I guess the Dems' new motto is...
... never let the barely adequate be the enemy of the plain flat fuckin' lousy.
I keep hearing from shills for the Administration that there are great things in the Senate health care bill, and I keep wondering, "for whom?" That's not an idle question today, given that the bill reported out of the Senate Finance Committee was heavily edited and influenced by a former VP in the health care industry, that all the so-called improvements have some very nasty and imprecise qualifiers attached to them, leaving lots of wiggle room for both regulators and the for-profit industry, and that the only real means of forcing competition on insurers is extremely likely not to be in the conformed bill.
Hell, the expansion of Medicare to the 55-64 age group was mostly a watered-down consolation prize for losing the public option, and that, if Lieberman continues to get his way, won't be in the final bill, either. Moreover, health care stocks are going up, and that says volumes about who benefits from this skanky piece of legislation.
I was about to say that the American people are like one giant nation with Stockholm syndrome, but, that's not quite right. It's the Congress that suffers from that particular malady, and its captors are the corporations. The American people just can't get through to their Congress critters, and the frustration of not being able to do so is gradually becoming debilitating, and that's showing up in polls, and in the Tea Party movement, which is composed, mostly, of the bottom 25% of voters who are mad as hell and aren't going to take it anymore, but, can't quite figure out who to be angry at, or why, and can't see that they're being guided and underwritten by the real villains.
When historians look back on the 21st century, I think they're going to see this year and the next as the critical turning point in the dissolution of the American empire, even though the actual decline began decades earlier. Serious mistakes made by the Bush administration are now being institutionalized; even though the export-jobs-and-buy-cheap-Chinese-shit-with-borrowed-money model has completely collapsed, everything the administration and Congress have done in the last two years has been an attempt to prop up that same system; the wars are spreading out and getting longer and progressively more expensive (and justified by endless variations on the theme of "the white man's burden" or outright black propaganda). The maldistribution of wealth is getting worse, job growth is non-existent, the government's obsessive preoccupation with internal security is distorting or making moot a raft of Constitutional rights, and many of the avenues to a more stable export economy are being systematically cut off by a failure to invest in non-military R&D and that aforementioned business model.
If I didn't know better, I'd think that pod people are involved.
I keep hearing from shills for the Administration that there are great things in the Senate health care bill, and I keep wondering, "for whom?" That's not an idle question today, given that the bill reported out of the Senate Finance Committee was heavily edited and influenced by a former VP in the health care industry, that all the so-called improvements have some very nasty and imprecise qualifiers attached to them, leaving lots of wiggle room for both regulators and the for-profit industry, and that the only real means of forcing competition on insurers is extremely likely not to be in the conformed bill.
Hell, the expansion of Medicare to the 55-64 age group was mostly a watered-down consolation prize for losing the public option, and that, if Lieberman continues to get his way, won't be in the final bill, either. Moreover, health care stocks are going up, and that says volumes about who benefits from this skanky piece of legislation.
I was about to say that the American people are like one giant nation with Stockholm syndrome, but, that's not quite right. It's the Congress that suffers from that particular malady, and its captors are the corporations. The American people just can't get through to their Congress critters, and the frustration of not being able to do so is gradually becoming debilitating, and that's showing up in polls, and in the Tea Party movement, which is composed, mostly, of the bottom 25% of voters who are mad as hell and aren't going to take it anymore, but, can't quite figure out who to be angry at, or why, and can't see that they're being guided and underwritten by the real villains.
When historians look back on the 21st century, I think they're going to see this year and the next as the critical turning point in the dissolution of the American empire, even though the actual decline began decades earlier. Serious mistakes made by the Bush administration are now being institutionalized; even though the export-jobs-and-buy-cheap-Chinese-shit-with-borrowed-money model has completely collapsed, everything the administration and Congress have done in the last two years has been an attempt to prop up that same system; the wars are spreading out and getting longer and progressively more expensive (and justified by endless variations on the theme of "the white man's burden" or outright black propaganda). The maldistribution of wealth is getting worse, job growth is non-existent, the government's obsessive preoccupation with internal security is distorting or making moot a raft of Constitutional rights, and many of the avenues to a more stable export economy are being systematically cut off by a failure to invest in non-military R&D and that aforementioned business model.
If I didn't know better, I'd think that pod people are involved.
posted by Montag at
6:45 AM
1 Comments:
As usual Montag, great analysis. Depressing, but great.
I'm tracking the tea party funders. Money to pay for buses and organizing comes from the Koch family ( big private oil) , RJR Reynolds, and health insurance companies) but the people who attend don't see that. Also here is an ironic deal the corporations who hate gov services USE lots of gov services for free at these events. The taxpayers pick up the tab for the protests organized to benefit the energy, tobacco and health insurance companies. How do they do this? They make a PAC or 501 c 3 and fund it to set up tea parties. The media don't ask who funds this because they think it is Grass roots.
Why do taxpayers give free services to multibillion dollar corporations? Because the corporations use the tools to trick them with no penality.
If you knew this was happening in your city would you like that Corp money? Or what would you say to liberals who say, "don't waste your time. Or they will come after us and make us pay for services at our protests. Or they have a right as a corporation to their free speech too and if they can get the wingnut to buy into their line, more power to them."
I need help creating responses to these comments from liberals.
Thoughts?
For reference the tea party in LA cost the taxpayers at least $6,500 in police security. They paid nothing.
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Spocko, at 10:23 AM
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