Yesterday morning, eight doctors, lawyers and other activists stood up for single payer health care. We stood up during a hearing before the Senate Finance Committee. The hearing was only to hear from the insurance industry, pharmaceutical companies, HMO’s and business interests. They did not want to hear about a real national health care plan.

I was one of the eight.

We stood up to the private health insurance industry, to the corporate power in Congress and demanded a single payer national health care plan where everybody is in and nobody is out. We want a plan that ensures the peoples right to choose their own doctor, hospital and health care treatment. We want a plan that will control costs – something that cannot be done unless the insurance industry, HMO’s and pharmaceutical companies are challenged.

The Senate Finance Committee which has taken millions from the insurance industry, HMO’s, pharmaceutical industry – those that profit from health care in America only scheduled their donors to speak. It was pay to play on display in Washington, DC before the corrupt Senate Finance Committee.

In the Arctic, sea ice is melting. In the United States, houses are foreclosing.

And in Washington, the Senate is becoming a real-life Bermuda Triangle for progressive agendas.

Proposals for major limits on carbon emissions aren’t getting far in the Senate, where the corporate war on the environment has an abundance of powerful allies.

As for class war, it continues to rage from the top down. Last week, a dozen Democratic senators teamed up with Republicans to defeat a bill that would have allowed judges to reduce mortgages in bankruptcy courts.

President Obama supported that bill. But as the Associated Press reported, he was “facing stiff opposition from banks” and “did little to pressure lawmakers” on behalf of the measure. The Senate “defeated a plan to spare hundreds of thousands of homeowners from foreclosure through bankruptcy.”

President Obama’s 2009 supplemental spending request to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is currently before Congress. The House Appropriations Committee will “mark up” (finalize its version) of a war funding bill at a committee hearing on May 7th. The full House will likely vote on the bill the following week. The objective is to have the bill finalized and to Obama for signature by Memorial Day.

President Obama is seeking an additional $75.8 billion in war funds for this fiscal year. It is possible that Congress will add to this amount before final passage. If Congress enacts Obama’s request, total war spending will come to $144.6 billion for Fiscal Year 2009 (which ends on September 30, with Fiscal Year 2010 beginning on October 1). This compares to the $186 billion war spending in 2008. Obama’s proposed war budget for 2010 is $130 billion.

At first glance, it is easy to conclude that the proposed 22 percent reduction in war spending from 2008 to 2009 represents a significant shift in war strategy and is indicative of a drawing down of the twin wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sadly, such a conclusion would be wrong.

American Indian activist and political prisoner Leonard Peltier has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for the sixth consecutive year. Peltier has been an inmate in the United States federal prison system since 1976, so the fact that he has earned the distinction of a Nobel nomination every year since 2004 is especially remarkable.

Peltier's unlawful conviction in the deaths of two FBI agents in South Dakota has long been internationally decried as one of the most blatant injustices in recent United States legal history. In the aftermath of his trial, federal prosecutors were openly excoriated for having manufactured evidence against Peltier, for having withheld exculpatory evidence, and also for having coerced witnesses into giving false testimony.

Lynn Crooks, Assistant Special Prosecutor in Peltier's trial, admitted to a federal judge that 'the government does not know who killed its agents, nor do we know what participation Leonard Peltier may have had in it.'

And yet Leonard Peltier has remained a prisoner for more than 33 years. Fifty five United States Senators and Congressional Representatives (including Democrats and