Our policies in Iraq as formulated by two oil men

Posted on May 10th, 2008 in Economy, Health, History, Medicine, Politics, War by Robert Miller

Now in our sixth year of war in Iraq, with no end game even contemplated by the administration, it is abundantly clear that Bush and Cheney have unfinished business in the Middle East and their motivations for staying there will make it challenging for any future administration to leave. It will take a sea change in our nationalized and militarized foreign policy to get out of Iraq. But, to understand why, you have to leave the WMD issue and the other bogus reasons given to us for the invasion in 2003 and concentrate on the following fact: never before in the history of the U.S. have we had two oil men in the top two positions of our government and never before have we had a foreign policy so singularly obsessed by the oil issue. In the past year it has become much clearer why GW Bush has constructed the largest embassy in the world in Baghdad and why the "surge" of this year will continue and war activity is likely to increase.

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Rudy Giuliani’s tirade against “socialized medicine”

Posted on November 10th, 2007 in Culture, Medicine, Politics by Robert Miller

In the 1940s, the key piece to Harry Truman’s domestic political agenda was to create a single payer national health care plan. He soon discovered, to his astonishment, that the Republican opposition, aided by the AMA, labeled his plan “socialized medicine” and it went down to defeat, as the flames of anti-communism and McCarthyism were beginning to shape the post-war mood of the country. Recently, Rudy Giuliani, never a stickler for accuracy and trying to get more cozy with the right wing of the Republican party, made the announcement that his personal victory over prostate cancer could not have been achieved if he had been treated under “socialized medicine.” He went on to say that the chances of surviving prostate cancer in the British system are only 44 percent while in the US, the survival numbers are 82 percent. Wow! Who wouldn’t look disfavorably on the socialized British medical care system with numbers like that? But a few reporters decided to look into this issue a little more closely and when that happens with Giuliani, usually some revision of his remarks are in order.

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