BLOGS

Notes and cases for:

• Universal Health Care (7 myths)
• Michigan Health Care (2005)
  
• (Dan Butts'
  Integrative pharmacies & Community Health Centers)
  
• electoral reform
  The Climate crisis:
  
• 10-24 blog
  
• climate change: other effects
• carbon tax faq
• Nuclear power?
  War & peace:
  
• GH Peace Project
• Permanent US military bases in Iraq (Dan Butts)
  

Events and meetings

read the news, oh, boy

Links:
ecology
social justice
grassroots
peace/nonviolence

local area political directory

This is about that outer box, about thinking systematically, and thinking in cause and effect on a broader scale. Here are some problems and effects that would fall within that: The effects of the food system on human health, the effects of climate change on human health, the effects of climate change on national security and foreign policy, the effects of toxics in the environment on human health, the effects of militarism on our ability to pay for a fix of the malfunctioning "health system." These are the kinds of interconnections that may very well be the best way of presenting a progressive point of view.

Taking the last of this incomplete list first, it's not just on our ability to pay for healthcare reform on which military expenditures have an impact. As Chalmers Johnson has written: " … the defense budget plus all military expenditures hidden in the budgets for the departments of Energy, State, Treasury, Veterans Affairs, the CIA, and numerous other places in the executive branch - already exceeds a trillion dollars." This is an amount that not only dwarfs all the other nations in the world, it also dwarfs all of the domestic expenditures about which the GOP has recently bitterly complained, as being instrumental in passing along debt to our children and grandchildren. The costs of Obamacare were held to be a trillion dollars, but, of course, that was spread over a period of ten years, not one year, as is true of our military expenditures. Much the same noises were made over the $787 billion stimulus package, particularly, the portions to be spent on anything other than tax relief.

Another way of looking at this, is to view just the costs of the wars the US has officially been involved in since 2001. The costs of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan has reached nearly $1 trillion, over $925 billion, to be more exact. The state legislature for Michigan has been embroiled in tense sessions leading up to the end of the budget year crisis as extended. Yet, Michigan taxpayers have shelled out over $24 billion since 2001 on these two wars, and the cry of the state GOP is loudly "no new taxes." This is the cry of people the vast majority of whom support the two wars costing all this money. These are also the people who caused a fairly major part of the present crisis period by revoking the single business tax.

Pick a pair, any pair, of the questions of the day, nearly always thought about in isolation one from the other, but actually, very much interrelated. Try climate change and health, for example. The EPA put out a paper, entitled "Climate Change - Health and Environmental Effects" in July of 2008. They examined the effect on health from a number of different perspectives, the direct effect of increased heat, the increased presence of "infective parasites", increased air and water pollution from higher temperatures, extreme weather events, and reduced agracultural yields, resulting in undernourishment. When the report was issued, other elements in the Bush administration panned the report. They did so, for similar reasons to their attempts to silence Dr. James Hansen, the now better known leading climate change scientist, who strongly advises that we should be working on reducing CO2 in the atmosphere to no more than 350ppm.

What about climate change and national security? A 2004 Pentagon study concluded that global warming was more of a security threat than terrorism. They said it would cost millions of lives from "wars and natural disasters." This is from a secret report, obtained by the UK Observer. "The [report] predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies."

John Podesta was Clinton's chief of staff and co-chair of the Obama-Biden transition team. He also heads a think tank, called the Center for American Progress. In July, 2008, Podesta underlined the priority he places on environmental security when he played the role of UN secretary general in the first-ever international "war game" focused on climate. That took place at another think tank, the Center for a New American Security, in cooperation with ten other organizations. It "brought together business leaders and climate and policy experts, who acted as representatives of the U.S., EU, China, and India, to play out climate negotiations in the year 2015. Players responded to a scenario based on climate simulations developed by the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory that included intense weather extremes and tensions brought on by water and food shortages." It was based as well on a document, co-authored by Podesta, entitled The Age of Consequences: the Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Global Climate Change. (November, 2007)

Just paying attention to the public debates taking place in Congress and in the media over questions, such as what to do about health care or how we can provide an adequate brake on accelerating climate change, often just does not cut it, not at all. Not only are the types of pairings discussed in the above totally absent, but the problems really demand systemic thinking beyond what I have just been examining. This is particularly true of both health care and climate change. Take just health care. There is such a staggering level of waste in the health care system in the US, it's almost impossible to know where to start. We pay almost double per capita compared to anywhere else, often with much poorer results. In that, Michael Moore in his examination of private insurance and the health care systems around the world is quite correct, as is T.J.Reid, who makes a similar case.

However, when one looks at the other problems, starting with the other areas of profit in the system, clearly without other reforms, the results will fall far short of our expectations. Some of the costs are rooted in excessive pharmaceutical costs, not only from the prices, which are sky-high in the US, but from over-prescription, which also drives up the costs, perhaps even more than the prices. Similarly, the over-use of medical tests drives up costs, as well as having adverse consequences for the patients, such as, for example, increased radiation exposure from too-frequent Cat-scans and mammograms.

Then, there are the nutritional questions and the environmental questions, stemming from the various nutritional disasters making up the average American diet and the presence of toxics in the environment from the literally thousands of untested and consequently uncontrolled new chemical compounds coming out each and every year. Just the simple act of adopting the precautionary principle, maybe something like the EU's REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Acceptance or Restriction of Chemicals), would undoubtedly bring down medical costs.

Of course, we should already be teaching environmental medicine in US medical schools. It's not there now, for the embarrassingly simple reason that there are strong private interests barring it. We are extremely lucky to have a very few strong advocates, such as Dr. Samuel S. Epstein, but there is not enough research in these areas. And, where the research has been done, too little reporting on the results manages to get past the various gate-keepers who keep much of the public in a state of profound ignorance. Of course, in areas where toxic exposure has become a public issue, sometimes, ordinary citizens were able to study what was involved in the threat and become quite effective opponents.

Draft: do not quote. Notes to be added.