Jim Hightower: Taking Us for a Ride on Health Care

via CommonDreams:



Published on Thursday, August 20, 2009 by Creators Syndicate
Taking Us for a Ride on Health Care

by Jim Hightower


If you get a thrill from taking a white-knuckle ride on a loop-the-loop, you don't have to wait for the state fair — just hop onto the right-wing express, which is plunging into ludicrous levels of loopiness in an effort to kill Barack Obama's health care reform plan.

You'll shriek with astonishment as alarmist right-wing pundits and politicos hurtle you past reality, past credulity and past sanity. Their wildest twist, so far, is that the demonic Obama has included "death panels" at the core of his insidious rewrite of our health care system. Yes, they cry, buried down deep in the bill at page 425 is a bone-chilling provision to create federal review panels empowered to decide whether the old, sick and disabled are allowed to live.

Impossible, you scoff? Well, none other than Sarah Palin says it's so, and we know she doesn't make stuff up. Citing her own elderly parents and her baby with Down syndrome, the ex-veep contender recently wailed that they "will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care."

In case you didn't grasp the horror of these governmental grim reapers, Palin added this punctuation: "Such a system is downright evil."

Indeed, it is. Which is one reason that Obama and the Congress have not even contemplated such a provision, much less included it in the bill. Section 1233, which Palin claims is the one containing the evil, merely allows doctors to hold voluntary consultations with their patients on such matters as a living will and other advance instructions on the care the patients choose to receive as their inevitable time of death approaches. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/08/20-9

It wasn't simply a difference of opinion, and I rarely disagree with him in principle. It was that he lied by omission in his piece on Chevron and Ecuador and misrepresented the situation.

As a Texan I've often been enamored with Hightower but sometimes he just rubs me the wrong way. I'd love to know more.

http://www.jimhightower.com/node/6904 This is Hightower's complete radio piece.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/149090/page/2

Texaco Petroleum performed an environmental remediation and public works program prescribed by, and certified by, the Government of Ecuador.


The Republic of Ecuador's failure to honor its contractual and legal obligations related to Texaco Petroleum's past activities in Ecuador is contrary to the spirit and letter of the trade preferences granted to Ecuador under U.S. law.

Dave Samson
General Manager, Public Affairs
Chevron Corp.
San Ramon, Calif.

http://www.chevron.com/news/press/release/?id=2009-02-12

1. At the conclusion of the oil production concession between Texaco Petroleum (“Texpet,” a
subsidiary of Texaco, which merged with a Chevron subsidiary in 2001) and the government of
Ecuador in 1992, the parties conducted a full environmental audit, and Texpet performed a multi-
year, $40 million remediation program proportionate to its minority ownership share of the
Consortium. That program was approved by the government of Ecuador, which then granted
Texpet and all related entities a full and complete release from any remaining environmental
liability associated with the consortium’s operations.

2. When the same U.S. contingency-fee lawyers initially filed the Aguinda case —the precursor to
today’s Lago Agrio lawsuit—in U.S. federal court in 1993, the then government of Ecuador
formally intervened in the case and advised the court that the government, not private plaintiffs,
had the exclusive right to assert claims for environmental impacts to the government-owned lands
upon which the oil operations had been conducted, and that the government had resolved those
claims through the negotiated remediation program and the related Settlement and Release.

3. By its own admission, the government of Ecuador for years neglected to perform its share of the
environmental remediation. Indeed, in sharp contrast, it has systematically starved its wholly-
owned oil operations of the funds necessary for reasonable maintenance and responsible oil field
operations, preferring instead to divert its billions of dollars in oil proceeds to other purposes.

4. Since the government of Ecuador assumed full ownership of the operation nearly 20 years ago,
Petroecuador has compiled a deplorable record of environmental irresponsibility, tallying more
than 1,400 oil spills since 2000 alone.


http://www.chevron.com/documents/pdf/texacopetroleumecuadorlawsuit.pdf