GPS systems in Israeli airspace were “mysteriously disrupted”, but the country has put measures in place to allow safe landings and takeoffs at its main international airport, according to Reuters.
The Israel Airports Authority (IAA) made an announcement following a report on Tuesday by the International Federation of Air Line Pilots’ Associations (IFALPA) that many pilots had somehow lost satellite signals from the Global Positioning System around Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport.
An IAA statement confirmed that the disruption only affected airborne crews and not terrestrial navigation systems. They said there had been GPS disruptions “for approximately the past three weeks”.
Israeli authorities have been working to locate the source of the problem, but so far haven’t been able to. An IAA spokesperson, when asked if they had found an explanation, simply said: “No. I don’t know.”
“At no stage has there been a safety incident stemming from the GPS disruption in the context of the precision of navigation and flight corridors.”
The Israeli Defense Ministry, when asked for comment, said that the disruption was “an IAA matter.” According to YnetNews, Israeli Army Radio reported that the disruption was a result of a satellite signal jammer used by the Russian military at Hmeimim Air Base base in Syria.
“It’s fake news, we can’t take it seriously,” said a Russian source in response.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2LnKqgR Tyler Durden
Switzerland and the EU are embroiled in an ongoing dispute regarding long-standing financial, immigration and trade ties between the two, since Switzerland is not a member of the bloc. However, more critically, as CNBC’s Elliot Smith notes, the stock market equivalence granted to Switzerland by the EU expires at the end of June.
As The FT reports, equity trading has become a flashpoint in a long process for the EU’s efforts to upgrade its messy relationship with non-member Switzerland, in which Brussels is seeking to switch about 120 bilateral treaties into an “institutional framework” that would require the Swiss to automatically to adopt some EU laws — a prospect Switzerland rejects.
If the deadline passes on Sunday without an agreement on the EU’s new political demands, and the bloc decides not to extend, “it is likely the Swiss authorities will remove the recognition that allows EU trading venues to offer trading in the Swiss equity securities.”
“Everyone has accepted it will happen,” said a diplomat from a major EU member state.
And, according to comments by the Swiss foreign minister on Swiss Radio SRF, that is exactly what ios going to happen as Swiss authorities will unleash countermeasures to Brussels indignance by disallowing trading of Swiss shares in EU, instead rerouting all transactions back to Switzerland from July 1st.
Charlotte de Montpellier, an economist at ING, said Switzerland’s loss of stock market equivalence would be compensated by the protective measures.
“However, the risk is that difficult negotiations between Switzerland and the EU and threats from both sides could leave long-term traces on the relationship between the two entities and on Switzerland’s economic performance. A deterioration of relations and a greater difficulty of trade with the EU, its main partner, would therefore be extremely damaging for the Swiss economy,” she said.
If, as expected, the two parties fail to agree new terms in the next two days, investors face the prospect of a major overhaul, since Swiss companies comprise around one fifth of the Stoxx 50 index by market capitalization (including blue chip giants such as Nestle, UBS and Novartis).
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2NrDTEu Tyler Durden
Of all people, it was the joke candidate—Bill de Blasio, the widely hated mayor of New York City who is currently polling far south of 1 percent—who nailed why last night’s Democratic debate was an important event, as is tonight’s second installment. Yes, per President Donald Trump, last night’s debate might have been “boring,” but that doesn’t mean it didn’t matter. “What we’re hearing here already in the first round of questions,” said de Blasio, is a “battle for the heart and soul of our party.”
Within the Democratic Party, that struggle is taking place around two large issues, foreign policy and economics. Last night, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii forcefully engaged the former topic when she ignored a question about gender disparities in wages and ripped U.S. military adventurism instead:
[Moderator Lester Holt]: All right, thank you. I want to put the same question to Congresswoman Gabbard. Your thoughts on equal pay?
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D–Hawaii): First of all, let’s recognize the situation we’re in, that the American people deserve a president who will put your interests ahead of the rich and powerful. That’s not what we have right now.
I enlisted in the Army National Guard after the Al Qaeda terror attacks on 9/11 so I could go after those who had attacked us on that day. I still serve as a major. I served over 16 years, deployed twice to the Middle East, and in Congress served on the Foreign Affairs and Armed Services Affairs for over six years.
I know the importance of our national security, as well as the terribly high cost of war. And for too long, our leaders have failed us, taking us from one regime change war to the next, leading us into a new cold war and arms race, costing us trillions of our hard-earned taxpayer dollars and countless lives.
This insanity must end. As president, I will take your hard-earned taxpayer dollars and instead invest those dollars into serving your needs, things like health care, a green economy, good-paying jobs, protecting our environment, and so much more.
As Reason‘s Christian Britschgi has written, Gabbard “has made ending American intervention abroad the defining issue of her campaign.” This is not a small thing within a Democratic Party that has helped drive ruinous foreign policy for the entirety of the 21st century. In contemporary politics, there’s a sense that Republicans are the party of the military-industrial complex. But that’s simply wrong, or at least incomplete, as Democrats have long been a party of hawks, ever-increasing defense spending, and interventionism. Certainly, the Democrats are as responsible as the Republicans for the current desultory state of U.S. foreign policy.
In 1976, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas, notoriously inveighed against “Democrat wars” in a campaign debate with his opponent, Sen. Walter Mondale. “If we added up the killed and wounded in Democrat wars in this century,” said the permanently injured World War II vet, “it would be…enough to fill the city of Detroit.” Dole tried to walk the comment back, but his meaning was clear: Democratic presidents led us into World War I, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. In 1960, John Kennedy argued that his opponent Richard Nixon had been part of an administration that was weak on Communism and had allowed a dangerous (and non-existent) “missile gap” to build up between the Soviet Union and the U.S. In 1972, George McGovern ran on an explicitly dove-ish platform that called for the withdrawal of troops from Vietnam and elsewhere (“Come home, America,” was one of his campaign slogans), but he was an odd duck in his own party. Bill Clinton was a thoroughly interventionist president and he and Vice President Al Gore made it official U.S. policy that Saddam Hussein should be deposed.
In the 21st century, large numbers of Democrats in Congress readily signed on to everything the Bush administration wanted to do, and despite winning a Nobel Peace Prize early in his tenure, President Barack Obama could never be confused with a peacenik given his legacy of “endless war.” The 2016 Democratic presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton never saw
an opportunity for American military intervention she didn’t like. As Secretary of State she was the most enthusiastic of all of Obama’s senior civilian advisors about the plan for a surge of troops into Afghanistan in 2009, and in 2011 she led the “humanitarian interventionists” in the administration who persuaded Obama to bomb Libya. In his comprehensive review of her work in the Obama administration, James Traub of Foreign Policy concludes that “at bottom, Clinton was a reflexive advocate of the military.”
In such a context, Tulsi Gabbard’s explicit non-interventionism and critique of the military-industrial complex is vitally important, both within and without the Democratic Party. Not only is her foreign policy broadly supported by the American people (majorities of whom also see the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq as mistakes), but it resonates with critiques voiced by Republicans such as Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan, and even President Donald Trump, who has been less interventionist so far than either George W. Bush or Barack Obama. If Gabbard’s foreign policy position becomes the default of the Democratic Party, it would mark a major change within the two-party system and it would also generate broader momentum across the political spectrum for restraint and diplomacy in place of war.
Because of the way the candidates were split up over two nights, Gabbard didn’t have the opportunity to spar directly with the most interventionist of all the Democratic hopefuls. Joe Biden isn’t just leading the Democratic field, he is its most outspoken advocate of using American military might around the world. But he is also the least progressive of the candidates appearing tonight, which sets up a likely confrontation between him and Bernie Sanders over capitalism vs. socialism.
Of the two dozen Democratic candidates, most have signed on to various new, big-ticket items such as the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, and student-debt relief (for what it’s worth, Gabbard is big on all these, plus increased gun control). If these initiatives stop short of putting the means of production in the hands of the state, they nonetheless represent massive increases in the size, scope, and spending of the federal government. Biden and, to a lesser degree South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, represent a counterweight to the Sanders-Elizabeth Warren axis within the party. If tonight’s debate has a memorable moment, it will almost certainly be a showdown between Biden and Sanders over how much bigger the government should get in terms of overseeing more aspects of the economy and redistributing money.
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Of all people, it was the joke candidate—Bill de Blasio, the widely hated mayor of New York City who is currently polling far south of 1 percent—who nailed why last night’s Democratic debate was an important event, as is tonight’s second installment. Yes, per President Donald Trump, last night’s debate might have been “boring,” but that doesn’t mean it didn’t matter. “What we’re hearing here already in the first round of questions,” said de Blasio, is a “battle for the heart and soul of our party.”
Within the Democratic Party, that struggle is taking place around two large issues, foreign policy and economics. Last night, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii forcefully engaged the former topic when she ignored a question about gender disparities in wages and ripped U.S. military adventurism instead:
[Moderator Lester Holt]: All right, thank you. I want to put the same question to Congresswoman Gabbard. Your thoughts on equal pay?
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D–Hawaii): First of all, let’s recognize the situation we’re in, that the American people deserve a president who will put your interests ahead of the rich and powerful. That’s not what we have right now.
I enlisted in the Army National Guard after the Al Qaeda terror attacks on 9/11 so I could go after those who had attacked us on that day. I still serve as a major. I served over 16 years, deployed twice to the Middle East, and in Congress served on the Foreign Affairs and Armed Services Affairs for over six years.
I know the importance of our national security, as well as the terribly high cost of war. And for too long, our leaders have failed us, taking us from one regime change war to the next, leading us into a new cold war and arms race, costing us trillions of our hard-earned taxpayer dollars and countless lives.
This insanity must end. As president, I will take your hard-earned taxpayer dollars and instead invest those dollars into serving your needs, things like health care, a green economy, good-paying jobs, protecting our environment, and so much more.
As Reason‘s Christian Britschgi has written, Gabbard “has made ending American intervention abroad the defining issue of her campaign.” This is not a small thing within a Democratic Party that has helped drive ruinous foreign policy for the entirety of the 21st century. In contemporary politics, there’s a sense that Republicans are the party of the military-industrial complex. But that’s simply wrong, or at least incomplete, as Democrats have long been a party of hawks, ever-increasing defense spending, and interventionism. Certainly, the Democrats are as responsible as the Republicans for the current desultory state of U.S. foreign policy.
In 1976, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas, notoriously inveighed against “Democrat wars” in a campaign debate with his opponent, Sen. Walter Mondale. “If we added up the killed and wounded in Democrat wars in this century,” said the permanently injured World War II vet, “it would be…enough to fill the city of Detroit.” Dole tried to walk the comment back, but his meaning was clear: Democratic presidents led us into World War I, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. In 1960, John Kennedy argued that his opponent Richard Nixon had been part of an administration that was weak on Communism and had allowed a dangerous (and non-existent) “missile gap” to build up between the Soviet Union and the U.S. In 1972, George McGovern ran on an explicitly dove-ish platform that called for the withdrawal of troops from Vietnam and elsewhere (“Come home, America,” was one of his campaign slogans), but he was an odd duck in his own party. Bill Clinton was a thoroughly interventionist president and he and Vice President Al Gore made it official U.S. policy that Saddam Hussein should be deposed.
In the 21st century, large numbers of Democrats in Congress readily signed on to everything the Bush administration wanted to do, and despite winning a Nobel Peace Prize early in his tenure, President Barack Obama could never be confused with a peacenik given his legacy of “endless war.” The 2016 Democratic presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton never saw
an opportunity for American military intervention she didn’t like. As Secretary of State she was the most enthusiastic of all of Obama’s senior civilian advisors about the plan for a surge of troops into Afghanistan in 2009, and in 2011 she led the “humanitarian interventionists” in the administration who persuaded Obama to bomb Libya. In his comprehensive review of her work in the Obama administration, James Traub of Foreign Policy concludes that “at bottom, Clinton was a reflexive advocate of the military.”
In such a context, Tulsi Gabbard’s explicit non-interventionism and critique of the military-industrial complex is vitally important, both within and without the Democratic Party. Not only is her foreign policy broadly supported by the American people (majorities of whom also see the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq as mistakes), but it resonates with critiques voiced by Republicans such as Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan, and even President Donald Trump, who has been less interventionist so far than either George W. Bush or Barack Obama. If Gabbard’s foreign policy position becomes the default of the Democratic Party, it would mark a major change within the two-party system and it would also generate broader momentum across the political spectrum for restraint and diplomacy in place of war.
Because of the way the candidates were split up over two nights, Gabbard didn’t have the opportunity to spar directly with the most interventionist of all the Democratic hopefuls. Joe Biden isn’t just leading the Democratic field, he is its most outspoken advocate of using American military might around the world. But he is also the least progressive of the candidates appearing tonight, which sets up a likely confrontation between him and Bernie Sanders over capitalism vs. socialism.
Of the two dozen Democratic candidates, most have signed on to various new, big-ticket items such as the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, and student-debt relief (for what it’s worth, Gabbard is big on all these, plus increased gun control). If these initiatives stop short of putting the means of production in the hands of the state, they nonetheless represent massive increases in the size, scope, and spending of the federal government. Biden and, to a lesser degree South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, represent a counterweight to the Sanders-Elizabeth Warren axis within the party. If tonight’s debate has a memorable moment, it will almost certainly be a showdown between Biden and Sanders over how much bigger the government should get in terms of overseeing more aspects of the economy and redistributing money.
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Denise Ho is a problem for Chinese and Hong Kong authorities. The 42-year-old celebrity musician became a public face for dissent after Hong Kong police arrested and detained her for participating in the 2014 “umbrella movement,” a large-scale protest demanding universal suffrage. The Chinese government subsequently banned her from performing in mainland China.
Ho is now a prominent figure in the Hong Kong protests, which started in early June after the administrative region’s executive council proposed a new law that would make it easier to extradite suspects to China—a change that many Hong Kongers fear would lead to the persecution of political dissidents.
Reason‘s Zach Weissmueller spoke with Ho about the on-the-ground reality for protesters, what it’s like being a political dissident in the shadow of the Chinese surveillance state, the politics of her “Cantopop” music, what she foresees for the immediate future of Hong Kong’s “one country, two systems” arrangement with China, and why the protesters’ fight to maintain Hong Kong’s autonomy should concern Americans.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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The New York Times casually acknowledged that it sends major scoops to the US government before publication, to make sure “national security officials” have “no concerns.”
The New York Times has publicly acknowledged that it sends some of its stories to the US government for approval from “national security officials” before publication.
This confirms what veteran New York Times correspondents like James Risen have said:
The American newspaper of record regularly collaborates with the US government, suppressing reporting that top officials don’t want made public.
On June 15, the Times reported that the US government is escalating its cyber attacks on Russia’s power grid. According to the article, “the Trump administration is using new authorities to deploy cybertools more aggressively,” as part of a larger “digital Cold War between Washington and Moscow.”
In response to the report, Donald Trump attacked the Times on Twitter, calling the article “a virtual act of Treason.”
The New York Times PR office replied to Trump from its official Twitter account, defending the story and noting that it had, in fact, been cleared with the US government before being printed.
“Accusing the press of treason is dangerous,” the Times communications team said.
“We described the article to the government before publication.”
“As our story notes, President Trump’s own national security officials said there were no concerns,” the Times added.
Accusing the press of treason is dangerous.
We described the article to the government before publication. As our story notes, President Trump’s own national security officials said there were no concerns. https://t.co/MU020hxwdcpic.twitter.com/4CIfcqKoEl
Indeed, the Times report on the escalating American cyber attacks against Russia is attributed to “current and former [US] government officials.” The scoop in fact came from these apparatchiks, not from a leak or the dogged investigation of an intrepid reporter.
‘Real’ journalists get approval from ‘national security’ officials
The neoliberal self-declared “Resistance” jumped on Trump’s reckless accusation of treason (the Democratic Coalition, which boasts, “We help run #TheResistance,” responded by calling Trump “Putin’s puppet”). The rest of the corporatemedia went wild.
But what was entirely overlooked was the most revealing thing in the New York Times’ statement: The newspaper of record was essentially admitting that it has a symbiotic relationship with the US government.
In fact, some prominent American pundits have gone so far as to insist that this symbiotic relationship is precisely what makes someone a journalist.
In May, neoconservative Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen — a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush — declared that WikiLeaks publisher and political prisoner Julian Assange is “not a journalist”; rather, he is a “spy” who “deserves prison.” (Thiessen also once called Assange “the devil.”)
What was the Post columnist’s rationale for revoking Assange’s journalistic credentials?
Unlike “reputable news organizations, Assange did not give the US government an opportunity to review the classified information WikiLeaks was planning to release so they could raise national security objections,” Thiessen wrote. “So responsible journalists have nothing to fear.”
In other words, this former US government speechwriter turned corporate media pundit insists that collaborating with the government, and censoring your reporting to protect so-called “national security,” is definitionally what makes you a journalist.
This is the express ideology of the American commentariat.
NY Times editors ‘quite willing to cooperate with the government’
The symbiotic relationship between the US corporate media and the government has been known for some time. American intelligence agencies play the press like a musical instrument, using it it to selectively leak information at opportune moments to push US soft power and advance Washington’s interests.
But rarely is this symbiotic relationship so casually and publicly acknowledged.
In 2018, former New York Times reporter James Risen published a 15,000-word article in The Intercept providing further insight into how this unspoken alliance operates.
1. #JamesRisen: “A top CIA official once told me that his rule of thumb for whether a covert operation should be approved was, “How will this look on the front page of the New York Times?” https://t.co/YIUtpTthe8
Risen detailed how his editors had been “quite willing to cooperate with the government.” In fact, a top CIA official even told Risen that his rule of thumb for approving a covert operation was, “How will this look on the front page of the New York Times?”
There is an “informal arrangement” between the state and the press, Risen explained, where US government officials “regularly engaged in quiet negotiations with the press to try to stop the publication of sensitive national security stories.”
“At the time, I usually went along with these negotiations,” the former New York Times reported said. He recalled an example of a story he was writing on Afghanistan just prior to the September 11, 2001 attacks. Then-CIA Director George Tenet called Risen personally and asked him to kill the story.
“He told me the disclosure would threaten the safety of the CIA officers in Afghanistan,” Risen said. “I agreed.”
Risen said he later questioned whether or not this was the right decision. “If I had reported the story before 9/11, the CIA would have been angry, but it might have led to a public debate about whether the United States was doing enough to capture or kill bin Laden,” he wrote. “That public debate might have forced the CIA to take the effort to get bin Laden more seriously.”
This dilemma led Risen to reconsider responding to US government requests to censor stories. “And that ultimately set me on a collision course with the editors at the New York Times,” he said.
“After the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration began asking the press to kill stories more frequently,” Risen continued. “They did it so often that I became convinced the administration was invoking national security to quash stories that were merely politically embarrassing.”
One year ago: Former New York Times national security reporter James Risen reveals how the paper repeatedly suppressed stories at the request of the Obama and Bush administrations https://t.co/pJ2BAPluqH
In the lead-up to the Iraq War, Risen frequently “clashed” with Times editors because he raised questions about the US government’s lies. But his stories “stories raising questions about the intelligence, particularly the administration’s claims of a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda, were being cut, buried, or held out of the paper altogether.”
The Times’ executive editor Howell Raines “was believed by many at the paper to prefer stories that supported the case for war,” Risen said.
In another anecdote, the former Times journalist recalled a scoop he had uncovered on a botched CIA plot. The Bush administration got wind of it and called him to the White House, where then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice ordered the Times to bury the story.
Risen said Rice told him “to forget about the story, destroy my notes, and never make another phone call to discuss the matter with anyone.”
“The Bush administration was successfully convincing the press to hold or kill national security stories,” Risen wrote. And the Barack Obama administration subsequently accelerated the “war on the press.”
CIA media infiltration and manufacturing consent
In their renowned study of US media, “Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media,” Edward S. Herman and Chomsky articulated a “propaganda model,” showing how “the media serve, and propagandize on behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them,” through “the selection of right-thinking personnel and by the editors’ and working journalists’ internalization of priorities and definitions of newsworthiness that conform to the institution’s policy.”
But in some cases, the relationship between US intelligence agencies and the corporate media is not just one of mere ideological policing, indirect pressure, or friendship, but rather one of employment.
In the 1950s, the CIA launched a covert operation called Project Mockingbird, in which it surveilled, influenced, and manipulated American journalists and media coverage, explicitly in order to direct public opinion against the Soviet Union, China, and the growing international communist movement.
Legendary journalist Carl Bernstein, a former Washington Post reporter who helped uncover the Watergate scandal, published a major cover story for Rolling Stone in 1977 titled “The CIA and the Media: How America’s Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up.”
Bernstein obtained CIA documents that revealed that more than 400 American journalists in the previous 25 years had “secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency.”
Bernstein wrote:
Some of these journalists’ relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit. There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services—from simple intelligence gathering to serving as go‑betweens with spies in Communist countries.
Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared their staffs. Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters who considered themselves ambassadors without‑portfolio for their country.
Most were less exalted: foreign correspondents who found that their association with the Agency helped their work; stringers and freelancers who were as interested in the derring‑do of the spy business as in filing articles; and, the smallest category, full‑time CIA employees masquerading as journalists abroad. In many instances, CIA documents show, journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America’s leading news organizations.
Virtually all major US media outlets cooperated with the CIA, Bernstein revealed, including ABC, NBC, the AP, UPI, Reuters, Newsweek, Hearst newspapers, the Miami Herald, the Saturday Evening Post, and the New York Herald‑Tribune.
However, he added, “By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc.”
These layers of state manipulation, censorship, and even direct crafting of the news media show that, as much as they claim to be independent, The New York Times and other outlets effectively serve as de facto spokespeople for the government — or at least for the US national security state.
Denise Ho is a problem for Chinese and Hong Kong authorities. The 42-year-old celebrity musician became a public face for dissent after Hong Kong police arrested and detained her for participating in the 2014 “umbrella movement,” a large-scale protest demanding universal suffrage. The Chinese government subsequently banned her from performing in mainland China.
Ho is now a prominent figure in the Hong Kong protests, which started in early June after the administrative region’s executive council proposed a new law that would make it easier to extradite suspects to China—a change that many Hong Kongers fear would lead to the persecution of political dissidents.
Reason‘s Zach Weissmueller spoke with Ho about the on-the-ground reality for protesters, what it’s like being a political dissident in the shadow of the Chinese surveillance state, the politics of her “Cantopop” music, what she foresees for the immediate future of Hong Kong’s “one country, two systems” arrangement with China, and why the protesters’ fight to maintain Hong Kong’s autonomy should concern Americans.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
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Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) said during the first Democratic Party debate last night that the reason we don’t already have a Medicare for All plan in place is that politicians “just won’t fight for it.”
More often than not, when a politician declares that the only thing preventing some particular plan from going into place is political will, it’s a sign that there are uncomfortable practical questions they would like to paper over. So it was when Warren explained her support for a single-payer health care in which the government takes over nearly all of the country’s health care financing.
The discussion began when the entire stage was asked who, by a show of hands, would eliminate private insurance. Warren was one of just two candidates, along with New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, to raise her hand.
She then went on to defend her position, saying “I’m with Bernie on Medicare for All.” One of the top reasons for bankruptcy, she said, was medical bills. And insurers, she argued, have an incentive to keep as much money as possible rather than pay for better care.
“That leaves families with rising premiums, rising copays, and fighting with insurance companies to try to get the health care that their doctors say that they and their children need. Medicare for All solves that problem. And I understand. There are a lot of politicians who say, oh, it’s just not possible, we just can’t do it, have a lot of political reasons for this. What they’re really telling you is they just won’t fight for it.”
The core problem, in Warren’s view, is politicians who won’t fight for ordinary people. Everything else is just politics. That’s a convenient and politically easy response, but it’s not a particularly good one. Warren’s blithe dismissal of the challenges of uprooting the nation’s health care system and starting over with an entirely new system of government financing allows her to portray herself as a populist champion while ignoring the practical problems that single-payer poses.
Like, for example, how hospitals will be paid in a one-size-fits-all system that pays Medicare rates for every service.
As former Maryland Rep. John Delaney pointed out just a few moments later, Warren’s plan—which is to say Bernie Sanders’ plan—would probably result in a sharp contraction in the number of hospitals.
“If you go to every hospital in this country and you ask them one question,” Delaney said, “which is how would it have been for you last year if every one of your bills were paid at the Medicare rate? Every single hospital administrator said they would close. And the Medicare for All bill requires payments to stay at current Medicare rates. So to some extent, we’re supporting a bill that will have every hospital closing.”
It’s probably an overstatement to say that every single hospital would close. But Delaney is right that under a single-payer plan paying current Medicare rates, some, and perhaps lots, almost certainly would. And many of the hospitals that stayed open would likely shed staff and services.
Medicare pays far, far less than private rates, and the higher rates from private payers is part of what keeps hospitals afloat financially. One estimate found that providers would take something like a 40 percent pay cut under the Sanders plan. And that cut would take place very quickly, as the Sanders plan calls for the elimination of most private insurance in just four years.
You can believe that American health care costs too much (it does) and that the country spends far too much on health care overall (probably) and still recognize that, in addition to the sheer bureaucratic disruption of switching to a new, government-run system of financing, reducing provider payments so sharply in such a short period of time would place a huge financial strain on the system, resulting in hospitals shutting their doors and jettisoning staff.
The nation’s hospitals would lose somewhere on the order of $150 billion a year, according to an article in The Journal of the American Medical Association. Which would mean that someone would have to be paid less, and it wouldn’t just be insurance companies: It would be nurses and doctors, therapists and billing specialists, the entire universe of middle-class jobs that America’s health care industry supports. Even some physicians who support single-payer have suggested they are worried about the possibility that hospitals would lose money. “The line here can’t be and shouldn’t be soak the hospitals,” the president of Physicians for a National Health Program recently told The New York Times.
Cuts to hospital payments, meanwhile, would be hardest to bear for rural hospitals that serve poorer populations. Many of these hospitals are, for obvious reasons, already struggling financially, and under a system of all Medicare rates, they would likely be first to close, leaving local residents with fewer health care options. Warren styles herself a populist champion of the working class, but it is not much of a stretch to say she supports a plan that would make health care worse and less accessible for the nation’s rural poor.
One response to this problem might be to have Medicare for All pay providers more than today’s Medicare does. That is roughly what the state of Maryland has done with its all-payer rate setting program, a system of price controls that equalizes the differential between Medicare rates and private rates. As a result, the state’s Medicare rates are far higher than is typical, and the state’s hospitals end up with about $2 billion extra in Medicare funds each year. But doing so would eliminate the “savings” in terms of total national health spending that single-payer supporters like to tout.
You can avoid these issues on the campaign trail, insisting that they can be solved with political courage alone. But once in office, these are the challenges and trade-offs that any single-payer plan will have to account for. Elizabeth Warren has plans for a lot of things, but by insisting that these are all fake problems that can be solved by more political fight, what she is inadvertently revealing is that so far, at least, she doesn’t have a plan for this.
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Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) said during the first Democratic Party debate last night that the reason we don’t already have a Medicare for All plan in place is that politicians “just won’t fight for it.”
More often than not, when a politician declares that the only thing preventing some particular plan from going into place is political will, it’s a sign that there are uncomfortable practical questions they would like to paper over. So it was when Warren explained her support for a single-payer health care in which the government takes over nearly all of the country’s health care financing.
The discussion began when the entire stage was asked who, by a show of hands, would eliminate private insurance. Warren was one of just two candidates, along with New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, to raise her hand.
She then went on to defend her position, saying “I’m with Bernie on Medicare for All.” One of the top reasons for bankruptcy, she said, was medical bills. And insurers, she argued, have an incentive to keep as much money as possible rather than pay for better care.
“That leaves families with rising premiums, rising copays, and fighting with insurance companies to try to get the health care that their doctors say that they and their children need. Medicare for All solves that problem. And I understand. There are a lot of politicians who say, oh, it’s just not possible, we just can’t do it, have a lot of political reasons for this. What they’re really telling you is they just won’t fight for it.”
The core problem, in Warren’s view, is politicians who won’t fight for ordinary people. Everything else is just politics. That’s a convenient and politically easy response, but it’s not a particularly good one. Warren’s blithe dismissal of the challenges of uprooting the nation’s health care system and starting over with an entirely new system of government financing allows her to portray herself as a populist champion while ignoring the practical problems that single-payer poses.
Like, for example, how hospitals will be paid in a one-size-fits-all system that pays Medicare rates for every service.
As former Maryland Rep. John Delaney pointed out just a few moments later, Warren’s plan—which is to say Bernie Sanders’ plan—would probably result in a sharp contraction in the number of hospitals.
“If you go to every hospital in this country and you ask them one question,” Delaney said, “which is how would it have been for you last year if every one of your bills were paid at the Medicare rate? Every single hospital administrator said they would close. And the Medicare for All bill requires payments to stay at current Medicare rates. So to some extent, we’re supporting a bill that will have every hospital closing.”
It’s probably an overstatement to say that every single hospital would close. But Delaney is right that under a single-payer plan paying current Medicare rates, some, and perhaps lots, almost certainly would. And many of the hospitals that stayed open would likely shed staff and services.
Medicare pays far, far less than private rates, and the higher rates from private payers is part of what keeps hospitals afloat financially. One estimate found that providers would take something like a 40 percent pay cut under the Sanders plan. And that cut would take place very quickly, as the Sanders plan calls for the elimination of most private insurance in just four years.
You can believe that American health care costs too much (it does) and that the country spends far too much on health care overall (probably) and still recognize that, in addition to the sheer bureaucratic disruption of switching to a new, government-run system of financing, reducing provider payments so sharply in such a short period of time would place a huge financial strain on the system, resulting in hospitals shutting their doors and jettisoning staff.
The nation’s hospitals would lose somewhere on the order of $150 billion a year, according to an article in The Journal of the American Medical Association. Which would mean that someone would have to be paid less, and it wouldn’t just be insurance companies: It would be nurses and doctors, therapists and billing specialists, the entire universe of middle-class jobs that America’s health care industry supports. Even some physicians who support single-payer have suggested they are worried about the possibility that hospitals would lose money. “The line here can’t be and shouldn’t be soak the hospitals,” the president of Physicians for a National Health Program recently told The New York Times.
Cuts to hospital payments, meanwhile, would be hardest to bear for rural hospitals that serve poorer populations. Many of these hospitals are, for obvious reasons, already struggling financially, and under a system of all Medicare rates, they would likely be first to close, leaving local residents with fewer health care options. Warren styles herself a populist champion of the working class, but it is not much of a stretch to say she supports a plan that would make health care worse and less accessible for the nation’s rural poor.
One response to this problem might be to have Medicare for All pay providers more than today’s Medicare does. That is roughly what the state of Maryland has done with its all-payer rate setting program, a system of price controls that equalizes the differential between Medicare rates and private rates. As a result, the state’s Medicare rates are far higher than is typical, and the state’s hospitals end up with about $2 billion extra in Medicare funds each year. But doing so would eliminate the “savings” in terms of total national health spending that single-payer supporters like to tout.
You can avoid these issues on the campaign trail, insisting that they can be solved with political courage alone. But once in office, these are the challenges and trade-offs that any single-payer plan will have to account for. Elizabeth Warren has plans for a lot of things, but by insisting that these are all fake problems that can be solved by more political fight, what she is inadvertently revealing is that so far, at least, she doesn’t have a plan for this.
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German Chancellor Angela Merkel was seen shaking again on camera as she stood next to President Frank-Walter Steinmeier on Thursday – her second such incident in less than two weeks.
Merkel’s upper body began visibly shaking as she stood next to Stinmeier, causing her to fold her arms as if bracing herself. She was offered water while the German president spoke, yet declined according to Reuters. Of note, she blamed dehydration on her first shaking incident on June 18.
A spokesman said later that she felt better after some water, which apparently cures whatever she’s got going on. “Everything is taking place as planned. The chancellor is well,” said the spokesman.
After the incident, Merkel proceeded to the Bundestag lower house of parliament for the swearing in of Germany’s new justice minister, where she showed no signs of shaking and looked relaxed while chatting and laughing with Vice Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
As Reuters notes, “Were Merkel to be incapacitated, Steinmeier would appoint a cabinet minister as acting chancellor until parliament elects a new chancellor. This need not be Scholz, a member of the Social Democrats, junior partner in Merkel’s ruling grand coalition.”
Sleep camel?
Merkel is known for pushing herself to extremes, joking in the past that she is a “sleep camel” who can go for several days on just a few hours of sleep, as long as she catches up over the weekend. That said, aside from slight hand tremors, uncontrollable shaking isn’t exactly known as a side-effect of sleep deprivation.
On Thursday, Merkel will fly to Japan to attend the G20 summit before moving on to Brussels for an EU summit on Sunday at which she will play a key role in trying to secure a five-year deal for the distribution of the bloc’s top jobs.
Asked about her shaking, Interior Minister Horst Seehofer told the press: “I won’t comment on this. I have never taken part in remote diagnoses because for years I was too often the subject of remote diagnoses.”
That sounds a little different than dehydration…
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