Podcast Omega: Single Payer Health Care: An Hour-long Special

The 24th and last podcast of the Broadcaster At-Large series is a special on single-payer health care featuring Dr. Margaret Flowers of Physicians for a National Health Program (pnhp.org) and the Baucus 8. Although the Greater Health Insurance Industry Profits Act of 2010 has been passed, it should not be the final word in health care, so download and distribute this program widely. You will find it on the left sidebar.

I am leaving podcasting to turn my attention to writing a book and seeking better health by not being so angry at world events. (High blood pressure is one of several stress-related ailments I have).  It is very obvious after 11 years in journalism,  that I am not the opinion shaper I had hoped to become. Quite frankly, with little feedback, little other evidence of listenership and only one small donation since I began this podcast series, it is not worth the stress to continue. Bigger than me, e.g. Paul Craig Roberts, have called it quits. No sense my continuing to report to deaf ears. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over yet expecting a different result. Whatever is wrong with me, insanity is NOT one of my problems.

Good luck to those who are choosing to carry on in the face of corporatism, ultra-conservative demagoguery, fear-mongering, racism, homophobia, religious bigotry, militarism, etc. etc. coupled with a lack of will on the part of allegedly progressive public officials to fight  for what they truly believe in. (Yes, Kucinich, Grayson and Sanders, I mean you). The lassitude of most Americans and the often outright obstruction by the lily-livered left at a time when similar economic and political conditions have put people of other countries into the streets until the government fell, is the most disgusting and discouraging part of the struggle.

I have had enough!

Just remember, as you get tossed out of your foreclosed home, or censored and even arrested for speaking out for peace or universal  health care or anything else the elites don't want us to have,  that I was one of the ones who told you early on that 911 was an inside job. We got here from there.

The Woman Who Just Might Save the Planet and Our Pocketbooks

By Fran Korten and Elinor Ostrom, YES! Magazine
Posted on March 14, 2010, Printed on March 15, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/145889/

For one thing, she is the first woman to receive the prize. Her Ph.D. is in political science, not economics (though she minored in economics, collaborates with many economists, and considers herself a political economist). But what makes this award particularly special is that her work is about cooperation, while standard economics focuses on competition.
Ostrom’s seminal book, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, was published in 1990. But her research on common property goes back to the early 1960s, when she wrote her dissertation on groundwater in California. In 1973 she and her husband, Vincent Ostrom, founded the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University. In the intervening years, the Workshop has produced hundreds of studies of the conditions in which communities self-organize to solve common problems. Ostrom currently serves as professor of political science at Indiana University and senior research director of the Workshop. 

Fran Korten, YES! Magazine’s publisher, spent 20 years with the Ford Foundation making grants to support community management of water and forests in Southeast Asia and the United States. She and Ostrom drew on one another’s work as this field of knowledge developed. Fran interviewed her friend and colleague Lin Ostrom shortly after Ostrom received the Nobel Prize.