July 30, 2009 archive

Pony Party is an Open Thread: please do not rec.

But please feel free to re-caption any of mine, to add your own captions to the rest, and to post your own pics, vids, or whatever in the comments.

moar funny pictures

The extended sausage making saga that is the American health care “reform” process is teaching us valuable things about how our government works. Perhaps the most important lesson is that the predatory corporations that control our government feed on the complexity of government legislation. Simple laws provide little room for evasion and deceit, but bills that run to a thousand pages invite cheating, chiseling, ducking, dodging, and all manner of lawyer-enabled avoidance of the spirit of the law.

Although we do not know what form the final health care bill will take, we can be absolutely sure that it will be grotesquely complicated, because it has effectively been written by lobbyists. After the bill is passed, month after month we will see revelations of “legal” methods by which hospitals and insurance companies evade the intent of the health care reform by exploiting fine print and ambiguities in the legislation and administrative guidelines.

It didn’t have to be this way. But by electing a politician owned by the corporate establishment, we assured ourselves that Obama would generate a bumper crop of legislative complexity to fatten the profits of predatory corporations and the salaries of their lobbyists. This is the reason single payer was killed off immediately at the start of the health reform negotiations: it is too simple a system.

The proposed health care system will be a four-ring circus of private insurance, a government-run insurance plan, non-profit cooperatives, and Medicare/Medicaid. If anyone believes that this can be implemented efficiently and that the insurance companies will be any more responsible, I have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn. Obama is giving the corporate predators exactly what they want, and he is packaging it as reform. This is a cruel deception, and it remains to see how many of the American people will be deceived.

The writing of this diary was inspired in part by mwmwm’s jeremiad of Monday.  The point is this: the future is cathected negatively because our institutions have failed to catch up with the real future unfolding before our eyes.  

Thus institution-based actions are often ineffective.  Direct action approaches to social problems, however, offer the immediate replacement of power lost through institution-based strategies of “triangulation.”  In relying upon bourgeois, capitalist government in a neoliberal era, we sell out our ideals to that government’s raison d’etre.  Thus anarchist direct action (in such a context) suggests grounds for further thought about methods of political problem-solving (and of redress for lost human rights), even for progressives.

(Crossposted at Big Orange)