( – promoted by buhdydharma )
This might be a short diary, and I hope you will forgive me.
You see, one thing bothers me. Columbo style, you might say. You might say it sticks in my craw. Makes me scratch my head in puzzlement. But in order for me to ask it in the most expansive possible fashion you might have to bear with me while I circle, apparently aimlessly, around to my question..
We see these problems in our country. Some of these problems revolve around accountability, others account to a systemic shafting of the middle class, and still others revolve around political will.
We have a country in which a Democratic Senator backtracks endlessly on basic oversight regulation for people who potentially stole or defrauded the American Middle Class out of billions or perhaps trillions of dollars. Yet this is the same country that will have bespectacled IRS Agents showing up at a car wash with threats and demands for 4 cents in back taxes.
(HT/Colorado Is the Shiznit).
We have a country in which the Attorney General’s Office of the United States of America will spend lawyers, briefs, and endless uncounted dollars making sure that two people with the same dangly bits can’t possibly join their lives together in a manner that might make them eligible for one cent of government benefits — benefits their taxes paid for.
Yet we have this SAME country where, when even supposedly “respected” mortgage companies defraud millions and millions of home owners, nothing, apparently can be done — our government, we are led to believe, is utterly helpless to hold them accountable.
We know that accountability does still exist in this country, for some people.
We know, for example, that if I were to go out, with a finger in my jacket, and hold up a liquor store for $50, I would be going to prison for a long long time.
Yet we have this country, that whispers, siren like in our ear — “Just be a BIGGER criminal. Steal MORE. Then they won’t put you in prison, they’ll promote you to Secretary of the Treasury.”
So, to my question .. I almost forgot!
You see, I am like 99% of Americans. I know what I read on the blogs, and I know what I’m told on TV, though, unlike many of those Americans, I know that what to believe and what not is an exercise in mass correlation.
We are being told that it’s a done deal, that we need to pass “Health Care Reform” no matter how flawed it is.
Among other things, we are being told that they can and will fix it later. We are being told that something is better than nothing. I will believe this as soon as you tell me that ungulates have the capability to levitate, but let’s say I believe this.
You see, among the more fatuous, and hard to understand, selling points for a bill that funnels billions of taxpayer moneys to insurance companies that commit fraud, is that there will be tough new regulations on what they can do.
They won’t be able to charge egregious money anymore for junk insurance, we are told. They won’t be able to deny people coverage for pre-existing conditions, they won’t be able to drop people when they get sick.
Sounds good.
So, really, my only question is,
“Yeah? And who is going to make them?”
But on the other hand we have millions of Americans being told, you must buy insurance or else. And of course, if we can’t afford it (according to the flawed ideas of the government about who’s poor and who’s merely “not well off”), well, then we’ll get subsidies! Paid for by whom? By the rich? Don’t make me laugh. These subsidies are going to be paid for by people very little less poor than the people to whom the subsidies are going.
Now I want to ask a “past performance is a virtual guarantee of future results” type of question:
When it comes to whether the government will enforce these putative and “tough” regulations of the murder by spreadsheet people, will anyone go to jail? If they get fined for not complying with these tough new regulations, will anyone even notice? Will any enforcement be done that the insurance companies, using their paid lackeys in Congress, will not stop if it gets in any way onerous?
On the other hand, when people start getting fined for not buying insurance, do you really think the IRS is not going to penalize the average everyday little American who can’t afford it?
Pass the bill, Obama and Pelosi and the Democrats in Congress say, and it’ll be great. Well, I wonder. Where accountability in this country is distorted and the worst white collar criminal miscreants are rewarded for their crimes, while most everyday Americans cannot escape the most vicious and punitive accountability no matter how mildly they fuck up, are they really so confident that it won’t backfire? How could they be.
This is where Teabaggers come from. A government that is all about making the rich richer, and protecting them from all accountability, while pushing accountability downhill on all who peruse the concept.
Democrats have a basic misunderstanding with the nature of the American electorate at this time. Voters do not make what Democrats think of as “rational” decisions based on bad or worse. They make decisions based on questions that used to be put very succinctly in elections of yore.
Questions like “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”
If you pass a Health Insurance Bailout Bill with punitive mandatory orders for ordinary Americans to pay money to people they despise, even with the best intentions .. that enforcement action on the other side won’t be there. Because it isn’t, and we have seen it. It’s not there with Goldman Sachs, it’s not there with AIG, it’s not there with Wall Street in General.
Congress could even have the best possible intentions in passing a piece of shit bill, thinking it would be better than nothing .. but when these people get off scot free while the average American suffers, due to lack of executive accountability, it won’t matter if they did it with the best intentions.
If that happens, and we know it will, for good or ill, whether wisely or not, the American people will kick your asses to the curb. Hard.
And how many forms am I going to have to fill out, and how many years am I going to wait, to get my subsidy if I just can’t afford it?
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Hell, it may even be a capital offense.
as long as AndyS thinks that’s the face of middle class and all we need worry about, as long as “ungulates levitate,” we will continue to have America looted and regulators regulate those who only think they are middle class.
It’s a pet peeve of mine, AndyS. I think you’re posting is superb but that “middle class” DLC fraud sticks in my craw. That has been the primary engine of perpetrating frauds on the public. The middle class has always been middle management, higher paid professionals, the well off, Republican to the core.
The phrase was used to exclude the “welfare queens,” the homeless, the undocumented, the working class, the mass of the population.
And it leads directly to vultures feasting on the ill and dying, not needing to wait for death, under Republican and Democratic presidents alike.
Best, Terry
And it’s not expressed enough. Basically, over the last decade the government has lost all credibility. No on has gone after the missing trillions from the Pentagon. I’ve heard very little about the frauds committed around the Iraq War, missing guns, missing money, fraudulent contracts (on a massive scale). Then there was the financial fraud throughout the financial system that needs no new laws to prosecute. What’s going on here? And I’m going to trust the government to regulate the health-insurance industry?
We are really screwed because we can’t trust the government to do anything other than help corporations steal our money and, on top of that, tax us under an increasingly regressive tax system.
I love Michael Moore. He just says it!
This bill, H. R. 4789, is so simple and makes so much sense that corporate Dems will stumble all over themselves trying to sweep this pesky bill under the rug and pretend it doesn’t exist. This bill is only four pages long and within two days has apparently obtained 50 co-sponsors as well as more than 25,000 signatures on a mass e-mail petition.
Would you like the option of buying into Medicare at any age, at cost? This would not require a signle penny of support from the taxpayers (and would have no impact upon funds to blow up innocent people on the other side of the globe) and would have absolutely no impact on the deficit.
Rep. Grayson eloquently explains this bill on the video that follows…
The site to sign the related petition can be found here.
I’m thinking of sending this notice along to even those friends, relatives and acquaintances who might reside on the other end of the political spectrum. How could anyone not support a bill allowing any U. S. citizen to buy into Medicare at cost, that is, unless their entire retirement savings is concentrated in a portfolio of health care companies?
I have attempted to contact my U. S. Representative, who says he’s a Democrat, but is either a Demopublican or a Republocrat. Conveniently, his line is busy, although callers are prompted to leave a voice mail message or send an e-mail. I will keep trying to reach someone live on the other end and request a written response to my question as to whether he is willing to become a sponsor of this bill and/or to vote in its favor.
but not because our Congresscritters are spineless shills for corporate interests. They are, of course, so with the HIR bill they really don’t even require insurance companies to cover everyone (the fine is $100 for each person they refuse) or not raise premiums to outrageous levels (premium increases just can’t exceed 300% annually) or not refuse to pay for medical procedures prescribed by doctors.
If all of the theatrical blame-gaming surrounding the latest killing of the public option has done anything, it has dramatically illustrated the lengths the Congress and Obama are willing to go to in order to enrich their corporate masters. Pelosi points at the Senate, Senators point at the House, and Obama can’t even say he supports it with a straight face anymore. Everyone knows its kabuki, and yet they continue with it. Is there any doubt about what will actually happen with HIR?
We are being told that they won’t come in our mouths. And the check is in the mail. And for this low low introductory price, you can grow hair on a bald head and your wife will think you’re George Clooney.
And if you DON’T think these things, you are Jane Hamsher, Michael Moore, Ralph Nader, Noam Chomsky, and worst of all, Dennis Kucinich. And a murderer. And last but not least, a racist. Why thy left out child rapist, i don’t know.
clear that mandates were in and the public option out. He actually began to lose me last August during that silly “go listen to your congressman” charade. It was like a “break out session” for bullshit. Obama picked that trick up when he “taught” Con Law.
From my viewpoint it was a joke. How do you tell congress to go talk to their constituents about healthcare reform with absolutley no guidance from the President? I remember I got a few calls and some emails wanting to know if I would get involved in those “forums”. I was even on the first conference call with Axelrod.
But how the f**k do you talk to people about a bill when there are no specific objectives that the president has identified as essential. It would be like giving a talk before you knew what the subject was. What a pile of juvenile, transparent trickery. Ever since then, I’ve looked at Obama as a phony hustler.