… health care reform must go down in flames.
Glenn Greenwald explains why:
The Obama White House isn’t sitting impotently by while Democratic Senators shove a bad bill down its throat. This is the bill because this is the bill which Democratic leaders are happy to have. It’s the bill they believe in. As important, by giving the insurance and pharmaceutical industries most everything they want, it ensures that the GOP doesn’t become the repository for the largesse of those industries (and, converesly, that the Democratic Party retains that status).
This is how things always work. The industry interests which own and control our government always get their way. When is the last time they didn’t? The ”public option” was something that was designed to excite and placate progressives (who gave up from the start on a single-payer approach) – and the vast, vast majority of progressives (all but the most loyal Obama supporters) who are invested in this issue have been emphatic about how central a public option is to their support for health care reform. But it seems clear that the White House and key Democrats were always planning on negotiating it away in exchange for industry support. Isn’t that how it always works in Washington?
Yep.
I would like to be proven wrong on this. But from this vantage point, what seems clear is that the Democratic Party, and the president himself, are less interested in the well-being of the country than they are the well-being of the party, and the financial interests that keep it on top.
It is a symbiotic relationship. In order to get what they want, the interests back the party that will give it to them. In order to stay in power, the party actively courts that sponsorship, the deep pockets which allow it to outspend the opposition.
It is this way regardless of whether Democrats or Republicans run the show.
It is the epitome of our broken system of governance, our plutocracy. Obama was elected in the hopes that he might change this - and Democrats thus far seem worse than the Republicans they replaced, in their eagerness to give free money so the financial industry might start its speculative madness once again; and now, at a time when the nation desperately needs health care reform, the one aspect of it that could actually be beneficial to American citizens looks as if it’s being jettisoned in order to placate the insurance industry.
If I thought the people expressing outrage at these town hall meetings thought this way - I might be there with them. But I am convinced that many/most of these people think it will all somehow be better if we just get Republicans back in power. I am in the midst of reading Kevin Phillips’ Wealth and Democracy, in which Phillips makes the case that wealth has periodically undermined democracy in this country, and others. But your right-wingers are out there pimping for unfettered capitalism. Some conservatives I know on Facebook - So-and-So became a fan of Capitalism. They have no idea what they’re talking about.
For I tell you what - people are sick of this, and Democrats perpetuate this system at their own risk, and the country’s. They don’t seem to get it. They had better wise up - and fast.
