People from all over the country are organizing to converge on Washington, D.C., to demand the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. and NATO forces from Afghanistan and Iraq.

On Saturday, March 20, 2010, there will be a massive National March & Rally in D.C. Gather at 12 noon at the White House (Lafayette Park).

more here

excerpts from Atul Gawande, “Testing, Testing,” The New Yorker, 12/14/09, pp. 34-41.

…Much like farming, medicine involves hundreds of thousands of local entities across the country—hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, home-health agencies, drug and device suppliers. They provide complex services for the thousands of diseases, conditions, and injuries that afflict us. They want to provide good care, but they also measure their success by the amount of revenue they take in, and, as each pursues its individual interests, the net result has been disastrous. Our fee-for-service system, doling out separate payments for everything and everyone involved in a patient’s care, has all the wrong incentives: it rewards doing more over doing right, it increases paperwork and the duplication of efforts, and it discourages clinicians from working together for the best possible results. Knowledge diffuses too slowly. Our information systems are primitive. The malpractice system is wasteful and counterproductive. And the best way to fix all this is—well, plenty of people have plenty of ideas. It’s just that nobody knows for sure….

…Among the most important, and least noticed, provisions in the reform legislation is one in the House bill to expand our ability to collect national health statistics. The poverty of our health-care information is an embarrassment. At the end of each month, we have county-by-county data on unemployment, and we have prompt and detailed data on the price of goods and commodities; we can use these indicators to guide our economic policies. But try to look up information on your community’s medical costs and utilization—or simply try to find out how many people died from heart attacks or pneumonia or surgical complications—and you will discover that the most recent data are at least three years old, if they exist at all, and aren’t broken down to a county level that communities can learn from. It’s like driving a car with a speedometer that tells you only how fast all cars were driving, on average, three years ago. We have better information about crops and cows than we do about patients. If health-care reform is to succeed, the final legislation must do something about this…..

Read the full article at The New Yorker

Truthout, Monday 08 March 2010
by Maya Schenwar

Monday evening, after a rousing speech in Philadelphia pushing for health reform passage, President Obama will celebrate International Women’s Day with a White House reception honoring women around the world for their achievements.

This recognition is important. However, International Women’s Day - the brainchild of a group of predominantly socialist women with revolutionary dreams of equality and basic human rights for all - presents an opportunity for a little more expansive thinking on the part of the Obama administration.

One item that’s ripe for rethinking, ASAP: the gender discrimination that is burning a hole through the Senate health reform bill that’s headed for a House vote next week. …

keep reading at Truthout

“We must execute not only the guilty. Execution of the innocent will impress the masses even more.”

–Bolshevik justice minister Nikolai Krylenko, quoted by Eric Alterman in The Nation, 3/18/10, p. 10.

On January 21, 2010, with its ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are persons, entitled by the U.S. Constitution to buy elections and run our government. Human beings are people; corporations are legal fictions. The Supreme Court is misguided in principle, and wrong on the law. In a democracy, the people rule.
We Move to Amend.

We, the People of the United States of America, reject the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United, and move to amend our Constitution to:

* Firmly establish that money is not speech, and that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights.
* Guarantee the right to vote and to participate, and to have our votes and participation count.
* Protect local communities, their economies, and democracies against illegitimate “preemption” actions by global, national, and state governments.

Signed by 70,553 and counting . . .

Sign here.

email from PDA, 3/8/10:

In November 2004, a flood of reports regarding massive electronic voting “glitches” (all that mysteriously favored George Bush), arbitrary and illegal behavior by partisan election officials, and old-fashioned voter suppression poured in from Ohio.

As evidence mounted that the 2004 presidential election was stolen, John Kerry refused to call for a recount. But Green Party Presidential candidate David Cobb did, and he helped to launch an election integrity effort that continues to this day.

Cobb welcomed the support of progressive Democrats during that fight, and he has been at the forefront of efforts to find opportunities for Greens and progressive Democrats to work together ever since. Read more »