There Will Be A Public Option Or Heads Will Role In 2010

There Will Be A Public Option Or Heads Will Roll! The Entertainment Value of Snuffing Grandma : A Nation of Children Roots for the Mafia by Joe Bageant / August 20th, 2009. “Every day I get letters asking me to weigh in on the healthcare fracas. As if a redneck writer armed with a keyboard, a pack of smokes and all the misinformation and vitriol available on the Internet could contribute anything to the crap storm already in progress. Besides that, my unreasoned but noisy take on this issue is often about as welcome as a fart in a spacesuit. None of which has ever stopped me from making a fool of myself in the past. So here goes. There ain’t any healthcare debate going on, Bubba. What is going on are mob negotiations about insurance, and which mob gets the biggest chunk of the dough, be it our taxpayer dough or the geet that isn’t in ole Jim’s impoverished purse. The hoo-ha is about the insurance racket, not the delivery of healthcare to human beings. It’s simply another form of extorting the people regarding a fundamental need — health. Unfortunately, the people have been mesmerized by our theater state’s purposefully distracting and dramatic media productions for so long they’ve been mutated toward helplessness. Consequently, they are incapable of asking themselves a simple question: If insurance corporation profits are one third of the cost of healthcare, and all insurance corporations do is deliver our money to healthcare providers for us (or actually, do everything in their power to keep the money for themselves), why do we need insurance companies at all? Answer: Because Wall Street gets a big piece of the action. And nobody messes with the Wall Street Mob (as the bailout extortion money proved). Better (and worse) presidents have tried. Some made a genuine effort to push it through Congress. Others expressed the desire publicly, but after getting privately muscled by the healthcare industry, decided to back off from the idea. For instance:” read it all below! Progressive Dems Refuse to Back Healthcare Reform Without Public OptionSurveyUSA Health Care Data Gathered Using NBC News Wall Street Journal Much of the attention in the health care debate of late has focused on the Senate, where the public option and other proposals face a tough fight. There has been lots of talk this week about a bipartisan bill being worked on by members of the Senate Finance Committee, and yesterday the big news was Senate Democrats considering splitting the overhaul into two bills. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi reminded everyone yesterday why it's important to still be watching what the House will do as well, especially if the Senate passes a version of the health care bill that does not include the public option or other provisions supported by liberal members of Congress. In a news conference in San Francisco, Bloomberg reports, Pelosi made clear that a health care bill in the chamber must include a government-sponsored health insurance plan to compete with private insurers. "There's no way I can pass a bill in the House of Representatives without a public option," she said. As debate raged this week over whether the administration had abandoned the public option, which President Obama denied yesterday, liberal members of Congress have been clear that they will draw a line in the sand over its inclusion in a final bill. The statements by Pelosi and others foreshadow the coming Fall battle between moderate and more liberal Democrats. How that battle is resolved will determine what a final health care reform bill will look like, and whether that bill can then pass Congress and become law.

SurveyUSA Health Care Data Gathered Using NBC News Wall Street Journal

Questions: SurveyUSA asked 1,200 USA adults four questions that, word-for-word, were included in the three most recent NBC News / Wall Street Journal polls.

SurveyUSA Question #2 appears in the June 2009 NBC-WSJ poll as Question #34A.

SurveyUSA Question #3 appears in the June 2009 NBC-WSJ poll as Question #34C, in the July 2009 NBC-WSJ poll as Question #29, and in the August 2009 NBC-WSJ poll as Question #10.

SurveyUSA Questions #4 and #5 appear in the June 2009 NBC-WSJ poll as Question #31C, in the July 2009 NBC-WSJ poll as Question #30, and in the August 2009 NBC-WSJ poll as Question #11.

SurveyUSA Question #6 appears in the June 2009 NBC-WSJ poll as Question #32, in the July 2009 NBC-WSJ poll as Question #31, and in the August 2009 NBC-WSJ poll as Question #12.

SurveyUSA demographics were matched as close as practicable to demographics used by the NBC-WSJ pollsters in June, July and August 2009. The NBC-WSJ questionnaires in all cases were longer.

Not all questions from the NBC-WSJ surveys were included in the SurveyUSA research. For example, in the July 2009 NBC-WSJ poll, respondents were asked questions about Congress, Sonia Sotomayor, Sarah Palin, Joe Biden , Nancy Pelosi, Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton, the 2010 mid-term election, job creation, deficit spending, Iraq, Afghanistan, gasoline, global warming, greenhouse gases, moral values, bank regulation and stimulus packages before respondents were asked questions about health care.

There is nothing inherently worse about a longer questionnaire, there is nothing inherently better about a shorter questionnaire; there is just more opportunity for "question-order" interaction in a longer questionnaire.

SurveyUSA included only the questions shown below, and no others. SurveyUSA Question #1 does not map to a specific NBC-WSJ poll; it was included to introduce the respondent to the topic of health care.

SurveyUSA poll was conducted using digitally mastered, recorded audio. NBC-WSJ polls were not. NBC-WSJ August data gathered 08/15/09 through 08/17/09. SurveyUSA data gathered 08/19/09. SurveyUSA data collection for this project was underwritten by MoveOn.org. Poll respondents did not hear MoveOn's name. SurveyUSA is an independent research company and does not endorse any particular cause or ideology. SurveyUSA has no stake in the outcome of any health-care legislation and is a disinterested party in the health-care debate.

1)

Are you paying ... a lot of attention? A little attention? Or not very much attention? ...to the debate over health care?

2)

In any health care proposal, how important do you feel it is to give people a choice of both a public plan administered by the federal government and a private plan for their health insurance--extremely important, quite important, not that important, or not at all important?

3)

Please tell me which ONE statement you agree with more on the issue of creating a new public health plan administered by the federal government. (choices rotated) Some people say it would help lower health care costs because it would compete with private health plans. This new public plan would provide coverage for the uninsured and all Americans would have an option for quality affordable health care. Other people say that patients might not always have access to their choice of doctors and the government would lower costs by limiting medical treatment options and decisions that should be made instead by patients and doctors.

4)

Do you have a health plan, that is, are you covered by a private health insurance plan or by a government program such as Medicare, Medicaid, or Tricare?

5)

Well, what kind of plan would you say your primary plan is?

6)

Now I am going to tell you more about the health care plan that President Obama supports and please tell me whether you would favor or oppose it. The plan requires that health insurance companies cover people with pre-existing medical conditions. It also requires all but the smallest employers to provide health coverage for their employees, or pay a percentage of their payroll to help fund coverage for the uninsured. Families and individuals with lower- and middle-incomes would receive tax credits to help them afford insurance coverage. Some of the funding for this plan would come from raising taxes on wealthier Americans. Do you favor or oppose this plan?

7)

And do you strongly or only somewhat favor this plan?

8)

And do you strongly or only somewhat oppose this plan?

The Entertainment Value of Snuffing Grandma

A Nation of Children Roots for the Mafia

by Joe Bageant / August 20th, 2009

Every day I get letters asking me to weigh in on the healthcare fracas. As if a redneck writer armed with a keyboard, a pack of smokes and all the misinformation and vitriol available on the Internet could contribute anything to the crap storm already in progress. Besides that, my unreasoned but noisy take on this issue is often about as welcome as a fart in a spacesuit. None of which has ever stopped me from making a fool of myself in the past. So here goes.

There ain’t any healthcare debate going on, Bubba. What is going on are mob negotiations about insurance, and which mob gets the biggest chunk of the dough, be it our taxpayer dough or the geet that isn’t in ole Jim’s impoverished purse. The hoo-ha is about the insurance racket, not the delivery of healthcare to human beings. It’s simply another form of extorting the people regarding a fundamental need — health.

Unfortunately, the people have been mesmerized by our theater state’s purposefully distracting and dramatic media productions for so long they’ve been mutated toward helplessness. Consequently, they are incapable of asking themselves a simple question: If insurance corporation profits are one third of the cost of healthcare, and all insurance corporations do is deliver our money to healthcare providers for us (or actually, do everything in their power to keep the money for themselves), why do we need insurance companies at all? Answer: Because Wall Street gets a big piece of the action. And nobody messes with the Wall Street Mob (as the bailout extortion money proved). Better (and worse) presidents have tried. Some made a genuine effort to push it through Congress. Others expressed the desire publicly, but after getting privately muscled by the healthcare industry, decided to back off from the idea. For instance:

• Franklin Roosevelt wanted universal healthcare.
• Harry Truman wanted universal healthcare.
• Dwight Eisenhower wanted universal healthcare.
• Richard Nixon wanted universal healthcare.
• Lyndon Johnson wanted universal healthcare.
• Bill Clinton wanted — well we can’t definitely say because he made sure that if the issue blew up on him, which it did, Hillary would be left holding the turd. Is it any wonder that woman gets so snappy at the slightest provocation? First getting left to hold the bag on healthcare, then the spots on that blue dress.

So why did American liberals believe Obama would bring home the healthcare bacon? Because they live in an ideological cupcake land. It’s a big neighborhood, a very special place where “Your vote is important,” and “by electing the right candidate, you can change our beloved nation.” Most of America lives in that neighborhood, even though they’ve never personally met. It’s a place where the shrubbery and flowerbeds of such things as “values” and “hope” bloom. Hope that our desires coupled with the efforts of a good and decent president can affect “change.” Evidently these voters never heard the old adage, “Hope in one hand and piss in the other, and see which one fills up first.”

The slaughter of the innocents by the healthcare lobby has pretty much extinguished the political usefulness of the word hope. Nobody, especially Obama, uses it now.

The first on-stage scuffle of the Obama administration, government assured healthcare, quickly settled down into the accustomed scenario of very rich and powerful people in expensive suits “finding middle ground,” otherwise known as the status quo. Single payer healthcare soon became “a consumer government alternative to private insurance,” and is now “a system of health cooperatives. Next comes “slightly better health insurance (but not medical services) than before, from the same insurance companies but at twice the price; don’t worry though, we’re increasing your tax load so you can afford it.”

The televised screaming matches, having served their purpose, are over now. The presidency and the nation have settled back into the normalcy of the officially sanctioned state consciousness and its curious non-language, one modified and shaped daily by corporate and government symbiosis. Over generations we’ve come to internalize this imagistic language, which is quite theatrical when heated up for public consumption and dully bureaucratic when attention is to be avoided. But always it is void of content and any sort of truth. In the corporately managed theater state, it’s not whether a thing is true that matters, but how it sounds and looks and what you call it. Call end of life counseling a “death panel,” and you’ve just turned mercy and choice into one more Great Satan.

In the end though, healthcare American style comes down to the preferences of two elite castes, Congress and corporate powers, neither of which can exist without the other. Corporations need the government to sanction their methods of extracting wealth from the public. Congress needs corporations to finance its campaign chariot races. Right now members of Congress have an excellent chance of putting the arm on healthcare industry lobbyist for some real cash:

Senator Smedley Heathwood: “Oh, I dunno, I’m sort of liking Obama’s alternative.”

Godzilla Healthcare Inc.: “Here, take this suitcase full of gold bullion, call me if you run short. And remember, we’ve got that ‘Life is a pre-existing condition’ bill coming up in the Senate soon.”

Siamese twins, joined at the hip, they share the same goal, preservation of control — the government’s social control and the corporations’ economic control. And you cannot have one without the other.

Obama got elected on hope of reform, despite that one cannot reform a mafia, only pay increased extortion moneys. He’s fortunate that it was not a genuine demand for reform, just hope. We’re fortunate we did not demand reform because we’re not going to get it. Obama doesn’t have to reform the healthcare industry mob. All he has to do is look like he took a shot at it, and hope it’s convincing enough. What we’ve seen is probably his best shot, too. Why not? There is always the off chance it might work, in which case his “presidential legacy” would be assured. And if it doesn’t, well, the serious progressives who are screeching mad at him now will still have to vote for him as the incumbent in 2012. Or learn to love somebody like Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Jeb Bush, Rick Santorum (take your pick) or some as-yet-unknown the GOP drags out from under the hen house and ballyhoos as a “new face.” Luckily, Dick Cheney is out of the question, barring a coup by the far right wing of the schizophrenic GOP. But still, after Palin, one shudders at the prospects.

Whatever happens, we will not see Congress stand up against the extortion of its people by the healthcare industry. We will not see even the most ordinary kind of healthcare declared as a human right, as it is in so many other nations. We will see, however, greater access to the public treasury by the insurance corporations.

Every nation in the world is now party to at least one treaty that addresses health as a human right, including the conditions necessary for the delivery of health services. Healthcare is a right under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Hell, even Saddam Hussein provided healthcare.

That Americans cannot grasp this fundamental aspect of human rights (but then we cannot even get child nutrition, or limiting the number of times you can taser an old lady in an airport, out of the starting gate) and join the civilized world and assure its people of such things is testimony. Testimony that we live in a vacuum exclusive of the accepted standard of mercy and decency common to civilized democratic nations elsewhere. Testimony that even we the citizenry would rather maintain and spread lies than accept truths such as most people in countries with universal healthcare would not ever give it up in favor of the U.S. system.

Most of all though, it is testimony that we live under an induced mass hallucination where spectacle replaces fact, information and common sense. In place of actionable information, we are served up screaming red faces — angry mobs manufactured for TV protesting “government interference in the people’s healthcare choices.” One must wonder what inchoate anger is really being tapped by the organizers of these strange “citizen protests.” As usual, the straw boogeyman of socialism is once more invoked. “Oh my god! I’ll have to give up my $1,100 a month insurance bill, which only pays 80% of my insurance costs AFTER I pay the initial $5,000 of those costs! If that ain’t Joe Stalin all over again, I don’t know what is!” We get the false media drama of “death panels.”

And being captives of spectacle and hyperbole, we friggin love it. The idea of death panels plays to our childish attraction to the extreme and entertaining. Killing Grandma is far more entertaining to our imaginations than say, guaranteed access to chest screens and blood pressure medicine. Two generations into this national infantilization, it’s now the only national life we know — the ideological spectacle made real.

To steal a page from Guy Debord, society has become ideology. We live in an antidialectical false consciousness, imposed at every moment on everyday life as spectacle. We are held in thrall. Our faculty of ordinary encounter has been systematically broken down. In its place we now have our unique social hallucination. Never do we encounter anything directly, yet we get the illusion of encounter. This includes encounter with each other. Anyone who lives in meatspace with his or her fellow Americans could not deny 57 million of them health. In this society no one is any longer capable of recognizing anyone else. Instead, we see others as the screamers at the town hall meetings, or as communists who want to give free healthcare to illegals and establish death panels. Or as Christian fundamentalists, or as liberals or conservatives. Or as celebrities or as nobodies.

But most importantly, whenever we must reach any significant agreement as human beings, whether it be about something as globally insignificant as U.S. domestic policy (we are only 6% of the world population, and though it hasn’t soaked in yet to most Americans, we’re also broke and owe the Chinese loan shark a wad) or as significant as global warming, we immediately cede the field to ideology. We simply don’t know how to do anything else.

Ideology has utterly triumphed. It has separated us from ourselves and built itself a home inside our consciousness, from whence it operates now as our reality. There is no going back, only forward. Given that we are a nation of children who prefer to close our eyes and make a hopeful wish with Tinkerbelle, rather than give hope the piss test, then let us hope to high hell. We may as well go for broke. So let us hope that, in going forward, new and unforeseen developments in the national consciousness occur. Developments that offer an escape from this one so deeply colonized by the corpo-political machinery we created — and which in turn recreated us. One that will break us loose from enthrallment. Maybe collision with a giant asteroid. Or that Garth Brooks will be barred from making a fifth comeback tour. That’s one hope. A consciousness shattering event by American standards.

Another hope is for an absolute and total collapse of the system.

At this point, I’ll take what I can get.

Joe Bageant is author of the book, Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War (Random House Crown), about working class America. He is also a contributor to Red State Rebels: Tales of Grassroots Resistance in the Heartland" edited by Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank, to be published this summer by AK Press. A complete archive of his on-line work, along with the thoughts of many working Americans on the subject of class may be found on his website. Feel free to contact him at: joebageant@joebageant.com. Read other articles by Joe, or visit Joe's website.

This article was posted on Thursday, August 20th, 2009 at 9:30am and is filed under Corporate Globalization, Health/Medical, Human Rights,Obama, Right Wing Jerks. ShareThis

14 comments on this article so far ...

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1. Don Hawkins said on August 20th, 2009 at 1:13pm #

Joe that’s it and I always’ remember that lady in a hospital gown walking down the sidewalk that had just got health care in LA and was let out of an ambulance in West or was it East LA as part of her treatment. Strange day’s ahead as the people now in control of this out of control system well the bullshit is going to get very hard to peddle. Just think maybe more people will say wait one little minute how can that be true it just doesn’t make sense. An asteroid football field size North Atlantic welcome to the Universe.

2. Don Hawkins said on August 20th, 2009 at 2:45pm #

The Copenhagen Post – ‎Aug 19, 2009‎
The Foreign Ministry has cancelled 20000 overnight hotel reservations meant for people attending the United Nations Climate Change Conference in December. .

Now if I was part Indian wait I am you might call this a sign.

3. Mulga Mumblebrain said on August 20th, 2009 at 4:18pm #

The idea that it is ideology that is in charge in the US (as it also here in Australia)obscures a deeper truth. The clash of ideologies is, at base, a clash of psychologies, of views of existence. The extreme Rightwing ideology that dominates the West, and that is growing more extreme, more hysterical, more deranged by the day, is rooted, I believe, in a simple pathopsychology. The Rightist, the authoritarian, paranoid, aggressive, violent Rightwinger, who feels no compassion for those whose lives are ruined by an unfair health system just as they are indifferent to the murder of millions of Iraqis, Afghanis etc in The War of Terrorism, is basically a frightened individual.
Flung into this world against their choice, suffering from that ’sexually transmitted disease with 100% mortality’-life, favoured by Fate ( or not), with utter indifference, in the gifts of physical attractiveness, intelligence and amiability, our Rightwing fellows are riven by fear, and its boon companion, hatred. Basically fear and hatred of the Other, a process exacerbated by the Rightist’s habitual psychological projection, where their feelings of fear and loathing are assumed to be inherent in everyone else.

The process of protecting oneself from this overwhelming dread has produced many of the manifestations of human culture. Religion plainly plays an essential role, denying the reality of death, consoling the unlucky for life’s unfairness, repressing women and keeping a lid on social tension, as the exploited and brutalised rabble are promised ‘pie in the sky’ when they die, just so long as they remain quiescent and obedient during this life. Capitalism, where the accumulation of material possessions is plainly an attempt to compensate for feelings of cosmic insignificance, is another method.

The pathopsychological rewards of beggaring others, of stealing with society’s protection and admiration, cannot be underestimated. This being a process for those without scruples, with contempt for others, and being the means by which money power, the primary source of power and legitimacy in capitalist societies, is acquired,capitalism perpetuates the rule of the worst in society, a process that only worsens and aggravates itself with the passage of time.

I think the clearest manifestation of our rule by psychopaths who hate and fear other people is not our endless wars, our massacres, or callous child killing, our mass torture or even our contempt for the weak and powerless within our own societies. It comes, I believe, in our ruling elites’ absolute indifference to the ecological collapse we are living through. I believe that the forces of Evil are mobilising to foment mob hysteria in the US against emissions trading, that third-rate ‘market’ solution’ to anthropogenic climate change. It looks like the same tactics employed in the ‘colour revolutions’ that the US Right has used to impose compliant, pro-business, proto-fascist regimes around the world, coming home. In the face of almost complete scientific consensus that every major life-sustaining ecosystem is collapsing, the Right finances and maintains a gigantic apparatus of lies and misinformation that denies every problem. And its hideous activity is supported, hysterically and belligerently, by the entire ghastly mob of Rightwing homunculi, without any idea or care that they are being manipulated. All that matters for them is the delicious emotion of rank hate that they feel, as they berate the despised ‘Greenies’ and environmentalists that they have been indoctrinated by the corporate media to fear and despise for decades.

When one considers that the Right are not entirely stupid, not universally moronic, what can explain this crusade to stop, by any means necessary, any action to ameliorate our plight? Greed, insatiable avarice, explains much. The capitalist appetite for limitless growth mirrors their limitlless greed, which, of course is antithetical to all natural processes, where sufficiency and balance are all. The unbounded growth of any organism inevitably leads to ecological collapse, yet the capitalist is unconcerned. What is going on?

I suspect it is just the playing out of the Rightists’ omniphobia, their fear and hatred of everything. I suspect that somewhere, deep down in the tortured labyrinth of the Rightwing psyche, that the future, and in particular, those who will be living when the currently extant Rightwingers are dust (having passed through the slime stage)are so absolutely despised that those in power at the moment could not give a stuff whether they suffer or thrive. Indeed, I have noticed more than a few Rightwing anthropogenic climate change denialists lately accusing the scientific rationalists of actually desiring a climate change apocalypse. Leaving aside the trademark insanity of accusing those who are feverishly attempting to avert disaster of really wishing it would happen, it is clearly the most transparent and chilling projection imaginable.

By their lurid abuse, they give away their own inner psychic landscape. We are heading for an apocalypse because powerful people want it to happen, which of course, brings us to fundamentalist religious belief. The longing for, the desire for ‘End Times’ when the elect are to be ‘raptured’ to ‘glory’ leaving the evil hordes to death and suffering, lies behind much anthropogenic climate change denialism, I am certain. As the ‘Good Book’ says, the world will end in ‘..the fire next time’, an outcome devoutly to be desired, by some.

4. Don Hawkins said on August 20th, 2009 at 4:23pm #

Just watched NBC Nightly News and they said the oceans are warmer now than ever ever being since record keeping started. Part do to El Nino and something else is at play. That was 15 seconds on the News and then moved on to more important things. I think there starting to adapt and maybe next we will hear where Exxon has a plan.

5. lichen said on August 20th, 2009 at 4:40pm #

Mulga, you are right; it is a form of psychopathology, and nothing more. I’m getting more upset by the day that these fucking peices of trash are allowed to bring down our collective quality of life so fucking far with their anti-democracy, life-hating politics that disinvest in society and destroy the planet and us. Yet they still expect that they can go on, not only robbing us of our human rights to free healthcare, college education, clean air, water, healthy food, living wage jobs with benefits…not only that, but they drown us with debts, keep upping the pollution to the point where we may all go extinct, they buy what little democracy we have from the sham “representatives” that should be replaced by the people directly making the decisions. They use “free speech” as an excuse for dominating the entire media to spread their disgustingness as if it was relevant at all.

6. Andres Kargar said on August 20th, 2009 at 11:16pm #

Hundreds of thousands of Americans demonstrated against war prior to the US invasion of Iraq, but the media remained mostly silent and refused to cover their protests.

But when a dozen brainless, right-wing nut jobs get up and protest against government attempt to exercise control over the health care and insurance industries, they are all over the news.

This is the reality of the criminal corporate media, totally subservient to the interests of the owning classes in these United States of America.

7. mary said on August 21st, 2009 at 3:23am #

I liked this article very much. In fact, the points it makes about the “Society of the Spectacle” and how when there are important issues, the public has to be as numbed, dumbed and bored as possible, so that they will not be following the small print that is going to screw them one way or the other, perhaps both.

I lived in the US for half of my life, so I know how expensive health care is, having had an emergency and being “uninsured” as a freelancer, I got a bill in the thousands (7, for precision) for one day of “treatment” of a collapsed lung, but sent out the door because I knew I could not keep up whatever payment was going to hit me should I stay. The other half in Europe, where the treatment isn’t free, but it is considerably cheaper. I know which system I prefer, and I don’t want to influence Americans, because they will never “get” anything resembling European health programmes. However, it seems that the debate is not about the issue at all, but runs along ideological lines, and besides, nothing in the US can change anyway. It is not built into the system. Hope, as the author pointed out, is. It’s just a word and a nice way to look at things that lets you not hold anyone responsible for the failure.

8. Mulga Mumblebrain said on August 21st, 2009 at 3:27am #

Andres, the USA, like every other capitalist state, is morally corrupt and ethically moribund. All its institutions are frauds designed to disguise the reality of pathocratic plutocracy. Naturally the media, with its responsibility to brainwash the serfs into fanatic dedication to a system that sets out to keep them in life-long wage slavery, servants to increasingly avaricious masters, before an impoverished and increasingly brief retirement, is the most evil and banal organisation of all. Setting out deliberately to distort reality to the advantage of one’s owners, creatures like Murdoch-Moloch, then incessantly screeching that you represent the Free Press is work fit only for vermin, and it’s vermin we get. When a sewer of human perfidy like FoxNews, under the ludicrous lie of ‘Fair and Balanced’, when it is neither, makes a hero of some poor tosser who thinks he is some sort of ‘winner’ because he stands outside a public meeting with his penis substitute strapped to his leg (so easy to reach, and caress)you know human civilization, at least the perverted facsimile of it that pertains in your poor, benighted country, has reached its end-stage.

9. mjosef said on August 21st, 2009 at 4:18am #

Well-said, Mulga, Andres, lichen.
In all the torrent of comment and criticism and schlarship and speechifying over the last few decades of the Information Age, I’ve seen very little that does justice to how egregious and ludicrous the super system has become in fomenting this plutocratic upsurge. The rich getting richer should have been a tough sell after the Woodstock era, right? Nah, it was a piece of cake for the masters and the myrmidons, and they were even laughing about it openly, as in their obvious meta-joke of “fair and balanced” Fox News. The phrase is of course stupendously redundant, which is an obvious tip-off to its flagrant Orwellian character – they must have been busting their guts and cackling like fiends when they decided on that whopper. Don’t fall for it, don’t watch it, don’t ever refer to it.

10. Don Hawkins said on August 21st, 2009 at 4:35am #

Sent this e-mail to Media this morning,

Morning,

The Copenhagen Post – ‎Aug 19, 2009‎
The Foreign Ministry has cancelled 20000 overnight hotel reservations meant for people attending the United Nations Climate Change Conference in December. .

Now if I was part Indian wait I am you might call this a sign.

ScienceDaily (Aug. 20, 2009) — Tasmania’s east coast is recording its highest-ever winter water temperatures of more than 13ºC – up to 1.5ºC above normal – due to a strengthening of an ocean current originating north of Australia.

NOAA polar orbiting satellites obtain the data generating sea surface temperature images. This is a composite 15-day image showing the extension of the Leeuwin Current around Tasmania. (Credit: CSIRO)

Average temperatures of waters at the oceans’ surface in July were the highest ever recorded, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said. The agency said the average sea surface temperature was 1.06 degrees higher than the 20th-century average of 61.5 degrees. Though July was unusually cool in some areas, like the eastern United States, analysts at the NOAA Climate Data Center said the combined global land and ocean surface temperature was 1.03 degrees higher than the 20th-century average of 60.4 degrees, the fifth warmest since worldwide record keeping began in 1880. The agency also said that, on average, Arctic sea ice covered 3.4 million square miles in July, 12.7 percent below the 1979-2000 average and the third lowest on record, after 2007 and 2006. NYT

On a cold wintry night in January the buses were being gassed for the demonstrations sorry town hall meetings to keep America free. You see some wanted to try and change the way freedom work’s in the greatest Nation on Earth and the best mind’s we have Steve Forbes, Dick Armey and the good people at Exxon and Massey, Chevron and many more knew this was very very wrong. The American people had been lied to and the truth, justice, and freedom will win. The lies were coming from people who just wanted to redistribute the wealth and change the very fabric of the greatest Nation on Earth. These nut cases were using climate change a Hoax to try and do that and thank God the thinkers among us knew the truth. Drill baby drill USA USA and Palin in 2012. The charts and reports show’s us that these nut cases now have NOAA and NASA and scientists on there side probably because of lobbyists from special interests. Palin in 2012, “Oh my God”.
Don

11. United-Socialist-Front said on August 21st, 2009 at 6:20am #

DEAR FRIENDS: HERE IS AN INFORMATION I GOT WHICH STATES THAT ZIONIST-US-COLOMBIAN IMPERIALISM AXIS WILL INVADE ECUADOR FIRST, AND THEN VENEZUELA AND BRAZIL TO STEAL THE OIL.

(Its in spanish)

José Luis Pacheco, experto petrolero venezolano: Eje Colombia-EEUU invadirá primero a Ecuador

http://www.aporrea.org/tiburon/n140937.html

20 de agosto 2009. -José Luis Pacheco, experto petrolero venezolano, alertó este jueves que, Ecuador se asoma como el primer país de la región que será invadido por la alianza Colombia-EEUU, en el marco del convenio firmado por estos países respecto a las bases militares.

Pacheco argumentó que esta tesis es factible por la política en la que persiste la nación colombiana de cercar a las FARC en el breve plazo. De allí que auguró que los primeros vientos de guerra apuntan hacia la república que gobierna Rafael Correa.

Sostuvo que esta situación va a desencadenar luego en un conflicto armado donde Venezuela deberá prepararse para afrontar la arremetida del país hermano en alianza con EEUU.

Denunció al gobierno colombiano como un factor perturbador de la integración regional, en virtud de la política que, permanentemente, ha dominado en ese país contraria a los gobiernos de izquierda. “Desde 1830 para acá, en Colombia, han ocurrido muy pocos cambios en materia política, porque siempre ha dominado la oligarquía”.

Reiteró que”nos vamos a ver muy probablemente en un conflicto armado” de inimaginables consecuencias.

Tales declaraciones fueron suministradas por Pacheco durante el programa “Ideas para el Debate”, que transmite Antv, canal de la Asamblea Nacional.

La fuente original de este documento es: Venezolana de Televisión (http://www.vtv.gov.ve)

12. balkas b b said on August 21st, 2009 at 6:25am #

what americans have, among many other nationals, is gangster rule. The larger and the stronger the ruling gang is, the less protests and honor of basic human rights matter.
The might will decide any issue; i.e., gang’s ‘laws’ will prevail.

The gang, seems to me, utterly controls armed service, private armies, cia, fbi, city police, manufacture of weapons, money, ‘education’, disinformation, private spies, etc.
tnx

wld massive passive resistance to such a iron-gripped rule loosen that grip?
Yes, likely! But once resistance goes to bed, the gang wld go back to old ways of doing things.

This leads me to conclude: americans need a very strong political party
that wld be talking for low[er] class or non-gangish supporters. tnx

13. desert flower said on August 21st, 2009 at 10:20am #

Hi,
What an amazing article. Very good.

My question is on what would happen (theoretically) if, say, we did get single-payer healthcare and these insurance companies got their walking papers? Nobody has addressed the question of what would happen to all those jobs in this industry, not just those with CEO titles but all those average American’s who work as Customer Service and other low end jobs. The industrial base in U.S. has been entirely ruined (until someone gets wiser and more creative and starts actually PRODUCING REAL PRODUCTS AGAIN). One of the few intact job sectors is the healthcare industry (yes, I know it is sad to call healthcare an industry, but that is what it has become in the U.S.).

So, we not only have an issue of Human Rights and the right to have access to medical help, but this entire issue SHOULD be exposing the entire politcal-economic-corporate-banking mafia-like system that has ruined this nation. And please, this has never been about ‘FREE MARKET”. It is entirely about the oligarchic ruling classes….(I guess its free market only to them, but for the rest of us small cheese its debt, debt, debt….just where they want us all).

Its much easier for these people to rule over us when we are so ignorant and unable to critically think anything through without turning a tv on to get our answers. This is so sad to me.

I don’t see an easy solution, and I don’t think anyone else does either. But thinking that single-payer or any other Human-friendly system will solve the whole dilemma is actually living with head in sand also.

I DO believe in single payer, don’t get me wrong. I just happen to see the BIGGER picture in this whole dilemma.

And the big picture keeps pointing back to the same sources.

It would have been nice they had installed a universal plan long ago. As it is, the quagmire as become so thickened it will actually take a massive failure in the whole structure before we can start rebuilding.

14. Don Hawkins said on August 21st, 2009 at 1:19pm #

That massive failure in the whole structure is coming and not as hard to see the future today as it was in the past. Of course many would like you to believe that you can’t see just fifth years from now as those same people make a few plans for the few in that massive failure. A little secret the greatest Nation in the World is bankrupt and that is today Friday August 21, 2009. I see California now has 11.9% unemployment rate. But not to worry Wall Street is doing fine. It appears they are now in control of all the debt in this out of control system that will as we all know if allowed to move forward destroy the Earth for life forms that again is rather rare in the Universe.

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