cosmic poaching

Man were the Beatles right. We need serious changes in the way our government operates, and we need them NOW. We are living in truly heinous times. While most people think things are bad because of the “Great Recession” they don’t understand the root causes: the fact that Wall Street and our government are one and the same (it’s always been that way) and as a result legislation is passed or killed based on what the moneyed interests want and not the people.

To further prove my point, the government bailout program for the financial industry (which was really a quid pro quo agreement – you give us campaign contributions, we cover your losses when you screw up royally) does not require banks to tell the Treasury Department how they are spending the taxpayer’s money.

This, “despite recommendations from the bailout’s special inspector general that the government demand a periodic accounting.” (See The Crisis, a Year Later – NY Times editorial, 9-9-09) The article concludes that without this information it will be impossible to figure out the efficiency of the bailout and difficult to create reforms to make sure such a catastrophe doesn’t happen again.

Are you kidding me?! This is a friggin’ joke people!

Our government is so corrupt pundits are actually praising Nixon – that’s right, Nixon! NY Times Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman, in Missing Richard Nixon, 8-31-09, wrote:

“But the Nixon era was a time in which leading figures in both parties were capable of speaking rationally about policy, and in which policy decisions weren’t as warped by corporate cash as they are now. America is a better country in many ways than it was 35 years ago, but our political system’s ability to deal with real problems has been degraded to such an extent that I sometimes wonder whether the country is still governable.” (Emphasis added.)

And Krugman closes the piece appropriately with:

“I’m not saying that reformers should give up. They do, however, have to realize what they’re up against. …Actually turning this country around is going to take years of siege warfare against deeply entrenched interests, defending a deeply dysfunctional political system.” (Emphasis added.)

“Seige warfare?!” “A deeply dysfunctional political system?!” This is truly heavy and frightening stuff coming from the mainstream press.

Krugman writes about how our “corporate-cash-dominated system” makes reform of any kind “extremely difficult” and that the health insurance industry is currently spending a whopping $1.4 million a day lobbying Congress in an attempt to kill any legislation that hurts its bottom line. I want someone to show me where in that most hallowed of all documents, our Constitution, the word lobbying appears and where lobbyists are granted so much power.

The same column also discusses Nixon’s health care reforms, ideas proposed nearly 40 years ago (that’s right, the health insurance industry with its campaign cash has been killing reform for at least four decades) and Krugman points out how Nixon’s proposals were actually stronger than ObamaCare.

Nixon wanted all employers, regardless of business size, to offer health insurance. He also wanted – gasp, that’s right, a REPUBLICAN proposed this – “tighter regulation of insurers, calling on states to approve specific plans, oversee rates, ensure adequate disclosure, require an annual audit and take other appropriate measures.”

And if that $1.4 million per day in lobbying (which is synonymous with bribing) isn’t bad enough, Krugman’s All the President’s Zombies – NY Times Op-Ed, 8-24-09 notes that “In particular, vast amounts of insurance industry money have been flowing to obstructionist Democrats like Mr. (Ben) Nelson (Nebraska) and Senator Max Baucus (Montana), whose Gang of Six negotiations have been a crucial roadblock to legislation.”

To get an idea of just how vast that money is and how the pigs at the trough in Congress slop it up, from 2003 to 2008 Senator Baucus took $479,100 from health services and HMOs and another $855,813 from pharmaceuticals and health products makers (see Baucus’ profile at OpenSecrets.org.)

Matt Taibbi’s “Sick and Wrong. How Washington is screwing up health care reform and why it may take a revolt to fix it.” (Rolling Stone, Issue 1086, 9-3-09, and my apologies for no link, their articles are not available for free online) claims Baucus has taken overall $2,880,631 from the health care industry. And the article also notes that two of Baucus’ ex-chiefs of staff and several of his former staffers now work as lobbyists for health care companies.

From 2003 to 2008 Senator Nelson’s third biggest individual campaign contributor was Blue Cross/Blue Shield, which gave him $60,900 of largesse. During that same time period the pharmaceuticals and health products industries gave him $296,098 (see Nelson’s profile at OpenSecrets.org.)

Another pundit, Errol Louis from the NY Daily News, also gets radical in his great column Citizens must be heard as the debate over President Barack Obama’s health care plan heats up, 7-30-09. He writes:

“We the people need to get organized and get loud about how to change America’s broken health care system before our voices get drowned out altogether. A good place to start is with the Universal Health Care Action Network, whose Web site lists contact info on more than a dozen pro-reform national campaigns (uhcan.org).

Sign up for any and all of them, and devote as much time, money and energy as you can to the fight for health care. You will not only help fix health care, you’ll help reclaim our democracy from the big-money vultures that are destroying it.” (Emphasis added.)

Wake up people! Every member of Congress needs to be bitch slapped, along with every health insurance company executive!

Here’s what we should do. Remember the infamous climax to the movie Frankenstein, where the angry villagers, pitchforks and flaming torches thrust forward, chase down the big, scary monster?

We should all lay siege to the health insurance vultures’ corporate headquarters, with pitchforks and torches at hand. We’ll then drag out all the multi-millionaire executives, who got rich by denying claims and constantly raising rates, and force them into the Capitol Building in Washington, DC.

We’ll lock the doors and tell the legislative vultures inside to fix the mess they’ve created with their friends at the health insurance companies or face another Boston Tea Party – they all get tossed into the Potomac River!

This entry was posted on September 12, 2009 at 2:31 am and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.