A "Fool's Errand" Guaranteed as "Moderates" (NOT) Are Exposed

A choice between the crazies and the corrupt is not much of a choice.

I am just enormously enamored of Brad and his Bradblog, and if I weren't also lazy (not really, but I'm working on a long essay based on Russ Baker's (Bush) Family of Secrets which will be much more complete as a compelling argument the longer I work on it), I wouldn't run as much of Brad's latest as I do below. The content of his blog makes me hopeful that if reporters of integrity can once again be heard clearly throughout the U.S., that maybe, just maybe, we can stop this onrushing spiral to the end of our existence as a decent place to live, democracy and sometime world leader for promoting what used to be thought of positively as the American Dream. (Emphasis marks and some editing were inserted - Ed.)

[The effort to satisfy both corporate greed and the health care needs of our people is a fool's errand.]

This back-room deal was, in large measure, cooked up by Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) and Sen. Charles "I-killed-the-death-panels" Grassley (R-IA) inside the corporate-occupied confines of the Senate Finance Committee - a development that should surprise no one given the Washington Post's report that the health and insurance lobby "gave nearly $170 million to federal lawmakers in 2007 and 2008, with 54 percent going to Democrats..." An additional $15.3 million was doled out to federal lawmakers between April and June of this year by the health care sector.

Wing-Nut Mobs Provide Cover for Obama/Baucus Health Care Betrayal

Guest blogged by Ernest A. Canning

In the final analysis, the ideological differences between Republicans and the corporate/controlling sector of the Democratic party are relatively narrow and insignificant as compared to the bi-partisan link to corporate wealth and power - a link both share with the corporate-owned, mainstream media.

In 2008 it was the insanity that was the Bush/Cheney flirtation with fascism. Today, it's imaginary "death panels" and the undereducated, easily manipulated wing-nut mobs sent to shut down one of the oldest forms of American democracy - the town hall meeting.

These provide the perfect cover. They permit the more gifted corporate Democrats, for example Barack Obama, to seduce the great masses of working stiffs who make up the American electorate with soaring, but ultimately deceptive, rhetoric; producing brief euphoria on the eve of the last election, followed by no real substantive change.

As the corporate media misdirects focus on brown shirt-like disruptions at the town halls, the real "death panels" - the corporate profiteers and their bought-and-paid-for politicians - hammered out a pseudo-reform package that will perpetuate a corrupt, dysfunctional and deadly health care system which kills more than 18,000 Americans each year simply because they can't afford coverage and countless more when carriers refuse to authorize vital, life-saving procedures... A Business Week piece, "The Health Insurers Have Already Won” reported: "The carriers have succeeded in redefining the terms of the reform debate to such a degree that no matter what specifics emerge in the voluminous bill Congress may send to President Obama this fall, the insurance industry will emerge more profitable."

This back-room deal was, in large measure, cooked up by Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) and Sen. Charles "I-killed-the-death-panels" Grassley (R-IA) inside the corporate-occupied confines of the Senate Finance Committee - a development that should surprise no one given the Washington Post's report that the health and insurance lobby "gave nearly $170 million to federal lawmakers in 2007 and 2008, with 54 percent going to Democrats..." An additional $15.3 million was doled out to federal lawmakers between April and June of this year by the health care sector.

While "30...lawmakers [involved in drafting] health-care legislation have financial holdings in the industry, totaling nearly $11 million worth of personal investments" and while Grassley has certainly collected tidy sums from all sectors of the health care industry, Baucus is the number one recipient of health insurance lobby campaign funds.

Huffington Post exposed an internal White House memo which showed that the President entered a back-room deal with the pharmaceutical industry "to oppose any congressional efforts to use the government's leverage to bargain for lower drug prices or import drugs from Canada."

This was followed late Sunday evening by a revelation that the White House was poised to abandon the "public option."

During a recent appearance on Democracy Now, Dr. Howard Dean, the former DNC chairman observed:

72 percent of the American people, including more than 50 percent of Republicans, believe that they ought to have the choice between a public or a private system. This is not a liberal-conservative thing. This is whether you’re going to vote with the health insurance companies or whether you’re going to vote for what 72 percent of your constituencies want.

In light of the numbers, there is only one word to describe these back-room deals - betrayal!

Perhaps the time has come for Americans, this writer included, to stop accepting the lesser-evil electoral choice and to start paying greater attention to independents like Ralph Nader, beginning with his powerful Aug. 14, 2009 appearance on Democracy Now!.

A choice between the crazies and the corrupt is not much of a choice.

Epilogue: In an Aug. 16, 2009 New York Times editorial, President Obama writes: "In the end, this isn't about politics. This is about people's lives and livelihoods."

I would dare to go one step further, Mr. President. This is about whether we value the health and very lives of our people above the obscene wealth of a few insurance carrier CEOs and their Wall Street investors.

The history of the corrupt, dysfunctional and deadly U.S. health care system; the repeated failures of expensive "hybrid" plans which simply pour public monies into the coffers of the for-profit carriers by way of subsidies, reveals that the effort to satisfy both corporate greed and the health care needs of our people is a fool's errand.

The back-room deals you and Senator Baucus cut with the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries reveal that you have no right to label what you are doing as "reform." And you know this to be true, Mr. President.

When you were simply a member of the Illinois state legislature, you supported single-payer, which you concede is the only system that would provide coverage for every American. But that was before you envisioned your place in the White House and recognized the corporate monies it would take to get there.

So I'm sorry, Mr. President. I don't buy "this isn't about politics." It goes to the core of American politics - the politics of corporate wealth and power.

UPDATE 08/17/09: An Aug. 17, 2009 front page article in The New York Times, “'Public Option' in Health Plan May be Dropped” by Sheryl Gay Stolberg, reveals how the corporate media has conflated the health insurance industry-funded, wing-nut mobs into an excuse for describing “betrayal” as “compromise” - justified because the “’public option’ . . . emerged as a flashpoint for anger and opposition.”

Stolberg conveniently forgets that a June 2009 NBC/Wall Street Journal poll revealed that 76% of all Americans support a "public option." A Feb. 2009 New York Times/CBS News poll [PDF] revealed that 59% of all Americans favored a national health care system. A Feb. 2009 Grove Insight Opinion Research poll [PDF] found that 60% of all Americans favor Medicare for All, the single-payer concept embodied in H.R. 676.

What we are seeing is a classic case of perception management by the corporate-owned, mainstream media. The same media, which inundates prime time news hours with wing-nut, town hall protests, failed to so much as mention that, in the span of one week, thirteen single-payer advocates were arrested for protesting their exclusion from the discussions of health care "reform" taking place in the Baucus-led Senate Finance Committee.

Indeed, as I noted in "Single-Payer and the 'Democracy Deficit,'" the words "single-payer" are rarely mentioned by the corporate media, MSNBC providing the occasional against-the-grain exception. The corporate media essentially ignored the large July 30, 2009 single-payer protest in Washington DC, staged as part of the celebration of the 40th Anniversary of Medicare.

By extensive coverage of wing-nuts, the corporate media skewed reality. The "opposition" to a "public option" comes from a tiny but very vocal minority. The Democrats who entered a Faustian bargain that will perpetuate a corrupt health care system that, annually, kills nearly seven times the number of Americans who lost their lives on 9/11 are not, as the Washington Post would have us believe, "moderates."

Corruption and betrayal can, by no stretch of the imagination, be seen as a reasonable "compromise." Ernest A. Canning has been an active member of the California state bar since 1977. Mr. Canning has received both undergraduate and graduate degrees in political science as well as a juris doctor. He is also a Vietnam vet (4th Infantry, Central Highlands 1968).

Suzan __________________

All Those Surveillance Cameras Watching Y O U & Krugman Doesn't Have to Apologize

As the news of all those cameras mounted all over downtown Greensboro (to track "freedom marchers" perhaps?) gets wide publicity, you might like to consider what this means for your personal freedom. And yes, no one likes the idea of the bad guys not being monitored. (Emphasis marks added - Ed.)

Big Brother Britain has more CCTV cameras than China Britain has one and a half times as many surveillance cameras as communist China, despite having a fraction of its population, shocking figures revealed yesterday.

There are 4.2 million closed circuit TV cameras here, one per every 14 people. But in police state China, which has a population of 1.3 billion, there are just 2.75 million cameras, the equivalent of one for every 472,000 of its citizens.

Simon Davies from pressure group Privacy International said the astonishing statistic highlighted Britain's 'worrying obsession' with surveillance.

'Britain has established itself as the model state that the Chinese authorities would love to have,' he said.

'As far as surveillance goes, Britain has created the blueprint for the 21st century non-democratic regime.

'It was not intended but it has certainly been the consequence.'

It is estimated that Britain has 20 per cent of cameras globally and that each person in the country is caught on camera an average of 300 times daily.

The Chinese Government revealed the number of cameras it has as it announced plans to expand CCTV surveillance. It began widespread installation of cameras in 2003 to bolster its system of extreme state control which hails back to the dark days of Chairman Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution.

Read more here. The government also deploys millions of security personnel, which include uniformed, official security guards who work along side police, patrolling the streets and others who bug phones, scour the internet for sensitive material and block international TV news bulletins.

Read more here.

Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist who has existed within the mainstream media for many years and written about events with honor and integrity as he actually reports the economics news as it exists and not as the Rupert Murdochs/Aerospace defense companies who rule this country's news reporting may wish. You might like to read this whole essay before moving on with your day. It's worth your while and if you have five minutes, give it a moment.

I'd like to mention that during the "pulling the plug on Grandma" argument by the rightwingnuts, I kept waiting for someone with a modicum of intelligence to mention that the current insurance-clerk-run healthcare system pulls the plug on Grandmas every day. No such luck (yet). And that "deer-in-the-headlights" quality of response which we came to know and love on Al Gore and John Kerry? Still working. (Click on the link to read it at the New York Times site with the accompanying ads.) (Emphasis marks added - Ed.)

Republican Death Trip

By PAUL KRUGMAN

August 13, 2009 Go to Columnist Page » Blog: The Conscience of a Liberal

“I am in this race because I don’t want to see us spend the next year re-fighting the Washington battles of the 1990s. I don’t want to pit Blue America against Red America; I want to lead a United States of America.” So declared Barack Obama in November 2007, making the case that Democrats should nominate him, rather than one of his rivals, because he could free the nation from the bitter partisanship of the past.

Some of us were skeptical. A couple of months after Mr. Obama gave that speech, I warned that his vision of a “different kind of politics” was a vain hope, that any Democrat who made it to the White House would face “an unending procession of wild charges and fake scandals, dutifully given credence by major media organizations that somehow can’t bring themselves to declare the accusations unequivocally false.”

So, how’s it going?

Sure enough, President Obama is now facing the same kind of opposition that President Bill Clinton had to deal with: an enraged right that denies the legitimacy of his presidency, that eagerly seizes on every wild rumor manufactured by the right-wing media complex.

This opposition cannot be appeased. Some pundits claim that Mr. Obama has polarized the country by following too liberal an agenda. But the truth is that the attacks on the president have no relationship to anything he is actually doing or proposing.

Right now, the charge that’s gaining the most traction is the claim that health care reform will create “death panels” (in Sarah Palin’s words) that will shuffle the elderly and others off to an early grave. It’s a complete fabrication, of course. The provision requiring that Medicare pay for voluntary end-of-life counseling was introduced by Senator Johnny Isakson, Republican — yes, Republican — of Georgia, who says that it’s “nuts” to claim that it has anything to do with euthanasia.

And not long ago, some of the most enthusiastic peddlers of the euthanasia smear, including Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, and Mrs. Palin herself, were all for “advance directives” for medical care in the event that you are incapacitated or comatose. That’s exactly what was being proposed — and has now, in the face of all the hysteria, been dropped from the bill.

Yet the smear continues to spread. And as the example of Mr. Gingrich shows, it’s not a fringe phenomenon: Senior G.O.P. figures, including so-called moderates, have endorsed the lie.

Senator Chuck Grassley, Republican of Iowa, is one of these supposed moderates. I’m not sure where his centrist reputation comes from — he did, after all, compare critics of the Bush tax cuts to Hitler. But in any case, his role in the health care debate has been flat-out despicable.

Last week, Mr. Grassley claimed that his colleague Ted Kennedy’s brain tumor wouldn’t have been treated properly in other countries because they prefer to “spend money on people who can contribute more to the economy.” This week, he told an audience that “you have every right to fear,” that we “should not have a government-run plan to decide when to pull the plug on grandma.”

Again, that’s what a supposedly centrist Republican, a member of the Gang of Six trying to devise a bipartisan health plan, sounds like.

So much, then, for Mr. Obama’s dream of moving beyond divisive politics. The truth is that the factors that made politics so ugly in the Clinton years — the paranoia of a significant minority of Americans and the cynical willingness of leading Republicans to cater to that paranoia — are as strong as ever. In fact, the situation may be even worse than it was in the 1990s because the collapse of the Bush administration has left the G.O.P. with no real leaders other than Rush Limbaugh.

The question now is how Mr. Obama will deal with the death of his postpartisan dream.

So far, at least, the Obama administration’s response to the outpouring of hate on the right has had a deer-in-the-headlights quality. It’s as if officials still can’t wrap their minds around the fact that things like this can happen to people who aren’t named Clinton, as if they keep expecting the nonsense to just go away.

What, then, should Mr. Obama do? It would certainly help if he gave clearer and more concise explanations of his health care plan. To be fair, he’s gotten much better at that over the past couple of weeks.

What’s still missing, however, is a sense of passion and outrage — passion for the goal of ensuring that every American gets the health care he or she needs, outrage at the lies and fear-mongering that are being used to block that goal.

So can Mr. Obama, who can be so eloquent when delivering a message of uplift, rise to the challenge of unreasoning, unappeasable opposition? Only time will tell.

And time is running out. Suzan _______________________