Doctors will get richer under this "reform." Insurance companies will get vastly richer under this "reform". Pharmaceutical companies will get richer under this "reform". But there will still be millions of people left with no access to health care. There will still be tens of millions of people who will get substandard or even pathetically trashy health care. And the cost of medical care, both for individuals and for society as a whole, already the highest in the world, will continue to soar. To make matters worse, taxes will also go up dramatically, by at least $100 billion a year. For extra laughs, while these costs would start hitting the public right away, the "benefits" of the bill wouldn't go into effect until 2013, meaning that a likely resurgent Republican Party, ousting Obama from the White House, and the Democrats from the majority in Congress in 2012, would simply undo the whole thing anyhow. - Dave LindorffBarack Obama, evidently, spoke many lies during his 2007/08 run for the Democratic presidential nomination, and fooled many people. Since I worked for him in four primary states and in the general, I volunteer to be one of the first sent to the woodshed.
Sadly, the result of Obama's election is that all of us have been sent to the woodshed, all of us not part of the Bankster class or one of the grand beneficiaries of the now-almost-completely-militarized American economy. We've reached a point where the debate on the Left has become: "Which was the biggest lie? The one most harmful to our children's future?"
Tough call, for the answer changes almost every week. I really didn't think that anything could soon surpass the Mother of All Betrayals: Obama's decision to begin a new war in Af/Pak -- a move which will rocket the United States into a full-blown military/corporate state, one no different in the totality of its totalitarianism than was Mussolini's Italy, Stalin's USSR or Hitler's Germany: the ideology in this case not being racial purity or Aryan living-space or mafia-fascism or a worker's paradise. While the means of domestic control will be different and less brutal -- American brutality generally being reserved for use everywhere else on the planet; and since the great majority of voters will obviously put up with anything, who needs brutality? -- the underlying ideology will be worse. Classical totalitarianism was able to take hold because of deep appeals to very human longings: solidarity, honor, selflessness, color, myth, melodrama. (All insanely distorted.) The heart-and-soul of future American totalitarianism will be a denial of all that is human, because it will be the commodification of everything. Air, water, earth, fire. Education, health, love, sex. Beyond Marx's worst nightmare.
But this week has trumped the Af/Pak decision in what can only be called the final resolution of The Fuck You Act. Health Care Reform was Obama's biggest domestic theme running through 2008. He correctly identified that here was where the stand can and must be made: here was where we stood up against the commodification of everything by reversing the commodification of human health. He endorsed Single Payer. Over and over again, he endorsed Single Payer. Until he won the nomination. That gone, he endorsed over and over again a robust, real and easily accessible-to-all-citizens Public Option.
What we're going to get next week is a massive increase in the connection between wealth and health, a further privatization of public health, a further weakening of controls over Big Insurance and Big Pharm, and for the first time a weakening and reduction of Medicare.
Wow, huh? Makes you think that for the past couple decades we've been electing Presidents for the sole purpose of seeing how far each man can go in destroying the core assumption of the Republic: that there is an actual connection between what citizens vote for and what they get. Bill Clinton is elected as the working-man's anti-Reagan and presides over the destruction of what was left of the social contract, eviscerates unions and destroys all remaining Wall Street regulations. GWB runs as a compassionate conservative, proclaims his desire to restore morality to national government and leads an administration more lawless and destructive of American traditions than any which came before it. Now the Obama Experiment: just how pathetic and narcissistic is the so-called "left," how much do we have to worry about them going forward, just how much excrement will they eat? If we can wrap the glow of Starbucks personality around what are basically corporate fascist developments, then we can take this society as far as we want in our direction, hopes the Prince of Greed.
The passing of the American Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 will give the Prince his answer.
