Tax the Politicians -- The Fair Solution to States' Financial Woes

It was reported by MSNBC that "Restore Our Future super PAC (founded by three former Romney political aides) spent $2.8 million on ads in Iowa, nearly twice as much as the $1.5 million spent by Romney's own campaign, according to figures compiled for NBC News by Smart Media Group Delta, a media ad tracking firm."

I see real opportunity here for our states to solve serious funding problems without sticking it to the rest of us! States and local governments can't tax home owners since a reassessment of property values would bring in less and not more. They can't tax businessess since there are few with profits left to tax left. They can't make it up by increasing regular sales tax since there are few big spenders making enough purchases left.

Campaign spending in just Michigian (not a big player) for 2011 is estimated to be $100 million. It's more like $6 or $7 Billion (yes, Billion is spelled with a big "B") for the whole of the U.S. So let's tax the people we like the least (or hate the most) -- politicians! During the next year, politicians will be spending big "B" Billions taking advantage of the Republican Supreme Court's determination that corporations are people and the sky isn't the limit for campaign donations and spending.

Given that our states are providing roads and other infrastructure for these politicians to travel around and plague the citizens with their campaign broadcasts, states have standing (a legitimate reason) for imposing taxes on politicians. A state sales tax of 50% on any campaign dollars spent in any state seems fair to me.

Let's not stop there. If we manage to elect anything but a do-nothing Congress in Washington this time around, let's get busy and lobby that Congress into passing a Federal Tax on Campaign Spending! Maybe anditional 25% on top of the state's campagin spending tax for use of FCC airwaves. We should also institute a fine on individual candidates of $100,000 for each lie they tell -- a personal fine not related to campaign or lobby money bribe collecting. That could be a source of Billions and Billions in state and Federal ongoing revenue!

Our current US Congress doesn't like the idea of taxing the rich. You can't get anymore blood from the rest of us turnips (the 99% of us who aren't rich). Taxing politicians is all that's left. And it's a fair tax, all things considered. These politicians are the responsible parties for shipping our jobs offshore, the responsible parties for the housing bubble and subsequent collaspe, the responsible parties for the wall street bubble and subsequent bailout, the responsible parties for the whole economic collaspe which leaves our state governments going bankrupt trying to provide state and local services without a tax base to support citizen needs. Taxing them is the only fair approach to raising much needed state and Federal revenue.

Universal Health Care -- NOW and HOW

A starting point for my rant today is an article in Salon
http://open.salon.com/blog/mishima666/2009/03/06/secrets_of_hospital_bills_revealed and an observation by a CNN reporter this morning that there are 87 million people, i.e., 1 in 3 people, in the US who are uninsured. There goes the old Republican argument that health care should be determined by a person and their personal provider -- those who have no health insurance do not have personal providers and often no care at all unless it is paid for by taxpayers.

According to this CNN reporter, another 1 in 3 people receive taxpayer paid health care through Medicare because they are old or through Medicaid because they are officially poor, or at taxpayer expense because their salaries are paid by the taxpayers -- Congressmen, Senators, federal government employees, federal contractor employees, state government officials, state agency employees, state contractor employees, teachers, policemen, etc, etc.

The rest of us, the 1 in 3 who have health insurance (primarly through private employer plans as long as we have jobs), are footing the bill for our own health insurance through payroll deductions. We're paying out of pocket the deductibles, copays, and costs for procedures or products not covered by our own insurance. We're also paying the bill for the 1 in 3 people in the US who now recieve health care at taxpayer expense. We're paying so our elected officials can have worry-free health care. We're paying when the uninsured need healthcare. The answer to the question of how do we pay for universal health care is simple -- we are already paying!

How to pay for universal care isn't the question. How do we make health care insurance affordable isn't the question? The real question is how do we make health care affordable?

The next time one of your "right" thinking friends ask how we'll pay for universal health care, answer firmily that we are already paying and move on to the next question -- why are those costs so high? My answer is that costs are so high because of our multi-payer system. Providing health care has become a "big corporate" enterprise. Profit, not quality or affordability of care, is the motive of both provider enterprises and health care insurers. Until we eliminate the profit motive, we will never get to affordable health care.

The usual Republican answer -- the same they offer up when we, the citizens, cry out for legislation that caps the compensation of Wall Street execs and punishes the swindlers-- is that in a free market you don't control compensation or fix costs. Bull Feathers! Wages and prices are controlled by somebody -- it's either the fat cats who charge whatever they think they can get away with or it's the taxpayers who say enough is enough.

I'm tired of both paying for health care coverage and worrying it won't be there when I need it. Here's why. A couple of years ago I had what has for generations been a routine and low cost surgical procedure. When I said yes to the procedure, nobody would tell me what it would costs -- I was assured that it was "covered" so not to worry. Afterwards, the surgeon was paid $1000 for the procedure by my health insurer. They paid another $2000 to unlicensed-in-the-US doctors who get to practice here under the unbrella of "assistant surgeons" -- how many unlicensed-in-the-US assistant surgeons are preforming surgery in our hospitals, I don't know. The hospital got another $3000 for my three day stay -- that's $1000 a night for an roadside motel grade single room with a bed from hell and "nurses" who didn't speak English showing up infrequently to refill my water container.

After a couple of months of resubmitting bills for reconsideration, the lot of these medical providers were reimbursed about $5000 total by my insurance company after a $1000 deductible contribution by me. Not so bad for a hospital stay these days. However, when I asked for an itemized bill, it totaled $45,000 USD. One hour of non-life-threatening surgery and 3 days of economy room and bad food -- $45,000!

No, I didn't have to pay the difference, because I had an insurance company who had negotiate a "fair and reasonable cost" for "reasonable and necessary care" that precluded the providers from coming after me for the difference. Had I not had insurance, the providers would have charged me the full $45,0000. The difference between the $6000 paid for the procedure and the $45,000 billed must have gone into that magic land where the uninsured dwell.

But let's do the math. In addition to the $1000 deductible that year, I paid over $5000 in health insurance premiums through my employer, as I had done for many years before. The health insurance company had no true out of pocket cost for me that year; for prior years they had several thousand dollars in profit because I paid in $5000 and only used up a few hundred in routine office visits. The providers who performed the surgery earned a substantial amount for the time they spent administering to my body. Let's assume that $6000 was the fair market value of that service, because that's what they agreed with the insurance company was "fair and reasonable." So, why was I billed $45,000? Greed on the part of this major hospital corporation? Deceptive trade practices? Criminal racketeering? All three. You be the judge.

Same song, different verse, different singer. A senior citizen friend who is on Medicare and an additional private Medicare-regulated insurance policy was recently in the emergency room and then hospital care for three days due to internal bleeding -- they never figured out where or what was bleeding inspite of the use of all sorts of high tech equipment for tests. Luckily the bleeding stopped on its own and she returned home. A week later she got a bill for $28,000, of which Medicare will probably pay something less than $3000 and she'll have to come up with the Medicare deductible out of her social security income.

As a tax payer with a pre-existing condition that now needs medical monitoring from time to time, I worry that my insurer will decide some test or procedure is not "reasonable and necessary" and I will have to pay the full-price billed. I worry that I will have no insurance at all and go into that magic land where the uninsured dwell if I should lose my almost affordable employer sponsored health insurance -- there is no way an unemployed person who isn't independently wealthy can afford to pay Cobra rates for insurance -- there's no way an unemployed person can afford the full-price billed for services. I can only imagine the mental anguish of millions of our fellow citizens who have lost their jobs and their health care insurance.

It makes no logical or moral sense to me to continue allowing medical providers to bill one group of patients -- the uninsured -- ten times what they bill those with insurance (private insurance, Medicare, or Medicaid) for the same exact procedures in the same exact facility. It makes no sense to continue allowing medical providers to charge 10 times the amount for pills dispensed in a hospital, pills they buy in bulk at discount, than you would pay at your local pharmacy for a 30 day supply. It makes no sense to allow medical providers and health insurance companies to continue their expectation of annual double-digit profits. It makes no sense, in this new American "greed is busted" land to allow medical providers and health insurers to control the national economy. It's time to level the playing field!

While not all medical doctors live lavish lifestyles, many do. Yes, doctors spend years of "borrowed student loan money" time and lose a lot of sleep getting a post-graduate education, but a heck of a lot of people in this country incur debt and lose sleep getting a post-graduate eduation in their fields -- teachers for instance -- and those people never earn more than $100,000 a year. Most nurses, who provide the major portion of medical care, never earn more than $60,000 a year.

I once worked in the field of bankruptcy law in the mid-1980s economic downturn and saw several doctors come into bankruptcy chapter 11 to restructure their bad real estate deals -- one heart surgeon in particular earned $10 million post-pettion (money his creditors couldn't touch even though they tried hard ) income in six months after his filing.

So, should we the taxpayers, we of more modest incomes, let medical providers continue those kinds of earnings at the expense of our own peace of mind and the financial ruin of 1/3 of our fellow citizens? I think not. Not in these greed-busting times.

My basic solution for paying for "health care for all" is the same as Obama's -- extensive costs cutting -- medical costs should receive the same hair-cut that home prices and stock prices have received. I just can't see how his plan to convert medical files to internet records will generate the savings he envisions. But I can see how lots of other things could lower costs. Here's my list, aka the Box Thinker 15-point universal health care plan:

1. Charge everybody the same -- the lowest negotiated price with any payer. I would require every medical practioner/providerer to have only one price for any procedure or service -- the same price whether the payer is the patient, state Medicaid program, federal Medicare program, XYZ private insurance -- and I would require the provider to submit charges to any payer in the exact same format as they submit it to any other payer. I would even let the IRS design them a short form so they don't have to spend any medical dollars devising their own -- maybe even let the government withold 10% of each payment for income tax purposes.

2. Disclose costs before the procedure. I would require every medical practioner/provider to post costs for all procedure in a prominent place in their places of business -- perhaps on a menu board the same way as McDonald does, where you can see all prices fully disclosed at the check-in counter. That way, everyone knows what the price is and the provider doesn't need a big back-office staff to cook the books for each category of payer.

3. Advertise medical procedure prices. I would allow, even encourage, medical providers to widely advertise -- television, newspapers, internet, other -- their charges for the procedures they provide. A patient with an small hand cut may want to choose a novicane injection and office suture that costs a couple of hundred dollars rather than a day knocked out in a hospital surgical suite for $10,000; a patient with an ankle sprain may elected to have a $200 x-ray and not a $2000 CT-scan or $3000 MRI. Some patients may elect to go to lower costs providers. Not all facilities will be able to afford the latest high-tech equipment -- they may have to send patients to other providers. But isn't that what a "fair market" is all about -- informed consumers making informed choices. Full disclosure of health care costs, before the buyer signs on the dotted line, will do a lot to bring down costs.

4. Fair fee agreement contracts. I would require that any leally enforceable agreement between a medical practioner/provider and patient fully disclose of all anticipated costs -- those of the provider and all associated providers -- of the procedure as part of the agreement. Give patients equal rights to recover payments for any procedures that are wrongly charged along with attorneys fees and court costs in any lawsuit over fees in which they previal.

5. RICO and DTPA. I would, by a specific federal law, make medical practioners/providers subject to both federal RICO and state deceptive trade practices laws.

6. Disclosure of financial interest. I would, by specific federal law, require any medical provider to disclose in writing to the patient any financial interest they have in any treatment facility or treatment option they are recommending. I would extend this to a disclosure of anything of value the doctor has received from the drug or medical devise company whose product they are recommending.

7. Medical fee jury. I would require each state to create a board of 12 ordinary people not in anyway associated with the health care industry or the health care insurance industry -- aka the medical fee jury -- to determine the "maximum" costs providers are allowed to charge on a procedure by procedure basis. To keep them honest and not corrupted by the medical industry, no person could be on this "medical jury board" any longer than 12 consecutive months and must provide a full accounting of all income during this time period. Medical providers, who now recieve a substantial portion of this nation's disposable income, should have the same amount of scrunity as public utilities and the auto and home-owner insurance companies when it comes to rates.

8. Citizens first. To solve the problem that the "border-control-NOW" people envision, I would require anyone presenting for medical care at any facility -- doctor office, clinic, hospital, other -- to proide a valid social security number through E-verify, and I would require those over 16 to produce a valid state or federal issue photo ID. Those who don't present valid indentification at the time of service would still be treated for life-threatening conditions, but released only to Immigration or other designated law enforcement agency where they would be held until such reasonable time as they could establish valid citizenship or green card or be deported, with or without their anchor children. We provide foster care for children whose parents are incarcerated for violating other laws; we can provide foster care for children whose parents violate immigration laws if the parents don't want to take their children back home with them.

9. Pre-existing conditions. The word "pre-existing" should be outlawed. A medical care provider or third-party payer takes a patient where they find them in whatever condition they find them. Treat whatever needs treating when it needs treating; don't treat what doesn't need to be treated.

10. Senior care facilities. I would mandate that all senior care facilities (nursing homes, assisted living, whatever) be allowed a maximum fee per month from any patient/inmate no greater than the total montly benefits that patient/inmate receives from Social Security regardless of any other assets held by that senior. After all, providing for living expenses in old age was the intent of paying into Social Security as a worker and living expenses is what we're talking about when we speak of assited living facilities - a clean room and three meals a day provided by minimum wage workers. None of us ever anticipated that the health care industry would decide that providing an elderly person (or two elderly people sharing) an 8x10 room would costs $2500 - $10,000 per month if anyone in the immedate family has the income to pay and ony $800 - $1500/month if Medicaid pays. An 8x10 room is the same room whether the patient is "private pay" or "Medicaid." Senior care facilities should not be allowed to charge more per month than luxury cruise ships. Senior care facilities should not be allowed to bankrupt seniors or their fifty-sixty something children.

11. In-home care. I would, as part of the new jobs enhancement program, mandate that both Medicare and Medicaid pay for up to 20 hours a week for in-home senior care (at $7 to $10/hour for at least 2 hours per day to help the senior with cooking, cleaning, and personal grooming instead of the currently paid-for twice-a-week $200/10-minute drop-in visit to check blood pressure by a "skilled home health care provider"). In home medical monitoring does little to prolong an elderly person's life, but basic home care services -- preparing meals, light cleaning, help with personal grooming -- will allow an elderly person to remain in their home for a much longer period of time before they need nursing home care. A patient's family should be allowed to select the home care giver and the home health provider, hire and fire either, and elect facility care instead of home care if they believe that is the best solution for their elder family member. Having affordability and flexibility in choice of senior care would solve both the lack of adequate facilities for seniors and some of the current unemployement problem of low-skill workers. The vast majority of elderly just need someone who can drop by a couple of hours a day -- to make sure they have at least one hot meal, that they have clean clothes and a clutter-free room, that they have a safe bath -- to be able to remain in their home indefinitely. A few hours work each day by a low skill individual who provides home care at several homes during a week will provide full employment for that low skilled individual for about the same current costs as twice-a-week home health care monitoring and the weekly costs of unemployment compensation, and it will allow elderly people to remain in their own home rather than be forced into higher costs custodial senior care facilities as their only option.

12. Medications for Seniors. I would closely monitor all medications given to people in senior care facilities for "medical necessity" and "standard of reasonable care." I would disallow recovery from any payer -- patient, insurer, government -- for any treatment that is not "medically necessary" and doesn't meet "standard of reasonable care." I would impose criminal penalities for providers who prescribe or administer medications that cause harm to an elderly person in a senior care facility, whether due to negligence or intentional act. This would substantially reduce the costs of the Medicare Drug program. This is one issue of which I speak from personal experience. My mother-in-law, still living alone at the age of 90 (her choice, not ours), fell and suffered a dislocated shoulder so that she could not provide her own basic care. She wanted to stay "at home" near her friends and church rather than relocate to the state where we live. Our only solution was private-pay assisted living at the newest senior care assisted living facilities in her community -- not an inexpensive solution. Within a few months she had recovered from the shoulder problem but soon had other health problems -- breathing problems, attention problems, memory problems. We questioned her medications and learned that multiple doctors (first they took her to one and then to another) had prescribed and they were now dispensing three high-cost blood pressure medicines and four other high-cost drugs to counteract the problems caused by the blood-pressure medications. No doctor had asked to see the complete medication list from the facility before prescribing more drugs. The facility nurse had never questioned the multiple medications. When we pointed out the problem, the facility refused to stop the multiple medications because "they had to dispense what the doctors prescribe" and the assisted living facility wanted to move her to higher cost nursing care instead. We removed her from the facility to protect her from her "providers," who were, of course, billing Medicare for the high price drugs. Back at home with in-home care, she was soon weaned off most medications and back to her normal alert state, living another five years in reasonble health. My mother-in-law is not an isolated case. You be the judge -- $3000/month for assisted living, $5000/month for nursing care, no additional revenue if no drugs, higher revenue with multiple high-priced drugs -- do you see greed or medical necessity at play here?

14. Outlaw drug company advertisements. On the subject of legal drugs, I would immediately outlaw any advertising on television or anywhere else for any pill (big Pharma or supplement), medical devise, or medical procedure. As we've all learned with Viox and it's sisters and brothers, any pill that has not made it to generic status, i.e., been around long enough to have been tested on enough people to prove it safe and effective, is just as likely to kill you as cure you. Behind all the pretty pictures of people strolling through flower gardens and pretty words in those television ads urging you to take pills you never before knew you needed are the "warnings." It is the duty of goverment to protect people who can't protect themselves; if there's a warning of a serious complication, the drug should not be advertised to the general public. Let's face it, a lot of people just aren't smart enough to figure out from those carefully crafted advertisments that they'd be better off with whatever condition they have than taking a drug that can kill them. And we certainly don't need any of those people with newly discovered errection or twitching leg problems cluttering up waiting rooms asking their "medical provider" if they're a candidate for this or that new drug.

15. Competitive pricing on drugs. I would require that any legal drug paid for out of taxpayer dollars be competively priced (through a competetive bid basis). If Mexico and Canada are our trading partners, we should be allowed to buy drugs at Mexican and Candian prices.

Why do I proposed my Box Thinker 15-point universal health care plan? Well, I like specifics and I don't believe those guys in Congress and the Senate can get off their talking points to figure it out. Universal care for all citizens should not be subject to the whilms of politicians, the bottom-line of employers, or the greed of the health care industry. Medical care should be universal, portable, affordable, and single payer for every American citizen and on an emergency care basis for illegal aliens.

There was a time in this country where doctors and hospital provided good care at reasonable costs, back when I was a kid in the 1950s, even back when I was a young adult having my family in the late 1960s -- the last child born in 1968 cost $250 in hospital bill and $50 for the doctor -- and we paid on an installment plan with the provider, same as we did with the house and car and the clothes for the kids. Then the middleman industry sprang up, substantially increasing the costs of medical care because doctors then had to hire people to try and collect from the insurance compaies, and patients separated from the true costs of their medical care became more demaning of care they really didn't need, demand fuel by advertisements by pill-makers.

While we're re-structuring, getting back to basics in every other aspect of our economy, let's restructure our health care system into something every red-white-blue American can be proud of. It's time to look back to the time when doctors were doctors and not a profit center in a maga health care corporation, a time when there were no middlemen insurance companies and not every clinic believed it should be a full-service hospital, when people who needed care paid to the best of their ability and doctors wrote the rest off to charity (and still had the best house and best car in town).

I'm not afraid of "socialized" medicine. I have traveled to other countries who have universal health care, and I have recieved very fast, very competent, very reasonable unreimbursed medical care. In a doctor visit in Beligum, which involved an EKG, blood work, and an hour of devoted time by the doctor, I paid the same amount as my US insurance co-pay for everything and everything was done in the doctor's office. I knew the results immediately. I was given a prescription that cost a fraction of the US cost for the same medication. Our own health care is not the best. It's just the most expensive and the most complicated. I has been brought to you by the same politicians who gave you the last Wall Street bubble. We can do better.

I'm not afraid of single payer. A single payer who fircely negotiates prices is what we need to control costs. Social Security delivers a check every month on time to millions of senior citizens; they pay "fair and reasonable" Medicare medical expense for those seniors on time as well. The Medicaid people are equally compentent as medical bill payers for the people too poor to afford health insurance. Both of them are much more efficient than any private health care insurance company I've ever been insured by. By combining Medicare, Medicaid, many VA funded services, and health care for everyone else under one universal health care "insurance" government agency we can make quality health care affordable for all. If we continue with the present multi-payer/multiple prices "free-enterprise" system and continue thinking of health care profits as the right of corporate America, we will never get there.

Quality medical care should be the right of all, just as quality police protection, fire protection, and other health related services are in our society. We don't have to ask how much when we call the police to come save us from someone breaking into our home; we don't have to ask how much when we call the fire department to come put out a fire in our home; we shouldn't have to ask how much when we need medical care to save our life. If medical providers and health care insuerers are reduced to earning no more than policemen and firemen to make that happen, it's a price I'm willing to pay!

Lastly, I don't believe a word of the scare tactics in paid advertisment by hospital corporations and medical insurance companies. I believe that if you cut out middlemen insurance companies and regulate provider and drug manaufacturer pricing, you can have both good and reasonably priced medical care for all, just as the other countries who have taken this approach have accomplished. If you believe the same, tell every one of those Republican congressmen and senators pontificating on the subject to either pass univeral health care or give up their own free taxpayer healtcare. And, while you're telling politicians what you want them to do with your money, tell Obama how to go about it.

Let banks who got the money to lend do the bridge-loan bailout of automakers!

We've given the Treasury at least $250 Billion and maybe $350 Billion taxpayer dollars with no explanation of where the money has gone or any requirement that it actually go to stress points in the economy.

My guess is that most of that money is now in secure Swiss bank accounts under the names of the board of directors and executive officers of the bailed-out US banks and maybe some token finders fees in the names of the administration and lawmakers who enabled the transaction. But then, I have a suspicous nature and, so far, all the proof of anything points to the entire eight years of Bush's "free-trade-no-regulation" economy as being one giant confidence game.

Now the automakers want a bailout. Every industry in America wants a bailout. All God's children want a bailout. Dumb idea to throw any new money at the problem until we find out where the last money we threw went. Dumb idea to throw more money on individual industry bailouts when banks have money to lend as bridge loans to automakers and others!

First thing the new Congress should do is pass a law that makes the banks who got the money lend that money to automakers to reshape the auto industry into a "green industry" or to any other manufacturing industries who thinks they are entitled to a bailout from public funds! If Congress can pass laws that tell banks to lend to "no credit check" consumers, they can pass laws to tell banks to lend to "no credit check" manufacturers. Get and keep people employed so they can pay their mortgages, buy new cars, and buy stuff from Wal-Mart!

Second thing Congress should do is to actually start criminal investigations into the eight years of confidence games played by Wall Street and the Bush administration. RICO prosecution and penalties come to mind. All money or property the crooks still have should be confiscated; the crooks who thought up the financial instruments and shell games (even if they later became members of the Bush cabinet) should go to jail for a long, long, long time! For the public good -- to restore confidence in the rule of law and in the economy!

Should we outsource elected official jobs to Saudi Arabia?

It's scary when the Saudi's are more protective of the US economy than US elected officials. Saudi Arabia is taking steps to punch a hole in the hedge fund trading bubble by increasing oil production. While our elected officials play the same old games, nothing happens to help energy consumers. If there were no other evidence, the run-up of $11/barrel in one day is proof beyond a reasonable doubt of an energy futures trading market gone bad.

Oil prices, and anything made from or makes use of a barrel of oil in getting to their respective market places, are drastically impacted by current oil prices, and the businesses and consumers who have to deal with the fallout are bankrupted. Yet, the U.S. Senate continued to do nothing this week on two energy-related bills. The only recent action on the problem (if you can call it action) is that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) finally began to investigate energy market trading for manipulation and now sees the need for a task force. Just what we need -- another task force! The Bush Administration owes it's continuing existence to the delays Senate task forces bring to any actual truth finding mission.

Yet Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill) wants to give the CFTC even more money to continue thinking about the problem. "I don't pretend to have all of the answers as to why gas prices keep going up, but I certainly see a problem that needs to be addressed," Durbin said on the Senate floor Monday. "It is time to give the CFTC the resources it needs to collect and analyze all of the relevant data, so that it can really understand what is causing these huge spikes." Prehaps Durbin didn't catch the Senate Commerce Committee hearing on energy markets chaired by Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash) last week.

Dick may not have all the answers, but the Senate hearings last week revealed a solution that promises to quickly halt run-up in energy prices. It's a simple solution that costs nothing. Just remove the "Enron loophole" put in place in 2006 that allows unregulated commodity futures trading in the US. The House of Representatives has introduced legislation to do just that.

Rep. Bart Stupak, D-MI, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, said a lack of regulation has contributed to the meteoric rise of crude oil prices: "You can certainly see manipulation of the price in the market that you never saw before." Stupak's bill would require the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to oversee U.S. crude oil futures even if they are traded on overseas exchanges. "This is Enron all over again, just a little bit more sophisticated.

Instead of throwing our good money after bad at a do-nothing federal agency (and continuing to confirm Bush Administration do-noting appointees to federal agencies), Senator Durbin could lend his support to Representative Stupak's legislation by going on all the airways and lobbying to the public about this much needed legislation. So far, the news blabbers on the airways haven't blabbed a word -- they're still on the "use less, drill more" mantra. Maybe Senator Durbin could even show up for the June 23 House hearing on CFTC oversight to see what he can learn without throwing more money at the CFTC. Maybe some of the others Senators running for re-election this year will want to do the same and then hit the airways. As Congressman Stupack has said, "We don't have time for studies. We need solutions now."

What can we, the tax-paying energy consumers, do? Well, there is the impeach Bush movement underfoot that will let you vent some of your frustrations. I'm more for a movement to impeach our entire do-nothing government by voting for term limits in November. Maybe you will want to vote your pocketbook this year as well! Unless you just want to outsource all our elected official jobs to a country who seems to care about our (one of their best customers) economic well-being -- like Saudi Arabia?

Why are gasoline prices so high? Would you believe the folks behind Enron are behind it again?

Why are gasoline prices so high? Well, it seems there's plenty of oil coming out of the ground. The problem is that commodity traders are trading "oil futures" and every time a barrel of oil gets traded on the futures market, the price goes up. Between the price of a barrel of oil coming out of the ground and the refinery that will turn it into gasoline are numerous unregulated trades that drive up the price.

F. William Engdahl in a recent Global Research post explains the situation and argues that at least 60% of today’s $130 per barrel price of crude oil comes from unregulated futures speculation by hedge funds. Engdahl says that through a regulation exception granted by the Bush Administration in January 2006, trading of US energy futures by ICE (Intercontinental Exchange) Futures in the United States is not regulated anymore.

If you'll recall, the U.S. Commodity Future Trading Commission - CFTC - exempted over-the-counter energy futures trading at Enron's request in 2000 and, even knowing what happened then, did it again in 2006 to the benefit of ICE Futures. You, of course, are again the biggest looser in this deregulation game.

In his detailed article, Engdahl identifies the giant financial institutions leading the current oil trading: "Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank or UBS. The key exchange in the game is the London ICE Futures Exchange (formerly the International Petroleum Exchange).

ICE Futures is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Atlanta Georgia International Commodities Exchange, founded in part by Goldman Sachs which also happens to run the world’s most widely used commodity price index, the GSCI, which is over-weighted to oil prices."

What's an immediate solution to the current crisis? Engdahl suggests that it's simply to re-regulate energy futures trading in the U.S. and anywhere else within the long-arm of U.S. laws. Is the solution to driving down gasoline prices really that simple?

It's definitely worth a try. We're all smart enough to know that instant answer is not drilling new wells that will take 5-10 years to come online, it's not agri-fuel that soaks up about as much fuel as it generates, it's not nuclear until someone deals with waste disposal, it's not oil shales for the same reason as agri-fuel, it's not fuel efficient engines in 10 years, but it may be electric cars and "transportation stamps" (aka food stamps) for use on public transportation.

In short, we need an instant solution to a problem that is driving business in the US out of business, that is, every business except hedge fund trading. Yes, we need all those "someday" sources of energy, and we need to work toward those goals, but we need to stop speculative trading now. That's a real simple solution that costs the taxpayers nothing.

Is that likely to happen? Maybe, if you stay on the ball. Seems our Senate is studying the issue as are regulators, which means we won't get any immediate relief unless there are some loudly yelling constiutuents. Why will it take yelling? Well, the big guys still have friends and lobbyists in Washington.

It seems the same guys who gave us Enron and the recent mortgage crisis are in the middle of our current energy crisis. The Enron exemption was a present from Senator Phil Graham who managed to get regulatory exemptions for electric commodity trading included in 2000 Commodity Futures Trading Commission legislation. Recently, Phil has been renamed Foreclosure Phil, and he is currently helping Republican Presidential candidate McCain, who admits to knowing little about the economy, figure it out in a way that continues the rape and plunder -- what's was that pledge to get rid of lobbyists? What was that about getting rid of political influence by big campaign donations?)

Are our regulators aware of the problem. Sure. But the CFTC is pretending they're just becoming aware of the problem and beginning to begin to think about regulating. That's only because of public outcries and because elections are coming. Right now, all they're doing is talking about new rule making. The reality is that new rules are not needed. Rule making is just the Bush Administration's way to run out the clock at the expense of gasoline and fuel oil consumers. Ending exemptions to existing regulations and enforcement of speculative trading laws will go a long way to cure the instant problem.

A former CFTC regulator explained it well in a Senate hearing this past week. A recent New York Times article explain how the market manipulation happens -- "these funds have become an increasingly large player in the commodity futures markets, rising from a stake of roughly $13 billion in 2003 to an estimated $250 billion this year. Unlike traditional commodity investors or balanced hedge funds, these index funds do not both buy and sell commodity futures — they only buy, reflecting investors’ desire for a stake in a rising market." The more trading, the faster oil prices rise.

The current Commissioners of the CFTC appointed "by the President, with the advice and consent of the Senate," to serve staggered five-year terms are: Acting Chairman Walter Lukken -- (who's for him); Commissioner Michael Dunn; Commissioner Jill E. Sommers; Commissioner Bart Chilton -- (who's for him). Jill E. Sommers and Bart Chilton were sworn in as CFTC Commissioners in August 8, 2007. Give them a ring or send them an email to let them know you care.

Is energy market manuplation illegal. Yes, sure is. Here's the law. Insist your Commissioners refer any suspicious trading immediately for criminal investigation.

Who in Washington is actually looking over the shoulders of CFTC to try to force them to do their job? Not many, most are still doing the Republican vs. Democrat dance of "drill more" vs. "alternative fules" and ignorning an instant solution to the problem. However, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, is overseeing a hearing on the issues. -- I happened to catch it on C-Span about 2:00 am. You can watch a video of the hearing here: http://video.aol.com/video-detail/senate-commerce-cmte-hearing-on-energy-market-manipulation/1833408978 or here http://www.c-spanarchives.org/library/index.php?main_page=product_video_info&products_id=205797-1.

Senate hearing testimony came from:

1. I. Michael Greenberger, now a Law Professor but Former Director of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission Trading Regulations group, explained how banks control the market. He says:

We're paying, some believe, as high as a 50% premium to the pockets of speculators that are operating in markets that are completely unpoliced.

At least 70% of the US crude oil market is driven by speculators and not people with commercial interests.

Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, control the price of oil and natural gas through the ICE futures market. Morgan Stanley currently owns 27% of natural gas futures.

The "Enron loophole" in the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 legislation, allows oil futures to be traded electronically in unregulated markets outside the US, resulting in the inability of the CFTC to regulate futures trading outside the US, which contributed to the Enron crisis, the recent CDO-subprime crisis, and current energy market crisis.

Current attempt to close the Enron loophole by Senator Levin through the Farm Bill will not work because it leaves the government the constant burden of proving manipulation and can only be enforceable on domestic market manipulators and not international ones.

Closing the Enron Loophole with a broader, international scope would stop market manipultion and would cause oil prices to plunge over 25% overnight.

Congress should impose increased margins for oil traders and regulate hedge fund owners' public speculation on oil prices.

Immediate action is required.

2. Gerry Ramm, representing Petroleum Marketers Assn. of America -- Ramm, now president of Inland Oil of Ephrata, Wash., was plain-spoken.

Excessive speculation on energy-trading facilities is the fuel that is driving this runaway train in crude-oil prices.

Oil-market activities are making speculators rich, while the retail side of the industry is getting squeezed.

Last year, gasoline dealers and heating-oil retailers saw profit margins from fuel sales fall to their lowest point in decades as oil prices surged. Most station owners make their profit by selling drinks and snacks.

Retailers are near the limits on their credit lines because of the high petroleum prices. This creates a credit crisis with marketers' banks, which creates liquidity problems and may force petroleum marketers and station owners to close up shop.

If you think it's bad now, try buying fuel oil this fall!

3. George Soros, Founder and Chairman, Soros Fund Management, told the committee that speculation, "reinforces the upward pressure on prices" and is "distinctly harmful" to the economy... "The rise in oil prices aggravates the prospects for a recession."

4. Senator Cantwell's position:

There are four things wrong with the CFTC’s weak approach [to regulating hedge fund trading].

First, there is still no large speculation limits that are critical to preventing fraud, manipulation and excessive speculation.

Second, the CFTC will not collect the same kind of information that it would collect from other fully regulated exchanges. The information will be unaudited and unverifiable.

Third, unlike fully regulated U.S. exchanges like NYMEX, there are no enforcement mechanisms.

Fourth, the CFTC approach [to study whether or not regulation is needed] is partly just an agreement to agree – there are no firm commitments – so all of these measures may not even be put in place.

The CFTC’s announcement appears to be nothing more than a ruse to deflect criticism for its serious abdication of oversight responsibility. We look forward to hearing a formal response to our letter insisting the CFTC fully regulate all trading of U.S. energy commodities and close the “London-Dubai-Oil-Loophole.”

If the CFTC does not act, I am planning to introduce legislation that will force them to. For those of us who suffered Enron’s manipulations, we have plenty of perspective to share with the CFTC. We want federal oversight agencies to do their job.

We expect federal oversight agencies to actively police the oil markets for fraud, manipulation, and excessive speculation.

If you believe Senator Cantwell is on the right track, as I do, let Senator Cantwell know you support her Senate action and expect quick follow through. Let the other members of the Senate Commerce Committee hearing this matter, Senators Snowe, Dorgan, Kerry, Boxer, Klobuchar, and McCaskill, know that you support their efforts and expect follow through. Demand from Senator Clinton and Senator McCain and Senator Obama immediate action to force the Bush Administration to rescind the Enron loophole-- in oil market trading, in the farm products trading, in mortgage market trading, in all markets trading.

It's time our regulators regulate again. Our elected officials need to act quickly. It's an issue that will make or break both this country's economy and candidates in the next election. Maybe it's time Obama and McCain took it on as a bi-partisan campaign issue. Maybe it's time our Congress and Senate representative spent their five minutes of opening remarks addressing this hedge fund trading of energy futures. It's either that, or be blamed with doing nothing! When the bubble bursts, it will be a big burst for our economy. If it doesn't burst, you'll be freezing in the dark come November.

What else can you do? Remember, you have the power to communicate your will to your elected officials and you have the power to vote for term limits again in November if they don't listen to you. This year, vote your pocketbook and not your prejudices or party!

Subpoenas Here, Subpoenas There -- Is the truth in them? Will we ever know?

I know. The congressional subpoenas for Rove and assorted White House folks are old news. Subpoenas here, subpoena there -- is the truth in any of them? Will we ever know? Would we even believe them if they testified factually (not a "I do not recall" chant) under oath? I doubt it. You can lie to some of the people some of the time and not get caught. You can even lie to all the people one time and not get caught. But when you do get caught, it doesn't matter whether you lie or tell the truth or "do not recall" because nobody will believe anything you say. That's the problem the Bush White House has now. Nobody believes a word they say anymore. All we want from the Bush administration is more resignations, the more the better. Better nobody in charge than the foxes guarding the hen-house now.

So on with the new news -- the Minnesota bridge collapse, the toxic toys from China , tainted food from China, the stock market two-step, and a mine disaster. All proof enough that almost nothing the federal government is in charge of making go right, goes right. The only inspiration to come of the recent China hazardous trade is that the Chinese seem to have a solution to incompetent officials -- the firing squad. Maybe we should give that a try as soon as we get somebody to testify under oath as to who is responsible for what.

Then there's the political news -- the straw vote in Iowa -- perhaps a glimmer of hope after all. Not in Romney, the guy who came in first, the guy who hired buses to ferry Iowa folk into his air-conditioned tent, the one who explained that none of his five sons was serving in Iraq because they had more important things to do, like get him elected (guess the Bush twins didn't volunteer for military service after 2001 because they were helping Dad get re-elected in 2004). No hope and no surprise there -- not Romney's big-spender win, not when the other well-financed candidates didn't bother to show up.

The hope comes from the fact that some Iowa Republican voters are not easily bought with air-conditioning and barbeque. The surprise is that the guy who told the Iowa Republicans, "I can't buy you; I can't even rent you," and didn't, came in second. Way to go Mike Huckabee.

Could it be that Mike Huckabee is the right man in the right place at the right time? (You have to admit that the name makes you think of Aunt Bee and "Mayberry RFD" and other warm and fuzzy things long past.)

Huckabee thinks so, and apparently other folks now think so too. If Huckabee swears on the Bible he thumps that he'll close the borders, get us out of Iraq, make it illegal for medical providers to charge more to care for the uninsured than is reimbursed by Medicaid for the same procedure or by health insurance for the people who can afford insurance, and he shows he has sense enough to understand that you can't export middle class jobs and still have a middle class to buy stuff from Wal-Mart and make mortgage payments, then I might even vote for him.

You never know, Huckabee might have a chance. Stranger things have happened. Huckabee now has as much chance of making it into the White House as everybody thought Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton had a long, long, time ago. Maybe all Mike has to do now is keep on running like Jimmy and Bill did and let the other guys prove to the voters who they really are: Bush-brain men beholding to their big campaign donors who are not likely to change anything if they can help it. If Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul team up, the Republicans might even be able to pull enough liberal voters to beat Hillary!

Border Control? Don't Build Walls - Build Highways!

As I was sitting in traffic on an interstate highway the other day, the entire solution to the border control problem became clear. Why don't we build a west-to-east-to-west super highway along our US-Mexico border?

Instead of using public funds to pay for a south-to-north International Mid-Continent Trade Corridor between Laredo and the Canadian border invisioned by the Federal Highway Administration's (FHWA) U.S./Mexico Border Planning Group, why don't we use that money to build a limited-access east-to-west-to-east road from Brownsville to San Diego and back to Brownsville? We can call this new east-west superhighway "Opportunity Road" or "Interstate O." How will that stop illegal border crossings, you ask. I'm getting there. Just hear me out.

"Interstate O" or "Opportunity Road" is a better idea for many reasons. First, it provides an "opportunity road" to move pass the current debate on how to fund a border wall and whether we need a wall or fence or just a few cameras here and there to record border crossings of the million new illegals that come across the border every year. That's just too many options for our simple-minded Congressional and Senate folk to get past. We need a tried and true approach they can sink their teeth into, namely "pork project."

Building a highway is the best pork -- excuse me, public works project -- ever dreamed up. After they finished the railways across the US in the 1890s, they started in on road building, and they've been at it ever since. Interstate highway building, road building pork on steriods, worked in the 1950s, the 1960s, the 1970s, the 1980s, the 1990s, and it's still working in the 2000s. In fact, the very same interstate highway where I sat in a traffic jam last week has been underconstruction in that very same spot since I first moved to this major American city in the mid-1970s. They had it pretty much built by 1980. Then they tore it up to to build it wider. They got that built, then they tore it up again to build it wider still. They've been rebuilding this same section of interstate highway continously for the past 30 years that I personally know about. If they ever get this road built, it will be a heck of a highway. But, for the past 30 years, it's been one hell of a traffic jam! And the beauty of my idea for Opportunity Road is that the same thing will happen with it! It will stop traffic; it will provide jobs Americans don't want to do close to where Mexicans want to do them.

Building highways provides good-paying benefit-laden middle-American jobs for the US construction bosses, and it gives road-building corporations lots of no-benefits low-wages jobs "Americans won't do" to keep Mexicans working. In the case of Opportunity Road, it will give Mexican workers a place to do the jobs Americans won't do much closer to home than if we built a road from Laredo to Duluth.

A quick look at all the "numbered roads" in the US, both interstate highways and state roads, show that there are no shortage of routes from Laredo to Duluth already. In fact, Interstate 35 starts in Laredo and goes all the way to the Canadian border. It also shows there are no continuous highways between San Diego and Brownsville along our southern border. Which part of the US has a greater need for NAFTA's economic development and USDOT dollars?

Highways are good ways to bring economic development to blighted areas. Gas stations and fast-food resturants every five miles along an interstate highway soon bring towns every 10 to 20 miles, each with its own Wal-Mart and Home Depot and McDonald's and KFC and Taco Bell . . . This is an interstate highway we're talking about. If we build it, opportunity will come. Both sides of Opportunity Road, north of the border and south of the border, will soon be laden with all the economic development they can handle. Both sides of the highway will quickly develop loads and loads of minimum wage no-benefit service jobs just as soon as it is completed; both sides will have public works projects jobs while it is being built; both the US and Mexico will have sustaning revenue from tolls to support their border control bureaucrats.

Interstate Highways Encourage Tourism. Think of all the scenic beauty between San Diego and El Paso that can be developed into tourist traps. There must be Indian village ruins and Conquistador Spanish church ruins scattered every 50 miles along the route, plus there's all that western landscape beauty to behold. The scenery must be as good in the southern parts of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas as it in the northern parts of the states. It must be just as pretty across the border in Bajo California Norte, Sonora, Chihuahua, Cocahuila, Nuevo Leon, and Tamaulipas. Tourists always need new scenic places to visit. When they visit, think Motel 6, Comfort Inn, Holiday Inn Suites . . . oil change places, car wash places, laundramats . . . (now we're building towns!) Once the route enters Texas, the Rio Grande is a natural wonder, perfect for the development of "river walk" towns like San Antonio all along its path -- I see another 6-Flags, and maybe another Disney World! If you build it, they will come. We learned that from that baseball movie.

Highways, specifically freeways, are perhaps the best way to control traffic, and if you control traffic, you control people. Only people in motor vehicles are allowed. People in motor vehicles get on feeways and can't get off, except at an exit. People get on on one side of the freeway and can't get to the other side, except at an exit. It's even possible to build fences along highways to make sure people on foot don't wander into traffic. After a few years of operation, there will be enough truck traffic from the ports in San Diego and Brownsville and all those new Mexican ports the Chinese are building that no sane person would think of trying to cross Opportunity Road on foot. And after all that economic development south of the border, why would they want to?

Exit points on freeways are good places to install border-check booths. Border check booths are good places to check immigration papers and search for non-permitted transport items, such as guns and drugs and illegal immigrants. Those people we want to exit off Opportunity Road, north or south, the ones with valid immigration documents, we allow through the exit/immigration check points to whichever side of the border they are trying to enter. Those who can't produce valid documents get funneled back onto Opportunity Road so that they can continue driving from San Diego to Brownsville to San Diego to Brownsville.

If we want to make Opportunity Road even more high-speed-truck friendly to get NAFTA goods to market faster, we can make it "limited-access," meaning that the places to get on and off are few and far between. Every developed country in the world had limited access roads; many of these are toll roads that employ high tech toll road technology. We do not need our homeland security spending billions of dollars to develop camera to record illegals crossing the desert when we can use existing toll revenue generating technology and effectively block the desert crossing at the same time. Viva Opportunity Road!

How do we pay for Opportunity Road? Simple. Make it a "revenue neutral."
So, how do we do that? The quickest answer is to redirect all funds allocated to the south-north Mid-Continent NAFTA Corridor. Unlike the "bridge to nowhere," the proposed new NAFTA-Corridor route goes from somewhere to somewhere along almost the same path as other roads now go. Surely it would be better to spend the money to build a road where no road now goes than to build it alongside a good interstate highway. I-35 has done a good job for years getting goods out of Mexico and into the US homeland. It gets NAFTA goods north to I-10, I-20, I-30, I-40, etc, etc, all the way into Canada, and along all thoses east and west crossing interstates into all of the US.

Sure there are bottlenecks that can be improved by limiting access or building by-passes around major cities, but those fixes would be low-budget fixes compared to building an entirely new road to transport goods from Mexico to Canada and back. Many US towns and cities are there only because the current interstate system is there. Once the new NAFTA road bypasses them, they will be history, another verse to the Route 66 song. That doesn't sound like it's good for the Old USA. And just what is the rush to get all that Mexican-made and/or China-made-Mexican-imported stuff to Canada anyway? Can't the Canadians import their stuff directly from China? Why should we put our cities and towns out of business so they can enjoy economic growth?

A road is cheaper than a wall to nowhere. A wall will cost billions to build, billions to maintain. It won't solve the economic-development woes of the millions of Mexican citizens now crossing the border to find work in the United States, and it won't pay its own way. The Trans-Texas leg of the International Mid-Continent Corridor is already underway. World Net Daily reports that the first leg, from the Mexico-Texas to the Texas-Oklahoma border has $184 billion heading to Texas: "The stretch through Texas, running parallel to Interstate 35, would be the first link in a 4,000-mile, $184 billion network. Supporters say the corridors are needed to handle the expected NAFTA-driven boom in the flow of goods to and from Mexico." Well, maybe not. There just aren't that much in the way of US-made goods going to Mexico, now, or likely to be in the future. The US doesn't make goods anymore. We're a consumer nation, a service enconomy. Why make it, when the Chinese can make it cheaper?

Why should US taxpayers bear the cost of building a road that primarily benefits Mexico and Canada, expecially when the citizens in the towns along the existing I-35 in Texas oppose the new NAFTA corridor. Maybe it's time to use some of that $184 billion to build a road to opportunity along the US southern border and let Canada and Mexico figure out how best to get their goods back and forth. We're going through more states to get from the Mexican border at Laredo to the Canadian border. Each state along the proposed north-south NAFTA corridor already has a good north-south interstate highway system. Each of those states are slated to get around $200 billion for their leg of the project -- possibly the reason those states haven't protested the project too much except for a little "re-route around forest and wetland" controversy and the massive concern expressed by business along existing highways. Since there are fewer states to get through to build Opportunity Road, we ought to be able to save billions and billions of dollars (remember when that sounded like real money?). If that's not enough money, then the US government can float "transportation bonds," sort of like "war bonds," and for the same reason -- to protect our nation from foreign invasion. If that's still not enough, maybe Mexico can borrow money from the World Bank to build its toll booths.

It should be noted that not even the truckers like the idea of the NAFTA Corridor roadway, because they don't like the idea of paying the tolls that would be charged on the new roadway. When has it ever mattered what any US worker thinks about new burdens that prevent them from earning a decent living?

Toll booth reveneue would make Opportunity Road self-supporting. If tolls are a good way to finace a north-south NAFTA Corridor, then they ought to be a good way to finance an west-east Opportunity Road. If the numbers crunching indicates a decent economic return, it may be possible to make this a private enterprise operation, much like the US ports operations. Public-private financing is a proven approach to highway building. Prephaps our friendly mid-east partners in ports operations would be interested in participating in building Opportunity Road across our southern border.

I'm betting that even if the federal government won't step up to the plate with construction financing, if this became a state and local revenue bond issue, the good people of California, Nevada, Arizonia, New Mexico, and Texas would quickly vote the money to build Opportunity Road through their blighted southern deserts if for no other reason than border control. Since federal, state, and local governments would be saving on health-welfare cost for illegals as well as crime-fighting in their towns and communities, money that is never coming back to their local economy, you'd get revenue bond money like you wouldn't believe. Toll revenue would be used to pay back the bond holders. Opportunity Road could be self-supporting state highways with "reasonable" tolls at every exit north or south. A brief inspection of vehicle and person and documents while collecting the toll free would go a long way to both getting and paying for the cost of border security.

Building a road instead of a wall saves lives. The death toll for illegals now dying in the desert or otherwise undertaking risky border crossings in hopes of finding work in the US will be substantially reduced. Just building the road would provide Mexican jobs where they are most needed -- along the Mexico-US border. By only allowing safety inspected vehicles on Opportunity road, we could cut the number of traffic deaths.

How do we make vehicle inspection happen? Simple. As we now do in most of the US cities, we require inspection stickers on vehicles who want to enter Opportunity Road. Those inspection stickers could be purchased for a reasonable fee at any "toll authority" station inside Mexico or inside the US. If vehicles are not allowed on the road without an inspection sticker, and they can't travel from one side of the border to the other without an inspection sticker, people will buy inspection stickers. And if they can't exit without paying the toll and providing valid immigration documents, people will pay the toll and provide documents.

To assure Mexico's cooperation in the project, first we do as we always do with road building projects -- use Mexican labor. Then, all vehicle inspection fees and all exit tolls beyond what is needed to maintain Opportunity Road would go to the "Joint US-Mexico-Border Control Agency," a "private enterprise" organization much like the US Post Office. We can staff this new Joint Agency with Homeland Security border control agents and Mexico border control agents, sort of like Bush's plan for joint US-Iraqi troops providing security in Bagdad. The "Agency" splits all fees collected, so my money is on Mexico doing their fair share of vehicle inspections and exit toll collection from their side of the border.

The beauty of this kind of system for controlling the border is that we're not reinventing the wheel and we're not putting up walls that will get torn down or tunneled under. We know how to build highways. We know how to build limited-access highways. We know how to build toll roads. We know how to scan vehicles and occupants on roadways. And so does Mexico. A vehicle-occupant checking system is now being instituted agains US citizens by Mexico, so one-half of this new agency's personnel are already trained, and the Mexicans can train the US border control toll-booth personnel. Check out what our Security and Propserity folk in our government have to say about why we need to support Mexico's new border security system. If it's good for US citizens crossing into Mexico, then it ought to be good for Mexican citizens coming into the US.

So, what do you think? Be the first in your neighborhood to travel Opportunity Road. Send an email to your Congressman/woman or Senator and tell them what you think about federal transportation dollars being spent on a Mid-Continent NAFTA road and how you think they ought to be spending those dollars. Remind them that you changed the faces in Washington last November and you can do it again if they can't or won't listen to the voters. The people who want a NAFTA corridor are telling your elected officials what they think, so maybe it's time you put your two cents in. It's your tax dollars they're spending and it's up to you to control how they spend your money. If you don't like my ideas, propose some of your own. Don't tell me, tell the people who matter -- your elected officials -- the people who have a blank check on your account. Join the nationwide term limits rally every election! Register to vote, then vote!

Throw the Bums Out!

Join the "Nationwide Term Limits Parade" in November.

The only power the people of a democracy have over their elected officials is the power of the vote. You can choose to vote for people who have lied to you, who have stolen and squandered your tax dollars, who have sold the trust you gave them to act as your elected official to the highest bidder, or you can "throw the bums out."

If you're perfectly happy with the status quo -- lies and corruption and incompetence -- stay home and be happy. If you think maybe, just maybe, somebody else, regardless of their party affiliation, might do a better job, then run to the polls the minute early voting starts.

If the machine doesn't record the vote you try to make, express your outrage to the voting officials and don't leave until your vote is properly recorded OR your complaint is properly registered with every level of voting officials -- local precinct and county and state. If you see other people at your voting place having problems getting to vote or getting a voting machine to work, make that cell phone call to all the local news media, your county election officials, and your state attorney general's office. Get outraged. Stay outraged until the problem is fixed. Stay watchful until the votes are counted.

And just for kicks, just for fun, this time, leave your party affiliation and long held political and religious prejudices at your own front door. Party names come and go, as anyone who has read their history books know. Red Team. Blue Team. Just labels, not substance. Both Democrats and Republicans can be good Christian or Jewish or Islamic law-abiding, moral, budget-minded, and competent people. Both Democrats and Republicans can be law-breaking, immoral, spendthrifts, and incompetent people. Both Democrats and Republicans can be Euro-American white or African-American black or Hispanic white/black/native or Native-American or Asian-American or.... But those are just labels to divide people. Poor white children and poor black children and poor hispanic children all need the same thing to grow into productive citizens. They need adequate food and health care and a good edcuation and their parents need good jobs to provide them with safe homes and adequate care. A goodly many of us have a "mixed" family origin and we're proud of all those ancestors no matter how they got here, and we're proud that both before and after the vote we're all Americans. So let's not play the party-politics game this time. It's a stupid game where the "party politician" wins and the American voter goes home busted.

What is liberal and what is conservative anyway? The vast national debt that the "Liberal" Clinton Democrats inherited from the "Conservative" Bush I Republicans was turned into a surplus sufficient to keep Social Security and other national health, education, and welfare program funded many decades into the future. That same surplus that the "Conservative" Bush II Republicans inherited was quickly squandered into a debt the American people may never be able to pay off -- and China is our shady loan officer holding this debt (and nuclear weapons, and a population ten times larger than ours from which to draw debt collectors).

So which party is Conservative? Which party is Liberal? Which is the party of true patriots? Which party has made us stronger? Which has made us weaker? Isn't saving for the future a "conservative" action; isn't spending your grandchildern's future earnings a "liberal" action. Is it more conservative to object to abortion or more conservative to object to not providing adequate health, education, and welfare services for the children already on this planet? If our children are our future, shouldn't we care enough about providing the best environment that we can for them as we do about killing Saddam?

Is the moral high ground held by the party of the womanizer or the party of the child abuser? Who is the more cherished in God's eyes -- those who would spend their nation's wealth providing for the wellbeing of its own citizens or those who would spend their nation's wealth providing an economic advantage for the richest corporations on the face of the earth? Are all endeavors equal in God's eyes? In the eyes of the Christian God? In the eyes of the Jewish God? In the eyes of the Islamic God? In your own eyes, are you better or worse off economically and emotionally in how you feel about yourself as an American today than you were six years ago? And with all the loss of your privacy and legal protections under the Constitution and Bill of Rights since September 11, 2001, do you fell as secure as you did on September 10, 2001? Are you as afraid of terroists as you are of homeland security?

Is that guy or gal running for political office doing it to serve you or to serve another master? Is he/she running for office to make life better for you and your family or is he/she doing it to make life better for his/her family? Red, Blue, Democrat, Republican. Just labels. Don't fall for any candidate's self-professed label this time. Don't believe what he says about the other candidate. Listen carefully to what they each have to say before the election. Look at their past lives, both as politicians and as people. Have they cheated on their spouses? Have they cheated on their taxes? Have they cheated their investors in prior business dealings? Have they cheated on the trust you placed in them last election? Have they promised voters one thing and delivered an entirely different bag of compost? Look up their voting records. Look up their address and find out if they live in a neighborhood much better than you would expect someone earning their level of income to live, and ask them how they managed to do that while your real-earnings decreased. Look up their campaign contributors.

Do your research, then listen to what that inner voice tells you about who a candidate really is as a person. Take anything your political party has to say about any candidate with a grain of salt. Your party leaders are collecting high salaries for telling you how you should vote. If you let them tell you how to vote, what will you get out of it? Peace? Prosperity? Clear Concience?

We all have faults. Political candidates are no exception. Some people will admit their faults. Some will lie or hide the facts to keep you from discovering their true nature. Some will make up lies about other people to keep the focus away from themselves. If they will lie to you about who they are, they will like to you about what they will do when in office. Look at how a candidate conducts a campaign. Hold a candidate accountable for any objectionable advertising his campaign uses to slander the oponent. A person of high moral standard would not engage in slander. If a candidate is willing to engage in slander to get your vote, they're willing to lie to you about other things as well.

Listen to that voice of reason inside your head. Listen to your experiences and your common sense. If a candidate didn't do their job in the past, why in the world would you trust them to do it in the future. And when you vote for a candidate, watch them like a hawk and hold them accountable for their campaign pledges to you in the years you allow them to remain in office. Keep watching those you won't get a chance to vote on this time -- the senators whose six-year term limit didn't come up this time. In two years, we get another chance to "throw those bums out" and try for a new batch.

That's my new party -- the Throw The Bums Out Party. My new buzz words are "send a message." It's high time voters send a message that lies and incompetence and corruption will not be tolerated. The other elements of this new party's platform are these:

We will no longer tolerate our young people being used as cannon foder in a war that is based on lies and half-truths and that only serves to enrich the military services industry. If our President and senators and congresspeople are not willing to send their own daughters and sons to serve in a war beget with lies and half-truths, then why should we the people send our daughters and sons? We will no longer tolerate bridges to nowhere and social security health-care plans that only enrich pharmacutical companies and health-care insurers. We demand that any politician who proposes any amount of spending put his name on the bill and put his ethics (or lack thereof) disclosure, including a complete listing of any campaign donations from any private sector entity likely to benefit from the new regulation, in the public record. We demand that any politician who betrays the public trust be immediately removed from office and prosecuted for any crimes committed. We will no longer tolerate a "no child left behind" program that does not provide adequate primary, secondary, and college education funding so that our poor and middle-class children who achieve the skill levels to persue that college education will have the ability to compete in a global maketplace. We will no longer tolerate our manufacturing and technical jobs being shipped offshore to China and India and Mexico while US corporate officers grow rich off "outsouring and downsizing cost savings" converted to lavish corporate officer salaries and a growing national debt. We will not tolerate politicians who will not protect our borders from invaders, be they friendly cheap labor or terrorist supporting foe.

It is also time to send a message that every citizen of this country -- young, old, or anywhere in between -- is entitled to health care as good and affordable as the health care our elected officials provide for themselves and their families. State and federal law can be written that require health-care insurance companies to offer health care policies to the general public at no more than the rate charged participants in the "groups of employees" plans of large corporations (campaign donors), and rules can be written to prohibit "pre-exisiting condition" exclusions in health-care policies. Rules can be written that apply deceptive trade practices laws to health-care providers. Health care providers shouldn't be allowed to charge one low "fair and reasonable" fee for the insured and an outrageous fee for the same service to the uninsured -- the people who can least afford the grossly elevated fee. We should all be asking our prospective state and federal officials where they stand on these issue. Even if we have health-insurance today. When our job is outsourced to China we'll loose that coverage, and when we grow older (not old enough for Medicare, but older) we'll be barred from coverage once it's discovered we have a "pre-existing" condition such as obesity, high-blood pressure, diabetes, cancer -- you know, the stuff of life kind of conditions we seek medical treatment for as we age. Aren't the taxpayers of this country at least as entitled to affordable health-care coverage and fair health-care pricing as are politicians and government workers?

Bottom line? I'm getting there. If our currently elected state and federal officials have demonstrated they can't honor their pledges to the voters and can't police their own ethics and can't function as good stewards of the public treasury and can't dilligently regulate the providers of necessary services (such as health care, education, utilities) to maximize the return of tax dollar value to the taxpayers, it's high time that we the people initiate national term limits in this and in every future election until we find elected officials who will serve the voters. It is high-time to let every political candidate know that he or she is an "employee at will" of the voters and that his or her job can be "outsourced" just as easily as our own jobs have been.

Sure, we need politicians who will do the right thing. But we also need campaign pledges honored without any more taxes. We're already paying through the nose for a grossly incompetent investment of our people's capital by those now holding seats of government. We don't need new taxes. We just need politicians who will be good stewards and manage the resouces of the people as wisely as they would if their own jobs depended on it.

Get busy. Do your research. Then go vote November 7, 2006 for Nationwide Term Limits. If anyone can turn this country around it's you!

(E-bumper stickers from http://www.InternetBumperStickers.com.)

Lawmakers Beware - Elections are Coming!

The Heritage Foundation reports that the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act (CIRA, S.2611) before the U.S. Senate has a previously unnoticed provision that would disarm America’s state and local police in the war against terrorism. Way to go on border security, Mr. President!

If you want to know how your Senators are voting on the "Comprehensive Immigration Reform" bill and its various proposed amendments, click here. It seems our elected officials have handed lawmaking over to agribusiness once again, as they did in the 1980s and 1990s immigration reform that killed off both US and Mexican small farmers and accelerated the flood of Mexican illegal immigrants into the US. It turns that this new immigration bill is just another Orwellian untruth from the administration, and it turns out that this bill is just another spending program we can't afford.

The one thing our Senators -- both Republicans and Democrats -- can't seem to get through their heads is that the citizens want the borders closed now (although there are a few people open to annexing Mexico instead). The polls show that the overwhelming majority of US citizens want the government to close the border, get a true head-count of the illegals currently employed in the United States as well as a true head-count of the illegals consuming health and welfare benefits at public expense, and then figure out such issues as "earned citizenship" from illegal entry and the actual long-term costs to the taxpayers to continue giving multinational employers ever cheaper and cheaper labor.

As Senator Sessions has pointed out, we can have "guest worker" without making law-breaking a path to citizenship. Now that the Enron trials are over, the Justice Department could focus on prosecuting employers breaking exisiting immigration laws -- the only sure way to stem the flow of illegal border crossing. Our National Guard helping out in border control could be allowed to bear arms to protect the US.

Of course, we can't depend on politicians to pay attention to voter polls. The current crop of Senators are betting we'll all forget what they did on 2006 "immigration reform" and who paid them to do it before they stand for reelection in 2008. It's up to voters to let our Senator know we still have long-term memory, that we are watching their votes and their campaign contributions. It's up to voters to follow up by contacting our Congress people now so they don't forget their jobs are on the line in November 2006 if they "compromise" us into another hairbrain scheme. Let's try funding enforcement of current immigration laws, something Mr. Bush and the Republican Senate has consistently failed to do since 2001, before we open the borders to another 50 million Mexican immigrants.

If, as they probably will, our elected officials place their own self-interest in getting big-business campaign contributions ahead of the interest of the people they are sworn to represent, what's a citizen to do? Here's a little reminder from the Declaration of Independence:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that... Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

Join the "Nationwide Term Limits Parade" on November 7, 2006. Register now to vote against any incumbent who votes against your interest!