The battle for Health Care is already over. It was over the minute the Democrats took single payer off the table. Now it’s just a tug of war between the lobbyists and the legislators to see how fake this fake reform will really be.
Did anyone really think that a political system as corrupt as ours could possibly produce anything but a corrupted product? Does anyone really believe another Obama speech is going to alter this fact?
Sometimes miracles do happen. So I’ve kept my mouth shut as this calamity has played out. But I accurately predicted all the way back in the campaign that a health care reform effort would, at best fail epically, and at worst actually make matters worse.
How did I know this? Am I an oracle from the netherworld? No. I predicted it because I am not insane. And by insane I mean doing the same thing over and over and over again while each time expecting different results. I mean WTF did people expect?
Progressives need to focus on one single issue for the rest of their lives if necessary: banning campaign contributions and other means to bribe politicians.
This is separate from campaign finance reform. There are a thousand ways we could finance elections. I’m sure we could come up with a few hundred that would be just, equitable and of benefit to the functioning of democracy.
The real issue is not how we finance elections. It is how we do not. We need a constitutional amendment to prohibit ever giving a penny to a public servant or candidate for office. It’s that simple.
This would be the second American Revolution and this country will continue to fail until it occurs. It will fail on health care reform, it will fail on climate change. It will fail on everything, just as it is failing now.
Removing the money from politics won’t solve all our problems. But it will at least eliminate the primary impediment that prevents us from solving those problems.
Imagine politicians elected on the merit of their ideas instead of their ability to raise cash. George Bush would have never been governor, much less president.
Some day, historians will look back on this era as an absurdity – the way we look back on the days when monarchs enslaved the people or when we enslaved Africans.
Why wait?
Every other issue liberals and progressives care about, with the partial exception of civil rights, has one single source: the corruption of money. And yet we continue to attempt change without addressing this issue.
NOTHING WILL CHANGE until we get the money out of politics. There is no other issue that compares in importance. Not even close.
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Seeing so much energy wasted.
the field on all other issues for as long as it takes to get this one, admittedly important, issue done? Really? You think we can’t be multi-focused ever?
I think you are going to have a hard time with a Constitutional Amendment. There are only two ways those happen. First 2/3rds of the States can call for Constitutional Convention. Once they are there they can write any new Amendments they want. They have to pass them by a 3/4 vote.
OR
2/3rds of both Houses of Congress vote for an Amendment and then 2/3 of the States ratify it. There is also going to be some kind of time limit on the States ratification as the Supreme Court has ruled an Amendment can’t hang out there forever.
Given how totally corrupt you view our current system as being, how is that going to work?
That shouldn’t be too long in coming.
Btw, we need to shoot down “reform” — that’s our victory.
ran against Clinton in the first primary on this very issue. He was dubbed Gov. Moonbeam and shot down by the corporate entities and both parties. The corporations own both our pols and all the information venues. Clinton removed the remaining obstacles in their way to owning the government. There is no way in hell to get campaign reform out the joke of a government we have now. I agree it is the issue that is at the heart of all the others. That and the fact that corporations are considered people. How do you suggest we do this? On a national leave it would require removing most of the population of DC.
… impact been effected in this country?
That is the first question. We have had major reforms in this country. What are the common factors?
I don’t think Obama ever really wanted true reform or “change”. Just look at how he built his own Cabinet and his Foreign Policy staff. It is decidedly status-quo, anti-Progressive, and pro-Establishment.
From the outset, Obama totally ignored the H.R. 676 “Medicare For All” Bill that has 90 supporters in Congress in a total vacuum. Now just imagine, if the President of the United States actually used the power of the bullypulpit to educate and direct the attention of the public towards this Bill? Imagine if then Congress did a cost-benefit analysis, and held hearings on how Insurance Companies routinely drop paying customers from coverage once they get sick, and run up costs and profits excessively, and pervert the entire system.
In this new environment, we would then be having an entirely different National Dialog, and the a single-payer solution would be the resolution in line for passage by the House of Representatives. Imagine if Obama played hardball in the same manner in which Bush and Cheney did, by threatening to expose GOP members to criminal investgations or embarrasing personal issues if they did not cooperate?
Instead, we have a lobbyiest approved approach right from the very beginning, in which the Drug Companies are assured that their inflated products will not be subject to the market pressures of “Generic Drugs”, and this so-called “public option” is deliberately limited and something that affects only a very tiny, tiny percentage of the public (unemployed). The vast majority of the people, who currently have jobs, have no option (even with the “public option” the way that it is written) to select anything other than the same lousy private insurance plans from their employers.
But even this weak-kneed, largely ineffectual approach is still too much reform for Obama to ever stand up and unabiguously fight for. He could have easily pressured the Senate Finance Committee to be less transparently corrupt, ideology rigid, and reminded them of the 2008 Election mandate for reform. Instead, Obama spent months meeting exclusively with Insurance and Drug company executives, listening to their phony and laughably false stories about “cutting costs“, and assuring them that their Monopoly position over our Health would remain totally in tact, totally unthreatened, and never subject to any true market competition.
Simply put, Obama has failed the test of leadership time and time again. He is following the violent and bankrupt Cheney-Bush Foreign Policy in every respect aside from just a few meaningless cosmetic superficial differences. And his idea of “change we can believe in” on the domestic front was: Rahm Emaneul and Timothy Giethner.
The Progressive Left must realize that it cannot trust this man or his “choices” and “decisions”. Up and down the line they have all been nothing short of an effort to legitimize and validate the corrupt Foreign Policy of the last 8 years, and continue the Corporatism-infested rape of the public’s interest at home.
He is not leading.
And I no longer believe that he is even on our side.
We have to reject phony reform, watch it fail, and then rebuild the public dialog to be about the single-payer solution.
Phony reform will only shut down the debate, while the people continue to unnecessarily suffer and die every year.
unless the buy a congressman complex is stopped.
…on the cause. At least for now, however, he’s working on a different solution. While working to get $$ out of elections, I’ll also work with Kucinich on this. But, I agree with you, we must get the influence of $$ out of the system.
His e-mail letter continues with his ideas. I’ve just posted his call to action on DD today. Find it in the “Action” column.