Comparisons

We have been living in Europe for almost five months now. Seems like forever and a day. One of the greatest things about being here is being in my school, which for those of you who don’t know is not an Italian school. It is also not an American school. It is called an “International School” meaning students come from all over the world. Classes are in English because English is almost an international language. Most other developed countries, especially the educated youth, speak english.
Before I left, I was well aware that America had some problems when compared to the rest of the world. But because we are so isolated in both location, and by the media which informs us little of the goings on in other nations, I was not sure exactly how deep those differences go, and how serious they are.

I have students in my classes from France, Germany, Sweden, Holland, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Kazakhstan, Venezuela, Japan, Mexico, and of course the United States. I am sure there are other nations represented at the school, I just haven’t met those kids yet.

Just like one of my other posts said, I have been here so long that I rarely ponder on the state of the USA lately. The news here does report in depth about what goes on at home, especially the printed media, which is incredible, but I don’t watch TV and never buy newspapers. Just don’t have the time. But a few days ago we had a conversation with some friends of ours that made me start thinking again.

His name is Aldo, and we went out for dinner with he and his girlfriend Daniella. We started talking about how cheap it is to travel in Europe. All of the public transportation is government-run, including the international train systems, which are sponsored by the EU to increase the ease and lessen the expense of travel. Also, there are many “socialized” airlines, funded by various governments. According to Aldo, he goes back to Spain, where he is originally from, to visit family quite often. The cost? Around 40 euro round trip. You couldn’t fly from New York to Philly for $40, or even $100. The difference? Means of travel are public services, rather than money making ventures. The American way to look at this is to think: dirty planes, untrained pilots, unsafe in general; the average non-subjective American view of anything that is government-run and therefore “socialist” or worse, the dreaded “communist.” But on the contrary, planes are new and up-to-date. Employees are friendly (far more friendly than in the US), pilots are well trained and safety records are strong. In fact, where in the United States we are increasingly allowing airlines to govern themselves by allowing them to do their own inspections, in the EU the government is getting increasingly involved in this process. After all, we know it is absurd to allow a corporation to set their own safety standards. But in the States, this is becoming more and more popular, unbeknownst to the average citizen: they don’t talk about it on Fox or CNN.

This led to another conversation: the typical American view of foreign healthcare, especially those systems that are “universal” or, in other terms, “free”. Italy is one of those countries. Like most developed nations, actually, like ALL developed nations other than the US, Italy’s healthcare system is completely free to all citizens, and depending on the severity of the issue, free for foreigners as well. To explain that a little: if you are a foreigner and you come and get a cold, it will cost you about €60 to see a doctor, plus the cost of a prescription, which is always far less than in the States. If you have a heart attack and go to the hospital, all of your care will be free, even as a non-citizen. All of this comes from the fact that people here believe that people should care about people. Instead of those who can pay simply paying for themselves, and the lesser of us getting stepped on, here, and in all other developed nations, those who can pay pay for everyone. You get the same service regardless of who you are.

Again, the typical American view of public health care systems is that hospitals are dirty, doctors are overworked and under-trained, facilities are second-rate, wait times are long, and the list goes on. Again, completely untrue. I have been to the hospital in the US. Several times actually. When my wife cut her finger and we had to go to the emergency room, we waited upwards of five hours to see someone, with only about four people in the waiting room with us. Then we saw a medical student, not a doctor, who ran her finger under water and put crazy glue on it. The bill was around $2,800, which our insurance company tried very hard to get out of paying. Our co-pay was about $250. Insane considering we paid over $800 a month for our insurance.

Before we left for Italy, upon telling someone I met we were coming here, her reply was, “that’s great. Just don’t get sick.” What Aldo said about the American perception of the Italian system was this:

“The conditions and expertise of the doctors at the Sanitaria (public hospitals) is great. You don’t wait long, they are very clean and very up to date. If it weren’t like this, the Italians would be in the streets and there would be riots. It has happened before.”

Maybe American’s poor views of public systems stem from our own very poor public systems. Our “public” hospitals, or clinics, are a disgrace, and most government-run agencies are a disaster, aside from the Postal Service which is okay in my book.

I saw Michael Moore’s film, Sicko, and something an American living in France said was very similar to what Aldo had told me about Italians. She said, essentially, that the government in France is scared of the people. Whereas in the States, the people are scared of the government.

How true this is. What happened to our revolutionary spirit? What happened to Americans being highly informed people who react when things aren’t right? What happened to the Boston Tea Party and the Revolutionary War?

Did you know that in both France and Sweden, and I’m sure many other nations, women get one year off, with fully pay, after having a baby? After we had Giada, Emily got six weeks and our payment was about $175 a week minus taxes. Thank God I decent a good paying job, and we had special living circumstances that allowed us to easily afford everything we needed. But, had we been in a normal situation, things would have been much different. Imagine a single mom trying to run a household on $175 a week minus taxes? It is impossible.

Additionally, most other developed countries get a minimum of four paid weeks off every year. In Italy, people take the entire month of August off. It is just the way it is. If the government, or employers, try to take away any vacations, people take to the streets. In the States, you have to be a millionaire to take off four or five weeks. Here, four or five is a minimum. Many people get as many as eight weeks off. Yes. Eight weeks. Two months.

One of the reasons for the successes of these public systems is that, because they are public, a lot of attention is payed to prevention. In the US, we have a reactionary system. When people get sick, our system responds to make them well (or make them even sicker). In many US hospitals, the goal is not to make people well, but to keep them in the hospital for as long as possible, and to put them on as many medications as possible, therefore maximizing profits for the health care system. Little attention is paid to general overall health. After all, if we were healthy, they system wouldn’t make as much money.
On the contrary, when you have a public system, it is in the government’s interest to make sure the public is healthy. A healthier public means less money spent on health care. For this reason, doctors in many countries with public systems get bonuses when they do such things as to get clients to stop smoking, or loose weight, or lower their cholesterol. Also, a public health care system leads to other government actions to protect the public. For example, hormones in meat are banned in the EU, because they have been proven to cause a myriad of health problems. Mercury has been completely banned in the EU for many years. We still use it in our vaccines. The EU has stricter standards on chemicals in electronics, which cause over 70% of our own landfill pollution, but make up only a small fraction of actual items in landfills. The list goes on and on, but hopefully you get my point: a public system means the government is concerned with the health of the public. This doesn’t mean they invade your home and make you loose weight, it means that they make sure you have available to you, for free, many preventative systems: nutritionists, chiropractors, psychiatrists, etc, and they give doctors an incentive to make sure you are healthy.

Knowing all this to be a fact, I am wondering more and more… what are we doing back at home in the USA? Why are we fighting so hard against this system? We already have “socialized systems” like our schools, postal service, other domestic services, some transportation, social security and medicare (which are both screwed up, but that’s another issue of corruption and greed). What are we waiting for? When will we get back the spirit of our forefathers? When will we take to the streets and be heard? When will we demand that all men not only be created equal in theory, but be treated equally? Maybe then, Americans will again have a longer life-span than people living in Cuba (whose life-spans surpass ours, probably due to the fact that their healthcare is top-notch, and also free).

One of the people in Sicko said something great, a British man speaking about why Great Britain, after being devastated by the second world war, had created a public health care system. In summary, he said this (no quotes because it is not a quote):
After WWII Britain was devastated. During the war the economy had been very strong. People all working to build bombs and tanks and guns. After the war, I suppose people figured, if we can employ people to build bombs and guns, why can’t we employ them to build schools and hospitals and libraries? If we can find the money to kill people, we can surely find the money to help people.

He also pointed out, very truly, that public health care is a very democratic idea. He said that democracy moved the power from the wealthy class and the corporations to the ballot box. From the rich to the poor. Before democracy, health care was only accessible to the rich. You got what you paid for. So what more of a democratic idea could it be than to move the power from the rich few to the masses of lower and middle class people?

He also made a very good connection to 9/11 in the US, and WWII in G.B. He pointed out how Americans all banded together after 9/11 to help each other. There was solidarity between us. In Great Britain, over 40,000 civilians were killed during WWII. The solidarity felt between the citizens of this nation could not have been stronger. It was in this atmosphere that their public health system was created. Additionally, Great Britain was in horrible shape after the war. It’s cities were destroyed, and the government was nearly bankrupt. It was in these conditions that they created a very successful public health system. Imagine the one the US could create?

One more fact: the US health care system is the most expensive system in the world. In other words, we as American pay more for health care than any other nation on earth. Therefore, Americans fear of high taxes when paying into a public health system is debunked. People in France and Italy (and everywhere else) pay far less in taxes to be included in their public system than we in American pay in insurance premiums and co-pays to be a part of our private one.

I could go on and on about this. I know many people back in the States just think that things will work themselves out. This is unfortunately not true. Many others think that they will just let their neighbors worry about it. We are all too busy and overworked to be messing around with protests and making demands of the government. But maybe we all have to sacrifice a little for our children and grandchildren. If there are 50 million Americans who have no insurance, and are unable to receive medical attention, how many will there be when my daughter is grown up? Will she be one of them? Will she have to go through her days hoping and praying that her kids don’t get sick?

This is a ranking of the world’s health care systems according to the World Health Organization (sorry it is horizontal, just copied and pasted from WHO site and this is how it came out. No way I was typing all of this):



1 France
2 Italy
3 San Marino
4 Andorra
5 Malta
6 Singapore
7 Spain
8 Oman
9 Austria
10 Japan
11 Norway
12 Portugal
13 Monaco
14 Greece
15 Iceland
16 Luxembourg
17 Netherlands
18 United Kingdom
19 Ireland
20 Switzerland
21 Belgium
22 Colombia
23 Sweden
24 Cyprus
25 Germany
26 Saudi Arabia
27 United Arab Emirates
28 Israel
29 Morocco
30 Canada
31 Finland
32 Australia
33 Chile
34 Denmark
35 Dominica
36 Costa Rica
37 United States of America
38 Slovenia
39 Cuba
40 Brunei
41 New Zealand
42 Bahrain
43 Croatia
44 Qatar
45 Kuwait
46 Barbados
47 Thailand
48 Czech Republic
49 Malaysia
50 Poland
51 Dominican Republic
52 Tunisia
53 Jamaica
54 Venezuela
55 Albania
56 Seychelles
57 Paraguay
58 South Korea
59 Senegal
60 Philippines
61 Mexico
62 Slovakia
63 Egypt
64 Kazakhstan
65 Uruguay
66 Hungary
67 Trinidad and Tobago
68 Saint Lucia
69 Belize
70 Turkey
71 Nicaragua
72 Belarus
73 Lithuania
74 Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
75 Argentina
76 Sri Lanka
77 Estonia
78 Guatemala
79 Ukraine
80 Solomon Islands
81 Algeria
82 Palau

The list goes on, but you get the point. We pay more than everyone else, per person, and we receive less. What's wrong with that picture?


*I know that a lot of people arbitrarily dislike Michael Moore. Unfortunately, most of those people have not seen his films, or have watched them with a completely closed mind and so have gotten nothing out of them. In some senses, his movies May be “biased.” Maybe he doesn’t show any of the problems in other nations health care systems, and maybe doesn’t point out one single positive point about George Bush (are there any?). But the fact remains that his movies are factual. There are no half-truths or made up tales. That’s why all anybody can say about his work is that they don’t like him; he’s fat or ignorant.

If someone were to find something untrue in one of his movies, you can bet it would make headlines across the US. Bill O’Reilly would be talking about it for weeks on end. That hasn’t happened yet, after all these years, and so that must lead us to believe everything is 100% true. On top of that, our media is completely one-sided too. Even the more “liberal” of networks rarely go near serious issues like this. Forget Fox news. So why not see the other side of the story? Few people freak out and refuse to watch the main stream news networks, so why all the complaining and boycotting of Moore’s films? If you haven’t seen Bowling for Columbine, Roger and Me, Fahrenheit 9/11 and most importantly, Sicko, go see them. Or better yet, if you don’t want to give him your money, download them for free, like I did. You can’t preach against something if you aren’t even familiar with it.

what it means to have less

I have been living in Italy for a while now, and being here here is teaching me something I never would have thought I needed to learn. It is showing me what it means to have less.

This is something I knew before, but it makes it so much more concrete to live in the midst of it. I am seeing, very clearly, how much of the rest of the developed world lives, the good and the bad.

People here live with less. Fewer clothes, smaller apartments, riding bikes, walking, or at least driving small cars. They eat less, drink less, watch less TV, don’t buy all the latest technology as soon as it hits the shelves, and life moves a little slower.
Some things here in Florence are very cheap. Fresh vegetables at the markets are at such low prices you can absentmindedly buy almost anything, including things like berries, which are usually fairly expensive in the US. Chicken is fairly cheap, red meat a bit more, but fish is quite expensive (because it is always so fresh, but we aren’t near a sea, so it is carted in very quickly; less than 24 hours from catch to market).

Many other things are extremely expensive: all types of electronics, dog food and dog medicines, things like notebooks and paper, clothes are exorbitantly expensive, and the list goes on. We have spent a lot of money since our arrival, just buying things that are necessary for us to get settled in.

This was all starting to dismay and confuse me. How could people live when things are so expensive? How do you buy a pair of shoes when they are all at least €100,00, if not more?

But then I read an interview with Carlo Petrini, founder of the Slow Food Movement, at odemagazine.com. Petrini said something that made me see clearly one of the major differences between life here and life in the US. Petrini was asked if he thought maybe his movement was sort of ridiculous because only upper-middle class people to wealthy people could think about living life the way he believes it should be lived: buying quality goods from local businesses, rather than supporting huge corporations selling bland, low quality products. Petrini’s focus is on food, but his views cover every aspect of life.
Petrini’s response was, “It’s not that quality food - organic, made with local ingredients - is too expensive; it’s that the other food is too cheap.”

This statement made me look at things here in a different light. I realized why things here are the way they are here. First off, almost everything you buy comes from somewhere in Italy. It is built here, grown here, or stitched together here. These people cherish quality over the quantity of objects they own. They would rather one bottle of good wine than five bottles of bad wine. They would rather two pairs of nice leather shoes than fifteen pairs from Payless. When it breaks, they repair it.

Not that they don’t have their bargain shops here, and their bargain shoppers. But the mood, on a large scale, is different. I read an article the other day about a fairly large protest that went on somewhere in Italy (Milan, I believe?) to try to get the government to crack down on illegal imports from China. Mostly clothing and food products. Their slogan was “Hands Off Italian Quality”. They don’t want tomatoes from China, they want tomatoes from Italian soil, grown using Italian traditions and following their quality standards. They don’t want leather from China, they want leather from Florence, stitched by an Italian leather shop that cares about the quality if its products. They want leather bags that cost a lot and last 20 years.

Although sometimes I miss H&M’s cheap button down shirts, printing without thinking about the cost of the paper I’m using, or having a car... I’m starting to get used to it. I have always believed that quality is important, and that we should be purchasing locally produced goods, and supporting local businesses. It is eye opening to see what that actually means. It is good, but hard to get used to when I am used to going to K-Mart for a hamper.

But, thank God, there is an IKEA.

The Mexico is to the US as the _____ is to Europe?

News stands here in Florence are much like those in New York City. They carry every paper you can image, in every language you can think of. The obvious ones (English, French, German, etc) plus several Arabic and Asian languages, Dutch, and others. They carry the New York Times, the Financial Times and US Weekly.

However, a New York Times is somewhere around €7 (about $10.00). Needless to say I don’t buy any English newspapers.
But this morning I discovered something wonderful. Yesterdays newspapers are placed in a pile outside the news stand at the end of the day. So, aside from breaking news, which I don’t care much for anyhow, I am free to rummage all I want through the pile and pick out as many papers as I like completely free of charge. And they don’t remove the covers like they do in New York.

This morning over toast and coffee I read the European edition of the Wall Street Journal. I am finding that living here, reading these papers, and talking to the people in my community, I am now on the outside looking in at what is going on inside the United States. I am now a bit of a bystander.

One article in particular stood out to me as amazing. Basically, it was talking about European car manufacturers, mainly Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz, and BMW. These automakers lost billions (VW lost almost 4 billion alone) over the past several years due to an unstable American dollar that has dropped sharply against the euro. The dollar used to outweigh the euro in both worth and stability, but this is no longer so. These car companies cannot afford to pull out of the American market, because sales are far too high, but their bottom line is being hit by the fact that when they take their money back here to the European Union, they are loosing upwards of 37%, and this being on goods built in the EU, with workers paid in euros. This essentially makes their manufacturing cost high in comparison to their return. Much like a car built in New York City being sold in Mexico City. Financial planning is also difficult when dealing with unstable currencies as payment for products manufactured in an area with a strong one.

Because the dollar has dropped so low against the euro, with no signs pointing towards a recovery, it is no longer cost effective for them to manufacture their cars within the EU, as they have always done, and ship them to the United States. So instead, Europe’s largest automakers are planning to largely increase their production within the United States. They figure, the dollar can go up and down all it wants: American cars will be built using American dollars, and the workers will be paid with that same currency, therefore the car companies are more immune to a rising and falling US dollar. A falling dollar merely means lower manufacturing costs, a rising dollar means a stronger return on their monetary transfers to the EU.
In other words, the US is becoming cheap labor. It might sound good at first: America’s big automakers are cutting jobs by the tens of thousands to go to China and Mexico, so hopefully this will make up for some of the losses. But what are the implications? What are the losses both short and long term? To me, it appears as if the US is becoming Europe’s China or Mexico. Yes, factory workers may make a decent wage working for BMW or Volkswagen, but at what long-term cost? Will the US stifle itself, and become a processing plant for goods bought up by middle and upper-class Europeans whose money, in the global economy, is worth twice that of their American counterpart’s? This is also an ironic shift, what with America’s big five off-shoring their own labor.

Where does something like this put us on the totem pole? Somewhere in the middle I suppose.

living in italia.

It has been a while since American politics has made it’s way into my mind enough to sit down and write about it. A year ago I could have written novels. But for the past six months all I have been thinking about is Italy. First, preparing for the news, and now just getting used to living here have been taking all my brain power. Plus, a New York Times is about €6, so there is no way I’m buying one. I suppose it is good though. I have been able to clear my mind. But I have signed us up for our absentee ballots, which I have no doubt will not be counted, but we’ll mail them in anyhow.

But yesterday I did go to NYtimes.com and read a few articles. The first letting the American public know that Bush had successfully legalized his warrant-less wiretapping program. Now, all international calls and emails can be listened in on without a warrant. They legitimized it by saying, basically, that they aren’t listening to the American citizen, but the foreign person on the other line. So if you call or email your friend in London, they can listen and intercept and it is 100% legal. It essentially says that an American does not have the right to talk to a non-American (or a friend or relative on vacation!) without possibly being listened to.

I know what the argument against me would be: “I’ve got nothing to hide! Anyone who doesn’t want people listening has something to hide.” It has nothing to do with having something to hide or not. It has to do with basic liberties and the “slippery slope” (G.W.’s favorite term these days) it takes us down. Free and uninhibited speech is an essential part of a free political system. It is the idea behind removing rights that is the issue here. Any invasion of privacy is a removal of an essential American liberty, and any removal of one of these essential liberties puts the state of our Union in danger.


“He who is willing to give up freedom or liberty in the name of safety deserves neither freedom nor liberty.” - Benjamin Franklin


I’ve said it before and I will say it again... there are risks that come with living in a free nation. The safest places to live are places with strong, invasive government systems, where the ruling authority knows what is going on in everyone’s lives and exerts control over its people.

This is a whole other issue to get into, but we all want a sense of safety, and in short, I don’t think that starting needless wars that lead to the deaths of up to 500,000 innocent civilians, and angering the entire world is the way to be at peace with ourselves and the world. Living life that way will give you as much peace as going out an killing all the people you don’t like. You would constantly make new enemies and spend your life looking over your shoulder. Like telling a lie, it’s necessary to keep lying to cover up for the one before. Each enemy we destroy creates more enemies. The only way to truly be at peace in the end doing things this way is to kill every single one of them.

You are better off, on both a personal and national scale, reducing the number of enemies you have to deal with in a diplomatic fashion. There will always be evil people bent on destruction... but at the very least having a kind and generous heart towards the rest of the population of the earth would engender a feeling of kindness and goodwill towards the people of the US. In reducing our fear we have been 100% wrong these past few years.

As someone who lived in very close proximity to New York City all his life, with many friends and relatives living there, I can tell you my fear level has increased exponentially since our invasion of Iraq. The soldiers who have constantly been a presence on the streets of New York since then are a constant reminder. People living in non-danger zones have no capacity to truly understand living with this fear of the multitude of new enemies that we have created.

So reading this article saying that the battle to preserve our right to not have our personal correspondence invaded upon is very disheartening. What happened to this great new democratic congress and senate we supposedly elected? Oh, they were all out campaigning so not to be ousted by the next billionaire who wants to run for senate. Oh well.

stepping carefully forward

This is my way of lashing out when I have too much to say and my brain overflows. My wife probably thinks I open my mouth too much, which is likely the truth, but if she only knew how many times I kept my mouth shut she would be very surprised. Maybe even impressed.

I wrote another blog a while back about prudence. That was in relation to the argument about global warming. My basic point was that it can’t hurt to cut back our carbon emissions, but it CAN hurt to continue on our present path.
Prudence, or playing it safe, can be applied to almost all aspects of life, especially in the area of personal health.
People may think my wife and I are too crazy about keeping ourselves and our daughter away from chemicals. We eat only organic foods at home, we neither keep or use poisonous cleaners in the house (we use natural alternatives to the regular scrubbing bubbles and windex), shy away from taking medications unless absolutely necessary, and even dress our daughter in chemical free clothing.

People might think that is overkill. But what’s the harm? I find it amazing that people think it is strange to wear clothes not sprayed with formaldehyde, but think it is normal to eat strawberries sprayed with highly-toxic chemicals designed not to be washed off by water.

If we look at the prevalence of cancer, auto-immune disorders, autism, ADD, turrets syndrome, and the many other illnesses plaguing our society, it makes you wonder where it all comes from.

I read a great article a while back that said, “it is impossible to link common chemicals with common illnesses.” Imagine trying to test every possible effect of formaldehyde transferred from an infants skin to their body? How do you link that formaldehyde exposure at 3 months of age to asthma at four years? You can’t.

So the answer for me is just to stay away from it. There are literally thousands of new chemicals introduced into our food, clothing, furniture, air and water every year, and very few of them are tested at all. None are tested for every possible effect because it is absolutely impossible to do so. To think that they are all tested to be 100% safe is at best ignorant, and at worst just a personal choice to ignore the obvious - which is likely a sin that puts you and your family in harms way.

maybe i'm missing something here?

I am having a lot of trouble understanding people anymore. George Bush’s approval rating is quite low, according to the polls, but there seem to still be a whole lot of people who, even if they disapprove of his handling of the Iraq war, still support him and his party nonetheless.

I don’t get it. If you ask almost any hard-line Republican why they are a Republican or a “Conservative” and they will list several reasons, mostly: they want a smaller, less invasive government, they are pro-life, and they are against “gay marriage”.

Do people realize that the Bush white house, elected on these platforms, have done absolutely nothing for any of these causes? What’s worse, is that they don’t even have the excuse that they tried, but their efforts were squashed by congress, the senate, or the supreme court.

These people, elected on the Conservative-issue platform, have had a rubber-stamp congress, and have been able to appoint not one but two supreme court justices! No other White House in history (that I can think of) has had such a luxury!

If Bush really wanted to overturn Roe v. Wade, he could have. If he wanted to pass a constitutional ban on gay marriage, congress and the judiciary would have let him - after all, he practically handpicked them. Furthermore, our government and its reach into our personal lives has grown exponentially in the past six years.

So why do people still support him on the whole “less invasive government, family values” platform? I just don’t get it. Maybe someone can enlighten me. Maybe i’m missing something here.

justice again.

Last year, due to increasing and un-relenting pressure from the people of England, and even from his own Labor Party, Tony Blair announced he would resign sometime before September of 2007. The reason the public felt he should step down was largely due to his involvement in our war with Iraq. The British seem to feel Blair had joined haphazardly, backing the U.S. without sufficient weighing of the facts involved, and therefore endangering the lives of British soldiers without good cause. It was bad form to the highest degree. The British appear quite angry their own men and women had been killed in Iraq... specifically when they, the British public, realized there was never any “imminent threat” posed by Iraq against themselves or against us (the U.S.). In fact, one of Britain’s only terrorist attacks to date happened after the Iraqi invasion (the July 2005 London subway bombing).

Now we see another similar case which is currently (not) making the regular news. The people of Israel have called for their Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, to step down. Their reasons? The greatest was that he led them into a summer-long war against Lebanon. The citizens feel that Olmert went to war without a clear-cut reason, without a strategy for fighting, winning, or exiting.

Sound familiar?

I simply do not understand anymore. The people of both Britain and Israel realize that a Commander who leads their country into war without a reason and without a plan, and causes the death of their fellow citizens, no longer deserves to lead, and indeed has shown himself an unfit commander.

How many more American soldiers have to be killed or maimed before the American public wakes up and impeaches George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice, and everyone else involved in dragging us into this Iraq quagmire?


Some figures, as of January 2007, according to the U.S. Department of Defense:

U.S. Soldiers Killed in Iraq: 3,021 (now over 3,500)
British Soldiers Killed: 129
Iraqi Soldiers/Police Killed: 5,965
Iraqi Civilians Killed: 70,100 - 601,000 (estimated)
Defense Contractors Killed: 665
Journalists Killed: 146
American Soldiers Wounded: 23,000

Saddam Hussein was put to death for killing 128 people.

Bush declared “Mission Accomplished” in 2003, with less than 500 American soldiers killed.

That was four years and 3,000 American deaths ago.