That is the excuse for passing a bad HCR bill.
Yeah, it sucks, but we can fix it later.
Yesterday NPR reported that this was also the excuse offered for a bad Climate agreement in Copenhagen.
Yeah, it sucks, but we can fix it later.
Two points:
One, no one actually believes that after a year of working on HCR and all these wasted years since Kyoto that we are REALLY going to fix anything later do they?
Especially if due to the Dems incompetence and weakness, the Repubs get back in power. The FIRST thing they will do is gut HCR. The second is gut any progress on Climate.
Two……WHY do we have to “fix it later?”
Why can’t we pass a GOOD bill now, one that deosn’t have to be fixed later?
The reason is obvious. The Minority Party that openly represents Corporate interest and only about a quarter of the people in the country and about 1% of the people on the Planet, have obstructed, buffaloed, beat down, punked, intimidated, and just plain SCARED the Dems into allowing themselves to be held hostage by the very same assholes who fucked everything up beyond recognition for the last eight years.
They either don’t know how to or they just plain WON’T fight against the Repub tactics that have stopped all progress not only on the health of all Americans….but now on the health of the entire Planet.
America is out of patience, and the Planet is out of time. if the Dems don’t show that they can fix ….something, ANYTHING now….the impatient American voter is going to fix them….at the ballot box.
Is there any way at all that we can prevent the Dems from committing political suicide……again?
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We’ve decided not to have kids.
Now we won’t contribute any more to the human-created problems for Gaia, and if She dies, we won’t have any descendants to worry about it.
In fact our non-existent kids will never get sick and never need health insurance.
When we go, just toss our carcasses out into the desert to feed the nocturnal omnivores.
get the foot in the door and we can improve it. SS and Medicare were changed after the initial bills (I don’t know, that’s what I’ve been told, I guess the key is what were the changes, haven’t researched). That’s proof right? OTOH, something tells me they created something that simply won’t hold up so they won’t have any choice but to go back to the table. Unfortunately, as you say, that could mean regression, not progression. And bad news for democrats and Obama.
one crucial thing: Obama and the Democrats in Congress are our employees.
Until they are made to remember that, nothing will change.
These aren’t Dems. They are the new Republican Party, and we need to remember that.
if we could tow an Ice Berg to DC,
and drop it on the Capitol Steps —
maybe then they’d get the urgency of the situation.
But probably not,
the Berg, would be gone in no time,
due to all the excess Hot Air, in that area!
start receiving ever escalating monthly bills in the mail for their MANDATORY health insurance, they will be in no position to contribute money to the Democratic Party. In addition, they won’t have the time to do the groundwork necessary for a successful political campaign, since they’ll be busy working second and third jobs to enrich the healthcare corporate titans. And finally, all this is assuming that they would have the stomach to even vote for a Democrat ever again.
Convincing a heroin addict to quit is difficult enough, but at least there is the promise of a better life on the other side of that lengthy and daunting bed of hot coals. With rare exception, the Dems are just addicated to corporate largesse as the Repubs.
If the Dems were to go “cold turkey”, what would await them on the other side? Zero corporate donations, well-financed smear campaigns by those same moneyed interests to prevent their re-election, lifelong irrelevancy, and no chance whatsoever of ever landing a lucrative position on a corporate board of directors or as a highly-paid lobbyist.
Most clear-headed Dems must surely realize that they are headed for the unemployment line after their next election. They are merely racking up points (aka auditionoing) with their corporate sponsors in order to land a plum job in the private sector after their “public” sector position ends.
Someone please tell me I’m mistaken!
that in a poll in slinkerwink’s diary opposing the passage of this debacle, the majority think that this bill shouldn’t pass by nearly a 2:1 margin
both Senator Obama and Senator Clinton pledged to return and “fix it later.”
Crickets.
I voted for Mike Gravel.
… progressives and psuedo-progressives.
“Take a bad bill and fix it later” while never fixing it later is exactly what a “moderate” is aiming to do in the first place.
Because the other side has been studying their propaganda-economics so long that they often forget that its just propaganda, we might have a chance to actually pass a weak climate bill and strengthen it later with the supposedly moderate replacement to the fatally flawed Kerry cap-and-Wall-Street set forward by Cantwell and Collins.
The “green” cubicles of the veal pen were, of course, squealing at the prospect of Wall Street losing out on commission income while dreaming up ways to profit from selling loopholes around the cap, but the cap and auction that is proposed is, likely due to some misunderstanding, fundamentally sound.
The targets for the cap are a silly joke, of course. However, as opposed to the carbon tax, which some higher “value added” corporate interests push because there is no limit at all on carbon emission on anyone willing to pay the set price to destroy the foundations of our current society, and as opposed to the Kerry cap-and-Wall-Street system, in which the people with the most skills in finding the loopholes and back door exits in contracts are set up as principle guardians of the cap – the Cantwell/Collins bill seems to go all in on the premise that there will never be a successful push for the kind of cap required, so its OK to pretend to set up a real cap-and-auction system.
You cannot get from a broken system to a functional system in piecemeal incremental steps. That’s why the insurance industry fought so hard to ensure that what would come out of the Senate on Health Insurance Reform would be a subsidy for a broken system, and why we have to fight to strip out the individual mandate to buy insurance in a broken system which threatens to extend this year’s failure and salt the well for a generation.
However, if perchance a fundamentally sound and functional system is established, and the problem is that the targets/thresholds are not ambitious enough, that is the kind of thing that its possible to win incremental victories along the way. And of course the real world will keep providing “shocks” which we can use to fight to lower the cap.
I believe that those pushing Cantwell/Collins as a “moderate” alternative to Kerry are not really aware that it fixes all three ways that Kerry was broken – pushing the permits upstream, limiting the market to permit users and so taking Wall Street out of it, and direct redistribution of 75% of Carbon Fees means that the income impact is progressive for at least the first 60% of income earners.
The likely “poison pill” is exactly that hand-back. They have been telling themselves that government has to “spend someone else’s money” to make productive infrastructure and technology investment that they have conned themselves into believing it too. Indeed, many of them were indoctrinated into that much younger and have no reason to go back and re-think it.
And under that false propaganda, handing 75% of the money back is going to tie the hands of any future administration in investing in a New Energy Economy.
But it is false propaganda, and the idea that there has to be some dedicated funding source for productive investments in a more sustainable New Energy Economy is patently absurd. Not letting government have a “source of finance” is a fictitious constraint, since the government can spend the money first and work out the desired “finance” arrangement later. Not letting the government have a “source of funding” is also a fictitious constraint when the only funds that can be constrained are foreign exchange, and the projects are net-savers on the import account.
They are, in short, gambling on the status quo, and against conditions reaching such a crisis point that people will be willing to break those rules. But of course conditions are going to reach multiple, repeated crisis points.
I say, take them up on the gamble. Breaking down that exact false conception is required for any actual progressive reform of the ambition required by our mounting crises in any event.
After all, we already need to have the antidote to that poison pill in hand if we wish to rise to the challenges that face us. We don’t win any sustainable victory without the antidote, so that particular poison pill cannot steal any victories from us.
Along with some very clear fact-checking gathering. We need to lay the evidence out as to why we believe what we believe and use this database of stuff as evidence. I’ve been toying with the idea of a wiki so that any of us can get all the relevant facts or bits of evidence so the dots are easier to connect when arguing with others. I think the case you make is utterly backed up by facts.
The defenders make good points (Al Franken’s current post on Naranja is garbage and isn’t one of them) about the bill really helping people but they look at it in a fragmented way not as a system. If we approach this crisis in the way they propose it would mean an utter disaster for the political process — the public good is ignored to serve some narrow ends and you basically get 30 million people with insurance (that they will get some help in buying) which will have to be paid by us and the insurance companies are guaranteed profits in perpituity since the bill sets in stone the sacredness of the current broken system without doing anything about costs. It is clear madness to reward what is basically criminal behavior by the Health Industry with no guarantee that the system will not be gamed just like every other thing in this society.
We have to say no. No to square wheels. Square wheels are too bumpy and too inefficient. Round ones would be better it’s just that the idea of round wheels is not allowed to be expressed in the MSM.
IF we fuck it up now we can fix it later …
OR …
IF we screw it up now we can fix it later, BUT
IF we don’t screw it up now we can’t do nothing later?
How come I’m so confused?
rmm.
It’s a suicide pill and the Dems are willingly taking it.
Bizarre.
Now Olympia Snowe says she’s gonna filibuster the bill anyway.
My hero!
I shit you fucking not! Promise.
http://vactruth.com/2009/12/19…
been announcing it’s a done deal, but there’s no word from Bernie at all that I can find. The last punk in town.
and has been since last April.
I think it’s in TN, I know it’s in Texas:
Fix it now. Make it a good bill now!
…THEY don’t want to fix it later…
No we can’t.
I’m going to need help over at Dkos. It’s Attack Jane Hamsher Day there. I’m writing a diary about the need to increase affordability in subsidies, and could use help to get it up onto the rec list.
There are three fucking JH diaries there now.