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 __________________

On Conspiracy Theories

From the dynamite Bradblog who just won't quit trying to get the facts out! And you thought when they said "conspiracy theory," they didn't know exactly how much of a conspiracy. And, yes, I was watching attentively on Election Eve 2004 when Kerry was ahead everywhere before I decided to turn in groggily at 2:00 AM. (And I remember hearing double agent Dick Morris' on-camera testimony too - although no one wants to talk about it today in the mainstream media which gives a large megaphone to the rational voices of Rushedboy and O'Lielly.) (Emphasis marks added (and please pardon the occasional large type!) - Ed.)

Guest Editorial by Ernest A. Canning "We killed the President that day. You could have been a part of it - you know, part of history. You should have stayed. It was safe. Everything was covered in advance. No arrests, no real newspaper investigation. It was all covered, very professional." - Sworn deposition testimony provided in Hunt vs. Liberty Lobby, Inc. by Marita Lorenz, Fidel Castro's former girlfriend and CIA asset, recounting what her CIA recruiter, convicted Watergate burglar Frank Sturgis, told her after the assassination of JFK. Sibel Edmonds' recent on-air revelation that, prior to 9/11, Osama bin Laden was relied upon by the Bush administration as a Central Asian asset, added one more disturbing piece to an incomplete puzzle, which, as could be expected, lent itself to a number of comments asking whether 9/11 was "an inside job?" These, in turn, were summarily dismissed in another comment as "conspiracy theory." Where does this concept of dismissing inquiry into momentous events as "conspiracy theory" come from?... If a police officer undertook to investigate an unsolved murder, relying upon circumstantial evidence supporting the theory that a husband had hired a hit man to kill his wife, no one would dream of dismissing that investigation as a "conspiracy theory." No one would suggest that the officer be fitted for a "tin foil hat." Yet, compelling evidence presented by Mark Lane, not only in his book, Plausible Denial, but in a federal courtroom - evidence which convinced a jury that the CIA killed JFK; a compelling statistical analysis provided by Steven Freeman, Ph.D. (and Joel Bleifuss) in Was the 2004 Election Stolen? augmented by the work of investigative journalists, including many pieces posted here at The BRAD BLOG, all of which raise the question as to whether the official count in the 2004 Presidential Election was the product of widespread irregularities and/or wholesale electronic vote-flipping, and scientific evidence which suggests that controlled demolition may provide a plausible explanation for the sudden (8.7 second) collapse of WTC-7 into its own footprint, are all swept aside with the mere utterance of the words "conspiracy theory." The word “theory” as a method of scientific study merely refers to “systematically organized knowledge applicable in a relatively wide variety of circumstances, especially a system of assumptions, accepted principles, and rules of procedure devised to analyze, predict, or otherwise explain the natural behavior of a specified set of phenomena.” (Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary). As used by the corporate media, “conspiracy theorist” is a derogatory label exclusively intended to dismiss any and all who challenge “official reality.” It is applied not only to those who present evidence in support of a theory which challenges official reality but even to those who feel it appropriate to seek an investigation to test whether there is empirical data that supports the official reality. Freeman's Was the 2004 Election Stolen? provides a classic example. On Election Day 2004, Freeman, a member of the teaching faculty of the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate Program of Organizational Dynamics, experienced a moment straight out of George Orwell's 1984: The laptop screen projected a Kerry victory in nearly every battleground state, in many cases by substantial margins. But on TV James Carville was saying that Kerry needed to ‘draw an inside straight' . . . The Slate Web site indicated a narrow edge to Kerry in Florida; the networks all had Florida solidly in the Bush camp. CNN’s Web site data informed us of commanding Kerry victories in Pennsylvania and Minnesota; TV anchors told us these states were too close to call... [In] Ohio...exit polls showed Kerry with a projected victory of more than 4%....But although the networks were conservative in refusing to call the state, TV viewers were left with little doubt that Bush had won. I was perplexed and uncertain - there were voters still waiting in line in Ohio cities, uncounted provisional votes, and so on. How could the exit polls be that far off? A funny thing happened after the polls closed and Kerry's exit poll lead, in state after state, slid into the Bush column. In a manner reminiscent to the incineration of inconvenient data placed in "memory holes" by the fictional Winston Smith in 1984's Ministry of Truth, the pollsters “corrected” the exit polls in order to reconcile them with the official results. The original “uncorrected” exit poll numbers, which had been “available on CNN.com” but “never broadcast on TV” simply vanished, replaced by the “corrected” exit poll results. While adjusting the exit polls to line up with election results has long been a standard practice with such polls, the initially leaked data certainly raised eyebrows. Fortunately, alert citizens had downloaded some of that original data, thereby permitting Freeman to offer a contrasting analysis of the widely disseminated explanation for Bush's "win", as advanced by The Nation magazine’s David Corn and by Michael Barone of U.S. News & World Report (and others) which argued the discrepancy could be explained away as a difference between early exit polls and late pro-Bush voting. According to Freeman: Kerry’s lead in the polls did not decline as the day went on….The system’s polling data never tracked with the official results until the polls closed and the pollsters ‘corrected’ their exit-poll data to conform to the official count. As observed by Republican pollster, Dick Morris: So reliable are the surveys that actually tap voters as they leave the polling places that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries....To screw up one exit poll is unheard of. Instead of citing the obvious - that vast discrepancies between exit polling and the official count suggests dishonesty in a U.S. Presidential election, just as those same discrepancies are seen by our government as prima facie evidence for dishonesty in Third World countries - Morris assumed that the pollsters had "screwed up" six separate exit polls which had been performed by corporate media-funded, reputable pollsters, including Warren Mitofski, whose experience dated back to the nation’s very first use of an exit poll taken during the 1964 California Republican Primary. Morris then speculated that the exit polls were deliberately skewed "to dampen Bush turnout in the Central, Mountain, and Pacific time zones." Barrone advanced an even wilder, and absurd, speculation about a Democratic "election day project" to slam the results - this despite the prompt capitulation by John "can't-concede-fast-enough" Kerry. Freeman's approach, by contrast, was scientific. During the 2004 election, in “ten of the eleven battleground states there was a shift - that is, the official count differed from the exit-poll results - and in all ten the shift favored Bush.” The statistical odds of this occurring are one in 1,024. The discrepancies were especially acute in the key battleground states of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida where the shifts in favor of Bush were 4.9%, 6.7% and 6.5%. “Assuming that these state exit-polls had no systematic bias, the likelihood of three such statistical anomalies - dramatic differences between the official count and the exit-poll projections in Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania - occurring together and all favoring the incumbent, Bush, is about one in 660,000” - statistics which render it “impossible that the discrepancies” in these three states “could have been due to chance or random error.” While these stark disparities were not present in thousands of accurate Mitofsky-led exit polls conducted over the preceding four decades, Freeman acknowledges that, counting 2004, there were six occasions where significant discrepancies arose in U.S. Presidential elections, the previous five being the general elections of 1988 and 1992, along with the Florida 2000 vote, and in three Republican primaries. In each of these six incidents..., the official count benefited the mainstream Republican candidate...And, remarkably, in five out of the six elections; the candidate whose official numbers far exceeded exit-poll results was named George Bush. Freeman's analysis has essentially been ignored by a corporate media which widely disseminated but, in large measure, failed to challenge the unscientific speculations advanced by Morris, Barrone and Corn precisely because, unlike Freeman, their "conspiracy speculations" did not challenge "official reality." With the "correction" of the exit polls, the position of corporate media pundits became analogous to that of 1984's Winston Smith as he was overwhelmed by the logic of his tormentor, the burley inner Party member, O’Brien, while tortured inside the Ministry of Love. Winston tried to cling to a furtive memory; information he once held in his hands - a photograph establishing the innocence of three high members of the Party who had been executed for treason - a photo that Winston, himself, had fed down a memory hole. O’Brien derided Winston; told him he was “mentally deranged;” that his very thought of the photo was a “delusion.” Winston would eventually succumb, ultimately accepting that there was no reality but what the Party said was real. As the official results poured in, in 2004, they overwhelmed the unofficial exit polls, elevating the official count into the "official reality".

And therein lies the real power behind the corporate media's use of the words "conspiracy theorist." There is a chilling effect. Even otherwise honest journalists are inclined to avoid challenging the "official reality" pertaining to momentous events out of fear that they will be branded as "conspiracy theorists." Anyone who challenges official reality is a "conspiracy theorist."Conspiracy theorists are "mentally deranged." Of course, if that is not enough to dissuade the desire to ferret out the truth, there's always President Obama's "we have to look forward and not back" - the excuse offered to evade the obligation to investigate the past administration's war crimes. Those too, as time moves on, and if no accountability is brought, will no doubt become little more than easily-dismissed "conspiracy theories" in the parlance of the corporate media - utterly marginalized in contrast to the "official reality", sure to set in for good as the "official" historical record. Epilogue:

Lest this opinion piece be misconstrued, my purpose is not to advance, as fact, any of the theories that provide the basis for this editorial. I have as much problem with self-described "truthers" who leap to a conclusion on the basis of incomplete factual data as I do with those who would shut the door on scientific inquiry of pivotal events through resort to the "conspiracy theorist" label. It is the essence of the scientific method that all theories, including the "official" version of an event, should be subjected to objective examination; modified or even abandoned if the results of that examination warrant an alteration of the original theory. === Ernest A. Canning has been an active member of the California State Bar since 1977 and has practiced in the fields of civil litigation and workers' compensation at both the trial and appellate levels. He graduated cum laude from Southwestern University School of Law where he served as a student director of the clinical studies department and authored the Law Review Article, Executive Privilege: Myths & Realities. He received an MA in political science at Cal State University Northridge and a BA in political science from UCLA. He is also a Vietnam vet (4th Infantry, Central Highlands 1968).

Suzan __________________________