Obama, the Republicans, and health care reform »
Posted By Progressive 2 months, 2 weeks ago in Health & FitnessAfter the tea-partying, town-meeting-disrupting, pistol-packing mensis horribilis of August, more than a few commentators complained, as one of them put it, that “Obama should have seen it coming.” No one doubted that the current attempt to overhaul America’s uniquely wasteful and unjust system of health insurance and non-insurance would touch off the kind of demagogic, misleading attacks that have greeted every past attempt at ambitious reform, successful (Medicare) and unsuccessful (all the rest) alike.
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There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating: people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing. -- Oscar Wilde
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hyperbola2 months, 2 weeks ago
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Obama is not trying to get a health care plan worth having. Instead he is kowtowing to the oligarchs that "hired" him as their next actor. The whole "left/right" political theater is simply their way of keeping Americans dumb, docile and under control while they continue to plunder the country.
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You should have known that when you saw that the "handlers" the oligarchs put in place around Obama vetoed single-payer from the beginning. Did you really suppose that ultra- zionist insider from the corrupt "financial oligarch" circles cares about average Americans?
Reviewing President Rahm Emanuels Health Care Speech
Not to be too much of a downer, but I found Obama's speech tonight a big O-bummer. Really, other than his very important reminder that "we're all in this together," it was disappointing (although that's probably not the right word, because it implies I expected something more). And remember, while I have at times been critical of Obama, I've been very supportive of him on health care...up until tonight. Here's a list of my basic problems:
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In sum, when you couple this with the speech's fawning praise for lunatics like John McCain and Chuck Grassley and add to it the news that the White House is holding closed-door compromise meetings with corporate Democrats tomorrow, I felt like I was listening to a parsed screed by President Rahm Emanuel, not a call to arms from the Barack Obama who actually ran for president. There was lots of passionate talk about the problem, and little courage to demand a serious solution.
I mean, I seem to remember an election just a few months ago that resulted in a Democratic president, and huge Democratic majorities in Congress - and I seem to remember there was a Barack Obama who only a short while ago said geting those electoral results was the only obstacle to a full-on single payer health care system, much less a weakened public option. But again, I guess it's just too bad that after that election, President Emanuel now rules America.
http://www.propeller.com/story/2009/09/11/reviewin...-
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hyperbola2 months, 2 weeks ago
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And if you doubt that with respect to health care, perhaps you would like to consider their actions (as opposed to the pretty words) vis-a-vis Iraq. We are going to have to clean up America to a much greater extent than a "hired-hand" like Obama will do.
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The Obama Administration is Actually Increasing the US Presence in Iraq
Believe it or not, the U.S. presence in Iraq is growing under the leadership of antiwar president Barack Obama. A recent Washington Post by reporter Walter Pincus explains that when U.S. troops are "withdrawn," their jobs are taken over by......mercenaries -- the notorious "contractors," who are hired for fabulous sums of money to sustain the huge U.S. presence there.
And there are some really awful aspects of this process, including:
• The cost of the contractors is substantially higher than the cost of the soldiers they replace. (That is, the cost of the war is going up as the U.S. "scales down" its presence in Iraq)
• "Where private guards replaced soldiers, many more guards were needed to do the same job." So the numbers and cost of the U.S. presence is going upward, not downward.
• The new contractors are overwhelmingly "third-country nationals" employed by U.S. corporations under contract from the U.S. Defense and State departments. That is, with unemployment at 60% in many places around Iraq, the new jobs created by these contractors are not giving employment to unemployed Iraqis.
• And just to underscore that this is not a process of de-escalating a U.S. presence, the "third country nationals" brought in to replace U.S. soldiers are required to speak English, but they need not speak Arabic. So we learn that the process of cultural imperialism is continuing--there is no effort to have the U.S. presence become blended into Iraqi civil society. In fact, this and so many other actions work to coerce the Iraqis into integrating into the globalized U.S. political economy.
Just another glimpse of the long term effort of the U.S. government to colonize Iraq.
http://www.propeller.com/story/2009/09/14/the-obam...
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Progressive2 months, 2 weeks ago
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Hendrik Hertzberg uses his valuable real estate in the front of the New Yorker this week to attack what he calls the “heart” and “brain” of the this summer’s town-hall movement: conservative media hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, and Michael Savage. Actual Republican Party leaders, Hertzberg says, have become followers of this group. According to Hertzberg, Joe Wilson, the Republican who shouted “You lie!” during Obama’s prime-time address, did the president a favor by showing how futile bipartisanship has become, thanks to the new structure of the opposition party. “A bill that reflects a necessary compromise among Democrats,” he writes, “is bound to be stronger than on that reflects an unnecessary compromise between Democrats and Republicans.”
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NoWayMan2 months, 2 weeks ago
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"A bill that reflects a necessary compromise among Democrats is bound to be stronger than one that reflects an unnecessary compromise between Democrats and Republicans."
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and Obama should be strategizing in this direction, since up til now the cons, as a group, have proven over and over that they're not interested in making this happen. so f*ck'm.
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