libbyliberal's blog

Rep. Dennis Kucinich appeared on CSpan recently. I found myself asking why Kucinich is in such a philosophical minority in Washington when everything he says addresses the serious economic and physical realities grinding down the American citizenry. Kucinich speaks with passion, clarity and empathy.

Kucinich admits that Obama received an “unmitigated mess” from George Bush. But he contends Washington is now too paralyzed to restore justice. He warns that we can’t afford to get gridlocked by partisanship. “The country is collapsing!” he declares. Kucinich maintains that health care is one of a three-pronged crisis. Our broken political system is not providing jobs, universal health care or saving homes for its citizens.

Our administration and Congress are not holding insurance companies accountable for the price gouging happening and even profoundly escalating right now. Kucinich believes the proposed health care bill has a CENTRAL FLAW. It is LOCKING IN PRIVATIZATION. There is no process for control of premiums. Kucinich’s rhetoric does not hold back. He calls this government a “cash cow” for corporations. It is providing corporations such as insurance companies with a “license to steal.” At one point he warns of us becoming “slaves on a health insurance plantation.”

If anyone starts giving you a hard time about “not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good” and how important it is for our Congress people to go ahead and hold their noses while they vote for the President’s Trojan horse of a health care bill in the name of incremental progress, consider some serious warnings made by Dr. Marcia Angell (first woman editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine and currently a lecturer at Harvard Medical School) in a recent Bill Moyers' interview.

Dr. Angell asserts this bill is a step in the WRONG, not right, direction. She laments the profound lack of leadership shown by the President for health care reform. She warns that this bill would pour hundreds of billions of dollars of public money into health care companies in the next decade. At the same time, our hapless citizenry will be forced to pay whatever exorbitant rates will be levied by avaricious, profit making insurers. Given the obscene, record-making profits 4 of the 5 largest insurance megacorporations made last year, in these very troubled times for the rest of us, Dr. Angell’s warning deserves serious consideration:

Dr. Angell:

Fighting for the wrong things and too little, too late. He [Obama] gave away the store at the very beginning by compromising. Not just compromising, but caving in to the commercial insurance industry and the pharmaceutical industry. And then he stood back for months while the thing just fell apart. Now he's fighting, but he's fighting for something that shouldn't pass. Won't pass and shouldn't pass.

I find myself more and more bewildered and angered over the total disenfranchisement of Single Payer-Expanded Medicare for All advocates in the official national health care reform conversation.

A recent article by Robert Kuttner is entitled “The Cure That Dares Not Speak Its Name.” The cure for our broken health care system implied by Kuttner? Anti-commercialism.

Every other industrial nation has a system of health care coverage that offers universal coverage. Kuttner points out as examples Canada with its single payer program, England with its National Health Service and Germany with its non-profit insurance plans. In an international scoring of quality health care, we rank a pathetic 37th and yet costs for our system are 5% more of the GDP than the second costliest system's.

One day last week I had fallen asleep before the TV only to be awakened many hours later by the rantings of some maniac named Larry railing on about the continued existence of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. This was during an early morning newscast which normally consists of overly impassioned chatter about the state of the weather.

Subsequently I have read that it was ol’ Larry’s first week with Channel 11 and he was channeling as much of Stern, Limbaugh, Beck and O’Reilly bad-boyness as he could possibly muster. It woke me up in a hurry. Channel 11 is fighting Fox for some of its audience I would venture. The Fox-ification of more of the mainstream media? Oy vey.

At one point during the rant Mendte was proclaiming he was ANTI-IDIOCY. Given the rhetoric that had awakened me, this struck me as terribly ironic.

Been channelling some political passion into haiku format, or more accurately, "senryu". (fyi-senryu is identical to haiku form, but addresses human foibles and society rather than nature)

Any more offerings welcome!

I call them "hai-copes".

----------------------
Soldiers’ Soon Enough Epiphany

Needing illusion,
we trust one cares there on high
brass totem. Dream on.

----------------------
U.S. War Games

Survival crap shoots.
Millions die to entertain
D.C.'s power-deranged.

According to M.J. Rosenberg, Senior Fellow, Media Matters, Obama’s laudable willingness to use non-“sledgehammer” diplomacy on Iran is being scuttled by an AIPAC-driven, hawkish -- especially during an election year -- and heretofore (re health care, at least) glacially moving Congress.

Kudos to the rational inclinations of Obama on this. Wouldn’t it be refreshing for the United States NOT to resort to extreme punishment first, last, and always with the slightest provocation or, more often, projected provocation onto others? Y’know, the old offensive defense Bush made so popular ... prevalent ... hellishly devastating ... homicidal ... genocidal.

But, alas, it is an election year, and xenophobic faux-nationalism plays so well politically. What’s a politician to do? Create untoward suffering on innocent citizens, and sully and/or surrender whatever last remnant of his or her soul has managed to survive in the national brothel a/k/a the United States Congress?

Or -- gasp -- make AIPAC unhappy? Play career-suicidal counterpoint to strident war-mongering, while incidentially saving lives or the quality of lives for innocent millions?

In Last Rites for the USA, Cindy Sheehan addresses the substantial erosion of U.S. democracy by oligarchy. The freshest hell, as Sheehan sees it -- an ultimate tipping point, she claims, in tearing away ANY illusion of democracy -- is the Supreme Court’s recent aggressive decision to expand “personhood” rights and protections of corporations in relation to campaign financing.

“Corporations have long held sway over our government and the soft fascism of corporate control has been running things behind the scenes.”

Sheehan points out that the oligarchs no longer need to lurk behind the “soft fascism” curtain to achieve their grotesquely ambitious goals. That had been soft fascism for decades, she contends. The corporatists presume to operate in front of the curtain now, thanks to the near unanimous, bi-partisan (or post-partisan in the darkest, Orwellian sense) cronyism -- of the across-the-moral-divide enabling of the executive, legislative and judicial branches of this, our formerly representative, democracy.

I decided to google those haunting, 14 Points of Fascism that every so often serious progressives forward to each other. I, once again, took that scary, fast, mental-clipboard inventory of America against the list. I ticked off every item as a qualifier for fascism, American style. They seemed even more entrenched at this moment in 2010 than during my last dismaying read.

This view from outside Obamaworld is that Obama is a corrupt community organizer. That is, a corrupt organizer of a corrupt and profoundly wounded national community. The lack of protection by and sense of responsibility, an "ability to respond", of an amoral "legacy" leadership is dooming what is left of our democracy and our collective and individual security.

The progressive messengers of this serious plight are clamoring for their leaders and fellow citizens to fight the seduction of corruption, denial, minimization and cronyism. These messengers are pursuing with their truth to power an intelligent, personable and eloquent president who seems to have no conscience over breaking passionate, large-scale promises for the common good that won him the election. They also are pushing against a collection of Congress people so deeply enmeshed in bribe-taking they seem to have ears only for their often out of state corporate donor "constituency" at the critical expense of their oath-taken geographical one, as well as a sustained fear of a corporate-owned, reckless and shallow media always willing to negatively spin all that is anti-corporate.

Big news!! Massachusetts didn’t vote for the Democratic candidate, Martha Coakley.

It had been reported that Ms. Coakley had flown a week before the election to Washington to enjoy a fundraising dinner with big pharma and private health insurance industry lobbyists. Do you think that might have angered a few citizens of Massachusetts?

Coakley was ready to pull her Democratic craven crony corporate capitalist weight when elected to help pass a health care bill that is an insult to any American who can manage to find out the real Trojan horse pro-craven crony corporate capitalism nature of this give-away bill.

Months ago I came across the reported daily income of Helmsley of UnitedHealth. He was “earning” $57,000 a day. 45,000 American citizens a year die prematurely from lack of health care. Every other industrial nation has universal health care. But not America. And this clown, this insurance vendor exec, is pulling in this kind of money during our craven corporate capitalism caused recession!

So let's examine the Senate bill, that Obama heavily PREFERS, that faux-progressives are touting as worthy of progressive support and worthy of loyal cronyism against the hypocritical corporatist Republicans and irrationally anti-government instead of anti-corporate teabaggers. (That is a massive amount of BLIND cronyism they are calling on):

The Senate bill depends on healthcare funding from middle class with excise taxes on comprehensive plans, sabotaging their sustainability.

The Senate bill offers no public option, not even a toehold.

The Senate bill mandates that people without insurance purchase it or be penalized. This assures dramatic escalation of profits for the companies, and recruits the IRS to monitor the citizenry. Instead of ensuring monitoring of corporate abuses, time, energy, taxpayer money is to be directed to monitoring and penalizing a struggling citizenry.

The Senate bill pretends to enforce pre-existing condition protections but does not rein in exorbitant pricing which will prevent patients from purchasing care when they technically are eligible but not economically capable of care.

The Senate bill subsidizes fewer of the poor than the House plan.

The Senate plan dooms citizens to state control of exchanges. Cheapskate states can prevent the poor from subsidies.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-kuttner/a-wake-up-call_b_426467.html

Robert Kuttner on the present, messy status of Obamacare:

How could the health care issue have turned from a reform that was going to make Barack Obama ten feet tall into a poison pill for Democratic senators? Whether or not Martha Coakley squeaks through in Massachusetts on Tuesday, the health bill has already done incalculable political damage and will likely do more.

Kuttner lays out what Obama's and Rahm's sweetheart-dealmaking with the corporations has done to the career of, ironically, one of the more liberal senators:

It has already brought down Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, a fighter for health care and other reforms far more progressive than President Obama's. Dorgan championed Americans' right to re-import cheaper prescription drugs from Canada, a popular provision that the White House blocked. Dorgan, who is one of the Senate's great populists, began the year more than twenty points ahead in the polls of his most likely challenger, North Dakota Governor John Hoeven. By the time he decided to call it a day, Dorgan was running more than twenty points behind. The difference was the health bill, which North Dakotans oppose by nearly two to one. The fact that Dorgan's own views were much better than the Administration's cut little ice. He was fatally associated with an unpopular bill.

Before I share some incredible quotes from a profound article by Ted Rall, I just heard talk on MSM news about the depressing jobs situation. WH response is “muted” the reporter said. A clip of Obama was then shown speaking with “respectful” concern, reminding us of the slow trek to recovery. After all, all that money gone. That darn deficit.

Let’s see, best he had for Main Street was “Cash for Clunkers” and asks us now to use whatever is left of our “audacity of hope” for those eventual “green jobs”. Right! Best for Wall Street, however, here’s all our cash along with the national credit card and the power also to continue unencumbered to shake down the broken citizenry. Knock yourselves out as much and long as you guys want!

Obama is the post-partisan president, after all. The ultimate vortex of cronyism of the bi-partisan political and financial elites. A surreal amorality, since he is so sincere looking and the MSM is so craven in its blockade of insight into reality. But you gotta admit, Obama does a really well acted sound bite. He does calm and concern, the appearance of it, very well. If it's good television, it will ride. But the buck doesn't stop with you, Mr. President -- stop saying that -- you pass the buck on to the plutocracy. Each and every buck for all your crony plutocrats. Your headwaiter role with them continues.

Now, to Ted Rall in his article in Common Dreams, Rall mourns the loss of a spirit of bravery of the citizenry. The shift, 9/11.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/12/31Since 9/11, We've Embraced Our Inner Coward

[Several websites where the following info was drawn from listed at end.]

Where We are Now – A Summary

The Senate Bill will go through the “reconciliation process” with the House version that was passed in November.

Both houses will vote on it and the President will try to sign off on it by the time of the State of the Union address in late January.

The President is leaning it is said toward the Senate rather than House bill, especially in terms of the funding. [tax on middle class insurance benefits rather than on wealthy income.]

We are about to lose another freedom. The right to die uninusured. The right to die uninsured, that is, without paying a fine for being uninsured because we cannot afford the insurance that would keep us alive.

I think we can safely categorize this as an “insult to injury.” You thought you and your fellow citizens were entitled to humane universal health care, single-payer-Medicare-for-All-suckers? Think again. You can go ahead and die without insurance, but don’t think you can get away with that without having paid a fine for not having the insurance you can’t afford that might have saved you!

Am I the only one confounded and angered by this situation? Recently Jim Hightower referred to Obama as the President of Absurdistan. The “audacity of amorality”?

The new plan is being touted as a favor to us in these times that try one’s sanity as well as one’s soul. The so-called health care reform mandate rule that every citizen must be a customer of a mega-corporation-vendor or pay a fine to the IRS is actually a colossal super-gift to the medical corporate complex by the Prez and the super-majorities in the Congress. Millions of involuntary customers! Was it valiant whistleblower Wendell Potter who first called the faux reform the “Health Insurance Enrichment Act”?

http://www.counterpunch.org/redmond12232009.html

Helen Redmond in a scalding analysis of presidential and congressional (especially on the part of supposedly “progressive” Democrats) betrayal of the US citizenry with the health care fiasco now being hypocritically and dangerously heralded as “historic reform” writes:

“Millions believed Barack Obama’s campaign pledge to create a humane, affordable and inclusive health care system and rein in the copious abuses of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. On the campaign trail, Obama proclaimed these corporations were greedy and more concerned about profits and patents than the needs of patients. Some thought because Obama was a former supporter of a single-payer system, he might just enact it when he won the Whitehouse. How wrong they were.

No one could have predicted how much influence and control over health care reform President Obama would give to the very corporate interests killing and bankrupting the American people, and who just a few months earlier, had fiercely attacked and called out by name. No one could have predicted the scale and scope of the sell out. It is truly astounding given the soaring rhetoric of before and the cruel and sleazy reality of now.”

“The cruel and sleazy reality of now."

I worked for Obama at the eleventh hour. I was one of the 80 million who responded to his invitation to hope. What he is doing right now along with a corporate-prostituted Congress? It is cruel and it is sleazy. It is anti-democracy. It cries out for citizen awareness, outrage and pushback!