Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) said on Tuesday that the Obama administration is “half-pregnant” with health insurers and pharmaceutical companies, which may jeopardize the success of reform.
The congressman — who is a leading liberal voice in the healthcare reform debate — said that rumored deals the White House has struck with big pharmaceutical companies and insurers may guide them to abandon key elements of reform, such as a public health insurance option.
“The Obama administration is trying to be, I don’t know how to put it, half-pregnant with the insurance industry and the pharmaceutical companies,” he told WNYC Radio today. “They’re to some degree the source of our problem.”
I for one APPLAUD Rep. Anthony Weiner’s knee jerk Truth Telling. Face it, President Obama has NOT done ANYTHING to fight for a Public Option, without which this is the subsidize and mandate private insurance bill, NOT the Health care Reform that would give Americans Universal coverage that we NEED.
What do we have to work with here? We’re faced with a federal government that is corporate owned and leading our country to third world status, relative to a large percentage of the population. U.S. imperialism is unchanged from the previous administration and actually expanding. Greed has completely taken over all facets of our controlled existence. The entire system has been set up and manipulated by a very small minority of people who have no interest in the welfare of the common person. The comparison of serfs to nobility is more apt than ever. The political party duopoly is so ingrained that any third party challenge on the national stage is easily brushed aside. Our supposed democracy is certainly no longer that.
We have to find a way to bring the common citizen to the table. Our current system of government, not unlike most in the world, is simply too skewed toward the wants of the few versus the needs of the many. What do we have to work with? The common citizen is still too apathetic to get involved in pressuring our politicians. That task is left to a small percentage of activists. Phone calls, petitions, whatever efforts are made, are simply too small to make any difference.
We know our government systems are corrupt. We know Wall Street, big banks and the Federal Reserve have effectively stolen the wealth from the majority and given it to the few. We know the illegal attacks and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan were mounted for corporate and imperialist interests, not because of terrorists. We know the reason we can’t get single payer health care reform is because of the corporate plutocracy that has completely taken over the Congress and Senate. We know the reason the term “jobless recovery” was floated in the first place was to get the populace accustomed to the fact that it will indeed be, a jobless recovery, i.e, the rich get richer and the rest of us take a step back, or two.
How can we possibly break this system? What do we have to work with? Challenging a government requires big numbers, on the same basic page. Challenging this government would require nothing short of a full spectrum dominance from the citizens. The small numbers on the internet, working to spread the word while preaching to the choir, are not going to have enough of an impact to do anything but delay a decision that we won’t have a public option, let alone challenge the entire premise of modern day U.S. government.
American citizens by and large like the soap opera, action hero, drama thing as trained by our media. Perhaps a full frontal assault on 9/11 resulting in a revelation of the true story would wake enough citizens from their acquiescent slumber to demand an end to business as usual. What better drama could capture the audience than one that includes a conspiracy of global proportions. I come to this with an air of impatience and a realization that something spectacular needs to happen before citizens can reclaim their country. My impatience comes from reviewing other options. Those such as working locally to elect more and better democrats, urging more citizens to get involved in contacting and pressuring politicians, or working toward third party legitimacy seem like peripheral efforts of no consequence when considering the state of the country and the world. My realization comes from knowing those efforts are by and large fruitless.
The only other possible option I’ve seen is waiting until things get so fucking bad that the citizens are forced into a revolution. Wait until conditions get so bad that people will finally fight back. Personally I’d prefer not to get to that point. That would mean much suffering and I have children and grandchildren who I would prefer not have to go through something like that.
What we know is our government is corrupt and our politicians are controlled by money. Most citizens already inherently realize this but don’t have a common issue they can focus on. Perhaps if the truth was revealed for all to see that our government was involved in the intentional murder of 3000 American citizens to further the agenda of imperialism and wealth transfer, the citizens would finally have had enough and avoid a revolution based on desperation.
I’m throwing this out there because of Charlie Sheen. I watched a video of him tonight and he seems to be sticking to his guns on his questioning of 9/11. Considering his high profile and that he could easily stay silent and enjoy his money, I have to applaud that. It’s not like I needed convincing by Charlie Sheen however. I’ve read pretty much everything out there and watched all the videos, so I already have an adverse opinion of the “official government version”. But he made me think again about the whole deal. Based on what I’ve learned, I can’t accept the “official government version” and believe those involved included our own government. And if our own government was involved and it can be proven to the citizens of the U.S. and the world, that just might be the path we can take to challenge the machine that controls us.
The Parables of Jesus were spoken in symbolic language which lends them to a variety of different, though often interrelated interpretations. Indeed, the very structure of the words which form them make any one sole meaning impossible. It is this fact in particular that has made me skeptical of any church or any faith which stakes a claim to the “real” way. Biblical scholarship has revealed nuance and even irony in the original text itself, both of which must be taken into account before forming any one-sided reading. Jesus often spoke indirectly to avoid persecution by both Roman and Jewish authorities, but beyond the obvious, I have always seen the Parables much as I would an excellent work of poetry, one which provides a new, helpful, before unseen resonance with every subsequent reading. The intrinsic thread remains constant, but new permutations arise as I age and depending on what frame of mind I am in at that particular juncture in my life, I always glean something brand new.
When we talk about our own complicity in a system where those at the top dictate the course of action for those subservient to them, I return to the Parable of the Talents. In this day and age where we often believe that our own power, income, and sphere of influence owes its existence to making compromises with unethical major players, this Parable address our messy moral dilemmas. Here, the version in the Gospel of Matthew, which is cited most frequently.
After all the controversy about the kids in grade school (purported as preschool, but those kids look a bit older to me) singing the praises about President Obama, I thought that I would tell of my experience. You have to know that I was raised in that bastion of left thinking, liberal political area of west central Arkansas (yes, that was with a chuckle).
The last Democrat that carried the county until after Rockefeller (yes, Arkansas elected a Rockefeller to office) was elected to the office of governor was Orval Faubus, mainly because he stood up to “the niggers” and the federal government during the desegregation conflict at Central High School in Little Rock during the year of my birth, 1957 CE.
Here is a bit of what I grew up with in public school, so that the record may be set straight. I was indoctrinated.
I have republished the two diaries posted by our President and fellow Kossack Barack Obama in order for us, as Democrats, to better understand the man and his style in passing the Democratic agenda he was elected to advance.
I do so for the purpose of making a point.
Therefore, I give you the words of President Barack Obama, posted below the fold.
Never has so much accurate and impartial information been so thoroughly ignored by the general public as in the current econmic downturn. There are numerous sites on the Internet that have been accurately predicting the steady decline of the world economy while government cheerleaders and corrupt “journalists” have been encouraging the public to smoke green shoots. As a public service, I will post a few links that are the equivalent of the “red pill” in the Matrix.
If you have the least interest in understanding the magnitude and direction of the economic turmoil around us, you owe it to yourself to swallow the Red Pill and visit these sites. Otherwise, you will be trapped in a Matrix dream characterized by this ridiculous headline from today’s New York Times business section:
“June Sales at Ford Fall Less Than G.M. or Chrysler”
By contrast, here is a quote from Cafe Americain that shows the attitude of the Red Pill blogs:
We are on the record in the opinion that the Obama economic team is ineffective, backward-thinking, compromised, and possibly corrupt. They are serving the corporate banks and not the people. They should be replaced starting with Larry Summers who is a Greenspan and Rubin crony and the core of failure on the team. Tim Geithner should follow to find better employment for his talents, possibly as a salesman of men’s suits.
I was banned at Dailykos a couple of days ago, for writing two-in-a-row recommended diarires, one which pointed out how much of the 9/11 Commission Report’s “information” was obtained through torture and which is therefore completely unreliable, and the other about an upcoming book written by a Commission Report insider in which he claims that the entire Report is “almost entirely untrue”.
The question becomes: Why are they refusing to release his health records? Is the Sarah Palin pick a stealth replacement for a candidate they do not expect to fulfill his term in office?
McCain needs to release his medical records without precondition.
Until he does, it can be speculated that a vote for McCain is a vote for Palin as president.
Please sign the doctors’ request for release of records letter here:
A morality that has within it no room for truth is no morality at all.
Men may dislike truth. Men may find truth offensive and inconvenient. Men may prosecute the truth, subvert it, try by law to suppress it, but to maintain that men have the final power over truth is blasphemy and the last illusion. Truth lives forever. Men do not.
Like many of you, I came to blogging as a way of fighting back. Before I found this avenue through which I could channel my dissent, I felt powerless to do anything about the outrages being visited upon our nation and virtually all the rest of the world by our own intractable and illegitimate government.
People often question what good it does to rant into the ether. We hear it all the time right here. ‘Preaching to the choir dude.’ But time has proven that we in the blogosphere are a force to be reckoned with. The pols and the pundits would be ignoring us otherwise…just like they used to.
“First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.”
A press that is free to investigate and criticize the government is absolutely essential in a nation that practices self-government and is therefore dependent on an educated and enlightened citizenry. On the other hand, newspapers too often take advantage of their freedom and publish lies and scurrilous gossip that could only deceive and mislead the people. Jefferson himself suffered greatly under the latter kind of press during his presidency. But he was a great believer in the ultimate triumph of truth in the free marketplace of ideas, and looked to that for his final vindication.
