Barkings! | The Small Dog Apple Blog

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You all probably know that I am not a fan of nuclear energy as a path for energy independence, but even if I was put in charge of Vermont’s only nuclear plant, I could not have done a better job of undermining their chances for a license renewal than they did on their own.

First it was a failed cooling tower, then a barely competitive power purchase offer but the straw that really broke the camel’s back was the leaking tritium that had found its way into the ground water. After testing, it was revealed that despite their testimony that there were not underground pipes carrying radioactive water, there were many, and they were leaking.

The Vermont Senate, after several hours of debate, in a non-partisan vote, defeated the request for a 20-year license renewal by a vote of 26-4. While this was a vote about a specific antique leaking nuclear power plant, it reflects a sentiment in our state that we should rely upon sustainable renewable energy sources, energy efficiency and conservation for our energy needs in the future.

The Vermont legislature could be an example for our national legislature. Many initiatives are the result of republicans, democrats and progressives working together to fashion legislation for the good of the entire state. Having spent quite a bit of time up in Montpelier talking to these part-time legislators, I find them to all be committed to providing the best for our state. They work together using persuasion and compromise to achieve this goal.

Vermont’s annual exercise of basic democratic rights comes next week with Town Meeting day. All of the towns in Vermont—there are 255 of them—hold annual town meetings to elect local officials, from constable to selectman to cemetery commissioner, and to pass town and school budgets. In my town of Warren, with a population of about 1500, there is a potluck lunch in between the town and school meetings.

Vermont’s legislature reserved the right to approve any extension of the State’s only nuclear plant many years ago. Yesterday’s vote is the elected representatives of the people exercising their right to protect the people from a potentially dangerous license extension and a poor economic deal. Kudos to the Vermont Senate for their courage and foresight!

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As I watch the battle over health care reform play out in Congress and on the airways, I am struck with how much of this debate is driven by greed. In this case, it is the greed of the health insurance companies that are fighting tooth and nail to protect the 30% of our health care dollars that go to the insurance companies. If you look at the voting records on health insurance reform, the lines are clear. Those that get lots of campaign contributions from the insurance companies tend to vote against the “public option” and those that get smaller contributions see the value if keeping those same insurance companies honest with a competitive public option.

Then there are the battling commercials, the surreptitious funding of protests by insurance company groups and literally hundreds of lobbyists trying to influence policy. None of our legislators is willing to stand up and say “I oppose the public option because the insurance companies have given me the huge bucks and I need the money” but the obfuscation of the true issues is apparent to anyone that looks closely. According to analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics, the 15 lawmakers to vote against the public option amendment offered by Sen. Jay Rockefeller received $69,137 more, on average, from the insurance industry since 1989 than the eight who voted for it. The 13 lawmakers who voted against another public option amendment offered by Sen. Chuck Schumer received $93,177 more, on average, from insurers since 1989 than the 10 who voted for it.

Even those that oppose the public option will grant that there is a pressing need for health insurance reform. The train is coming in the tunnel so the option of doing nothing doesn’t work as the current thing we call a health care system is failing. With annual double digit increases in premiums, well over the rate of inflation or wages, it is simply unsustainable to stand pat. At Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility we have annually polled our members about health care and one of the most compelling signs of decay in the current “system” is that 75% of our members (and this slice of business is generally businesses that DO provide health insurance to their employees) have made changes to their policies in the past year that have either increased the cost to the employees, dropped coverage, moved to high-deductible plans or otherwise made changes to reduce the employer’s contribution to health insurance. The payer of last resort for health insurance now, is employer-funded health insurance. When the uninsured are provided care, the cost is shifted onto the big pool of private insurance and with that cost increasing and the pool decreasing we are facing a fiscal and a health-care time bomb.

The opposition is not pulling any punches. I got involved in a discussion on Facebook based upon a friend’s post about health care and all I had to say was that I was an advocate of a publicly-funded universal health care system and you would not believe the names I got called from people that didn’t even know me. I was called a socialist (I had to remind everyone that in fact, I am a capitalist entrepreneur), a communist and a nazi. The polarization has made dialog and compromise almost meaningless. I think this polarization is dangerous not only to civil dialog and good lawmaking but it is polarizing beyond the legislature.

Some have seen this as an opportunity to push other agendas as well. I was shocked to learn that there was a coordinated attack on women’s reproductive freedom with a move to restrict even private insurance policies from providing funding for abortions. Women’s health including reproductive freedom as established by the constitution and the supreme court should not be the issue as we discuss how to create a more intelligent health insurance system.

There is a parallel with climate change legislation. Stay with me on this one. In both cases we have experts that can see dire consequences if we do not take action. With health care it is a system on the verge of collapse, with climate change it is global warming and all the negative impacts on our planet and economy. In both cases, it is powerful special interests with huge war chests that prevent comprehensive and effect action. In both cases, we must break through this partisan gridlock and find common ground.

While you do not have to guess my position on either of these critical issues, I think that the key to breaking the gridlock on a long term basis is true campaign finance reform. We must get the big bucks out of our elections so that large special interests do not control the agenda but that the will of the people do.

Image source: Will Blog For Food

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This week marks the 64th anniversary of the first use of an atomic weapon. The US atomic bombing of Hiroshima marked the start of the atomic age and also killed 260,000 people with a single bomb, marking a new height in man’s inhumanity to man. While I do not want to debate the wisdom or morality of that most difficult decision of Harry Truman to end the war, I do think the words of the pilot, Captain Robert Lewis, of “My God, what have we done?” ring true 64 years later as they did at the time.

With trillions of dollars of the world’s wealth spent and being spent now on maintenance of nuclear arsenals that have the power to destroy our planet, it is time once and for all to eliminate nuclear weapons from our planet. While we continue to pay lip service to eliminating useless nuclear weapons, little has been done to stop their production and we have a serious issue now with more nations seeking to join the nuclear club.

Nuclear weapons remain the most serious threat to humanity. Humanity’s capacity to use those weapons makes that a threat to take seriously. Even though the tensions that caused the cold war and the nuclear arms race have subsided, the nuclear arsenals continue to be produced, older weapons are being replaced by new weapons and unstable governments around the world seek nuclear arms in a sick sort of weapons-envy power trip.

I marched in my first anti-war rally on Hiroshima Day in 1964. I told my parents I was going to the library and ended up on the front page of the Chicago Sun Times. Yeah, I got grounded. But, I do remember the fear of the nuclear arms race. My parents even had a nuclear shelter in our home when we lived in Kansas. It was sort of silly—it didn’t even have a door, no sanitation facilities and would do almost nothing to protect you from that kind of explosion. I remember the ‘duck and cover’ exercises in school that were just as silly.

The use of nuclear weapons is no longer an option in our world and they should be forever banned.

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Tags: atomic, disarmament, hiroshima, nuclear, truman

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Yes, I can’t help it. I noticed that there are now TV commercials from special interest groups that are once again trying to scare people about health care reform. President Obama is correct in saying that without real health care reform there cannot be a true economic recovery. While the car companies may have failed because they were making the wrong cars, they also had the enormous burden of health care for their current and retired employees. So great was this burden that health care expense represented more in the price of a car than steel.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights that was passed unanimously by the UN stated that health care was a basic human right:

Article 25.
(1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
(2) Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.

I truly believe that health care is a basic human right. Of the 27 industrialized nations in the world, 26 provide universal health care for its citizens. The one that does not? Yes, that’s right, the USA. While we have the most expensive health care system in the world, we lag behind other countries in areas such as infant mortality, breast cancer screening, childhood leukemia and heart attack survival rates.

We pay over twice what other countries with universal health care pay and yet, we do not get our money’s worth. Worse yet, millions have no insurance or coverage in our country and many millions more are “under insured.” These under insured are often ignored in the system. The natural result of the rapidly escalating cost of health insurance is the flight to very high deductible plans or health care savings accounts, both of which provide a disincentive to seek preventative care and screenings.

We are setting ourselves up for a more costly health care time bomb when unscreened individuals discover the hard way that they have diabetes, high blood pressure or other chronic diseases.

The payer of last resort has always been employee-sponsored health insurance. Our surveys show that this fragile leg of the system we call health care in our country is crumbling as employers drop coverage, move more costs to their employees or go to very high deductibles and co-pays.

This has been a slow train coming for decades. The rate of increase of health insurance has made employer-sponsored health care unsustainable. When I first started in business, I could buy health insurance for a family for about $1500; now it costs $15,000. No longer are decisions about hiring new employees solely made by opportunity and business plans—if you are an employer that does the right thing by providing this benefit for your workers, you must also consider the astronomical cost of health insurance.

These employers are also put between a rock and a hard place as they have a competitive disadvantage in bidding for business when providing this benefit is voluntary and the competitor has a lower overhead structure by not providing health insurance to their employees in the race to the bottom.

This is why I am an advocate for a publicly-financed universal health care system. You may call that a “single-payer” system, but I really do not care if there is one payer or ten payers—I want the burden of health care lifted from employers and recognized as the “common good” that it truly is. I want us to put the sentiment that our country voted for in the UN into law—access to health care is a human right!

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Tags: healthcare, insurance

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The new MLB iPhone application will now stream live game video in addition to the audio feeds. The first game to be boardcast is the Cubs versus White Sox. We are in the midst of inter-league play and once again, that unfortunate mistake that will always make the American League the junior league becomes more apparent—the designated hitter rule.

Adopted in 1973, the rule has artificially inflated the hitting percentage of the American League and has allowed older players who can no longer play a defensive position to extend their careers unnaturally. This isn’t football where you have an offense and defense and different players for each—this is baseball where nine players play both offense and defense!

Baseball is the game of inches; the game of details. The strategy for managers of when to lift a pitcher, who to pinch hit, where that player might play are all integral parts of the game of baseball. The double switch is something American League teams just don’t know, yet it is an important part of baseball.

The national league has produced some great hitting pitchers. One of the best plays for my Chicago Cubs. Carlos Zambrano is one of the best hitters on the team and is their pitching ace, too. (He is frequently used as a pinch hitter!)

Hitting pitchers are rare, though and during inter-league play the American league home team automatically receives a significant unnatural advantage by shielding their pitchers and having that one-dimensional hitter on their roster.

I haven’t liked the American League since before the DH was instituted, but that rule is truly a travesty and should be repealed!

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