Morton Mintz

From #26: Whether it would be wise or unwise to adopt the nonprofit, Canadian-style "single payer" system, which would provide health insurance for all Americans, regardless of age, health, income, or job; enable every citizen to choose his or her own physician; end insurers' interference in the doctor-patient relationship; improve the overall health of the American people, and save $127.4 billion (!) in administrative and billing costs in 2001 alone. (The estimate is that of Dr. David U. Himmelstein, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, who built on a calculation made  by the General Accounting Office, the auditing agency of Congress, that single-payer would have saved $66.9 billion in 1991.)

From #7: Whether Congress should rescue 13.5 million American children from hunger, whether the incoming President should press Congress for $800 million to increase the Earned Income Tax Credit for the two million working families beset by the highest rates of child poverty, and whether ending poverty in America is as important as tax cuts for the middle class and the wealthy.

From #2: Whether Congress should enact legislation allowing pharmacies to buy drugs for Medicare beneficiaries at the far-lower "best price" paid by Medicaid and the Veterans Administration, and whether Congress should investigate high drug prices, using its subpoena power to obtain documents and compel testimony. 

From #4: Whether the widening chasm between the very rich and everyone else is good or bad for American democracy.

From #5: Whether Congress should stop forcing rank-and-file taxpayers to subsidize over-the-top executive pay...The tax code now allows a company to deduct "reasonable" pay--salary plus bonus--from taxable income and caps the deduction at $1 million. A House bill proposed to revise "reasonable" to mean twenty-five times the salary of a company's lowest-paid pull-time worker. Maybe forty-two times would be reasonable.  But 450?

From #6: Whether Congress should lower the limit on the first and second home mortgage debt on which a taxpayer can take an interest deduction from $1 million to, say, $300,000, thereby making $40.8 billion during the decade 2000-2009--the estimate of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office--available to help the estimated 5.3 million households escape miserable "worst case" housing.      

From #8: Whether the campaign-finance laws legalized bribes, a bribe being  "Something, such as money or a favor, offered to or given to a person in a position of trust to influence that person's views or conduct" (source: The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language).

From #9: Whether the federal government should stop doling out more than $125 billion a year to politically-wired corporations and industries--corporate welfare that costs the government as much as it collects in income taxes from 60 million individuals and families.

From #10: Whether major oil companies stole billions of dollars from federal and state taxpayers by cheating on royalties--rental fees--for the privilege of drilling on public and American Indian tribal lands (they pegged the royalties not to market prices, but to whatever prices the companies chose to "post" at the wellhead.)       

From #12: Whether Congress should investigate the refusal of product-liability insurers to warn unsuspecting consumers when the carriers learn of needlessly unsafe defective tires, cars, medical devices,  pharmaceuticals and other products, when by keeping such information secret the carriers have exposed and continue to expose people to massive injury, disease and death; and whether this secrecy  violates fundamental ethical principles, such as this one from Leviticus: "Thou shalt not...put a stumbling block before the blind."

From the piece on the first presidential debate: Whether to halt the massive transfer of cash, securities and other assets to foreign tax havens that enables Americans to evade U.S. income taxes in an amount equivalent to, by one unofficial estimate, the sum of "every tax dollar paid by everyone in New York State and New Jersey who earns less than $200,000 a year"; whether some people earning $30,000 should continue paying a larger proportion of their income in federal, state and local income taxes, and Social Security than do some people earning $30 million; and whether Congress should fund the Internal Revenue Service so that it can focus its audits of taxpayer returns on those where the evasions can be big-time. Presently, the IRS audits more people earning less than $25,000 (these are quick and easy) than it does  of people earning more than $100,000 (these are time-consuming and complex). 

From #14: Whether the defense of the United States actually requires a nuclear arsenal capable of destroying every major city on the planet ten times over,  when we could save, say, $15 billion a year merely by having enough nukes to make the rubble bounce three times rather than nine times.

My first tompaine article, posted in August 1999,  set the tone for the rest by making this core point: During the first six months of that year, while Texas Governor Bush was "smothering rivals for the Republican presidential nomination by collecting a record 37.3 million bucks," his five-year record of governance went largely unexamined, as was noted in print by no fewer than three Washington Post political reporters. But the national press had no good excuse for such nonfeasance.  Simply by clicking on a couple of websites, the article pointed out,  anyone could find a cornucopia of facts and data on Bush's record that he---and consequently the mainstream political press--did not care to discuss.  For example, the article included these rankings of Texas among the fifty states:

First: Pollution released by manufacturing plants; pollution by industrial plants in violation of the federal Clean Air Act; greenhouse gas emissions' percentage of working parents without insurance' percentage of children without health insurance.

Second: Number of children living in poverty; percentage of population without health insurance.

The  press habits that let Bush's record go unexamined while he was locking up the nomination during the critical first half of last year are deeply ingrained. The second article illustrated this with a look at coverage of  the 1988, 1992 and 1996 presidential campaigns. 

In May 1988, for example, newspapers and television newscasters gave top billing to an  alarming report by the Surgeon General of the United States:  Cigarettes "are addicting in the same sense as are drugs such as heroin and cocaine." Although smoking was killing more than 400,000 Americans prematurely every year, no reporter asked the presidential candidates whether they agreed or disagreed with the Surgeon General, an appointee of Ronald Reagan, or how they would define the moral difference between taking money from cigarette makers and drug cartels.

The tompaine article also recalled a couple of past sayings of 1996 GOP presidential nominee Bob Dole. These presented the press with marvelous opportunities. In 1983, for example,  the senator had said: "When these political action committees give money, they  expect something in return other than good government." He'd been no less blunt in 1990, when he referred to his efforts in "cleaning up the campaign sewer money."

Did reporters on the campaign trail remind Dole of these quotes while his campaign was raking in sewer money?

You don't need me to tell you the answer.

Originally published at:
www.tompaine.com/news/2000/11/27/index.html

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