• The Ointment reminds us that Hillary Clinton is losing, after all. “The big headline for me: Journalists are not too good at math.”
• Big industries try to block limits on pollution – Surprise surprise. Corporate power working against your interests. Again.
• Carnival of Green Gardening brings you healthy growing from Wiggly Wigglers (shameless plug – Changeany1thing’s there too. Thanks Karen!)
• Did Hillary also reassure Canada about NAFTA? Can you spell “hypocrite”?
  …someone from (Hillary) Clinton’s campaign is telling the embassy to take (her anti-NAFTA talk) with a grain of salt.”
• Buckley’s Big Mistake – Brilliant exposé on the hidden agenda of the modern conservative movement – it’s a must read:
“Buckley was instrumental in shifting the American Christian right from William Bryan’s old fashioned anti-capitalism to its modern enthusiasm for mass consumerisms.”

Many of these come by way of the ever-resourceful LeftWord. But be warned: If you visit, you may never leave….

Keep corporate entertainment away from my kids.

I’ve really had it with the corporate media’s entertainment bread and circuses. My kids are unplugged for the most part and I hope to keep it that way. Today they’re fun-loving, confident children; why should I watch as their self-worth is destroyed by their worrying over how thin they are, or how thick their lips are, or other meaningless trivialities? The sexualization of young girls in the media is truly frightening for anyone with children. It can lead to all kinds of psychological disorders, according to the APA. But honestly, we don’t need a press release to understand these things.

I want my children to take pride in their capabilities. I want them to be mindful about things that matter, about how kind they are, about how they should treat their friends. These values are mostly absent from anything that pops out of the tube or sits on the magazine rack at the checkout counter. They’re certainly missing from commercial entertainment.

Spend an hour with corporate entertainment and the one thing that you walk away with is the cheapness of everything. It’s everywhere, in the snide, snappy, mean-spirited digs in commercials or sitcoms; in many movies, which have “gun tracks” instead of music tracks – how many murders can one person watch in two hours? This cheapness leaves the impression that “nothing really matters”. But things DO matter. There really are implications to our actions. When you live in a commercial-infused TV reality, it’s very easy to lose sight of this.

Corporate advertisers know exactly what they’re doing; they go after our kids, exploiting young minds who’ve yet to develop the skills to understand that advertising is not “the truth” but rather a manipulation. Advertisers recognize this phenomenon and even boast about doing it. When you manipulate minors for your own benefit and at their expense, well, that’s called molestation under any other situation and I think that’s what commercial TV is doing to kids. We have laws in the US against this kind of thing; why should it be OK when it comes in the form of cartoony characters?

We have drug-free school zones; how about commercial-free school zones too?

I’m all for free speech – passionately – but this is not a free speech issue. I know there are plenty of “small government” folks who don’t agree with regulations, and besides it’s hard to imagine the kinds of laws that exist in other countries being passed here in the US to control advertising to children. But we can do the next best thing by turning our backs on the thing. If you have kids you should take pride in keeping commercial TV away from them.

Maybe if more people understood the danger to kids from TV they would simply turn it off. Imagine if 25 million – 50 million – just millions and millions of Americans unplugged themselves from corporate entertainment as a protest. What a message that would send!

Here’s a social experiment to try. There are few things more frightening – enlightening? – than NOT watching commercial entertainment for a set period, say three months, and then taking a peek. You’ll be amazed, believe me. I’ve done it.

What do you think? Leave a comment!

If you’re interested in this topic here are a few resources to browse:

• Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood
• New American Dream (their page on Kids and Commercialism is outstanding)
• Commercial Alert has a Parents’ Bill of Rights petition to send Congress

If you’re not familiar with C&L (and honestly I don’t know many blog readers who don’t visit that site on an hourly basis) go check them out! But watch out, it can become dangerously addictive.

In the years since I’ve watched Nader vilified – not from the Right but from the so-called “Left”. And this criticism is – it seems to me – short-sighted, narrow minded and ultimately reactionary. It does great damage to any progressive movement. And it plainly shows why need multi-parties and instant runoff elections.

Anyway, here we are in 2008, and Ralph is at again. And I won’t vote for him this time around. We’ve seen what an out-of-control right-wing party can do; it’s only the Bush Administration’s bungling and ineptitude that limited their damage, and they’ve done plenty of damage regardless. So I’ll vote for a Democrat because right now, the stakes are that high. But still, I’m damn glad Ralph’s running.

That’s because there is only one political and economic party in America, and that’s the Corporate Party. We need progressive voices to raise the issues that the corporate media and the corporate-backed Republican-Democrats just won’t.

Corporations have every right to exist and to make money – it’s what they’re supposed to do. They either earn profits or they die. So I’m not saying “smash the corporations”. I work for corporate America. I buy products from corporate America. I’m not a hypocrite.

But the point that “liberals” who attack Nader ignore or don’t understand is that relying on the Democratic party to function as the political counterbalance to corporate power is a waste of time. In truth, there is no national party to counter-balance corporate power. This is really not a difficult argument to make. American corporations wield a level of control over our society that rivals – and may even excel – any organized force in history.

That makes this a dangerous moment – after all, tyranny is not just for the history books, coming from Kings and the 18th century. It’s a constant threat. The founding fathers understood this and gave us a country that prides itself – rightly so – on a system of Checks and Balances. This forward-thinking philosophy should – on paper – limit the chance for a single branch of government to dominate the others. What the founding fathers didn’t count on is a situation where a single power is able to dominate ALL branches of government. And that’s what we have today, a corporate government.

The democrats throw rhetorical anti-corporate bones to progressives every four years and then go right on working for corporate interests after the elections are done. Just check out Hillary sounding like a Wobbly as she barnstorms Rhode Island, “blasting companies shamelessly turning their backs on Americans by shipping jobs overseas.” This isn’t just disingenuous. It’s dishonest. It was the Clinton administration that passed NAFTA, for crying out loud.

This is why Ralph Nader must run and hopefully even get into the debates, and this is why progressives need to stop whining about 2000 and start being more forward-thinking about the perils facing our democracy, or the dangerous state of the products we consume, the air we breath, the policies we pursue. Nader doesn’t have a chance to win the election. And no individual, no matter how brilliant, can be effective without political support from Congress, something a Ralph Nader would never have without some kind of Green Party revival. But Ralph needs to run because no one else will be bringing up progressive points.

Show me the Democrat who’s talking about Nader’s issues, nicely shown here, and highlighted below:

• Adopt single payer national health insurance
• Cut the huge, bloated, wasteful military budget
• No to nuclear power, solar energy first
• Aggressive crackdown on corporate crime
  and corporate welfare
• Reverse U.S. policy in the Middle East
• Impeach Bush/Cheney
• Work to end corporate personhood

There are no other candidates talking about these subjects, period. As Alternet puts it, “Run Ralph Run! But I won’t vote for you.“

Tell me then what I should do when I come across a line like this during a “friendly chat” over at In These Times:

I mean how does one respond to such nonsense? In my case it was with about 500 clever, sharp, biting words. I wrote so fast my fingers were falling off.

But I didn’t send it. I saved it to my desktop and then the next day I deleted the thing. It’s like that rule about nasty emails to your friends or co-workers when you’re angry: You write them out, save them as a draft, but the next day they go in the trash. Keeps your friendship – or your job – alive.

And if we hope to see the Web as an instrument for progressive change I’m suggesting that we all take this same pledge. Tossing flames across political blogs is like screaming at the car that cuts you off; the distance makes you brave. But bump into someone at a store and right away you’re friendly, polite and apologetic. It’s the difference between building community versus social disorder.

So here we are in the cold and physically distant blogosphere, tossing snarky barbs from the safety of our PCs at the “idiot winger” online. Honestly, where’s that get us? It’s a progressive-change dead-end. I think it’s killing the Web as a place to share and learn about grass-roots, up the front the bottom, progressive ideas. It’s really got to stop.

I’m not suggesting some kind of “fair and balanced” rule here. Those are reactionary code words designed to stand in the way of change. I’m talking about something much more subtle. It’s finding a way to move beyond our own internal, knee-jerk ideology towards a more open-minded strategy, because God knows we need new ideas.

So when I post at other sites – and I do this all day, it’s like an addiction – I’m trying to chuck the easy arrogance that comes from anonymity. I don’t think I’m going to change someone’s opinion with clever insults and nasty names anyway. And how do I know my position is “right”? I used to think “everyone else is asleep, I know History, I know what’s real”. But I don’t agree even with half the things I myself once thought. Who’s to say everyone else is wrong, all the time?

The concept of being stuck to an ideological position – Marxist vs. Capitalist, Stalinist vs. Trotskyist, Democrat vs. Republican — it’s all about being stuck in a place. And the result is that nothing ever changes. You can still be open to new ideas without leaving your core beliefs behind. I still have core beliefs, my basic values and I’m sticking to them. When it comes to how we’ll get a world based on those values (fairness, compassion, respect, community, democracy, in my case) – I’m open. I think we all ought to be.

It’s a new century, after all. You can see a progressive awakening all over. You can see it in the natural food sections cropping up in the supermarket, in the new environmentalism, in the sustainability movement, even some elements of the evangelical crowd are acting like they’ve rediscovered The Beatitudes, the original progressive’s platform. I see it even in myself, when I realized hours after leaving the primary voting booth that I’d just voted for my first black presidential candidate, and race hadn’t even entered – in any form – into my decision. This is cool stuff; we’ve come pretty far.

But we’re not there yet, not by a long shot. Now more than ever we need passionate communicators to bring progressive ideas into the world to move the greater community beyond worn out, dug-in, ideological positions holding back true social change. “lib” vs. “repug”, “us” vs. “them” – these belong in the past. An open mind is the path of true social change.

Listen: I just found out that my “FOX-is-Right,” Limbaugh-listening, hate-all-liberals co-worker is thinking seriously of voting for Obama in November. So maybe anything’s possible, after all.

Demand socialized medicine. That’s what it is, that’s what we should call it, and that is what we need.

OK, I’m being a bit dramatic with that headline. What I really should have written is “demand a single payer health care system”. But I had a “mad as hell” moment this weekend and while it hasn’t put me over the edge with our health care system – that happened a long time ago – it was enough to get me thinking about our need for real health care change.

It came from the Flu, which I thought might be pneumonia, and which inconveniently hit on a Saturday afternoon. This gave me two options: The emergency room’s day-long ordeal or the walk-in service at a local physician’s group. I could have tried making an appointment with a doctor on a Saturday afternoon, but there’s no chance in Hell I’d get one.

It’s just not cost-effective to have office hours at that time.

So I walked into the nicely decorated drop-in facility; waterfall in the corner, stone walls, very comforting although I was ready for death’s door. I was told to be ready for a wait – a long one. Did I really need to see the doctor?

Yes, I really did. So I settled in and waited. It felt like half a lifetime. Why such a long wait? Because there was one doctor on call.

Having one doctor on call during Flu season is nuts. But it is cost-effective.

And this is really what galls me: Why in the world should one’s care be subjected to “cost effectiveness?” I had a family member diagnosed with a severely clogged artery – frightening stuff – but couldn’t see the specialist – any specialist – for four days. I guess it’s not cost-effective to be available on Fridays, or weekends, or Mondays for that matter. I have other family members facing financial ruin with a long-term illness, and I watch rather helplessly as they rip through their retirement savings. It’s destroyed the quality of their lives. And isn’t this why we work and save so hard? So we can retire with contentment?

All this doesn’t even begin to consider the implications of insurance-driven medical decisions, insurance companies denying life-saving care, the millions who don’t even have coverage, or the ever-rising costs – even for the insured – of basic health care itself. Last year I spent 10% of my net pay on out-of-pocket medical expenses. And I’m lucky enough to have insurance.

As for my visit to the walk-in center: Raging fever and ready-to-drop sick, it was round trip just under five hours. But the topper: Even with insurance my prescription ran a cool sixty bucks. Rubbing salt in the wound was the pharmacy paperwork which showed that my insurance – for which I pay a hefty monthly sum – generously covered eighteen dollars of it.

This is truly insane.

The free market is a powerful entity. It works, sometimes with great elegance, for many situations. But must we be so fanatically devoted to the free market concept that it becomes the framework for every social program? What ideology do you know that satisfies every test, every time? Yet mention single payer health care and be prepared for the shouts of “socialism” and “big government” and “Sweden-sized taxes” (I’d say my $thousands per year for sometimes subpar care constitutes the worse form that taxes could ever take).

Even so, that knee-jerk fear over “socialized medicine” put out by “small government” folks and their insurance executives as a way to red-bait health care reformers may finally be losing its impact, and may even be backfiring. Ezra Klein over at The American Prospect breaks down a new poll from the Harvard School of Public Health nicely here. In essence, 45% of the respondents felt that “Socialized Medicine would improve health care”. And yes, that was the word used.

Truth is, a Single Payer system is not socialized medicine anyway. It’s a health care payment system, where providers are not employees of the government at all. I’m not an expert, but I found an excellent and accessible overview of the Single Payer approach here.

Honestly, it’s time we opened our minds and stopped relying on the mainstream media, soaked with advertising and pharmaceutical connections, and demand a government run, singe payer health care system. It’s the 21st century after all. It’s time to start living like it.

Montel Williams has blasted Faux News – on the air and in their faces – for their tabloid-like exploitation of Heath Ledger’s death. Daily Kos has the details and the video:

Talk about Must See TV. It has also apparently cost the man his job.

I was in the bank on Thursday where the propaganda machine television goes all day to keep the folk happy and sedated, I guess. And what’s CNN reporting on? With grim seriousness and “on location” urgency they’ve got Britney Spears and her hospital stay.

Cable news has really become a national embarrassment. Here’s an idea: Shut the freaking thing off. Nothing would be better than a few million people putting commercial media on “ignore” to send a message.

Clearly the idea of a mainstream media actually performing their duties as the Fourth Estate is laughable (I can hear you laughing right now). And so I guess there should be no surprise at the media silence regarding the latest “Is He Wired” story right out of the “Bush’s Bulge” controversy during ’04 – well, it could have been a controversy if the media would have taken it up.

This time we have that smooth-talking Romney who clearly gets prompted by a mysterious whisper during a recent GOP debate. Crooks and Liars has the video.

Take a listen – clearly someone is prompting the guy, and he wears a creepy earpiece, just like Bush in the ’04 debates (tip to AmericaBlog for the creepy reference).

Now this one is getting some attention around the blogosphere, from the Left and Right…will the mainstream media actually pick it up? Or is this all part of the Infotainment Age, where news is only news when it involves sexy teens and celebrity baby bumps? Here’s a change worthy of Changeany1thing.com: Let’s all shut the TVs and start thinking for ourselves again…

I’ll vote for a Democrat in 2008. I know, big surprise. Anyone stumbling on this site gets the political drift here. After all, “conservative” means “against change”, and I’m nuts about change.

Anyway, it’s not that I reject conservatives out of hand – truth is there are some things that make sense. But really, what’s “conservative” about the Republican Party anymore? I mean even ol’ Ike must be rolling in his grave.

“Clear Skies Initiatives” for polluters, “Family Values” that rip up families, “small government” that starves public works but still dictates personal behavior; “Christian Coalitions” that ignore The Beatitudes, xenophobia at home, stepping on the Constitution…..somebody stop me!

But are the leading Democrats any better?

Sure, the Democrats are different. But for real honest-to-God change? Kucinich was the most progressive, and Edwards it pretty cool. But as a member of what is – let’s face it – a corporate party, neither are going to win. And Obama – who is deeply inspiring – is something of a chameleon when it comes to progressive passions.

But I am so fed up with Democrats who completely ignore the runaway corporate power grab…who among the Democrats is talking about $billions in corporate welfare? Who’s talking about Net Neutrality? Media Concentration? Single-payer healthcare? The revolving door at the FDA?

If the country is based on checks and balances then this scale of ours needs some serious re-balancing.

Take a listen to Ralph Nader:

More from Ralph at Democracy Now….

Given the alternatives I’ll vote for a Democrat. But how about a few third parties and new ideas? Let’s get some real change out there!

I know, you are aghast. One theme you’ll see often here at Changeany1thing is how the working and middle class (you know, “the people”) have been getting shafted through a generation of deregulation. That’s why we need a “re-regulation” movement. Or maybe just a “democracy movement”. But I digress.

Now here comes a truly revelatory book by NY Times reporter David Cay Johnston called Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You With the Bill). “Did you know that big box stores get to keep all the sales tax when you make a purchase? You are subsidizing that new Home Depot every time you buy a light bulb.

Dandelion Salad has all the links to the democracy now! interview here.

And dig this:

That’s from a terrific Q&A with the writer, from here.

It would be nice if the “liberal media” would make a storm out of this now and again but I guess they’re too busy covering Hillary’s emotional moment.