PNHP’s Senior Health Policy Fellow Don McCanne, M.D. comments on ‘Schumer Offers Middle Ground on Health Care‘ by Robert Pear (New York Times, 5 May 2009):

Comment: The success of the effort to reform health care seemed to be threatened by the disagreement over whether or not a public insurance option should be offered to compete with private health plans. All Republicans have expressed opposition to the public option, indicating that it would be a deal breaker if included. The Progressive Caucus in the House, which actually wants single payer, has taken a position that leaving the public option out of the reform legislation would be a deal breaker.

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Sue Sturgis, Institute for Southern Studies, 5 May 2009

Writing about swine flu last week, we observed that massive hog farms like those clustered near the outbreak’s epicenter in the Mexican state of Veracruz “can act as a vector for environmental injustice,” and pointed to studies done in North Carolina — the nation’s second-biggest producer of hogs after Iowa — that found such farms put nearby residents at risk of serious health problems and tend to be concentrated in communities with high poverty rates and a high percentage of racial minorities.

As it turns out, there’s a more direct connection between the current swine flu outbreak and North Carolina: Scientists working to understand the genetic makeup of the H1N1 virus that causes the disease have linked it to a virus behind a 1998 swine flu outbreak at an industrial hog farm in Sampson County, North Carolina’s leading hog producer.

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US air-raid kills over 100 civilians in Farah

Inflation is deemed benign as long as wages rise at a slower pace than asset prices. The monetarist iron law of wages worked in the industrial age, with the resultant excess capacity absorbed by conspicuous consumption of the moneyed class, although it eventually heralded in the age of revolutions. But the iron law of wages no longer works in the post-industrial age, in which growth can only come from demand management because overcapacity has grown beyond the ability of conspicuous consumption of a few to absorb in an economic democracy.

That has been the basic problem of the global economy for the past three decades. Low wages have landed the world in its current sorry state of overcapacity masked by unsustainable demand created by a debt bubble that finally imploded in July 2007. The whole world is now producing goods and services made by low-wage workers who cannot afford to buy what they make except by taking on debt on which they eventually will default.

– Henry C K Liu (5 May 2009)

This report is the second in a series.

Part 1: Monetarism enters bankruptcy