Admin: July 2009 Archives

The health care crisis in this country is a monster, like one of those mythical giant squids that could grab a sailing vessel, wrap its tentacles around it, and pull it to the bottom of the sea. President Obama's message is that the U.S. economy is that ship. Without reform, health care costs will sink us in the near future. Yet it's no surprise that Congress can't find a solution or that the public is deeply worried about the cost of reform. Each arm of this monster thinks it has a right to hold on. Doctors don't want lower salaries. Pharmaceutical companies don't want a flood of generic drugs from across the border. Lawyers and insurance companies fight for their share of premiums and court settlements. Patients don't want reduced care.

In a televised town meeting aimed at selling his program, Obama rightly pointed out that Americans pay more for health care than anyone else in the world but don't necessarily get more. One example is the estimated $700 billion dollars in unnecessary tests that doctors routinely run each year. As soon as he made the point, however, a doctor in the audience raised a familiar specter. If your wife or daughter had cancer, he said, would you tell them they can't get the best care possible, no matter what the cost? It's a fearful question, and frankly, the ace in the hole that mainstream medicine has been pulling for decades.

So which is worse, cancer or the huge cost of health care?

If we can set our fears aside, certain facts need to be faced. A recent European study on prostate cancer poked a hole in the need for early detection, a need that's drummed into us constantly for every type of cancer and which costs billions every year in expensive tests. The new study "indicated that saving one man's life from the disease would require screening about 1,400 men. But among those 1,400, 48 others would undergo treatments like surgery or radiation procedures that would not improve their health because the cancer was not life-threatening to begin with or because it was too far along," to quote the New York Times. The same story covered an early-detection campaign known as "Check Your Neck" aimed at thyroid cancer. Yet this rare cancer kills only 1,400 people a year, and there's no evidence that regular checkups for it save lives. The same holds true for ovarian, lung, and skin cancer. Considering all the factors, including side effects and risks of treatment, one expert in early detection gloomily declared, "There are five things that can happen as a result of screening tests, and four of them are bad."

The one good outcome, finding a fatal cancer that responds well to treatment, is what Americans pay billions and billions of dollars in the hope of achieving.

So, will doctors back off on the standard PSA tests to detect prostate cancer, much less the protocols of radiation and surgery to treat it? Not unless a new system of health care emerges that reduces fear as well as costs. Thirty years ago I first entered alternative medicine with an emphasis on wellness, believing that it represented a new system. I still believe it does. Cancer, and the anxiety it induces, is a red herring. The mean adjusted age of death from all types of cancer -- meaning how long the average patient survives before succumbing to the disease -- has barely changed since the 1930's for both  men and women. With all the early detection and advanced treatments, a cancer patient today is by no means guaranteed to live longer than a cancer patient in our grandparents' generation. That's another fact we need to face.

The final fact is that American health care needs prevention more than anything else. The majority of medical costs go to treating three conditions: obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. As this society grows fatter, older, and less likely to exercise regularly, all three will rise, and yet sensible prevention would go a long way to halt or reverse that trend. A major type of diabetes, Type 2, is directly linked to obesity, so even though type 1 is incurable, maintenance and prevention would effectively fight the scourge of diabetes, not to mention the myriad secondary problems it causes.

The thing about a giant squid is that you can't peel it off one tentacle at a time. You need to find a way to pull off every arm at once. In our current crisis, doctors and Congress cannot do the job. Vested interests will be fighting over health care for years to come. The public is right to worry that Obama's promised reforms cannot be paid for without extra taxes, and even then the overall costs may not go down. But it's the public that is best equipped to kill the monster, not by focusing on the war on cancer, gene therapy, heart bypass surgery, and the next miracle drug -- these all cost a king's ransom and are controlled by powerful interest groups -- but by finally waking up and taking charge of our own health. The cry for preventive medicine and inexpensive natural treatments isn't new or glamorous, yet we need to heed it now more than ever.

Published in the San Francisco Chronicle

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There's not much debate about the continuing oppression of women in many, if not most, traditional societies and their modern offshoots. The important question, as the Buddha noted long ago, isn't why the house is on fire but how to get out of it as quickly as possible. In the West, where women have escaped the worst restrictions of sexism and enjoy something approximating equal rights, the key issue historically was the Catch-22 of chivalry. As heirs of the medieval Christian ethos coupled with romantic ideals, women were expected to depend upon the loving kindness of knight errants, men who retained all the power, did all the fighting, and bestowed the rewards as largesse on women. The catch was that any woman who claimed her own power violated the romantic-Christian ideal and had to pay the price. (Hence the slow transformation of women executives from power-hungry bitches to men's respected equals. A transformation by no means complete in the workplace.)

Outside the Western tradition there's a complex mixture of tribal forces that keep women from assuming power and equality. God hasn't been much help in this regard. Whatever the founders of world religion intended, the authority of priests has colluded in keeping women weak. I'm not sympathetic to the notion that religions embody equal rights at their core, and that present-day oppression is simply a deviation from that pure path. Every scripture is more favorable to males than females, at least all the ones I've encountered. When women are worshipped or venerated, their status has been idealized. The feminine principle may be beautiful, but your own wife and daughter can stay at home, barefoot, ignorant, and ready to bear children at your whim. That's the social reality imposed in tribal societies, and modernism has been slow to overturn its gross inequalities.

So back to the salient question: what can women do to change the situation? A touching story emerged recently about girls in Afghanistan and their eagerness to be educated. That's always the first step, along with basic consciousness raising. Basic means convincing women that they are worthy. The blood ran cold at those mass rallies organized under the Saddam regime in Iraq when screeching, irate women called for the punishment of Kuwaiti "whores" by a good Muslim man like Saddam. Interpretation: If a women strays from the tribal fold, her sisters, so called, are the first to drag her back into oppression.

Education and self-worth can do a lot, but eventually women confront a power barrier. No one cedes power willingly, all the more when the rise of the weaker sex is interpreted by men as the castration of the stronger sex. On the power front, situations get reduced to particulars, and every case must work itself out according to which men face which women. It helped Hillary Clinton in 1992 that a forceful women's movement was on her side, but she still had to go through the fire alone when it came to her remark about not staying home and baking cookies. The majority of American women call themselves feminists, or at least feminist sympathizers who want more equality, yet it was women as a voting bloc who gave Bush the White House a second time -- in an ironic throwback, he became their knight errant protecting them from the dragon of Islamic jihad.

There are no magic formulas here. Education, consciousness raising, and individual claims to power are tried and true steps if women want to attain equality. Will God ever be on their side? In reality, yes, of course. An omnipresent God doesn't discriminate. We are all in God and of God. But insofar as religion was organized by males, interpreted by males, presided over by males, etc., I find myself believing in the power of consciousness much more than the benevolence of the pulpit.

Published in the Washington Post

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It's been roughly twenty years since the fall of the Soviet Union, which means that the U.S. has experienced two decades of being the world's sole superpower. The experience hasn't been positive. Under the sway of neocon ambitions, in particular, the Bush era was marked by a failed attempt to dominate the globe militarily. Mired in Afghanistan and scarred by Iraq, those ambitions proved to be shameful and foolish. A group of misguided gunslingers led to a catastrophe. Have we come to the point where disillusion will lead us where we need to go, to the end of playing the superpower role?

This is a relevant question in the aftermath of President Obama's visit to Russia, a country that yearns to return to its former status and does everything it can to posture as its old superpower self. Yet other than a bloated nuclear arsenal and swaggering oil production, present-day Russia doesn't fit the bill and never will again. Its diminished threat is the first reason why the U.S. should abandon the thankless task of policing the world. The second is the enormous waste of resources involved in being a superpower. Sheer inertia keeps fueling the production of new armaments to replace outworn ones that were useless to begin with. Has the Stealth bomber justified its staggering cost, or the nuclear submarine, Polaris missiles, Titan missiles, not to mention Star Wars? Most of these weapons haven't seen the slightest use. Billions of dollars have been spent on a defense system that is protecting us from a foe who long ago neutralized its threat.

The third reason to stop being a superpower is that Nixon's specter of the U.S. as a pitiful helpless giant hasn't decreased since Vietnam but only become worse. Crude terrorism lurking in the shadows of side streets is a match for advanced weapons systems if you are measuring in terms of psychological threat, anxiety, and a creeping sense that the enemy can strike at will. Atomic arsenals, a massive standing army, and space-age technology aren't justified when a single dirty bomb can sneak in under the fence. It's time to accept what every insurgency expert tells us, that asymmetrical warfare is here to stay and must be fought on a smaller, smarter scale that is closer to neighborhood policing than conventional, World War II style combat.

That's only the beginning of the list. There's the need during this crippling recession to spend money on productive jobs and rebuild infrastructure, not more arms. There's the moral question of the fear we inspire internationally by our aggressive militancy, which is tragically at odds with our pronounced aim of world peace. Peace is achieved by being peaceful, no matter what the military-industrial complex claims to the contrary. Other factors center on the ideals of a functioning democracy. Is it fair for a few senior congressmen to hold the power to fund massive, largely secret arms programs without check? Should the arms lobby be able to write its own ticket, year after year? It's deeply wrong that a tiny portion of our populace should fight wars abroad, bearing the full burden of suffering, while reactionary politicians promise tax cuts and no consequences for the enormous harm we do by invading other countries.

America leads the world in arms dealing, starting wars, and developing new methods of mechanized death. Even if you leave aside the basic insanity of the Cold War and its stockpiling of nuclear weapons on a scale that can potentially decimate life on earth, all the reasons listed above should be enough to make anyone think twice. We may be accustomed to feeling like a superpower, but that isn't the same as feeling safe and secure. Having tried militarism for the past sixty years, perhaps we can give peace a chance and see if genuine safety and security lies there instead.

Published in the San Francisco Chronicle

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The confirmation hearings for Judge Sotomayor are a foregone conclusion, with the dust raised by Republicans barely masking the bald fact that the Democratic majority can vote in whomever they want. In any case, a ritual that resembles liar's poker more than a serious interrogation of judicial philosophy will stay true to form, with much dodging and weaving on the nominee's part. This time around the Democrats no doubt feel that they must redeem themselves. John Roberts and Samuel Alito managed to disguise their true reactionary colors so successfully that their hearings were sweetheart kisses from all but a few liberals (one of those being the prescient Sen. Obama, who wasn't fooled for a moment).

Sotomayor can expect to be grilled on her supposed ethnic bias and gender issues, but the real issue has nothing to do with either. It has to do with the taint that has been on the Supreme Court since the shameful ruling over the 2000 Presidential election. The purity of the justices, their supposed detachment from the dirty business of politics, was exposed as a sham. Defying the court's own long precedent, the right wing simply installed George Bush by fiat. They did so willfully, smugly, openly, and without remorse, figuring that it was payback for the activist decisions initiated under the liberal Warren court. Nine years later, the irony is that if Sotomayor were the partisan zealot so ridiculously portrayed by her opponents, she'd fit right in. Her balance and impartiality could actually be hindrances, although we are told she's good at judicial street fighting -- let's hope so.

It may take a scrapper to shake up a court that has drifted as far out of touch with America's collective consciousness as the one that tried to sink the New Deal during the Great Depression. We are very fortunate that the liberal justices so reviled by the right wing gave us civil rights, school desegregation, abortion rights, the absence of mandatory school prayer, the Miranda rights for arrested suspects, and general advocacy for ordinary citizens. By comparison, Chief Justice Roberts has almost without exception voted for corporations over individuals, and he has used his prerogatives to seek out cases where he can weaken Miranda rules and most recently, open the door for overturning the Voting Rights Act of 1967, the single most important legislation that keeps the South from sliding back into racist practices of the past.

Skeptics will argue that the Supreme Court has always been political, or at least biased toward left or right, that only the naive believe that any branch of government can -- or should -- be impartial. If that's true, then the statue of blind Justice holding her scales in the balance should be removed from the premises. The present court is unusually impure, as Bush v. Gore clearly evinced. The only good that came from that corrupt decision was to expose how harmful it is when a democracy is saddled with judicial ideologues. Bush compounded this corruption by infiltrating the whole federal judicial system with a vast number of reactionaries and religious fundamentalists. It will take years to unseat these lifetime appointees, but Pres. Obama needs to start the work, ignoring red herrings like ethnicity, faith, and gender.
Published in the Washington Post

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On his visit to Moscow, President Obama carried more than an olive branch. He urged Russia to join the global community, which may be more important even than healing the mess that George Bush made of Russian-American relations. From the perspective of the former Soviet Union, there have been a lot of betrayed promises in the past ten years, and Obama needed to attend to that. His theme of a fresh start was welcome news.

Yet something more basic hangs in the balance. Russia is struggling to find its collective consciousness. Aspects of the past linger in many unhealthy ways. The loss of empire stings, and Obama had to be careful to make the Russians feel like equal partners. In reality, they aren't, except in the deadly sense of possessing an enormous nuclear stockpile. They have a population of only 140 million people (less than Pakistan), that is quickly aging. Because of a drastically low birth rate, the country could dwindle to 100 million over the next twenty years, with a huge portion of the elderly.

The average Russian male has a life expectancy of 60, with alcohol being a major factor in early death. There is substandard medical care, with almost no attention to prevention and wellness. On the economic front, the Russians have failed to develop a safe, reliable system of capital. Without oil and gas, they would have almost no viable economy.

One can see why their sense of identity is struggling, trapped between the security of the old repressive system and the fragility of a newly fledged democracy. Many Russians are satisfied with an autocrat like Vladimir Putin, who seizes whole industries at will and outlaws freedom of the press. On the other hand, the isolation of the Soviet years was stifling, as evidenced by the mass migration of minority groups, particularly, Russian Jews, as soon as the borders to the West were opened.

Officially, the agenda for dealing with Russia centers on nuclear disarmament, mutual defense interests, fighting terrorism, and the like. But the real issue is intangible. Will Russia become secure enough to join the world? Old habits die hard, and in Russia's case a return to militant nationalism and isolation would be disastrous. For decades Russia has played the role of the outsider and dissenter, the country that prides itself on blocking international progress and fomenting tension.

The good news is that President Obama struck exactly the right notes for calming Russian anxiety and hostility. He agreed to negotiate on almost every sore point; he showed respect for a once-equal antagonist; he pointed the way to global initiatives. Very quickly the Russians responded with various concessions, both real and symbolic. For once, the U.S. is motivating Russia toward positive change. They are unlikely to embrace freedom, democracy, and capitalism along American models, but with any luck, the new Russian consciousness will benefit the world at large for the first time.

Published in the San Francisco Chronicle

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Firefighters and the Simmering Race Problem When you first look at it, the lawsuit brought by eighteen white firefighters against the city of New Haven doesn't seem relevant to everybody's daily life. But it is. The central dispute in the...