Freedom Rider: Health Care Deceit
As if we needed (by now) further proof of Obama’s and the Democrats treacherous nature. When will Americans learn that the so-called two-party system is a cruel hoax?
By BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley
The health care fiasco has bared the cowardly underbelly of the Democratic Party, which is putty in the hands of President Obama and his co-conspirators in the insurance industry. The “public option” has been stripped down to a tiny two percent of the people, while the private insurers get tens of millions of captive, subsidized consumers. The conclusion is inescapable: “Barack Obama and the majority of the Democrats never had any intention of bringing reform to health care.”
“Barack Obama and the majority of the Democrats never had any intention of bringing reform to health care.”
As an Illinois State Senator, Barack Obama enthusiastically called for single payer health care. He said he wanted a system with “everybody in, nobody out.” Now that the very same Barack Obama is president of the United States, single payer is nowhere to be seen on his agenda. The words of the ambitious politician are inconsistent with his actions now that he is the president.
Not only did State Senator Obama say that he wanted single payer, but he laid out a road map [1] for achieving his stated goal. “Because first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, and we have to take back the House.” Now that all of those conditions have been met, he is the person currently occupying the White House, the health care “reform” plan currently under discussion does not include single payer.
What we do have is a plan to force the uninsured into purchasing health insurance. Single payer, Medicare for all, call it what you will, is now off the presidential and congressional table. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi won’t even allow a vote on a Dennis Kucinich plan to give individual states the right to seek a public option. The little bit of change in the so-called reform amounts to nothing more than a bailout of the health insurance companies responsible for making American health care the deadly disgrace that it has become.
“The so-called reform amounts to nothing more than a bailout of the health insurance companies.”
The systemic corruption in the Democratic Party has never been more obvious. The proposals put forward by Pelosi and Harry Reed are by the insurance companies, for the insurance companies and of the insurance companies. Not only is the party’s allegiance to corporate interest becoming clearer all the time, but so is their intention to do nothing for the people who gave them electoral victory.
Obama is not alone among Democrats in repeating the well-worn lie that they will be different and better than Republicans once they are in office. If a Democrat is president and if Democrats control the House, and if they have not only a majority but the magic number of sixty in the Senate, why is there no plan for true health care reform?
There is no plan for health care reform because too few Democrats really care about the issue in the first place. Some may care but have greater fear of insurance industry power and money going to bat for an opponent in a future campaign. And as in all other things, the fish still stinks from the head. President Obama made it crystal clear that his previous words on health care reform were nothing but empty campaign promises. He didn’t even directly involve the White House in crafting a bill. He left that to conservadem Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. It must have been the first time in history that a president handed off an issue to a member of congress who never even claimed to want the same thing.
“The uninsured will be forced to buy insurance at a rate up to 125% of current costs.”
The public option plan currently under consideration would cover approximately 2% of the public [2]. Most workers will be in the same position after the over hyped “reform” takes effect in 2013. If they are lucky enough to be employed and to be offered coverage they will see no change in price, or quality of coverage. The uninsured will be forced to buy insurance at a rate up to 125% [3] of current costs.A true public option will only be available to those without insurance who live in states choosing to opt in instead of out. Red staters will in all likelihood be out of luck.
Business Week magazine hit the nail on the head [4] all too succinctly in their analysis of health care reform. “The carriers have succeeded in redefining the terms of the reform debate to such a degree that no matter what specifics emerge in the voluminous bill Congress may send to President Obama this fall, the insurance industry will emerge more profitable.”
Republican posturing against the insurance company victory is just that, posturing. They are struggling with a moribund brand which has no appeal beyond their ever shrinking base. They obstruct for the sake of obstructing. The tea parties, town hall riots, and opinions of hateful pundits like Beck and Limbaugh are currently of no consequence and should not play a role in Democratic strategy. Their enmity does nothing but give Obama and the rest of the Democrats another excuse to stab the people in the back.
“No matter what specifics emerge in the voluminous bill Congress may send to President Obama this fall, the insurance industry will emerge more profitable.”
The unnecessary bowing and scraping to Senate Republicans like Olympia Snowe is a farce meant to keep us quiet and fool us into thinking that single payer is an impossibility. Sadly, the ruse will probably work. Too many progressives are the cheap dates of politics and will swoon if their idol emerges with a bill, any bill. In the end, they will all claim that the final product is the only possible outcome and those of us who dare to say otherwise ought to be ignored.
No one should be fooled by the idol worshippers. We are entitled to our opinions, but not to our own facts. The facts in this case are not debatable. Barack Obama and the majority of the Democrats never had any intention of bringing reform to health care.The citizens of this country won’t have true change in health care or anything else unless they fight for it and unless they acknowledge they will be fighting Obama and the rest of the Democrats too.
Margaret Kimberley
Margaret Kimberley’s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley@BlackAgendaReport.com.
Source URL: http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/freedom-rider-health-care-deceit
Links:
[2] http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091101/ap_on_go_co/us_health_care_public_plan
[4] http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_33/b4143034820260.htm
If Democrats Don't Pass Health Insurance Reform This Year, What Do We Lose? And What Do We Gain?
The recent defeats in Virginia and New Jersey are likely to stampede the cowardly Obama and his Democrats in precisely the wrong direction–further to the right.
By Bruce A. Dixon, Managing Editor, Black Agenda Report [BAR]
Created 11/04/2009 [print_link]
"Yeah, stop with that single payer whine. It's beginning to annoy me."
The version of health care reform championed by the White House and Congressional Democrats will force millions to buy crappy insurance from private providers with no interest in health care but plenty of interest in profits. Its pubic option is a cruel hoax that will not take effect till 2013 and even then will leave tens of millions uninsured. Now Democratic leaders in Congress say it might not pass this year anyway. Is that really so bad?
The president said it himself in early September. His public option will be neither public nor optional for any more than a tiny percentage of Americans, and unlike his wars and bank bailouts, has to be “deficit neutral.” It will force millions under penalty of law to buy the deceptive and defective products of greedy private insurers.
Most alarmingly, the Democratic version of the public option will be rigidly means-tested to ensure that only the poorest get in, and financed with a John McCain style tax on those who receive nearly adequate benefits from their employers. This is a patented recipe for ghettoizing and socially stigmatizing those who do avail themselves of the public option, setting one segment of society against another poorer one, the exact reverse of the everybody in, nobody out spirit of social security and Medicare.
And though we are told that insurers will not be able to deny policies on the basis of pre-existing conditions, there is mounting evidence that insurers intend to enforce the same discriminatory requirements by claiming that conditions such as diabetes, overweight, smoking and more are the result of patient behaviors and “lifestyle choices” for which the insurance company cannot be liable unless it is able to charge more. The president has even deceitfully lowered the number of uninsured referred to in all the Democrats’ pronouncements by subtracting the 12 or 15 million undocumented from all its numbers, as though they are expected to live in our midst as an underclass with no access to health services.
In the year since the last election the president has made concession after concession to drug and insurance companies, to private health care providers and their lobbyists. The White House, establishment Democrats and their echo chambers in the corporate media and even on the internet have worked hard to suppress voices advocating the simple, practical and elegant solution of single payer Medicare For All, which is still favored in polls by a substantial majority of Americans.
The longer the health care reform drama takes to unfold, the shabbier the president and his party are looking. With overwhelming majorities in both Houses of Congress, the Republicans can no longer be blamed for anything, and Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are sending signals that they may not be able to pass the president’s health insurance reform this year. They can’t blame Republicans for this because there are not enough Republicans to stop legislation in either chamber. The Republican talking point on health care now is that the president is spending too much time on it, and needs to concentrate on something, anything else, like sending another 40 or 50 thousand troops to Iraq.
Ever men and women of their word, Democratic leaders in Congress have stripped out of the president’s bills any chance for states to pursue their own single payer regimes, and backtracked on promises to allow a floor vote on the Medicare For All measure, HR 676.
Deceit has its price. The initiative has passed to the forces of single payer, the solution championed by Barack Obama up until his 2004 election to the US Senate.
In dozens of cities and towns across the nation Americans are seizing that initiative. The wave of demonstrations and sit-ins at the offices of insurance companies continues to grow. At the beginning of October, www.mobilizeforheathcare.org [1] initiated actions in New York and DC. A month later more than a thousand people have volunteered to be arrested to put single payer back on the table in cities and towns across the country. Sit-ins are planned for more than two dozen cities today, and by year’s end at this rate, will be occurring in more than sixty cities by the end of the year.
What Single Payer Health Care Will Do For Ordinary Families
In fact, the next job for most Wal-Mart workers will be very like the last, and the next after that one too. But if workers in dead-end jobs had the security of guaranteed health care, they’d be much more inclined to stay where they are and organize and fight for better working conditions. Service workers are underpaid not because of the nature of the work, any more than west coast dockworkers seventy years ago were underpaid because they were drunkards and thieves. They are underpaid because they have not succeeded in organizing and fighting for their rights. This is why elite bodies like the US Chamber of Commerce are stubbornly resisting anything like Medicare For All. The economy, and the present health insurance regime serve them well, and they want to preserve it.
Medicare For All, single payer will enable the working poor to make a stand where they are, and lift themselves out of poverty by organizing for and demanding a greater share of the wealth they produce every day. By removing the dread of financial ruin due to illness or injury, single payer will enable working people to fight for their own collective economic uplift. That’s why the struggle for guaranteed and universal single payer, Medicare For All is the real deal right now, the key to unlocking a better life for millions in the near future, a concrete focus of the civil and human rights movements of our time.
It’s time to mobilize for Medicare For All, now. Go to www.mobilizeforhealthcare.org [2] and take your future, your family’s future into your hands. Donate to provide legal assistance and bail money and other expenses. Volunteer to be present at a legal demonstration, or to put your body on the line in a nonviolent demonstration for health care now at the offices of an insurance company near you.
The incorruptible Bruce Dixon.
Bruce Dixon is based in Atlanta, and is managing editor at Black Agenda Report. He can be reached at bruce.dixon@blackagendareport.com.
Links:
[1] http://www.mobilizeforheathcare.org/
[2] http://www.mobilizeforhealthcare.org/
The Democrats are clearly an obstacle to real political progress
State and Local Democrats From California to New York: The Standup Party, or the Party of Excuses?
Dateline: 10/28/2009
By Bruce Dixon, Managing Editor, Black Agenda Report
The corruption and cowardice of Washington Democrats may have doomed the chances of even more acceptable politicians, like NJ's Jon Corzine.
For some time now, many have wondered when or if Congress and the president would ever stand up against Wall Street, the insurance companies, the militarists, gentrifiers and privatizing vampires, and what it might take to make them do it. But if Democrats don’t stand up at the state and local level for the interests of ordinary people, why should we expect Democrats in Congress or the White House to be profiles in courage?
When a kidnapper takes hostages and threatens to murder them all unless demands are met, do the good guys arrive and say, OK, OK, we will meet your demands, or maybe half your demands, and you can kill half the hostages? If they do this of course, we have to conclude they are not exactly good guys, and they haven’t ridden to anybody’s rescue.
When California Republicans earlier this year proposed the cutting of thousands of state jobs, the end of home health care, payless paydays for state and municipal workers, the end to (relative) guarantees of clean water and uncontaminated food and dozens of other vital services, service cuts that cost the literal lives of Californians did that state’s Democrats stand up and ride to the rescue? Of course they didn’t.
The solution of California Democrats was to propose the same cuts as the Republicans, only a third to half as deep. And that was an initial bargaining position, they were prepared to go higher if need be. They told voters, and the Republicans OK, shoot half the hostages and we can live with it. OK, OK, maybe sixty percent of the hostages but this is as high as we go, absolutely. This is not a heroic picture. This is not a profile in courage. This is not a Democratic party standing up for the interest of ordinary people. It’s also nothing new this year, and not at all unique to California. How many of us from Maine to Miami and Mississippi to Montana have held our noses, suppressed our gag reflexes, and perhaps grabbed our ankles while we voted for, or encouraged others to vote for the party of Marginally Less Evil? And how many more times are we prepared to do it?
What does it mean when New York state’s first black governor David Paterson, tells reporters at Harlem’s paper of record, the Amsterdam News, that although he is proposing the most drastic cuts to health care, to education, to mass transit, mental health and across the entire spectrum of services government is supposed to provide, that it’s going to be tough, but at least it’s not California. That’s not riding to the rescue, and it’s certainly not standing up for New Yorkers. It’s an excuse, one that makes you wonder if a generation of promises and sweat and hopes invested in a party that can only provide excuses has in fact been a bad investment. It’s not that Democratic voters didn’t invest enough. Corporations and bankers and the wealthy have money to give, they can fund your career. All poor people can do is vote for you once every two or four years.
It’s the end of October in an off-election year, exactly halfway between the last elections to Congress and most state houses and the next one. And Democrats at the state and local levels still have no idea how to produce jobs. Democrats, including black ones have yet to come up with a model for inner-city economic development other than moving poorer residents out and richer ones in, so their friends in the real estate racket can make a few billion and break them off a piece.
California Democrats are in a corner. New York Democrats are at a dead end. On both coasts and everywhere in between bankruptcies and foreclosures are rising, and anger is building as people wonder if Democrats on any level will ever be ready to mobilize their base to rupture the envelope, the change the rules, to do something different. Like fight. Or whether the best they can offer is the excuse that hey, at least they aren’t Repubicans. They don’t shoot all the hostages. It could be worse. You could live in California, right.
www.blackagendareport.com [2].
Links:
[1] http://media.libsyn.com/media/blackagendareport/20091028_bd_standup_party.mp3
[2] http://www.blackagendareport.com/
[3] http://www.addtoany.com/share_save?linkurl=http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/state-and-local-democrats-california-new-york-standup-party-or-party-excuses&linkname=State and Local Democrats From California to New York: The Standup Party, or the Party of Excuses?
Reaping the whirlwind of a decomposing crony capitalism
Banksters Rob States and Cities Too
[print_link]
By Margaret Kimberley
Corporate crooks thrive everywhere.
The $17 trillion dollar transfer from federal coffers to the pockets of Wall Street banksters didn’t happen in a vacuum. The same bipartisan cast of players have had their wolvish way with sheepish state and local governments for a long time now. They have honed their expertise at extracting piles of cash from cities, counties, towns and states in return for little or nothing, while the absence of news coverage hides a golden age of corporate financial corruption. It’s not just federal any more, if it ever was….
The citizens of this country are under siege from a group of master thieves. They must be constantly on the alert for the likes of Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and others of that ilk who now exist only to steal from the public. The infamous federal bailout is not the only example of the public bankrolling the investment banks. The crimes continue with the collusion of state and local governments across the country.
The state of New Jersey [1] is paying $1 million per month for nothing, that is to say for bonds that don’t exist because they have already been redeemed. In 2003, New Jersey’s Transportation Trust Fund Authority (TTFA) sold $345 million in auction-rate bonds. While New Jersey replaced the debt with fixed-rate securities in 2008 after the $330 billion auction-rate bond market froze, the swap, in which two parties exchange fixed payments for ones based on floating interest rates, isn’t scheduled to expire until 2019. Interest rates have risen, but New Jersey can’t cancel the agreement before 2011 without paying a $36 million penalty. In the mean time, the state will continue to pay $1 million per month for nothing.
None of the parties involved now knows how this scheme came to fruition. John McCormac, treasurer of the state when the dead was done, can’t remember anything about it today. “I have no recollection of anything. Ask the treasurer.”
The man who should be able to explain anything about Goldman Sachs is New Jersey’s governor, Jon Corzine. Although this deal predates his term in office, Corzine was once the chairman of Goldman Sachs. He should be able to explain succinctly how interest rate swaps, or any other exotic financial instruments work. Yet like the erstwhile treasurer, he too is perplexed. “I’m sure there’s an explanation. They don’t just send money out.” But that is exactly what has happens when casino capitalism fixes its gaze in the direction of the public trough. Goldman Sachs and its ilk are predators who know a victim ripe for the picking when they see it.
Governor Corzine may shrug his shoulders and feign ignorance about the activities of his former employer, but he has a quick solution to the shortfall in TTFA funding. He proposes raising the gasoline tax by 14 cents. It is bad enough that Goldman Sachs stole from the state of New Jersey, now New Jersey steals from its own residents as a means of masking its role as accessory to theft.
New Jersey is not the only willing governmental victim of casino capitalism run amok. Birmingham, Alabama mayor Larry Langford [2] has been charged with 60 counts of money laundering and bribery. Langford took money, watches and designer clothes in return for turning over his city to the same banksters who looted New Jersey.
In the case of Jefferson County Alabama, which includes Birmingham, it was JP Morgan Chase who took the public to the cleaners. Chase claimed that the interest rape swaps would lower interest rates. Instead, as in the case of New Jersey, rates rose as the credit market crashed in 2008. Debt payments for the Jefferson County sewer system doubled to $460 million per year, twice the annual revenues of the system. Residents of Jefferson County are now paying four times as much [3] for water usage as they were paying one year ago. They cannot flush their toilets or turn on a faucet without paying the price for an unholy alliance between corrupt bankers and corrupt politicians.
Langford is just the latest black politician to make a mockery of the decades long fight for political power. He is accused of being nothing more than a cheap crook who chose to wear rolex watches and expensive clothes when he should have been protecting the public’s money.
It is ironic that Jon Corzine is a figure in one of these scandals. Corzine has represented New Jersey as a senator and now as governor running for re-election. In the good old days before the market meltdown, Corzine would spend up to $60 million [4] of his own money on a campaign. These days Corzine has to raise funds like other politicians do. He will spend a mere $25 million on this year’s campaign. How the mighty have fallen.
It used to be that banks were the victims of robbery. Now they are the robbers themselves. Langford is in court because of sloppy and obvious theft, not because the system that gave him an opportunity for greed has changed at all. As Black Agenda Report has already pointed out [5], “Greater Wall Street has become a Black Hole of its own creation. It now sucks all remaining and potential national wealth into its infinite darkness.”
New Jersey and Birmingham are but two of the examples of the ongoing decline of the United States. With theft at the top fully supported by the political class, the only question is will the decline be fast or slow. Its existence is not in doubt at all.
Margaret Kimberley’s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgandaReport.com.
Source URL: http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/banksters-rob-states-and-cities-too
Links:
[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=al5.EHL9NEBQ
[2] http://features.csmonitor.com/politics/2009/10/23/did-larry-langford-bet-birminghams-future-on-wall-street-scheme/
[3] http://www.alternet.org/workplace/143485/after_the_billionaires_plundered_alabama_town,_troops_were_called_in_…_illegally?page=entire
[4] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/17/nyregion/17corzine.html
[5] http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/great-black-hole-casino-capitalism
[6] http://www.addtoany.com/share_save?linkurl=http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/banksters-rob-states-and-cities-too&linkname=Banksters Rob States and Cities Too
America, stop sucking up to Israel
Dateline: Haaretz 01/11/2009
By Gideon Levy
[print_link]
Dead Palestinian. A war without end until the US acts with honesty and foresight.
Before no other country on the planet does the United States kneel and plead like this. In other trouble spots, America takes a different tone. It bombs in Afghanistan, invades Iraq and threatens sanctions against Iran and North Korea. Did anyone in Washington consider begging Saddam Hussein to withdraw from occupied territory in Kuwait?
But Israel the occupier, the stubborn contrarian that continues to mock America and the world by building settlements and abusing the Palestinians, receives different treatment. Another massage to the national ego in one video, more embarrassing praise in another.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Gideon Levy (Hebrew: Israeli journalist for the Haaretz newspaper, where he is also an editorial board member. He is a prominent left-wing commentator,[1] and publishes on the weekly column “Twilight Zone” of Haaretz, where he covers since 1988 what he describes as Palestinian hardships and suffering in the West Bank, which he attributes to the actions of Israel and to Jewish Settlers. He is a regular participant and a representative of the left-wing in a television panel on the TV show, “Moetzet Ha’Hahamim” (Trans. ‘The Committee of the Wise’). Levy was awarded the 1996 Emil Grunzweig Human Rights Award and the 2007 Anna Lindh Foundation Euro-Med Journalist Prize for Cultural Dialogue.[2] Levy also served as spokesman for Shimon Peres from 1978 until 1982.[3]