US HEALTH CARE SYSTEM HEADED FOR COLLAPSE

With its economy stalled and its government mired in a global terror war, the US\'s already overburdened health care system-- the industrial world\'s most expensive and least equitable-- appears destined for collapse, writes Mark Sommer, internationally- syndicated columnist and radio host who directs the Mainstream Media Project. In this article for IPS, the author writes that with a ruling party captive to insurance, hospital, and drug industry lobbies, politicians are likely to do nothing to avert this looming catastrophe. Whatever minimal health care system survives the coming shakedown will need to be substantially reinforced by care based less on money and more on mutual aid built on a revived sense of community. How can communities of mutual caring be created in a society of industrial anonymity? Sommer points to the co-housing model pioneered in Northern Europe and now spreading worldwide, providing private and communal spaces and functions that accommodate needs for both privacy and community.

PROFITS OF DOOM: TO THE DESPOILERS GO THE SPOILS

If anyone outside the US harboured lingering doubts about the motives behind the invasion of Iraq, they were surely put to rest recently by the shameless profiteering of Bush administration officials and their extended financial family in both the destruction and reconstruction of Iraq, writes Mark Sommer, internationally-syndicated columnist and radio host who directs the Mainstream Media Project, a US-based effort to bring new voices and innovative ideas to the broadcast media. In this article for IPS, the author writes that the double burden of bearing massive reconstruction costs for Iraq while enduring the deconstruction of their own schools, hospitals, roads, police and fire protection can\'t help but produce severe cognitive dissonance even in the sleepwalking centre of American politics. The United States is rich, but not so rich that it can sustain both an empire and a democracy. Facing such public pressures, and never much interested in reconstructing anything Iraqi other than its oil fields, the Bush team may quietly abandon the effort altogether. We need only consider its last conquest, Afghanistan, to see a nation \'\'seduced and abandoned\'\' by an empire too busy making new messes to clean up its old.

WORLD’S HELP NEEDED TO RESTRAIN ROGUE SUPERPOWER:

In the year since the attack on the World Trade Centre, unconditional sympathy for the US in its time of trauma has been transformed into intensely anti-American sentiment not only among distant Muslims but among close European allies, writes Mark Sommer, an author and columnist who hosts ''A World of Possibilities,'' a syndicated weekly radio programme featuring innovative approaches to long-standing global challenges.

Big Petroleum Takes Power

Supported by a Cabinet rich in energy executives, George W. Bush, who took office Saturday as President of the United States, could halt environmental progress and abandon the crucial Kyoto Protocol negotiations on curbing greenhouse gas emissions