The battle for Health Care is already over. It was over the minute the Democrats took single payer off the table. Now it’s just a tug of war between the lobbyists and the legislators to see how fake this fake reform will really be.

Did anyone really think that a political system as corrupt as ours could possibly produce anything but a corrupted product? Does anyone really believe another Obama speech is going to alter this fact?

Sometimes miracles do happen. So I’ve kept my mouth shut as this calamity has played out. But I accurately predicted all the way back in the campaign that a health care reform effort would, at best fail epically, and at worst actually make matters worse.

How did I know this? Am I an oracle from the netherworld? No. I predicted it because I am not insane. And by insane I mean doing the same thing over and over and over again while each time expecting different results. I mean WTF did people expect?

Progressives need to focus on one single issue for the rest of their lives if necessary: banning campaign contributions and other means to bribe politicians.

This is separate from campaign finance reform. There are a thousand ways we could finance elections. I’m sure we could come up with a few hundred that would be just, equitable and of benefit to the functioning of democracy.

The real issue is not how we finance elections. It is how we do not. We need a constitutional amendment to prohibit ever giving a penny to a public servant or candidate for office. It’s that simple.

This would be the second American Revolution and this country will continue to fail until it occurs. It will fail on health care reform, it will fail on climate change. It will fail on everything, just as it is failing now.

Removing the money from politics won’t solve all our problems. But it will at least eliminate the primary impediment that prevents us from solving those problems.  

Imagine politicians elected on the merit of their ideas instead of their ability to raise cash. George Bush would have never been governor, much less president.

Some day, historians will look back on this era as an absurdity – the way we look back on the days when monarchs enslaved the people or when we enslaved Africans.

Why wait?

Every other issue liberals and progressives care about, with the partial exception of civil rights, has one single source: the corruption of money. And yet we continue to attempt change without addressing this issue.

NOTHING WILL CHANGE until we get the money out of politics. There is no other issue that compares in importance. Not even close.

This is a teaser. Read the whole thing here.

Sick and Wrong

How Washington is screwing up health care reform – and why it may take a revolt to fix it

By Matt Taibbi

Let’s start with the obvious: America has not only the worst but the dumbest health care system in the developed world. It’s become a black leprosy eating away at the American experiment – a bureaucracy so insipid and mean and illogical that even our darkest criminal minds wouldn’t be equal to dreaming it up on purpose.

The system doesn’t work for anyone. It cheats patients and leaves them to die, denies insurance to 47 million Americans, forces hospitals to spend billions haggling over claims, and systematically bleeds and harasses doctors with the specter of catastrophic litigation. Even as a mechanism for delivering bonuses to insurance-company fat cats, it’s a miserable failure: Greedy insurance bosses who spent a generation denying preventive care to patients now see their profits sapped by millions of customers who enter the system only when they’re sick with incurably expensive illnesses.

The cost of all of this to society, in illness and death and lost productivity and a soaring federal deficit and plain old anxiety and anger, is incalculable – and that’s the good news. The bad news is our failed health care system won’t get fixed, because it exists entirely within the confines of yet another failed system: the political entity known as the United States of America.

Just as we have a medical system that is not really designed to care for the sick, we have a government that is not equipped to fix actual crises. What our government is good at is something else entirely: effecting the appearance of action, while leaving the actual reform behind in a diabolical labyrinth of ingenious legislative maneuvers.

Over the course of this summer, those two failed systems have collided in a spectacular crossroads moment in American history. We have an urgent national emergency on the one hand, and on the other, a comfortable majority of ostensibly simpatico Democrats who were elected by an angry population, in large part, specifically to reform health care. When they all sat down in Washington to tackle the problem, it amounted to a referendum on whether or not we actually have a functioning government.

It’s a situation that one would have thought would be sobering enough to snap Congress into real action for once. Instead, they did the exact opposite, doubling down on the same-old, same-old and laboring day and night in the halls of the Capitol to deliver us a tour de force of old thinking and legislative trickery, as if that’s what we really wanted. Almost every single one of the main players – from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Blue Dog turncoat Max Baucus – found some unforeseeable, unique-to-them way to fuck this thing up. Even Ted Kennedy, for whom successful health care reform was to be the great vindicating achievement of his career, and Barack Obama, whose entire presidency will likely be judged by this bill, managed to come up small when the lights came on.

We might look back on this summer someday and think of it as the moment when our government lost us for good. It was that bad.

Posted with kind permission of Truthdig

By Chris Hedges

Globalization and unfettered capitalism have been swept into the history books along with the open-market theory of the 1920s, the experiments of fascism, communism and the New Deal. It is time for a new economic and political paradigm. It is time for a new language to address our reality. The voices of change, those who speak in powerful and yet unfamiliar words, will cry out Sept. 25 and 26 in Pittsburgh when protesters from around the country gather to defy the heads of state, bankers and finance ministers from the world’s 22 largest economies who are convening for a meeting of the  G-20. If we heed these dissident voices we have a future. If we do not we will commit collective suicide.

The international power elites will go to Pittsburgh to preach the mantra that globalization is inevitable and eternal. They will discuss a corpse as if it was living. They will urge us to remain in suspended animation and place our trust in the inept bankers and politicians who orchestrated the crisis. This is the usual tactic of bankrupt elites clinging to power. They denigrate and push to the margins the realists-none of whom will be inside their security perimeters-who give words to our disintegration and demand a new, unfamiliar course. The powerful discredit dissent and protest. But human history, as Erich Fromm wrote, always begins anew with disobedience. This disobedience is the first step toward freedom. It makes possible the recovery of reason.

The longer we speak in the language of global capitalism, the longer we utter platitudes about the free market-even as we funnel hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars into the accounts of large corporations-the longer we live in a state of collective self-delusion. Our power elite, who profess to hate government and government involvement in the free market, who claim they are the defenders of competition and individualism, have been stealing hundreds of billions of dollars of our money to nationalize mismanaged corporations and save them from bankruptcy. We hear angry and confused citizens, their minds warped by hate talk radio and television, condemn socialized medicine although we have become, at least for corporations, the most socialized nation on Earth. The schizophrenia between what we profess and what we actually embrace has rendered us incapable of confronting reality. The longer we speak in the old language of markets, capitalism, free trade and globalization the longer the entities that created this collapse will cannibalize the nation.  

What are we now? What do we believe? What economic model explains the irrationality of looting the U.S. Treasury to permit speculators at Goldman Sachs to make obscene profits? How can Barack Obama’s chief economic adviser, Lawrence Summers, tout a “jobless recovery”? How much longer can we believe the fantasy that global markets will replace nation states and that economics will permit us to create a utopian world where we will all share the same happy goals? When will we denounce the lie that globalization fosters democracy, enlightenment, worldwide prosperity and stability? When we will we realize that unfettered global trade and corporate profit are the bitter enemies of freedom and the common good?

Corporations are pushing through legislation in the United States that will force us to buy defective, for-profit health insurance, a plan that will expand corporate monopolies and profits at our expense and leave tens of millions without adequate care. Corporations are blocking all attempts to move to renewable and sustainable energy to protect the staggering profits of the oil, natural gas and coal industries. Corporations are plunging us deeper and deeper as a nation into debt to feed the permanent war economy and swell the military budget, which consumes half of all discretionary spending. Corporations use lobbyists and campaign contributions to maintain arcane tax codes that offer them tax havens and tax evasions. Corporations are draining the treasury while the working class sheds jobs, sees homes foreclosed and struggles to survive in a new and terrifying global serfdom. This has been the awful price of complacency.

Protests will begin several days before the summit. Many of the activities are being coordinated by Pittsburgh’s Thomas Merton Center. There will be a march Sept. 25 for anyone who, as Jessica Benner of the center’s Antiwar Committee stated, “has lost a job, a home, a loved one to war, lost value to a retirement plan, gotten sick from environmental pollution, or lived without adequate healthcare, water, or food. … ” There will be at least three tent cities, in addition to a Music Camp beginning Sept. 18 that will be situated at the South Side Riverfront Park near 18th Street. Unemployed workers will set up one tent city at the Monumental Baptist Church on Sept. 20 and five days later will march on the Convention Center. The encampment and the march are being organized by the Bail Out the People Movement. The Institute for Policy Studies, The Nation magazine, the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, Pittsburgh United and other organizations will host events including a panel on corporate globalization featuring former World Bank President Joseph Stiglitz, along with a “People’s Tribunal.” There will be a religious procession calling for social justice and a concert organized by Students for a Democratic Society.

But expect difficulties. The Secret Service has so far denied protesters permits while it determines the size of the “security perimeter” it will impose around the world leaders. Pittsburgh has contracted to bring in an extra 4,000 police officers at an estimated cost of $9.5 million. Activist groups have reported incidents of surveillance and harassment. The struggle to thwart the voices of citizens will be as fierce as the struggle to amplify the voices of the criminal class that is trashing the world’s economy. These elites will appear from behind closed doors with their communiqués and resolutions to address us in their specialized jargon of power and expertise. They will attempt to convince us they have not lost control. They will make recommitments to free-trade agreements from the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, or GATT, the World Trade Organization and NAFTA, which have all thrust a knife into the backs of the working class. They will insist that the world can be managed and understood exclusively through their distorted lens of economics. But their day is over. They are the apostles of a dead system. They maintain power through fraud and force. Do not expect them to go without a struggle. But they have nothing left to say to us.

“Those who profess to favour freedom, yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground,” Frederick Douglass wrote. “They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

If you can, go to Pittsburgh. This is an opportunity to defy the titans of the corporate state and speak in words that describe our reality. The power elite fear these words. If these words seep into the population, if they become part of our common vernacular, the elite and the systems they defend will be unmasked. Our collective self-delusion will be shattered. These words of defiance expose the lies and crimes the elite use to barrel us toward neofeudalism. And these words, when they become real, propel men and women to resist.

“The end of something often resembles the beginning,” the philosopher John Ralston Saul wrote in “Voltaire’s Bastards.” “More often than not our nose-to-the-glass view makes us believe that the end we are living is in fact a new beginning. This confusion is typical of an old civilization’s self-confidence-limited by circumstances and by an absence of memory-and in many ways resembling the sort often produced by senility. Our rational need to control understanding and therefore memory has simply accentuated the confusion. … Nothing seems more permanent than a long-established government about to lose power, nothing more invincible than a grand army on the morning of its annihilation.”

Chris Hedges’ latest book is “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.”  

Great Op-Ed in the Times yesterday:

PRESIDENT OBAMA’S apparent readiness to backtrack on the public insurance option in his health care package is not just a concession to his political opponents – this fixation on securing bipartisan support for health care reform suggests that the Democratic Party has forgotten how to govern and the White House has forgotten how to lead.

This was not true of Franklin Roosevelt and the Democratic Congresses that enacted the New Deal. With the exception of the Emergency Banking Act of 1933 (which gave the president authority to close the nation’s banks and which passed the House of Representatives unanimously), the principal legislative innovations of the 1930s were enacted over the vigorous opposition of a deeply entrenched minority. Majority rule, as Roosevelt saw it, did not require his opponents’ permission.

When Roosevelt asked Congress to establish the Tennessee Valley Authority to provide cheap electric power for the impoverished South, he did not consult with utility giants like Commonwealth and Southern. When he asked for the creation of a Securities and Exchange Commission to curb the excesses of Wall Street, he did not request the cooperation of those about to be regulated. When Congress passed the Glass-Steagall Act divesting investment houses of their commercial banking functions, the Democrats did not need the approval of J. P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs or Lehman Brothers.

Roosevelt relished the opposition of vested interests. He fashioned his governing majority by deliberately attacking those who favored the status quo. His opponents hated him – and he profited from their hatred. “Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today,” he told a national radio audience on the eve of the 1936 election. “They are unanimous in their hatred for me – and I welcome their hatred.”

My only difference would be to point out that Obama didn’t “forget” to lead. He never knew how in the first place.  When he came to Daily Kos to chastise us for being too shrill, his big argument was that the American people don’t share our views of politics, so we need to be more conciliatory.

In my rebuttal diary, which incidentally knocked his diary off the #1 spot on the rec list, I argued that they don’t share our views because they’ve been lied to for years and someone needs to stand up and tell them the truth.

“It is not enough to take a poll and decide what can be done. We must change perceptions so that we may do what must be done. We must educate. We must persuade. We must lead.

…

Senator Obama says our perspective “misreads the American people.” I say we need a lot less reading and a lot more leading.”

Obama responded to my rebuttal with this:

I also agree that it is the job of Democratic elected officials to help shape public opinion, and not just respond passively to opinion thats been aggressively shaped by the Republicans PR machinery.  I am simply suggesting, based on my experience, that people will respond to a powerfully progressive agenda when its couched in optimism, pragmatism and our shared American ideals.

Yeah, it sounded good. But it was complete BS. Obama has had the greatest opportunity of any president in my lifetime to reform public opinion on a score of issues from the role and importance of government to the dangers of too big to fail institutions and monopolies.

Instead he sent out Larry Summers to lie about the economy and tell everyone it’s all coming up daisies.

Obama is a decent orator, though utterly and completely over-rated, but he is not a leader. He’s another Ivy League technocrat. He should have gone back to teaching, churning out more little technocrats. God knows we need more of those.

A diary was recently posted to a liberal blog attacking the baby boomers for their bad eating habits. The argument was made that they should not be allowed unlimited health care because they don’t deserve it – “they should have eaten better.”

This is typical Right wing savagery. But what surprised me were the responses.

Many arguments accepted the premise that health care is earned and responded by proposing that the baby boomers have indeed earned their health care because they are paying for it – with social security etc.

What I didn’t see was one argument that addressed the real issue – that access to health care is not something you earn, it is a right.

As decent people of good conscience we must reject the right wing frame of health care as a privilege or something you must earn. What kind of society turns away the sick because they don’t “deserve” health care? A sick society.

This is the disease of the free market ideology – the idea that everyone, working in their own selfish interests, creates an equilibrium which benefits society as a whole.

What this ideology creates is a sociopathic society.

sociopath

noun

a person, as a psychopathic personality, whose behavior is antisocial and who lacks a sense of moral responsibility or social conscience.

We must restore the health care debate to the realm of common decency. And we must reject the fallacy that Adam Smith’s invisible hand can replace our basic obligations to our fellow man.

Humans, on the most instinctual level, have always understood that we depend on each other to survive. Society itself is a product of this understanding.

The ideology of the free market, the view of society as the aggregation of individual self interests, is just an invention designed to allow the corporate model to operate without conscience or regard to society as a whole.

It has been embraced and propagated by capitalist forces who see democratic institutions and government regulation as enemies to profit. The health care system is only one manifestation of this sociopathy.  There are many others, from environmental abuse to economic injustice.

What the left has allowed, under the leadership of conservatives like Bill Clinton, is nothing less than the defeat of the idea that society is a social compact, the means by which we work together to solve common problems, and express the basic understanding that we are all in this together. We have allowed right wing forces to slowly redefine our most basic values and subvert our better nature.

Even entertaining the notion that people should be denied access to health care because, by some criteria, they don’t deserve it, is evidence of how far we have fallen.

The instrument of Social Democracy, the way  we as a society make collective decisions on how to benefit society whole, is democratic government. But the left, and Democrats specifically, have largely conceded to the right’s fallacy that government is inherently bad. And as a result, we have allowed the subversion of the most powerful agent of social justice in the history of the human race – the federal government under the United States constitution.

This could not have happened at a worse time. Never before in history have we needed to come together as much as we do now. Modern civilization is in a crisis state on multiple fronts. It is essential that we, as Americans, and as citizens of the world, unite in common purpose to solve these problems – the climate crisis, the energy crisis, overpopulation, under-education and, of course, the health care crisis. Transparent, effective, democratic government is the only tool we have. It is our only shot.

The first Americans fought and died for the same government that Ronald Reagan, a candidate for the presidency, called “the problem.” We must fight for our government again. We must fight for the idea that a free, thinking people can come together and work for not only the interests of the individual, but the interests of society.

If we don’t succeed, we will see all that we know and love perish.  

The United States has never been more powerful than it was on September 12th, 2001. On that day, with the sympathy of the world, we had more true power than all the armies in on Earth combined. Strange to think that as we lay smoldering, bleeding in the ruins of our collective self image as the most powerful nation on Earth, we had in fact grown in power by exponent. This is the strange currency of violence. The wealth of martyrs. And this currency is as tangible as a bar of gold.

Rarely discussed, and little understood, this principle is essential to understanding why the war on terror, and the aspirations of global American hegemony, will fail. It is why all empires fail. It is why terrorism fails.

I have been aware of this idea for years. I’ve been trying to distill it down into a fundamental law. But it is not an easy idea. There are nasty lose ends and apparent exceptions to the rule. But as best as I’ve figured it out, the rule is this:

Whenever you cause harm to another, you empower them.

It doesn’t matter if it’s an individual or a country, bombs or words. The moment you strike, or even strike back, you hand your opponent a gift. The people who attacked us on 911 didn’t weaken the American beast. The unleashed it. And when we responded with bombs in Afghanistan, we didn’t weaken radical Islam, we empowered it, justified it.

Unlike real currency, where every exchange is a tit for tat, the currency of violence creates a new specie on every transaction. It’s as though I hand you a $20 bill, and in exchange you hand me another, different $20 bill that had not previously existed. Except also, unlike real currency, it is not wealth that is created in the exchange, it is more hatred and more violence.

While it may seem that this idea should be resigned to the concerns of some dusty philosophy course somewhere, make no mistake, it’s political implications are as practical as they are profound.

How did Mahatma Gandhi defeat the most powerful Empire in the world without firing a single bullet? The currency of violence.

As I’ve watched the discussion on Guantanamo and torture and Dick Cheney’s speech and Obama’s speech and the advertisement for the arms industry that Memorial Day has become, it hit me that none of our leaders understand the nature of true power.

They speak of America’s strength in the world as something that comes from might. But might used, more often than not, is power spent. Just as the mighty British learned.

We are a militant nation. Our national symbol, the eagle, is a predatory animal. We like to pride ourselves on being able to kick some foreign butt, at least we did until Iraq demonstrated the limits of our prowess.

But Americans desperately need to begin to understand what real strength means and where it comes from. And we have to rise above the reptilian impulse to take the easiest path. The voice for strength through peace should be the Left. But the Left, following the lead of Bill Clinton, has long abandoned enlightenment for political expediency. But such primal expediency at home is anything but expedient abroad.

Obama, at least, pays heed to the idea of strength through peace. But it is an empty gesture as he escalates one war while failing to end another. Empty as bombs kill hundreds of women and children and unmanned drones swoop down on peasant villages.

The idea of strength through peace is not new and did not originate with Gandhi. He just demonstrated a mastery of it that was unprecedented in the modern world.

I’ve been trying to pound into my brain this wisdom as I navigate through my own battles. The currency of violence is fully redeemable in all wars, big and small. It is hard for me to remember that when I lash out at my political foes, when I launch ad hominem attacks and call people names, I am actually giving them something – a gift. The gift of martyrdom.

I think this is why Bill Moyers is far more dangerous and persuasive than say, Keith Olbermann or other attack dogs of the Left. And why he is rarely, if ever, invited into the corporate media sphere.

Attack is not Moyers style. He induces the scoop from his guest and allows the user to feel their own outrage. This is the opposite of an Olbermann special comment where he is so busy expressing outrage that we aren’t much allowed room for our own.

I’ve been in attack mode for so long that I almost feel like I’ve lost my voice, my claws to say this. But I’m tired of empowering my opponents with hate and hostility.

I do hate. I hate what has been done to my country. I hate the greed and brutality of corporatism. And I hate the actions of man.

But hate is just the bank in which the currency of violence is deposited. I am going to try -try- to stop trying to harm my enemies with vitriol and invective. They already have too much power as it is.

P.S., I also have a new blog. Check it out if you want. Visit often if you like it.