(1 pm. – promoted by DDadmin)
Doing some reading before bed last night and opened nyceve’s diary over at dKos titled In 2011, these people will launch holy war against the health insurance Industry.
I get here, where she writes:
As insurers continue to raise premiums and cut benefits, Health and Human Services is relegated to pleading, cajoling and threatening, but in the end, can do little to control them. This is an uncontrollable industry.
… and my head explodes: they can’t they be controlled???? Why is that?????? Isn’t that what we should focus on???
nyceve… she’s great, heroic even… out there fighting to make things better. But there’s this one little thing: we are engulfed in lawlessness and lack of accountability. Nobody… nobody… is enforcing the law or holding the powerful accountable.
What does this have to do with health insurance?
Just . . . everything.
cross-posted at writing in the rAw and at dKos
I know I am not the most eloquent of writers. Or the most clear. But I’ve said it a hundred times, although, by now, the point ought to be making itself:
It does not matter what policy is enacted… or what legislation is passed… or what laws may be on the books… or what regulation exists. None of it matters. Because the criminals are running the show. The people who have robbed you, me, us, this country and its treasure in blood and gold… are in charge. They do what they want with health care rates and there is nobody to stop them. There’s nobody to stop them from taking our soclial security either. At this moment, we have no tools: we can not stop them.
I know health care is important. But it is moot. It’s a diversion. It pales in comparison to the usurping of our laws and the undoing of our Constitution by the bad guys. And that is why, as nyceve writes, the health care industry is uncontrollable.
They along with all the other power players are un_controll_able. Let me repeat: because the laws on the books have absolutely no impact on their actions. They face no consequences. The can do whatever the fuck they want.
You want to change this game? Because as timid as you, me, we might be… this game is going to change. It’s going to change… what impact will we have on the outcome?
I predict this: if we keep focused on single issues, like health care, the environment, social security et al, we will lose.
There is only one issue, as it has always been: accountability to the law. We need to reinstate accountability to the law. We need to reinstate consequences to the might-is-right crowd. Democrat, Republican, I don’t care. The people who crashed a world financial market and continue to cripple it further need to be stopped. It’s that simple.
Focus. We need to get this straight. The facade is more fragile than ever and that makes this all the more dangerous. If we want to have influence, then we need to exert pressure and create platforms of influence at the right places. And in a fucking hurry.
Health care, civil rights, human rights, animal rights, the environment… all of it succeeds only when we reinstate the rule of law and reinstate and/or create common sense/fair regulations on all industry. And when we force/insist/demand CEOs and politicans to adhere to the LAW. Without it, everything else is just camping out.
Be prepared. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.
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our effort on the one or two things that will have the most impact for effort on all of the quality of life issues/legislation/law/policy.
as i write above, for me there is no question: it is about enforcing laws and regulations. it is the ability of citizens to have some mechanism to push back when national “leaders” become complicit in the might-is-right meme…
i think we have some chance to gain influence if we work locally. evolve the role of local and regional politics and form coalitions/collectives/consortiums across the country and the world. perhaps modeled after netroots or the constitutional convention in Philly all those years ago…
further it seems to me we have to have instigate regional economies and revive small businesses.
have we learned our lesson yet? that cheap goods are the most expensive we will ever buy???? all this war and unrest is based on the ever expanding model of economics.
when do we realize we are not the universe? we live in a finite space, with finite resources.
of what is wrong with the system – that those at the top will not hold themselves accountable, and break laws with impunity.
The question is while they are applying those laws to us, to keep us at bay, how do we make them accountable?
Young Mr Bush called the constitution “just a piece of paper…”
A system is only as good as how the people MAKE those at the top apply it. No one should be above the law.
As an attorney of 33 years, I know the problem from the inside.
For 33 years I have seen the exponential increase in difficulty that it takes for an individual or a small business person to win against a corporate giant.
I am so disgusted and disheartened about so many cases I should have won but lost. And it was not because my competition was better or worked harder. I whipped their asses every which way to Sunday; yet still lost. Sometimes I lost with juries who had been so totally pre-programmed by our media that there was nothing I could do to change their view of my client. But the most disheartening loses were the ones that I lost to judges who should have know better, but don’t.
Almost all the judiciary now is a product of large corporate practice and training. They simply can not conceive of being on the side of the individual and don’t know how to do it if they wanted.
The minefield that one must navigate to win on behalf of the individual is just horrendous.
And what gaps of hope the judges leave for individuals, the legislatures quickly fill.
I have a great sadness for the judicial and legal system. I am quite cynical. If you can’t get justice out of the legal system, then justice will be found outside the system and that is where we are headed, I am afraid. In fact, I encourage it, because I really have lost hope that the judicial system and political system can correct itself at this point. It is just too far gone.
The economic system is also too far gone, but that is because the judicial system went first.
OK, who is going to do actual work in American industries that are not here to support my nursing home days. What, the Facebook set?
Also I am coming to question the validity of a medical system with four pages of disclaimers per remedy and Googling popular drugs which feature lawyers just below the big pharma companies.
The last brilliant idea was a push to mandate a vaccine for a disease that never materialized. Neither the vaccine nor the engineered unicorn flu which spawned the media hype lived up to the projected kill numbers.
So, do I actually want health care. Yeah, well if I fall off my horse yes, if they tell me I have to be “on” something then I will evalutate that as it comes. Otherwise it is much like everything else in “post 911 Seig Heil America, a surveillance system.
Oh, big fucking wup. I can save for medical expenses tax free but with the administrative load of an army of assholian control freak accounting dweebs who pledge allegiance to the Council on Fucked up Relations.
I don’t know which is more annoying right at this point in time, reading the “it’s hopeless” drivel, or reading the reverse- racism trash coming from the OFA operatives who try telling us any criticisms of any policies or actions of this administration are racist.
Laws can change very quickly.
So can the impact of elections or coups on what government does, or does not.
They passed a shitty law and now they’re going to watch the opposite party try to overturn a lot of it and make it worse. They can either start acting like a political party that represents constituents who are not millionaires or they can get cast into political hell, and not by their base, whom they don’t give a flying rat’s a$$ about, anyway. It’s pretty simple. The fear of failure will either motivate them, or it won’t.
And I’m supposed to say to them, hey, Kansas Lady, get your act together and enforce the regulations, dagnabit ?
Is this supposed to be a satire ?
They’re more concerned with groping people in airports and collecting endless data streams on which websites we visit. Oh, they’ve got their little obsession with following teh rulez down pretty good ! That and it looks like they took the unions by a tender part of their anatomy and said, here’s your payoff, so shut up now.
Enlightenment doesn’t mean shit. The universe doesn’t revolve around some reproducing protoplasm. Half the people still don’t know that what goes up must come down and that organisms must adapt or die off.
Laws, treaties, contracts etc. seem to be built around a strange blend of assent and enforcement inside an evolving mythos in a world of symbolic manipulaltion and conflict.
Getting 300 million Americans on the same page is impossible, let along the rest of 6 1/2 billions of humanity.
Laws result from the organizing impulse in structuring security out of language. Kind of like making art to influence events. We all live in multiple worlds. We are forced to use old tools to shape modernity. We are forced.
I must use the logic and language of ancestors to convince another of my position. But the better way is to design a new way to communicate to avoid the bullshit. My legal arguments are still needed in this real world, but morality is nowhere to be found except in the dictionary.
It’s easy to make the constitution into prostitution and a dollar the guiding principle of democracy. As long as we talk about “health insurance” (to get back to the topic), we have a big problem i.e. the issues is already framed for us before we begin to argue. Yet how weird that I have to assent to this in order to participate in the discussion.
So I am in and out of the discussion simultaneously. As a lawyer, I am in it, and as an “idealist” I am out of it.
I do however think a “revolution” of ideas is necessary, and after all, isn’t our ultimate physical purpose somehow involved around making big ideas from a sperm and egg cell?
And I don’t have Cartesian schizophrenia, I just know if I ain’t here, I probably don’t contribute the the “living” conversation.
Is the lack of law enforcement. The oligarchs have decreed that they are immune, as a class, from the law as it applies to economic issues. You can prosecute a few people and corporations here and there to enforce the charade–sort of like cops raiding the odd whore house from time to time or raiding the houses that doesn’t pay them a bribe.
Eventually, systematic law-breaking will reach the population in general because, despite MSM propaganda, people will realize that the law only applies to them so why respect it? Most of our social order depends on people enforcing the law by following it.
Our social contract is fraying as sure as ice melts on a hot stove. Law enforcement agencies will decide by themselves, for their own reasons, what laws to enforce. That’s the reality we are in.
Health care, like everything else in this country, is a political issue–we are invited to play the political game yet, most of us have no stomach for it.