Years ago, in the early '70s I think, I hosted a talk radio show in New York City. I called it "Connections."
Swimming as we do these days in a vaster sea, teeming with tiny bits of info, we are even more likely to drown - unless we make connections.
Take the President's State of the Union speech. Ignore his statement that we have the best health care in the world, an obvious falsehood. But consider that he also spoke in favor of improving our "private" health care system.
I connect that to what (his) Medicare said the other day - effective March 1, payments to HMOs and other private health plans will go up a record 10.6%.
That is five times as large as the typical increase in recent years. It's intended to entice private plans to buy into the Medicare program.
Understand, please. The Administration is subsidizing profit-making insurance companies with taxpayer money so as to keep our health system "private."
Sounds like socialism to me, at least for the corporations.
Another connection:
Richard Reeves writes in today's Albuquerque Journal about how the Administration disdains the press.
"The press still thinks that buttering up the White House - particularly in coverage of Iraq and Afghanistan policy - will get them more favored treatment," he says. "Wrong! All the White House press corps is gettng from the people they cover is amused and deserved contempt."
Connect that, if you will, to James Fallows" article, "Blind into Baghdad," in the January "Atlantic."
Fallows takes us report-by-report, meeting-by-meeting through Washington's planning for post-war Iraq. Turns out there was lots of it, that the planning was expert, detailed and predicted everything that happened - the looting, the fading away of the (armed) Iraqi army, the inability to provide water and power, you name it.
But - get this - Fallows establishes that it was all willfully ignored by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and others.
Would you have known that from reading the daily press?
As I was saying, connections are how we understand what's happening.
Of course, understanding also can make one cry.
Posted by Arthur Alpert at January 21, 2004 11:18 AM