporter of the  Clinton health care reform overhaul. Hillary Clinton organized a Health Care Task Force of powerful members of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. The health care reform proposal from members of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) was arrogantly dismissed. The meetings were conducted in secrecy and the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, along with several other groups, filed a lawsuit against Clinton over the closed-door meetings. The bill that finally emerged was 1000 pages long, the complexity - stunning. It was a disaster: an enforced mandate for employers to provide health insurance to workers through health maintenance organizations (HMO’s.) It never passed, but the terrible era of HMO hegemony began.    

The Kennedy-Kassebaum bill (1996) was another incremental attempt to stop the hemorrhaging in the employment-based system of health care provision. It was DOA - dead on arrival. Named the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), it was intended to narrow conditions under which insurers could refuse coverage. What finally passed was a watered-down bill that eliminated a few of the more egregious practices of the small group market. However, HIPAA didn’t stipulate that health insurance policies had to be offered at an affordable rate and it contained enough loopholes to allow insurers to avoid covering people with chronic and “expensive” health conditions. At the time of its passage, the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) released a statement saying, “Although this doesn’t solve the nation’s problems with lack of insurance and under-insurance, this legislation does increase the security blanket for many who can already afford health coverage. Now, Congress and the president must turn their attention to extending affordable health insurance to the more than 40 million Americans who have no health coverage.” Gee Teddy, thanks for your life-long commitment to make quality health care a reality for all Americans.

The year 2006 was a double debacle and setback for fundamental health care reform. Kennedy heartily supported the draconian Massachusetts mandate that funneled millions of government subsidized dollars into insurance industry coffers and punished people that didn’t buy their defective product by stealing their tax refund. Three years later the Massachusetts mandate is unraveling as we knew it would. It never included undocumented immigrants, benefits for legal immigrants are being drastically cut, and over 200,000 people are still uninsured. Kennedy’s second miscast vote was in favor of the now widely acknowledged pharmaceutical industry give away, commonly known as Medicare Part D. Besides being inordinately complex, the legislation forbids the federal government from negotiating drug prices. Kennedy sided with the drug company vampires in bamboozling and ripping off millions of seniors.
With Obama’s election, Senator Kennedy, by now the all-time health care legislation loser, again went to work on health care reform, but this time with an incurable brain tumor growing in his head. President Obama promised transparency and all views would be heard in the health care debate. Saint Edward, accountable to no one, held secret, closed door meetings with the same cast of crooked corporate characters responsible for the health care crisis. Perched at “Ted’s table” were lobbyists from America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), big PhRMA, and the Business Roundtable. Single-payer activists didn’t find out about the clandestine meetings until the New York Times ran a front page article exposing them and were rightfully outraged at being shut out once again. Kennedy’s proposal to reform health care this last time around: the Massachusetts Mandate grafted onto the entire country.

The more things changed, the more Kennedy stayed the same. He never heeded his oft quoted, unoriginal and hokey one liner, “Sometimes a party must sail against the wind.” He sailed with the entrenched, profit-gouging, corporate, hurricane force winds that control health care, inflict, and are responsible for unspeakable suffering and death. Kennedy bears responsibility, too, and has the blood of hundreds of thousands of people on his hands. Because it could have turned out very differently. If Kennedy hadn’t given up the fight for the National Health Act in 1971 the United States wouldn’t be mired in a massive health care meltdown today. Kennedy was especially well positioned to take on the powerful insurance industry and pass legislation that evicted them from health care and created a government financed health program. He was independently wealthy and didn’t need corporate campaign donations to fund his reelection campaigns. He had the power and prestige of the Kennedy name, the connections and tons of money to keep up the fight for as long as it took. Remember, he served in the senate for 46 years! If the liberal lion had shown any courage or had any balls (lions have big balls, but perhaps not if they’re liberals) and actually stuck to the uncompromising principle that health care is a human right for all, not a commodity, he could have claimed a well deserved and genuine legacy as a champion of health care reform, he could have gone down in history as the Aneurin Bevan of American health care. But he didn’t, so he can’t.

An astute politician summed up Kennedy’s career this way: “Usually at the end of the day, he [Kennedy] would make a compromise that his most loyal fans would be disappointed with. ‘Oh, you’ve given up too much, Teddy’ – but he would know how much you needed to give up to pass the bill…”

Helen Redmond, LCSW, CADC, is a member of Chicago Single-Payer Action Network (CSPAN.) She blogs at http://helenredmond.wordpress.com and can be reached at redmondmadrid@yahoo.com

This article was written in memory of Marilyn Clement and Nick Skala. Marilyn was the national coordinator for Health Care Now! and Nick was a senior research associate at Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP.) Both were fierce advocates for single-payer and never sold out.

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