“One million, four hundred thousand dollars a day,” said my friend Dick, as we stood on the sidewalk in front of New Mexico senator Jeff Bingaman’s Santa Fe office. “A DAY.” That’s the amount, according to a July 6 story in the Washington Post, the for-profit health care industry is spending to quash any congressional action that would allow citizens to sign up for a public health care system, let alone a single payer option along the lines of Medicare.

In the choice between a health care system that rewards waste, fraud, and denial of service and one infinitely better, they’re betting we’ll sit still while they ram the former down our throats. But we won’t – will we?

Despite what you've heard, not all restraints on what you can do are a violation of your "freedom." Sometimes your rights end where someone else's begin.

Previously, the Pencil Warrior asked the question, "what is an economy for?" - this week, he ponders the question "who is an economy for?"

The benefits of the booms of recent decades never “trickled down” to the middle and lower classes because they were not designed to. The growing gap between the very rich and everyone else was a signal that a different kind of economy was now in place, but the big picture was ignored by self-serving Wall Street interests and a complicit news “industry.” Nowhere was the most fundamental question asked: “What is an economy for?”

Whether from a desire to preserve ill-gotten riches, avoid prosecution, or simply to save face, the perpetrators of the hog-wild deregulation that’s wrecked the world economy have designated a new scapegoat, designed to hoodwink us into thinking it was all the fault of “the liberals” for thinking regular citizens deserve a fair shake in securing housing loans.

This moment in history is remarkable in that nearly everyone on the planet understands, on one level or another, that familiar systems have broken down and fundamental change is underway. It will now be more crucial than ever that we tune out the propaganda urging us to maintain the status quo.

A reader’s e-mailed response to August 7th’s Pencil Warrior illustrated the impasse many Americans have reached on the issue of corporate power. “I hope you tell us how to exercise some meaningful control over the abuses you describe,” read the message from Albuquerque.

Today our world is reeling from the effects of all manner of profound challenges. Crashing economies. Climate change. Energy shortages. Increasing hunger and thirst. Threats of epidemic disease. The snowballing effects of environmental destruction. A widening abyss between the “haves” and the “have-nots,” and the increasingly deadly competition for the resources that support both economies and life itself. As Dave Wheelock, The Pencil Warrior, notes, many of these problems can be traced back to a single root cause: corporate power.

Normally I keep the business of this column above that of debunking obvious oil industry PR. I give my readers credit for seeing through such obviously self-serving – and bogus – stunts as British Petroleum’s new translation of their familiar BP logo to mean “Beyond Petroleum” or Chevron’s proclaimed new emphasis on “corporate responsibility,” “protecting the environment,” and “human energy.” No matter how much giant energy corporations dress up their pigs, they still tend to let off a pronounced barnyard aroma.