"Heckuva job, Bushie."

Recent revelations about the Bush administration's role in New Orleans's rebuilding have included: **FEMA trailers are making residents sick from contaminated air
**Federally-funded housing reconstruction is moving at a snail's pace, with just a tiny number of new units completed.
**Thanks to bureaucratic barriers erected by the Bush administration, Louisiana and New Orleans are getting a fraction of what they need for reconstruction.

But the most appalling aspect came to light in a July 24 NY Times article on the absence of hospitals and doctors in New Orleans, which are absolutely essential to the city getting back on its feet. After all, who would live in a city where they literally could not get healthcare? Unfortunately, Bush and Co. see this as an opportunity to drive home a vital lesson: healthcare is best delivered through paying off private insurers as useless middlemen, instead of directly providing health services.

Much the same philosophy underlines Bush's opposition to the S-CHIP program to provide health coverage to uninsured children. The expansion of S-CHIP has the support of such hardline right-wingers as Sens. Orrin Hatch, Pat Roberts, and Charles Grassley, but Bush is taking the extreme position that the S-CHIP program is part of a plot to establish single-payer healthcare in the US, according to a NY Times article July 8.

In New Orleans, at immediate issue is the rebuilding of Charity Hospital, constructed in 1939 as one of Gov. Huely Long's most important achievements. The state is willing to commit the needed funds, but Bush wants the money mainly funneled to private insurers, despite the obvious inefficiency. As the NY Times reported July 24,

"But the hospital’s future is now the subject of a debate about the best use of federal health care dollars, even after the state agreed to pay $300 million to get the project off the ground. The federal government would prefer that the state build a small hospital and use its federal dollars to buy private insurance for the poor. Dr. Frederick P. Cerise, the secretary of Louisiana’s Department of Health and Hospitals, said that plan would help less than half of the uninsured."

So when it comes down to subsidizing private insurers or saving the poor of New Orleans and poor children across the nation, Bush's priorities are atrociously crystal-clear.

The big drug companies must be using some of their own steroids to keep their arrogance pumped up.

Large pharmaceutical firms have been particularly adept at both manipulating Congress into a tax amnesty and then continuing to exploit tax-haven loopholes in the US tax code, all the while cutting US jobs.

"Two years ago, when companies received a big tax break to bring home their offshore profits, the president and Congress justified it as a one-time tax amnesty that would create American jobs," reported Alex Berenson (NYT 7/24/07) "Drug makers were the biggest beneficiaries of the amnesty program, repatriating about $100 billion in foreign profits and paying only minimal taxes. "But the companies did not create many jobs in return. Instead, since 2005 the American drug industry has laid off tens of thousands of workers in this country."

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Meanwhile, at the state level, a full 62% of state firms with revenues of $100 million or more paid zero state income taxes in 2003 (the latest year for which full data was available)according to a dynamite report by Jack Norman, research director of the Institute for Wisconsin's Future. Whether these firms have a shiny reputation as good corporate citizens (eg., Racine-based SC Johnson-related companies) or gained wide notoriety for rapaciousness (eg., Wal-Mart), they share a shameful record of not paying state income taxes and shifting the burden to ordinary homeowners. As Norman wrote in Isthmus (4/5/07)http://www.thedailypage.com/isthmus/article.php?article=6214) , "Among the companies that in 2003 paid no income tax are some big names: McDonald's, Merck, Microsoft, PepsiCo, Kimberly-Clark, Johnson Controls (the largest Wisconsin-based firm), Kohl's and Snap-on Tools.

"The S.C. Johnson family of companies is especially noteworthy. Emerging from the Johnson Wax company, based in Racine, are a handful of large firms, including Johnson Financial Group, Johnson Bank, Johnson Outdoors, JohnsonDiversey, along with the original S.C. Johnson & Son. From 2000 through 2004, not a single one of these firms paid a cent in Wisconsin corporate income tax."

You may be interested in a couple recent pieces I've done:

RECENT WRITINGS
"Racine: Haunted City" in the July, 2007 issue of The Progressive.
I reflect on family history, the state of my hometown, once a hothouse of working people standing up for their rights, and now, thanks to deindustrialization and globalization, a city where the factories are being emptied out and the jails being filled up.

"Welcome to the Sicko world" July 3 FightingBob.com.
"Michael Moore's "Sicko" doesn't have an unforgettable shower scene like Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho," but nonetheless, private insurers and drug companies are running out of the theatres screaming in terror.
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"Sicko" has touched an unbelievably responsive chord among Americans distraught over their health system: it's expensive (twice any other nation's per-capita cost), provides 37th-place quality, carries a 31% bureaucratic overhead burden, leaves out some 47 million uninsured, and is dominated by for-profit insurers, not caring medical professionals. In city after city, audiences erupt in applause and standing ovations at the conclusion of Michael Moore's film.

But public opinion doesn't seem to register with our elected representatives, who often seem to operate as though held tightly on a leash by their big campaign contributors. Along with tens of millions in campaign contributions, there are four healthcare lobbyists for each of our 535 members of Congress.
Only people power can overcome this money power. Along with fighting for the Healthy Wisconsin legislation that will lower costs and rein in the insurers' abuses, here's some sources for ideas on what you can do:
http://www.michaelmoore.com/sicko/what-can-i-do/
http://www.calnurse.org/sicko/
http://www.michaelmoore.com/sicko/checkup/