When I was growing up in Little Falls, New York in the 1960s, the men who worked in Snyder’s  on East Main Street or at the Remington factory  in nearby Ilion had good jobs. The work was highly skilled and the pay gave their families a solid middle class life. And those men produced solid goods that stood the test of time.

Two Factories of Ilion: Why did Remington thrive when Snyder bicycles died?

We owned the products of those factories. I had an ancient Snyder bicycle that took me anywhere I wanted to go. And one of my father’s proudest possessions was a Remington Springfield 30-06 bolt action rifle.  A standard US infantry weapon for World War I and the first part of World War II, the 30-06 was a reliable deer rifle even after a half century of use.

Although Snyder’s was closed decades ago, Remington Arms in nearby Ilion is humming with activity – the only major manufacturing firm left in a valley strewn with abandoned factories. The work at Remington is still highly skilled, much sought after, and still pays well. But the workers in Ilion built the Bushmaster .223 assault rifle used to kill the children of Newtown.

Understanding the different fates of these two firms is a window into what has gone wrong with America.

The story of the Snyder Manufacturing Company is the simpler one.  Homer P. Snyder, a friend of my grandfather and later a congressman, came to Little Falls from nearby Amsterdam early in the 20th century and set out to meet the growing demand for bicycles. In both world wars, Snyder’s switched to defense production but when peace came, they returned to making the fine bicycles for which they were known.  In the face of much cheaper imports, made mostly in Taiwan, Homer’s grandson Bill sold out in the early 1970s to Mossberg, an arms manufacturer who eventually dropped bicycle production and closed the factory.

The Remington story begins way back in 1816 when Eliphalet Remington, a blacksmith, forged his own flintlock musket and, according to legend, won a local shooting contest. Neighbors admired its accuracy and ordered their own guns. By 1828 Eliphalet and his son Philo had built a factory in Ilion and were producing muzzle loaders using the new all-weather percussion caps. In 1847 the father and son invented a breech-loading carbine and sold it the U.S. Navy, their first military contract.  During the Civil War, the Remingtons supplied a large proportion of the small arms used by the Union forces. The Ilion plant and new factories elsewhere in New York and Ohio produced rifles during World Wars I and II.. Remington continued to make a variety of sporting rifles and shotguns – as well as typewriters and safety razors – but thanks to steady  military contracts, never experienced the kind of foreign competition that destroyed Snyders and countless other factories in the Mohawk Valley.

Max Baucus

“Baucus’ Finance Committee passed a bill in August extending 50 expiring deductions and credits for favored industries. At Obama’s insistence, the Baucus bill was cut and pasted word for word into the cliff legislation.“
-Timothy P. Carney, The Washington Examiner, January 6, 2013

“Now to be honest, there were a couple in there I was not happy with. One that’s come out in the press, quite frankly, I’m not very happy with, and I don’t know how it got in there.”
-Senator Max Baucus, Great Falls Tribune, January 11, 2013

Major tax cuts were extended for giant corporations — while the average Montana was stuck with a $900/year in increased taxes — and the person responsible is claiming he doesn’t even know how his staff put it in there for his former staff?

This is why last night Bill Moyers referred to Max Baucus as, “a connoisseur of revolving door corruption.”

The Baucus revolving door cabal numbers in the dozens. In fact, his last revolving door scandal was less than a month ago. There was another Baucus revolving door scandal only six weeks ago. And another Baucus revolving door scandal only six months ago. Last year, Baucus had a revolving door scandal on tax policy. In the previous congress, there was his revolving door scandal on climate change. And of course, who could forget the obscene revolving door scandal during health care reform. And these are just some of the highlights from this term, which is only 2/3 of the way done. And Baucus is in his sixth, 6-year term in DC.

Montana voters rightfully retired Conrad Burns for his culture of corruption. Unfortunately, Montanans are still represented by the most corrupt member of the House of Lords.

Written by Farah Diaz-Tello for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.

How two pain pills and the drug war cost a woman her life.

I don’t like war metaphor. I prefer to think about reproductive justice advocacy in terms of healing and love. But when our nonsensical policies on drugs and reproductive health claim the lives of living, breathing people, it feels like a war.

Jamie Lynn Russell was 33 years old when she went to an emergency room in Pauls Valley, Oklahoma in such debilitating pain that she was unable to move. Because her excruciating pain prevented her from lying down for an examination, hospital staff labeled her “noncompliant,” and called the police. The police discovered that she had two pain pills that weren’t hers. Still in pain, she was released by the hospital as “fit to incarcerate,” arrested for drug possession, and taken to jail, where she died two hours later from a ruptured ectopic pregnancy.

Two pain pills.

Much of the initial response to the case centered around the actions of the hospital, which likely amount to malpractice. But we must avoid making the mistake that the hospital did: looking at individual actions when they are merely symptoms of deeper, deadlier problems.

Jamie’s needless death shows us where our priorities lie, misplaced: chasing down minor drug offenders in service of a failed war on drugs is more important that human life and dignity; women’s health is not taken seriously and “noncompliance” is cause for punishment. The tragedy of her death once again disproves the myth that women never need abortions and that “modern technology and science” have eliminated maternal mortality.

I hope that her family — and people across Oklahoma and the United States — will demand justice for Jamie so that she is not just another unnamed casualty of the many political and rhetorical wars waged on pregnant women.

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

The Pentagon as a Global NRA 
For Washington, There Is No Arms Control Abroad 
By Tom Engelhardt

This dangerous weapon is NOT a toy.

Given these last weeks, who doesn’t know what an AR-15 is?  Who hasn’t seen the mind-boggling stats on the way assault rifles have flooded this country, or tabulations of accumulating Newtown-style mass killings, or noted that there are barely more gas stations nationwide than federally licensed firearms dealers, or heard the renewed debates over the Second Amendment, or been struck by the rapid shifts in public opinion on gun control, or checked out the disputes over how effective an assault-rifle ban was the last time around?  Who doesn’t know about the NRA’s suggestion to weaponize schools, or about the price poor neighborhoods may be paying in gun deaths for the present expansive interpretation of the Second Amendment?  Who hasn’t seen the legions of stories about how, in the wake of the Newtown slaughter, sales of guns, especially AR-15 assault rifles, have soared, ammunition sales have surged, background checks for future gun purchases have risen sharply, and gun shows have been besieged with customers?

If you haven’t stumbled across figures on gun violence in America or on suicide-by-gun, you’ve been hiding under a rock.  If you haven’t heard about Chicago’s soaring and Washington D.C.’s plunging gun-death stats (and that both towns have relatively strict gun laws), where have you been?

Has there, in fact, been any aspect of the weaponization of the United States that, since the Newtown massacre, hasn’t been discussed?  Are you the only person in the country, for instance, who doesn’t know that Vice President Joe Biden has been assigned the task of coming up with an administration gun-control agenda before Barack Obama is inaugurated for his second term?  And can you honestly tell me that you haven’t seen global comparisons of killing rates in countries that have tight gun laws and the U.S., or read at least one discussion about life in countries like Colombia or Guatemala, where armed guards are omnipresent?

After years of mass killings that resulted in next to no national dialogue about the role of guns and how to control them, the subject is back on the American agenda in a significant way and — by all signs — isn’t about to leave town anytime soon.  The discussion has been so expansive after years in a well-armed wilderness that it’s easy to miss what still isn’t being discussed, and in some sense just how narrow our focus remains.

Think of it this way: the Obama administration is reportedly going to call on Congress to pass a new ban on assault weapons, as well as one on high-capacity ammunition magazines, and to close the loopholes that allow certain gun purchasers to avoid background checks.  But Biden has already conceded, at least implicitly, that facing a Republican-controlled House of Representatives and a filibuster-prone Senate, the administration’s ability to make much of this happen — as on so many domestic issues — is limited.

That will shock few Americans.  After all, the most essential fact about the Obama presidency is this: at home, the president is a hamstrung weakling; abroad, in terms of his ability to choose a course of action and — from drones strikes and special ops raids to cyberwar and other matters — simply act, he’s closer to Superman.  So here’s a question: while the administration is pledging to try to curb the wholesale spread of ever more powerful weaponry at home, what is it doing about the same issue abroad where it has so much more power to pursue the agenda it prefers?

Tonight at 5pm, West Coast time, join us in discussing Black Tulip with writer, producer, director and star Sonia Nassery. Facing threats and intimidation by the Taliban, Cole, her crew, and cast shot the film, based on a true story, in Kabul. Black Tulip was Afghanistan’s official 2011 Oscar entry.

Jean Seberg in Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless

Many people will recall Jean Seberg as the young blonde gamine who played opposite Jean-Paul Belmondo in Godard’s classic 1960′s film Breathless.

Few remember that she was hounded by the FBI for supporting liberal causes, and committed suicide in 1979 at the age of 40.  J. Edgar Hoover personally tried to destroy her career by planting the story that the married Seberg was pregnant by a member of the Black Panthers.  As the LA Times wrote in 2009:

Hoover oversaw the Seberg smear, ordering agents in Los Angeles to wait until Seberg’s pregnancy grew more visible. He didn’t want the wiretap–which agents apparently misinterpreted–to be suspected. Ronald Ostrow, a former Los Angeles Times reporter who worked in the Washington bureau, obtained documents in 1980 showing that FBI officials in Washington and agents in Los Angeles targeted Seberg for giving $10,500 to the Panthers.

The psychological toll of being targeted by the government for political beliefs is massive, the stuff that filled Soviet-era gulags. People like John Kiriakou and Thomas Drake have had their careers destroyed and their lives torn apart simply for telling uncomfortable truths that expose corruption and lawlessness at the highest levels. The only surprise is that there aren’t more people who simply can’t handle the intense pressure.

Seberg’s family blamed the FBI for her death, just as activist Aaron Swartz’s family rightly blames his overly zealous prosecutors. Public intolerance for this kind of government harassment and abuse of power should be vigorous and swift, but sadly there’s no better way for careerists to make their bones at the DoJ or any other agency right now than to engage in the personal destruction of activists advocating for the freedom of information.

Aaron Swartz isn’t the first victim of this war nor, sadly, will he be the last. His death is collateral damage in a war being waged by a ruthless government intent on protecting a secretive and unaccountable kleptocracy at all costs.

It’s tragic that this lesson must be learned anew by every generation, it seems.

It's a wager

Insurance companies make a simple wager with you each time you sign a policy. They are betting that, over the life of the policy, they will pay out less to you and your beneficiaries than you will pay them.

Insurance companies of all kinds make tidy profits on this simple wager. If they don’t, sometimes the government will bail them out.

Either way, insurance is still just a bet. And in America, we do not have a healthcare system. We have a health insurance industry.

That industry has been one of the most profitable sectors of the economy for well over a decade. But costs skyrocketed and care suffered. We heard horror stories about rationed care, denied procedures and corporate bureaucracies run amok. Ironically, these were the horror stories we were supposed to hear if the government took the reigns of the “best healthcare system in the world.”

So, instead of a single-payer healthcare system, we got The Affordable Care Act—aka Obamacare. Instead of retiring the health insurance industry and its actuarial tables and profit margins and wagers, Obama “saved” the health insurance industry and enshrined it in perpetuity as the “Health Insurance-Industrial Complex.”

As the Affordable Care Act’s provisions begin to take effect, the folks in the Complex are wasting no time doing what they can to keep their profits tidy. Leading insurers in California are seeking increases in premiums ranging from 20% to 26%. Regulators in Florida and Ohio have already approved increasing premiums as much as 20%, and, since the ACA doesn’t set federal standards, insurance companies are moving in a number of states to force these spikes in premiums.

Remember, if you can “afford” health insurance, you have to buy it. If you refuse, you’ll pay a penalty to the government at tax time. Some are exempt from this mandate. But, in effect, the ACA has guaranteed the health insurance industry a captive market.

Meanwhile, they continue to change the terms of all those bets they’ve placed against millions of Americans and the cost of the “best healthcare in the world” continues to rise. When compared to other nations with some form of single-payer system, the difference is so stark that it’s almost obscene. It’s not just the $800 difference between an MRI in France versus the U.S., it’s almost every part of a system that has at its heart the relentless desire to turn a profit.

Even worse, a much-ballyhooed part of the promised “21^st Century transformation” into greater “affordability” has turned out be little more than a profiteering scheme.

Remember the “streamlining” and “cost savings” guaranteed from the conversion to electronic medical records? Well, it hasn’t quite panned out. In fact, the only real beneficiaries of the conversion are companies like General Electric that sell electronic medical records systems. Not coincidentally, GE and other interested parties funded the key RAND study in 2005 that both predicted $81 billion in savings for America’s health care system and also became the driving rationale for the profitable conversion.

This type of closed system is par for the course in Washington, D.C.

Every door revolves in the nation’s only recession-proof city. Is it any surprise that the woman who wrote the Affordable Care Act is now leaving the White House for a job with health care giant Johnson & Johnson? Liz Fowler worked for Senator Max Baucus (D-MT) during the drafting of the ACA and had the primary responsibility for authoring the legislation. After its passage, she migrated to the White House to help with implementation. Seems reasonable enough. However, it is important to note where she was before joining the staff of Senator Baucus. Yup, you guessed it…she was a bigwig at WellPoint, the nation’s second leading health insurance company with nearly 54 million policyholders.

All of this makes you wonder who knew whom in the breast milk-pump industry, which is seeing a huge spike in its profits thanks to a new coverage requirement written into the ACA.

It may be too early to render judgment on a law that hasn’t yet been fully implemented, but it is not too early to determine that the profit motive might simply be incompatible with the equitable delivery of healthcare. As matter of course, businesses try to lower costs and increase revenue. That may be okay when they sell scissors or candlesticks, but it seems ill-suited to deliver labor-intensive care for those who are most vulnerable.

And as far as the health of the insurance industry, it’s a safe bet that they’ll keep coming out on top as the Affordable Care Act is fully implemented.