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

Pennsylvania is the another front in the war on women.

As we saw with 2011’s targeted regulation of abortion providers (TRAP) bill, the Republican-dominated Pennsylvania legislature routinely ignores protests from medical associations and professionals in passing bad-faith bills that politicize and endanger women’s health.

Now, Republican Gov. Tom Corbett, already suffering low approval ratings in large part because of a significant gender gap, is poised to sign HB 818. The bill intrudes on the free market by prohibiting private insurance companies that plan to sell health-care plans through Pennsylvania’s forthcoming state health insurance exchange from covering abortion, even in cases of medical emergency, health of the mother, and severe fetal anomaly.

Even more troubling, lawmakers supporting HB 818 are attempting to deceive the public by offering a non-solution: allowing Pennsylvania women to purchase abortion-specific riders from private companies not participating in the exchange.

The problem is that such abortion riders do not appear to exist.

HB 818

Even though the state exchange, established by the Affordable Care Act (ACA), won’t be set up until next year, Pennsylvania lawmakers have been working on versions of the bill since Corbett’s first week in office back in 2011.

The bill’s sponsor, state Rep. Donna Oberlander (R-Clarion/Armstrong), insists HB 818 simply underscores existing policy that already prohibits tax dollars from funding abortion. There’s no reason for the “small government” party to propose redundant legislation—except, of course, as cover for something else.

HB 818 doesn’t address tax dollars, which are indeed not allowed to be used to fund abortions (except in cases of rape, incest, and endangerment to the life of the mother) under the Hyde Amendment, Pennsylvania state law, and terms set within the ACA. What it will do is require businesses participating in the health-care exchange to offer sub-standard insurance plans to women—which, in turn, means the hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvania women expected to purchase coverage through the exchange won’t be able to spend their own money to purchase industry-standard medical care through the exchange.

No Health Exceptions

Tinkering with the free market in order to bully insurance companies into economically hijacking working women’s constitutional right to abort an unwanted pregnancy is bad enough, but HB 818 goes even further, restricting physician-advised terminations of wanted pregnancies complicated by unexpected disease or accident.

Pennsylvania lawmakers explicitly rejected an amendment to add health of the woman as an exception to the narrow restrictions, which only allow abortion coverage “where necessary to avert the death of the woman” and in cases of incest and rape, providing the rape victim already reported the assault to the authorities. (The fact that many victims often don’t report aside, protocol of communication between police, insurers, doctors, and patients is unclear.)

When lawmakers voted against a medical emergency amendment offered by state Sen. Judy Schwank (D-Berks), they voted against insurers covering the expense of medically advised terminations in cases when a pregnant woman faces, for example, a cancer diagnosis, diabetes, a car accident, or discovers a severe fetal anomaly.

“Let’s say a woman was pregnant [and] her water broke prematurely and the baby would not survive. She would not be able to get an abortion,” Sen. Schwank told RH Reality Check. At least, not without paying out-of-pocket for the procedure, which could cost tens of thousands of dollars.

“These are already tragic situations,” said Schwank. “These are babies that are wanted, and to have to add this anguish on to the situation. … I can’t understand why we couldn’t get this through.”

“Certainly I understand that there are extenuating circumstances,” Oberlander said in a PCN interview defending the bill. “However, [a health exception is a] loophole wide enough you can ride a semi truck through. Women experience a lot of different issues and side effects from a pregnancy.”

Seemingly frustrated with questions about the bill, Oberlander added, “It’s not rocket science.” Well, it’s not medical science, either; it’s religion-based health care influenced by special interests. Specifically, the Pennsylvania Catholic Conference, the public affairs arm of Pennsylvania’s Catholic bishops, and the Catholic dioceses of Pennsylvania lobbied hard for HB 818 and against the health amendment.

“I hear it in my colleagues,” state Sen. Vincent Hughes (D-Philadelphia/Montgomery), who has spoken out against the bill, told RH Reality Check, “the frustration that they continue to get [calls from the Catholic Conference], especially since the Affordable Care Act took care of everything in terms of public funding. No matter where it comes from, no public funding can be utilized for abortion.”

Two Democrats, state Sens. Tim Solobay of Canonsburg and Richard Kasunic of Fayette and Somerset, voted against the health amendment, which lost by two votes.

Rep. Oberlander also insists the bill is “consistent with the will of the people.” But 2011 polling conducted by Susquehanna Polling & Research reveals otherwise. When asked whether or not they support insurance companies participating in the exchange covering abortion “to protect the health of the woman,” 79 percent of respondents said yes.

What Abortion Riders?

By Chris Lilienthal, Third and State

Last week, hundreds of people from across Pennsylvania took the Capitol by storm to put faces to the debate over expanding Medicaid health coverage in Pennsylvania.

The “Lives on the Line” rally featured a number of speakers who talked about the stress of working full-time without health insurance. One woman named Petrina has diabetes, but her employer doesn’t offer health insurance. She had to fight back tears as she talked about the struggle to control her insulin. She is understandably terrified.

Mary Lou struggles to get through the days, given that she’s needed new glasses for years.

Cheryl from Washington County recently incurred thousands of dollars in ER charges and has no idea how she’ll ever pay it back.

And it goes on…

All of the speakers would have the security of knowing they can see a doctor when they get sick if Pennsylvania opted to take a federal opportunity provided by the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to expand Medicaid coverage in 2014 to adults with incomes up to 138% of the federal poverty line (roughly $32,000 for a family of four).

The federal government will pay 100% of the cost of new enrollees for the first three years—2014, 2015 and 2016—and will cover 90% of the costs by 2020.

Hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvanians will be eligible for health coverage under expansion, cutting the state’s uninsured rate in half. Acting on this opportunity will create jobs, strengthen Pennsylvania’s economy, and make its citizens healthier and more financially stable. Get all the facts about the expansion in a new fact sheet prepared by the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center (PBPC).

Despite the tremendous upside, Governor Corbett has yet to decide on whether the state will expand, and there are only a couple weeks left before the Legislature breaks for the summer. That’s why the Cover the Commonwealth Campaign (of which PBPC is a member) organized last week’s Capitol rally.

And it was a success, generating good press coverage. The Governor’s office and legislators took notice, and the crowd was fired up. But more needs to be done to keep the pressure on Harrisburg to do the right thing.

You can help by calling your state legislators at 1-800-515-8134 and the Governor at 717-787-2500. Tell them: My name is ___ and I’m calling because Pennsylvania needs to accept federal funding to expand Medicaid. Thank you.

From This in Michigan…

To This in Honduras….

In Michigan, Republican Governor Rick Snyder has appointed an “emergency manager” to take over the city of Detroit, with the powers to over-ride the votes of local citizens and the decisions and contracts made by their locally elected mayor and city council. The manager has the power to abrogate previously signed union contracts with city workers and sell city assets to pay off the city’s creditors. The new emergency manager has ordered the appraisal of the Detroit Art Institute’s world class art collection with a view to its sale.

In Honduras, its post-coup president and legislature has signed a law allowing the government to sell or lease vast tracks of lands in habited by Honduran’s indigenous tribes, to private owners to establish “charter cities”, feudal-like city states which are to establish their own laws and form of government, free of pre-existing state laws and regulations.

As a part of Honduras’s “public-private partnership”, law, capitalist business have been invited to create new business cities in the wilderness, profit paradises to be totally controlled by the businesses which own them. Thus the ese corporate vandals are pillaging the world, its land, art and culture by liquidating previously sovereign states in their favor.

Honduras will now allow consortia of private corporations to set up their own city-states, free of virtually all pre-existing law and regulation by the country’s government. The “public” component of this “public-private partnership”, the putatively democratically elected Honduran government (post the 2009 Zelaya-coup) have voted to sell (or long term lease) large tracks of their country to private corporations and their agents. Hondurans living in these feudal city-states will have no democratic control of their environment.

The rules will be set by private charters, written by the corporate agents who shall decide who shall live in their states and who shall be excluded and where they will live and work if they allowed in. (Never mind that the likely territories involved long have belonged to indigenous tribes, who have not been consulted in this massive give-away of their land, but actively oppose it.)

It’s really not much different in Michigan.

The Michigan Model: The Emergency Manager Law

Thus, in Detroit, Republic governor, Rick Snyder, using the “Emergency Manager” law passed by his Republican majority in Michigan’s legislature, has appointed his own man to take over the city of Detroit and run it. Over the past 30 years, Detroit’s tax base has disappeared as its manufacturing companies, once the pride of U.S. capitalism, has abandoned Detroit to move their factories to Third World countries where workers’ wages are so much lower, thus increasing the companies’ profit margin. Detroit and surrounding areas, once prosperous, have been turned into a new industrial wilderness, unable to pay its running expenses.

Snyder’s selected “emergency manager” is a corporate bankruptcy attorney experienced in acting in the interest of creditors not Detroit voters. Under the Emergency Manager law, Detroit’s voters simply don’t count at all.

Carrying out the same neo-liberal policy being employed in Greece, that of privatizing capital assets and services, the emergency manager law empowers empowered the manager to close down those public services, such as schools, utilities, and emergency services which he considers “wasteful”, selling or renting the assets to charter schools and private companies and the like, while setting aside all the city’s labor contracts with the workers previously providing those services. Thus teachers, emergency and service workers, find themselves divested of jobs and facing the loss of their post-employment benefits such as pensions for which their unions long fought.

The new manager now in charge of running Detroit is Washington, D.C. attorney, Kevyn Orr. One of Orr’s most provocative acts has been to demand that the Detroit Institute of Art, holder of one of the U.S.’s most respected art collections, including the irreplaceable Diego Rivera wall murals, must have all its artwork appraised with a view to selling the works on the open market for the benefit of Detroit’s creditors. (Even Republican Attorney General, Bill Schuette, has expressed his objection to this outrage.)

The Honduran Model: The “Public-Private Charter City”

Edward Snowden’s disclosures, the New York Times reported on Sunday, “have renewed a longstanding concern: that young Internet aficionados whose skills the agencies need for counterterrorism and cyberdefense sometimes bring an anti-authority spirit that does not fit the security bureaucracy.”

Whistleblower heroes like Manning prove our government cannot eradicate the ethics and free spirit of every young person it hires.

Agencies like the NSA and CIA — and private contractors like Booz Allen — can’t be sure that all employees will obey the rules without interference from their own idealism. This is a basic dilemma for the warfare/surveillance state, which must hire and retain a huge pool of young talent to service the digital innards of a growing Big Brother.

With private firms scrambling to recruit workers for top-secret government contracts, the current situation was foreshadowed by novelist John Hersey in his 1960 book The Child Buyer. When the vice president of a contractor named United Lymphomilloid, “in charge of materials procurement,” goes shopping for a very bright ten-year-old, he explains that “my duties have an extremely high national-defense rating.” And he adds: “When a commodity that you need falls in short supply, you have to get out and hustle. I buy brains.”

That’s what Booz Allen and similar outfits do. They buy brains. And obedience.

But despite the best efforts of those contractors and government agencies, the brains still belong to people. And, as the Times put it, an “anti-authority spirit” might not fit “the security bureaucracy.”

In the long run, Edward Snowden didn’t fit. Neither did Bradley Manning. They both had brains that seemed useful to authority. But they also had principles and decided to act on them.

Like the NSA and its contractors, the U.S. military is in constant need of personnel. “According to his superiors . . . Manning was not working out as a soldier, and they discussed keeping him back when his unit was deployed to Iraq,” biographer Chase Madar writes in The Passion of Bradley Manning. “However, in the fall of 2009, the occupation was desperate for intelligence analysts with computer skills, and Private Bradley Manning, his superiors hurriedly concluded, showed signs of improvement as a workable soldier. This is how, on October 10, 2009, Private First Class Bradley Manning was deployed . . . to Iraq as an intelligence analyst.”

In their own ways, with very different backgrounds and circumstances, Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden have confounded the best-laid plans of the warfare/surveillance state. They worked for “the security bureaucracy,” but as time went on they found a higher calling than just following orders. They leaked information that we all have a right to know.

This month, not only with words but also with actions, Edward Snowden is transcending the moral limits of authority and insisting that we can fully defend the Bill of Rights, emphatically including the Fourth Amendment.

What a contrast with New York Times columnists David Brooks, Thomas Friedman and Bill Keller, who have responded to Snowden’s revelations by siding with the violators of civil liberties at the top of the U.S. government.

Brooks denounced Snowden as “a traitor” during a June 14 appearance on the PBS NewsHour, saying indignantly: “He betrayed his oath, which was given to him and which he took implicitly and explicitly. He betrayed his company, the people who gave him a job, the people who trusted him. . . . He betrayed the democratic process. It’s not up to a lone 29-year-old to decide what’s private and public. We have — actually have procedures for that set down in the Constitution and established by tradition.”

Enthralled with lockstep compliance, Brooks preached the conformist gospel: “When you work for an institution, any institution, a company, a faculty, you don’t get to violate the rules of that institution and decide for your own self what you’re going to do in a unilateral way that no one else can reverse. And that’s exactly what he did. So he betrayed the trust of the institution. He betrayed what creates a government, which is being a civil servant, being a servant to a larger cause, and not going off on some unilateral thing because it makes you feel grandiose.”

In sync with such bombast, Tom Friedman and former Times executive editor Bill Keller have promoted a notably gutless argument for embracing the NSA’s newly revealed surveillance programs. Friedman wrote(on June 12) and Keller agreed (June 17) that our government is correct to curtail privacy rights against surveillance — because if we fully retained those rights and then a big terrorist attack happened, the damage to civil liberties would be worse.

What a contrast between big-name journalists craven enough to toss the Fourth Amendment overboard and whistleblowers courageous enough to risk their lives for civil liberties.

John Oliver took over as summer host for The Daily Show this week and so far so good.

No pressure…

By Jill McLaughlin, World Can’t Wait Steering Committee

Protestors in Hong Kong supported Edward Snowden.

On the afternoon of Sunday June 9th the internet was abuzz with news that the person who leaked information on the depths and true nature of the NSA spying apparatus had come forward. We learned it was Edward Snowden. It was one of those moments in history, and I think especially for people who have long been opposing and resisting the crimes of this government in the post 9/11 era, that was one of awe, hope, and fear.

We were in awe of such courage, we hoped that people would be galvanized by this and wondered if and hoped more whistle blowers would come forward, and we feared for Snowden’s safety and wellbeing. From the beginning there were many calling him a hero. Rallies to support and stand with him were quickly organized.

There too was the onslaught of slander, name calling, and calls for his prosecution by those in the highest offices of this government and mainstream media. As with Bradley Manning, whose trial incidentally started the week previously, the media and these same public officials wildly speculated as to what motivated Snowden. None of them on the mark, but as usual when government crimes are exposed painted him as some kind of creepy narcissist who did this out of purely selfish reasons or worse branded him as traitor and accused him of espionage. I can’t think of anything more narcissistic than deflecting from what is the reality of one’s wrong doing- in this case the government’s wrong doing and pointing the finger and attacking the person who brings it to light.

We have, however, Manning’s and Snowden’s own words that reveal exactly why they did what they did. It basically comes down to this-they acted with a morality based on the reality that they saw.

From his own personal testimony at a pretrial hearing we learned the impact of the U.S. war crimes on his conscience. In one instance he talks about a moment in which he is rebuffed by his superior over a matter he found objectionable and when he mentioned it to his fellow soldiers they sympathized but he found he was alone in wanting to do anything about it. He was motivated to risk everything in exposing the truth. BradlyManning.org highlighted some of Manning’s statement. Read what motivated Manning to release these files here.

Edward Snowden as well has been slandered and again there has been much conjecture as to what motivated him and he too talked to those around him in his work about what he thought was objectionable but was told to not worry about it.

Edward Snowden, too, was guided by his conscience to reveal to the world the crimes of government. In an interview in The Guardian he is very straightforward about why he decided to leak this information.

“I really want the focus to be on these documents and the debate which I hope this will trigger among citizens around the globe about what kind of world we want to live in.” He added: “My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them.”

There is one critical point that doesn’t get discussed often enough as to what also motivates people like Manning and Snowden and that is they want us to take the truths they’ve told us and act on them. What they reveal to us should shock our conscience and spur us to act to stop these crimes. The courage they exhibit through their actions should bolster our courage which brings me to this point. We cannot let the darkness of these twisted crimes by our government paralyze and immobilize us. We cannot let the repression of our government that comes down on whistle blowers silence us…it would be a disservice to them and most of all it would be a betrayal to people who suffer the most from our government’s crimes- the Guantanamo prisoners who are in their 129^th day of the hunger strike, the people of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen who are terrorized by U.S. drones, and those who are on a growing list of those targeted for assassination without due process that has no end in sight as Jeremy Scahill reveals in his film Dirty Wars: The World Is A Battlefield.

We must recognize these events as openings where we can effect change. These are moments for us to be talking with people and struggling with people to come forward to resist and oppose what they know is wrong. We must be willing to do this at times when it seems nothing is happening, no one is listening, or more challenging when it is least popular to do so. We must come to understand and help others to understand that revelations like these point to the fact that the rulers of the U.S. do not have it all sewn up. The fact that the only answer they have to dissent, resistance, and opposition to their crimes is repression says a lot about how worried they are about the genie coming out of the bottle and what contradictions their own wrong doing have created for them. What we do now in this moment matters greatly. As a recent post in Revolution Newspaper points out:

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

NSA Headquarters in Ft. Meade. Snowden’s whistleblowing has revealed much about what goes on in places like this.

As happens with so much news these days, the Edward Snowden revelations about National Security Agency (NSA) spying and just how far we’ve come in the building of a surveillance state have swept over us 24/7 — waves of leaks, videos, charges, claims, counterclaims, skullduggery, and government threats.  When a flood sweeps you away, it’s always hard to find a little dry land to survey the extent and nature of the damage.  Here’s my attempt to look beyond the daily drumbeat of this developing story (which, it is promised, will go on for weeks, if not months) and identify five urges essential to understanding the world Edward Snowden has helped us glimpse.

1. The Urge to be Global

Corporately speaking, globalization has been ballyhooed since at least the 1990s, but in governmental terms only in the twenty-first century has that globalizing urge fully infected the workings of the American state itself.  It’s become common since 9/11 to speak of a “national security state.”  But if a week of ongoing revelations about NSA surveillance practices has revealed anything, it’s that the term is already grossly outdated.  Based on what we now know, we should be talking about an American global security state.

Much attention has, understandably enough, been lavished on the phone and other metadata about American citizens that the NSA is now sweeping up and about the ways in which such activities may be abrogating the First and Fourth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution.  Far less attention has been paid to the ways in which the NSA (and other U.S. intelligence outfits) are sweeping up global data in part via the just-revealed Prism and other surveillance programs.

Sometimes, naming practices are revealing in themselves, and the National Security Agency’s key data mining tool, capable in March 2013 of gathering “97 billion pieces of intelligence from computer networks worldwide,” has been named “boundless informant.”  If you want a sense of where the U.S. Intelligence Community imagines itself going, you couldn’t ask for a better hint than that word “boundless.”  It seems that for our spooks, there are, conceptually speaking, no limits left on this planet.

Today, that “community” seeks to put not just the U.S., but the world fully under its penetrating gaze.  By now, the first “heat map” has been published showing where such information is being sucked up from monthly: Iran tops the list (14 billion pieces of intelligence); then come Pakistan (13.5 billion), Jordan (12.7 billion), Egypt (7.6 billion), and India (6.3 billion).  Whether you realize this or not, even for a superpower that has unprecedented numbers of military bases scattered across the planet and has divided the world into six military commands, this represents something new under the sun.  The only question is what?

The twentieth century was the century of “totalitarianisms.”  We don’t yet have a name, a term, for the surveillance structures Washington is building in this century, but there can be no question that, whatever the present constraints on the system, “total” has something to do with it and that we are being ushered into a new world. Despite the recent leaks, we still undoubtedly have a very limited picture of just what the present American surveillance world really looks like and what it plans for our future.  One thing is clear, however: the ambitions behind it are staggering and global.