THIS MODERN WORLD

This story figures into tomorrow’s cartoon. Was going to post it then, but I’m not entirely sure the site will be online …

AMY GOODMAN: In 2007, CIGNA denied a California teenager, Nataline Sarkisyan, coverage for a liver transplant. Her family went to the media. This is her mother.

HILDA SARKISYAN: The insurance company can’t decide who’s going to live and who’s going to die. Only doctors and nurses. Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: The California Nurses Association joined in. Geri Jenkins is head of the CNA.

GERI JENKINS: It’s just really atrocious that we let decisions be made based on money and not on human life and what’s necessary to keep people alive. The Sarkisyans had insurance. And that’s the telling thing here. They had insurance. They had done everything that was expected of them. They worked hard. They provided insurance. And yet, when they needed it, it wasn’t there for them.

AMY GOODMAN: Under mounting pressure, CIGNA finally granted coverage for the liver transplant. But it was too late. Two hours later, Nataline died.

The rest. Via.

Robert Parry’s Consortium News is holding a fundraiser. I just sent them some money, and I strongly encourage you to do the same. You can donate by credit card, by paypal at consortnew@aol.com, or by check to Consortium for Independent Journalism, 2200 Wilson Blvd., Suite 102-231, Arlington VA 22201.

There simply is no other journalist in the U.S. like Robert Parry. For instance, did you know Alvin A. Snyder, director of the U.S. Information Agency’s television and film division in the early eighties, wrote a book in 1995 called Warriors of Disinformation? And that in the book he takes you in detail through exactly how the Reagan administration lied at the UN Security Council in 1983 about the Soviet shootdown of KAL-007? And that this former government official then straightforwardly explained that “all governments lie”?

I had no idea at all. And to date, no one else anywhere has noticed it except for Parry. And not only did Parry notice it, he remembered it and brought it up again immediately after Colin Powell’s presentation to the UN (where I missed it for a second time).

Here’s some of Alvin Snyder wrote:

By my calculations, the National Security Agency, with the apparent approval of the State Department and White House, had deleted at least five critical minutes of conversation between the Russian fighter pilots and their ground controllers from the tape that we presented as evidence in the UN Security Council…We had been duped…Former U.S. officials involved in the cover-up, who insist on anonymity, confirm that monitoring data was withheld from our UN tape…

The moral of the story is that all governments, including our own, lie when it suits their purposes. The key is to lie first…The story of KE-007 will be remembered pretty much the way we told it in 1983, not the way it really happened.

BONUS!: Here’s what Reagan said immediately after the massacre;

…the world notes the stark contrast that exists between Soviet words and deeds…What could be said about Soviet credibility when they so flagrantly lie about such a heinous act? What can be the scope of legitimate and mutual discourse with a state whose values permit such atrocities? And what are we to make of a regime which establishes one set of standards for itself and another for the rest of humankind?

We’ve joined in the call for an urgent United Nations Security Council meeting today. The brutality of this act should not be compounded through silence or the cynical distortion of the evidence now at hand.

I can’t find the cartoon right now, but about ten years ago I noted that small investors are important to Wall Street in the way that stranded motorists are important to horror movies. This appears to be more true than ever these days:

Nearly everyone on Wall Street is wondering how hedge funds and large banks like Goldman Sachs are making so much money so soon after the financial system nearly collapsed. High-frequency trading is one answer.

And when a former Goldman Sachs programmer was accused this month of stealing secret computer codes — software that a federal prosecutor said could “manipulate markets in unfair ways” — it only added to the mystery. Goldman acknowledges that it profits from high-frequency trading, but disputes that it has an unfair advantage.

“This is where all the money is getting made,” said William H. Donaldson, former chairman and chief executive of the New York Stock Exchange and today an adviser to a big hedge fund. “If an individual investor doesn’t have the means to keep up, they’re at a huge disadvantage.”

For most of Wall Street’s history, stock trading was fairly straightforward: buyers and sellers gathered on exchange floors and dickered until they struck a deal. Then, in 1998, the Securities and Exchange Commission authorized electronic exchanges to compete with marketplaces like the New York Stock Exchange. The intent was to open markets to anyone with a desktop computer and a fresh idea.

But as new marketplaces have emerged, PCs have been unable to compete with Wall Street’s computers. Powerful algorithms — “algos,” in industry parlance — execute millions of orders a second and scan dozens of public and private marketplaces simultaneously. They can spot trends before other investors can blink, changing orders and strategies within milliseconds.

High-frequency traders often confound other investors by issuing and then canceling orders almost simultaneously. Loopholes in market rules give high-speed investors an early glance at how others are trading. And their computers can essentially bully slower investors into giving up profits — and then disappear before anyone even knows they were there.

The house always wins of course, but it’s as if they’ve entirely given up on the pretense that you might beat the odds.

“The truth is that unless you have what’s called the single payer system in which everybody’s automatically covered, you’re probably not going to reach every single individual…”

Great cartoon here, and some equally entertaining responses here.