Jun 03 2009

Does Anyone Still Doubt Our Government Has Been Bought?

The Bank and Financial Bailout. Now Health Care. Next Climate Crisis…..and oh yeah, War Crimes.

Over the last couple of days of watching Health Care get sold down the river, I have seen a couple of Senators shake their head and make the following statement…

“We just can’t pass Single Payer.”

Well……why not? What is stopping you? You are the most powerful legislative body in the world right? The People of the United States, your constituency, overwhelmingly wants Single Payer Health Care right? The Democrats have 59 votes, so all they have to do is turn ONE Republican right? So it is not that you “don’t have the votes” because of partisanship. Because it is not about partisanship, is it? All that talk by Democrats about how it was the Republicans who were stopping the Democrats from doing what the People want, what happened to that?

So……why? Why are Senators so convinced, so adamant, that it is simply impossible to give the American people, the people who voted you into office, the people who pay your salary, the people the Constitution SAYS you are there to represent, the people who are protesting….and suffering from…our current Health Care system, what they OVERWHELMINGLY want?

Why?

You have the power to do it, you have the public support to do it, you SHOULD have the votes to do it.

So what is stopping you?

Who is it that is FORCING you to go against the Will of the People, the people who voted you into office, the people who pay your salary, the people the Constitution SAYS you are there to represent?

Isn’t that the way our government is supposed to work? We The People elect you, We The People tell you what we want and you represent US by passing legislation to get what We The People told you to get us? Isn’t that….the deal? Isn’t that the very basis of our representative government? Isn’t that what our entire system of government is supposed to be based on?

You just gave the Banks BILLIONS of The People’s money…..against the Will of The People. You got the votes, somehow, to give money to Corporations.

Now it looks like we won’t even get the compromise of a Public Option, let alone the Single Payer that The People want.

Why, Senators? Why?

By Golly, it appears as if you are NOT working for The People doesn’t it?

In fact it appears that you have stopped even pretending to honor the deal. In fact it appears that you have stopped even pretending to work for The People.

.

In fact it is now blatantly obvious that you are working for the Corporations, not The People.

.

There is no longer any doubt is there, as our government prepares to sell The people out …again….for the umpteenth time, that our government has been bought.

In fact it is no longer OUR government at all. Our government now blatantly and openly is working for the Corporations, not us.

The Insurance Corporations, the Banking Corporations…and coming up the Energy and Pollution Corporations. As the officials WE elected pass legislation that favors the Corporations.

Let’s state this clearly, shall we?

The American Government is passing Legislation that is against the interests of The American People.

It has never been more obvious.

Our Government has been bought.

And is now working against us.

(And in the case of Climate Crisis legislation, against the future of the human race!)

Our Government has been bought.

What are we going to do about it?

.

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Please go to by slinkerwink’s diary and make some calls

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  1. Photobucket

    Photobucket

  3. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06…

  4. No.

  5. pointed out some years ago that we are living in an oligarchy:

    Or perhaps the quid pro quo is more narrowly focused. Experienced Bushologists let out a collective “Aha!” when Clear Channel was revealed to be behind the pro-war rallies, because the company’s top management has a history with George W. Bush. The vice chairman of Clear Channel is Tom Hicks, whose name may be familiar to readers of this column. When Mr. Bush was governor of Texas, Mr. Hicks was chairman of the University of Texas Investment Management Company, called Utimco, and Clear Channel’s chairman, Lowry Mays, was on its board. Under Mr. Hicks, Utimco placed much of the university’s endowment under the management of companies with strong Republican Party or Bush family ties. In 1998 Mr. Hicks purchased the Texas Rangers in a deal that made Mr. Bush a multimillionaire.

    There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear, but a good guess is that we’re now seeing the next stage in the evolution of a new American oligarchy. As Jonathan Chait has written in The New Republic, in the Bush administration “government and business have melded into one big `us.’ ” On almost every aspect of domestic policy, business interests rule: “Scores of midlevel appointees . . . now oversee industries for which they once worked.” We should have realized that this is a two-way street: if politicians are busy doing favors for businesses that support them, why shouldn’t we expect businesses to reciprocate by doing favors for those politicians ? by, for example, organizing “grass roots” rallies on their behalf?

    What makes it all possible, of course, is the absence of effective watchdogs.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03…

  6. it is being used to control the people, while the corporations finish bleeding us, “to the very last drop.”

    • TomP on June 3, 2009 at 20:38
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    This is why we never get campaign finance reform.  

    • Edger on June 3, 2009 at 20:40
    • #

    According to a common progressive lament, positive democratic change is next to impossible in the United State because the Right has stripped “government” of its capacity to act. American “government” can’t really do anything anymore because it doesn’t have the resources, including money and competency, to carry out key objectives. The national and global governing class’s supposed “government-busting” ideological preference for free markets, the story goes, has hopelessly disabled American government’s ability to act. Really? Tell it to the United States’ more than two million “homeland” prisoners or to the survivors, friends, and families of the millions the American Empire has murdered, maimed, tortured, incarcerated, and uprooted in oil-rich Southwest Asia over the last the last eight years.

    The lament is exposed as a reactionary, regressive, and democracy-disabling myth when we ask WHOSE objectives American government can and supposedly can’t carry out. In the wealthiest nation on earth, the public sector lacks the money to properly fund education for all of the country’s children. It lacks the resources to provide universal health coverage, leaving 47 million American without basic medical insurance. It can’t match unemployment benefits to the numbers out of work. It lacks (claims to lack) the money to provide meaningful rehabilitation and reentry services for its many millions of very disproportionately black prisoners and ex-prisoners, marked for life with a criminal record. The list of unmet civic and social needs goes on and on.

    But behold what “our” public sector “can” pay for. American government is weak and cash-strapped when it comes to social democracy for the people but its cup runs over in powerful ways when it comes to meeting the needs of wealth, racial disparity and empire. It “can” afford to spend trillions on arch-plutocratic tax cuts rewarding the top 1 percent in the disingenuous name of “economic stimulus.” It “can” spend more on the military than on all possible enemy states combined many times over, providing massive subsidy to the high-tech corporate sector, including billions on weapons and “defense” systems that bear no meaningful relation to any real threat faced by the American people. [12] It “can” afford to incapacitate and incarcerate a greater share of its population than any nation in history and to spend hundreds of millions each year on various forms of corporate welfare and other routine public subsidies to “private” industry. And of course it “can” afford hundreds of billions and perhaps more than a trillion dollars for an invasion and occupation of distant devastated nations that pose minimal risk to the U.S.

    “We can do [all] that,” as Barack “No Peace Dividend” Obama says.

    [snip]

    “None of this should surprise us. The Democratic Party has broken with its historic conservatism, its pandering to the rich, its predilection for war, only when it has encountered rebellion from below, as in the Thirties and the Sixties.“ [26]

    After Compound F yesterday posted his excerpted quote from Paul Street’s article, I emailed Street and asked his permission to republish his article at Antemedius, and he agreed to let me do that. In it Street discusses much more than just Obama, and takes aim at the entire “Democratic”   party.

    The quote above is from that article: The Dawning Age of Obama as a Potentially Teach-able Moment for The Left. It’s quite long, but I’d recommend reading the whole thing…

  9. they are throwing at banks and certain favored industry “We the People” will not get what we have asked for.

    From the banking mouthpiece himself.

    Certainly, our economy and financial markets face extraordinary near-term challenges, and strong and timely actions to respond to those challenges are necessary and appropriate. Nevertheless, even as we take steps to address the recession and threats to financial stability, maintaining the confidence of the financial markets requires that we, as a nation, begin planning now for the restoration of fiscal balance. Prompt attention to questions of fiscal sustainability is particularly critical because of the coming budgetary and economic challenges associated with the retirement of the baby-boom generation and continued increases in medical costs. The recent projections from the Social Security and Medicare trustees show that, in the absence of programmatic changes, Social Security and Medicare outlays will together increase from about 8-1/2 percent of GDP today to 10 percent by 2020 and 12-1/2 percent by 2030. With the ratio of debt to GDP already elevated, we will not be able to continue borrowing indefinitely to meet these demands.

    The only way “We the People” get single payer healthcare (socialized medicine) is if the seat at the table is taken away from the insurance behemoths.

  10. I was writing pt 2 at 5 am this morning… “Healthcare on Demand”

    It would amuse me were it not so very freaking DIRE!!!!!!!!

  11. Anyone wishing to run for the U. S. House of Representatives, U. S. Senate or the Presidency, unless they are incredibly wealthy, must kiss the [list any body part – you are limited only by your imagination] of Big Money in order to receive the funding they need to wage a competitive campaign. And only then can they receive any coverage from BM’s evil Siamese twin – the corporate-dominated mainstream media.

    Anyone remember the non-stop coverage about John Edwards’ $400 haircut?  That’s what happens to anyone who has the audacity to speak of representing the people.  If they can’t find something negative to report, they will simply refuse to mention the candidate. Most voters will not even know that certain candidates exist, at least in any positive sense.

    In other words…with rare exception, mega-corporations determine the choices placed before us on the ballot — at least those candidates who have any chance of getting elected to office.

    Elected officials who play ball for Big Money are assured of a lucrative future if they ever leave office, and for those who don’t…

    Granted, there are a few for whom this statement does not apply, however, they are too few to make any appreciable difference.

    Only if and until corporate money is removed from the political process can we anticipate a return to a government of the people rather than a government of the corporations.  Of course, those who are sitting in office as a result of the present, corrupt system would have to vote in sufficient numbers to jettison the system that helped them win office in the first place.  

    If one were to apply the premise that we are no longer a government of the people, but, rather, the corporations, just about everything that has occurred since January 20, 2009 makes perfect sense.  

    Please pass the Prozac.

  12. … from David Swanson:

    Senator Max Baucus met Wednesday with advocates for single-payer healthcare, including Senator Bernie Sanders, and told them that he might drop criminal charges against 13 people arrested for speaking up in his hearings, but that he would not include any supporters of single-payer health coverage in any future hearings. According to one report, Baucus suggested that he’d been mistaken to exclude single-payer but asserted that the process of creating healthcare reform legislation was too far along now to correct that omission.

    Senator Sanders said after the meeting that if healthcare reform did not create a single-payer system it shouldn’t be done at all, and that within three or four years we would realize we’d solved nothing. He said that it would be better to increase funding for community health centers and take steps to make it easier for medical students to go into primary care, than to enact major reforms that didn’t go to the root of the problem.

    There’s also a letter to the Kennedy and Baucus from Obama backing the public option and a letter from Conyers, Grijalva, and Edwards to Steny Hoyer that are posted in full in Swanson’s diary and are worth reading.

  13. when you vote representatives (mainly incumbents) in over and over, and they still don’t represent your interests.  To tide you over they give you other stuff to think about like abortion, partisan arguments, celebrity news and such, as if the TARP and Healthcare issues and foreclosure issues are not as important.  I watched a piece of Max Baucus late night on C span talking about his commitment to healthcare and its dire importance, and the way the words came out of his mouth, so unbelievably, like he was being forced under duress to commit to the people.  I couldn’t believe it.

  14. when you vote representatives (mainly incumbents) in over and over, and they still don’t represent your interests.  To tide you over they give you other stuff to think about like abortion, partisan arguments, celebrity news and such, as if the TARP and Healthcare issues and foreclosure issues are not as important.  I watched a piece of Max Baucus late night on C span talking about his commitment to healthcare and its dire importance, and the way the words came out of his mouth, so unbelievably, like he was being forced under duress to commit to the people.  I couldn’t believe it.

  15. is the ratio of citizens to representatives is too high for any “regular” citizens to get attention from reps.  The constitution mandates 30,000:1 or more.  Trouble is, since the  early 1900’s its been way more (today it’s almost 700,000:1).  With that, I’ll leave it to Jack Tripper:

  16. Call it family faith, but there are too many of my clan that work in and around politics and I just don’t have the evidence that the government is bought and paid for in this way. We are not corrupt, and I don’t personally know any corrupt legislators (not that this means anything, it is just I have not run into them myself, they are out there).

    I still think we are going to get the public option. I just think this is the sausage making that is politics. There is a reason why people are advised on to look too closely at how law is made.

  17. the “people” get the government we deserve.  This is what we get for refusing to pay attention.

    Any group is as strong as it’s weakest link.  The “group” of average Americans is really large and mostly weak.

    Forgive me, or not, but I have no sympathy for the American  people (me included).  Our civic spirit has been on the wane since probably when we won independence.

    We have the government we deserve.  It won’t change until a critical mass engages.  I’ve no hope that it will happen.

    Cheers!

  18. I’m glad to see some action on this.  It needs to happen NOW.

  19. Probably since before I went into the service during the Vietnam war.    

  20. In the Corporate State it is the job of the government to represent the interests of and enact the laws desired by the true power in society, corporate ownership and top management.    Congress, the White House and the Supreme Court are essentially their gofers, and elections? You’ll excuse me as I put on my kimono and white facepaint and grab a fan or two.  I’ve been told, I don’t know if it is true, that the word kabuki literally translates as “the old song and dance.”

    • Arctor on June 4, 2009 at 03:32
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    government really want us to know it’s been bought, ’cause his flip-flops have to be the most outrageous in a cynical national political history. Why did I have the impression listening to Obama v Clinton that we were gonna have national healthcare? Did I misunderstand him or is this the biggest serving of Kool Aid since Jonestown? I can’t believe the 1.8 million people on the Washington Mall just over four months ago aren’t getting this but are still entranced with that winning smile?  

    • Adam on June 4, 2009 at 04:14
    • #

    I had been asking this question roughly every six months at this place or that place since Dubya stole Florida in 2000. Didn’t get more than a couple of affirmative responses in almost a decade of tossing this feeler out.

    So… are you fed up enough to discuss general strikes YET?

    NOTHING is going to change until you start planning real direct action that can take money out of the pocket of the investor class.

  24. were a real third party power then.

  25. It’s been rotten for a long time, but Bush’s enablement of the corporations, in a myriad of ways, worsened the situation ten-fold. Anti-trust laws are a sham and have not been enacted, or these mega-conglomerates would not be the size they are — that’s one thing.  Lax or no regulations, banks, Wall Street, labor, etc.  

    Yes, our representatives listen to the lobbyists, as they have their palms “greased” at the same time, lucrative deal for both.  And should a representative decide to go against one or any of them, the corporation(s) can launch a massive campaign to get that individual out of office.  Witness what happened to Kucinich and Wexler, for example.  How can Obama be effective, if members of Congress and the Senate are not supportive?  

    It’s a despicable, disgusting situation we have, not all that different from other countries that we criticize.  Investigations and prosecutions would go a long way to setting everyone in our government and the lobbyists, too, back on their heels for a while.  That’s number one.  Otherwise, we need to find a way to “sweep” house.  Get rid of all of them. Doing away with the two-party system might be a good idea, too.  Let each person run on his own merit and have run off voting.  Means getting rid of the electoral vote.  

    There are a number of avenues to pursue, but will it be done?

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