Counterpunch: Top Ten Reasons to Kill the Senate Health Care Bill:Obama and Rahm Cheer Republican Victory in Mass: An End to Reform

Thanks to Alex Cockburn for highlighting the poison below about the Senate Health Care Bill.  As of this writing, how many if any of the insults below will pass in some kind of health care "reform."  But if all of the execrable provisions or some of them pass, wouldn't it be interesting that when the Dems had 60 votes they needed all 60 so that the worst elements could be forced through by a single Senator -- like Lieberman. Now that they don't have 60, will it take only 51 to pass some of the outrages below, and pay off Big Pharma and Big Insurance (redundant), BHO's major contributors?

 

In his lead article for the same issue of CP, "2010: Is The Future Behind Us?" Alex Cockburn refers more than once to the power of Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel in shaping and forcing through the legislation he prefers: anti-abortion for one; and by implication, blocking legislation he opposes. I wonder if people -- besides Marcy Wheeler and Jane Hamsher of firedoglake and emptywheel -- are starting to wake up to who is really the president and who is the empty suit whose words get emptier every week.

 

It's a nice question how upset Rahm and Obama really are by the Massachusetts loss since their goal seems to be to lose the Democratic majority -- perhaps in both Houses, just like Clinton -- so that the pressure --pressure? what pressure? -- for reform will fade into a memory from last year. Their only embarrassment is the public relations blow and this simply gives a chance for Obama  --again and again-- to sound like he's the populist while he plays  the delaying game. Their plan which has worked for them like a charm, seems to be to create the vacuum that will open the door to the lobbyists and the Tea Baggers whose job it is to make plenty of noise -- the less reality-related the better. Their cacophony gives cover to Rahm, as he dispatches marching orders to Reid and Pelosi, ensuring that only his right wing agenda gets through.

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Top Ten Reasons to Kill the Senate Health Care Bill

 

from CounterPunch (hard copy edition) vol. 16, No. 22, Dec. 16-31, 2009

January 4, 2010

CounterPuncher Chuck Spinney sends us this note:

 

I got this from a friend who works on budget issues in Congress. If true, this list would explain why Insurance stock just rose to all time highs.

 

• Forces you to pay up to 8% of your income to private insurance corporations – whether you want to or not.

 

• If you refuse to buy the insurance, you’ll have to pay penalties of up to 2% of your annual income to the IRS.

 

• Many will be forced to buy poor-quality insurance they can’t afford to use, with $11,900 in annual out-of-pocket expenses over and above their annual premiums.

 

• Massive restriction on a wo-man’s right to choose, designed to trigger a challenge to Roe v. Wade in the Supreme Court.

 

• Paid for by taxes on the middle-class insurance plan you have right now through your employer, causing them to cut back benefits and increase copays.

 

• Many of the taxes to pay for the bill start now, but most Americans won’t see any benefits – like an end to discrimination against those with preexisting conditions – until 2014, when the program begins.

 

• Allows insurance companies to charge people who are older 300% more than others.

 

• Grants monopolies to drug companies that will keep generic versions of expensive biotech drugs from ever coming to market.

 

• No re-importation of prescription drugs, which would save consumers $100 billion over 10 years.

 

• The cost of medical care will continue to rise, and insurance premiums for a family of four will rise an average of $1,000 a year – meaning, in 10 years, your family’s insurance premium will be $10,000 more annually than it is right now.

Diebold and Health Care: Bradblog on Election for Kennedy Seat

Who should we root for in the Tuesday special election for senator in Massachusetts: the Republican or the Democrat?  Do we want to stop the  terrible health care reform bill or do we want a Democrat Senator in Kennedy's old seat? I say we take the Republican for 6 years: a good trade off.

 

Some of the implications of the Bradblog item below.

 

How long now has it been since we've given up hoping that an incoming Obama administration would help do something regarding the computer voting machine fraud (see below)  and move to establish fair elections in this country?  Has it been 6 months already that we've given up hoping for reform from the Emanuel administration.

On that score, it's a testament to Rahm Emanuel effectiveness that we can't get ONE Democrat to vote against the health care monstrosity. He's as powerful as Cheney was apparently when it comes to ensuring that only the legislation he wants, gets passed. That includes further restrictions on abortion, a huge windfall for the insurance industry and big pharma. We can't even roll back the Bush monstrosities on the costs of medications; nor will we have the Canada option we used to have.

 

Interesting or ironic that Emanuel/Obama really don't want a Democratic controlled Congress, certainly not a 60 vote majority in the Senate. On the other hand, they want this health care giveaway bill. Tough call.

Where's Walter Karp when we need him?  He's the one who explained that when Democrats win the White House and/or Congress their big challenge is how to dampen hopes for reform. In Indispensable Enemies (1993) he shows that the last thing the Party wants is an activist base pushing and shoving with reform proposals and competing for power. Republicans have an easier time since their platform is anti-Reform.

But this is Emanuel's time so it looks like one way or another the health care disaster will somehow pass.

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Easily Hacked Diebold Machines to Determine Winner of 'Toss-Up' Special Election for U.S. Senate in MA
Written by Nathan Barker and Brad Friedman

 

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7650

 

Since writing today's piece for Upstate New York's right-leaning Gouverneur Times, a new poll has come out this morning showing the Republican Scott Brown now leading the Democrat Martha Coakley by 4 points in
the race for the U.S. Senate seat formerly held by a Democrat named Kennedy for nearly 60 years.
As of last night, when I filed the story with them, the latest survey from a Democratic-leaning pollster showed Coakley up by 8, though a day or two earlier, Republican Rasmussen had Brown down only by 2 points.
Suffice to say it's now officially "a toss-up", at least according to the Rothenberg Political Report, and to all
the Dems and Reps now sweating out what was previously thought to have been an easy Democratic win.
With the 60th "filibuster-proof" Senate seat now hanging precariously in the balance, I'm sure you'll be delighted to hear that the winner will now be whoever Diebold declares it to be. The near-entirety of the
state will vote next Tuesday on paper ballots to be counted by Diebold op-scan systems. The same ones used dubiously in the New Hampshire Primary in 2008, and the same ones notoriously hacked --- resulting in a flipped mock election --- in HBO's Emmy-nominated Hacking Democracy.
And to make matters even worse, the notorious LHS Associates --- the private company with the criminal background, who has admitted to illegally tampering with memory cards during elections, and who has a Director of Sales and Marketing who embarrassed himself with obscene comments here at The BRAD BLOG some years ago, resulting in his being barred from CT by their Sec. of State --- sells and services almost all
of MA's voting machines along with those in the rest of New England.
Read my detailed coverage of the entire sad affair over at Gouverneur Times today. And yes, here we go again...

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7650

Obama's Lies…Lead to Cheney in Iowa?

One Middle East analyst interviewed in connection with Obama's Nobel Prize award ceremony this month said that despite his good intentions, Obama hasn't accomplished much as far as resolving crises, especially on the Israeli Palestinian issue.

Good intentions? I suspect that we're beginning to see that not only are the outcomes on so many crucial issues the opposite of what we would wish, but we're beginning (we latecomers) to be forced to conclude that the intentions were not what we imagined.

Which brings us to the question of presidential lying.

All presidents lie, it comes with the territory.

Yet we wonder if  BHO’s lying is perhaps among the worst in post war history, up there with LBJ, Nixon, Reagan and Bush-Cheney?

At least with Bush Jr there was something good-natured with his lies in the sense that his pronouncements weren't intended to be taken seriously – except as media fodder. He and Cheney couldn't care less that their political opponents knew they were lying. What was important to them was their power to pursue their agenda. And as for their supporters, the regime's real agenda was always clear and the lies were viewed simply as the necessary cover story. 

The difference with Obama is that he's lying to his base, intending to fool us -- perhaps less and less successfully after about a year -- into thinking that he’s on our side. 

It would seem that the difference between Obama's rhetoric and the agenda he's pursuing, -- replicating and consolidating the worst policies inherited from the most criminal regime in U.S. history -- contributes to his falling popularity and makes him a potentially weak candidate in 2012. Perhaps that is why Art Cullen, editor of The Storm Lake (Iowa) Times is predicting that “Cheney Will Visit Iowa.” According to Cullen:

       Cheney thinks Obama is a pipsqueak and that he can beat him. Most important, Cheney believes in his bad ideas and is perfectly willing to run on them.         http://www.populist.com/09.22.artcullen.html

 We're fortunate to live in an age that has produced the first Black president, and a smart, eloquent one at that. But it appears that we're just as unlucky that our first minority president has turned out to be some combination of too young and inexperienced and too feckless to rise to the challenge of providing us with the leadership so desperately needed. 

Obama's Surge Consolidates the Bush-Cheney Legacy

Obama's Surge Consolidates the Bush-Cheney legacy

 

What could be worse than a continuation of the Bush-Cheney administration?

What could be worse in an Obama administration than the consolidation of the worst of the Bush-Cheney  policies starting with their permanent war agenda?

Why has Obama embraced permanent war, a policy that he, as well as anyone else knows, is unsustainable, if not suicidal?

Some, if not many, agree that the twin pillars that underpin the status quo are the military industrial complex and the Zionist lobby, for which constant war is always the desideratum.

Perhaps fewer will agree that the chief way, in a post cold war age that permanent war is maintained is by funding, arming and directing the enemy.

Where and how, one might ask, do the Taliban get their weapons and wherewithal?

The enemy is the U.S. in a literal way that we have not previously imagined.

Now that Obama has moved to the consolidation of permanent war, HE is the enemy.

The first step is to know thy enemy.

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("Bush &) Obama's Trillion Dollar Bailouts -- Questions that won't die

Trillion $ Bailouts  – Questions that won’t die

by Ronald Bleier

11.6.09

 

A major political question that doesn’t want to die is whether the billion and trillion dollar Wall Street bailouts that Washington handed out were necessary to keep the economy from disintegrating.  Despite the persistence of the question, the only answer seemingly allowed in the mainstream is the monotonously uniform: Without the bailouts we’d be using beads for currency -- a line I heard on TV this week. 

 

Yet there is another, rather different answer available. The alternative response is that not only were the bailouts unnecessary to save the economy, but they represent perhaps the biggest single criminal theft and transfer of wealth to the wealthy from the rest of us.

 

Some of the evidence for such an unorthodox view was presented back in September by Mike Whitney, a regular contributor to the indispensable Counterpunch.org website.

 

Whitney took the trouble to read some of the findings of independent economist, Dean Baker, who took the trouble to look at some of the relevant data.

 

According to Mike Whitney

 

Lehman Bros. didn't die of natural causes; it was drawn-and-quartered by high-ranking officials at the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve. Most of the rubbish presently appearing in the media, ignores this glaring fact. Lehman was a planned demolition (most likely) concocted by ex-Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson, who wanted to create a financial 9-11 to scare Congress into complying with his demands for $700 billion in emergency funding (TARP) for underwater US banking behemoths.  The whole incident reeks of conflict of interest, corruption, and blackmail.

 

(9.15.09)“Lehman Died So TARP and AIG Might Live”) http://Counterpunch.org/whitney09152009.html)

 

Whitney explains that Lehman brothers could have been saved relatively easily if “Bernanke and Paulson had merely provided guarantees for some of their trading positions.” According to Whitney, their claim that they didn’t have the legal authority for such guarantees was “a lie.”

 

Whitney continues by quoting economist Dean Baker who explains that the $700 billion TARP authority wasn’t necessary to rescue the commercial paper market - –the market that most major companies rely on to meet their payrolls and pay other routine bills.  Dean explains that Bernanke “forgot to tell Congress…that the Fed has the authority to directly buy commercial paper from financial and non-financial companies [and thus] the power to prevent the sort of economic collapse that Bernanke warned would happen if Congress did not quickly approve the TARP.” Indeed, Dean continues, the weekend after TARP was approved the plan for the Fed to buy this commercial paper was put in motion. (emphasis mine)

 

For more on the case for criminal indictments of Messrs Bernanke, Geithner, Summers, et. al., read the work of the brilliant Matt Taibi in recent articles in Rolling Stone --  if you can deal with his liberal use of obscenities which he childishly thinks somehow improves his prose -- who has done the legwork and taken the trouble to understand and to pass along the nature of some of the frauds that have been managed – and are doubtless continuing.  

Wall Street's Naked Swindle  by Matt Taibbi -- October 2009

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/30481512/wall_streets_naked_swindle/print

A scheme to sell fake stocks helped kill Bear Sterns and Lehman Brothers — exposing the counterfeit nature of our entire economy.  

The Great American Bubble Machine  by Matt Taibbi  -- July 2009

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/29127316/the_great_american_bubble_machine/print

From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression - and they're about to do it again.

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Letter to the New York Times --Obama and the Lack of Accountability

Another in the long list of my letters that the NYTimes has ignored. --RB

Letters

The New York Times

August 28, 2009

To the Editor

Re: "Abuse Issue Puts The Justice Dept And CIA At Odds", Front Page, 8.28.09

The latest developments in connection with US employment of torture on the pretext of fighting the "global war on terror," suggest that President Obama's dictum that we look forward not backward will be in the news for as long as he maintains such a misleading and dangerous political posture.

On the issue of accountability, we might like to recall Winston Churchill who effectively reminds us what's at stake. .

“The use of recriminating about the past is to enforce effective action at the present.” --Winston Churchill, 1936.

Sincerely,

Ronald Bleier

Doug Henwood, Left Business Observer: The Health Care Debate --The Enemy Within

One of the most astute observers of the health care reform debate must be Doug Henwood, author, journalist and radio producer.

On his July 16, 2009 program radio program for WBAI-FM, New York, his guest, Len Rodberg of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), outlined the problems with current versions of ObamaCare. And Henwood followed up with a précis of the situation in his invaluable Left Business Observer (LBO) #120, August 2009.

It seems that the White House has effectively given up on an effective public option that would compete with private insurers. Instead we have an agreement between Obama and the insurance industry whereby they make certain changes to their restrictive practices in return for which they get to collect the premiums of dozens of millions of U.S. citizens and residents not currently insured. One can only guess at the rate at which the insurance companies will benefit over and above their current profits. For every dollar that they will expend under the new guidelines, can we not expect that they’ll take in an extra $10? $100? $1,000? or more? Thus we won't be surprised to find that the salaries of top executives of the ever more consolidated private insurance industry will be enlarged over and above their current payoffs –- in some cases $10 or $20 or $30 million or more annually-- into really healthy amounts.

There’s more. For example, current proposals are that the U.S. will subsidize some portion of the premiums under the mandatory rules that everyone must carry insurance. Who’s going to pay these billions? We’ve just answered the question. The U.S. taxpayer. But in order to squeeze the billions this will cost into an acceptable package for Congress, current proposals are that huge amounts will be – is “stolen” too harsh a word?-- from Medicare (and Medicaid?) disbursements. One number I’ve seen is half a trillion ($), so that seniors are correct to be scared –really scared --that their services will be reduced if not crippled.

In addition, according to Dr. Jerry Avorn of the Harvard Medical School (Author, "Powerful Medicines"), as reported on NPR’s All Things Considered (July 23, 2009; “Drug Firms Pour $40 million into Health Care Debate” http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=106899074

government negotiated drug prices is already off the table. While this immense concession has apparently not yet publicly been set in stone, such a consideration is not inconsistent with the way the Rahm Emanuel-Obama administration has tilted toward the previous administration’s policies on so many foreign and domestic issues.

One of the reasons I was so opposed to Hillary Clinton and supported Obama was because I was convinced that she and her husband intended to sabotage health care reform from the inception of their presidency in 1992. I suspected that they were opposed to reform because of some combination of their right wing ideology (the undeserving poor are truly undeserving) and their loyalty to some of their biggest financial supporters.

In 2008 I figured that our only hope for change was an Obama presidency. But the bad news is that for his own complex of reasons – perhaps slightly different from the Clintons but surely overlapping when it comes to seeking the favor of the movers and shakers -– we are faced with the prospect of legislation just as bad or worse than the Clintons managed to devise.

Ironically, I’m now wondering whether a 2009 Hillary Clinton victory might have produced a bill with elements of real reform simply because her former opposition (disguised as mistakes) was well known and for credibility’s sake she would have been forced into effective change. But such speculation runs into the reality of Hillary Clinton as a lightening rod and a divider.

***

Health Care and Consumer Spending

LBO # 120 follows up with a brilliant analysis of the astonishing degree to which consumer spending has been bolstered by health care costs. It turns out that consumer non- health spending has remained pretty steady over the years including the last two decades while close to 80% of the increase (is this possible?) has been due to health care spending. In other words, U.S. citizens (and residents) weren’t by and large on a buying binge: we were going into debt to pay for health care.

This turns out to be such a new finding that Henwood actually apologizes for not understanding this trend earlier.

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FDR vs. BHO

Speaking of the LBO, Henwood’s #119 (July 2009) is worth the price for his insightful contrast between FDR and BHO. Henwood notes that Obama’s not the man to make a speech anything like FDR’s October 1936 announcement of a second New Deal. Henwood cites FDR’s famous lines:

They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.

And Henwood’s analysis continues with the suggestion that the difference between the two men is that FDR was a product of the aristocracy with all the self confidence of someone from that class, while Obama’s emergence from the meritocracy leaves him with little but admiration for the “establishment that groomed him.”

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Go to http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/LBO_subinfo.html for information regarding subscriptions to LBO (the print edition is $22; digital $20)

***

Ronald

Greg Eow: I used to be a fan of Bernard Lewis and the Neocons

H/T to FJ by way of Mondoweiss 8.13.09 for this wonderful email showing that, with some effort, time and money --and, btw, an open mind -- people's views of the Israeli-Palestinian issue can change to better reflect reality. Come to think of it, it happened to me despite my years of yeshiva indoctrination and it didn't cost all that much, and I didn't even have to read 20 books on the subject.

One can get cheered up after reading an example of such change, but all too soon one is brought back to reality to realize that the siege of Gaza and the starvation of the Gazans is ongoing. The slow genocide and the removal of the Palestinians from their land is occurring with the full knowledge of Sec Clinton and President Obama who either don't care or prefer not to risk political capital trying unsuccessfully to "interfere" with Israeli policy.
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___________________________________________
I was with the neocons– (Then I went to the Middle East)
by Greg Eow
August 13, 2009

Mondoweiss wrote:

In April, Greg Eow wrote a letter to a professor he had met in graduate school at Rice University, Ussama Makdisi, describing his political transformation. Eow. . . shares it with us.

Dear Professor Makdisi,

I don’t know if you rem ember me, but I finished my PhD in the Rice history department in 2007. I was one of Thomas Haskell’s students. We ran into each other a handful of times, including once when I helped you with some of the microfilm machines in Fondren Library. Anyway, this is a strange e-mail, both to write and most likely to receive. But I wanted to tell you about some recent experiences which have profoundly changed my view of the Israeli-Palestinian issue. You have demonstrated an interest in changing how people think about the issue, and so I thought you might be interested in what for me has turned out to be a transformative event.

First of all, a quick word about presuppositions. I confess that I previously never paid a great deal of attention to the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Insofar as I did follow the issue, my sympathies were with neoconservatives. Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis were my guides. They were realists, I would tell myself, whereas those who quarreled with them, for instance colleagues at Rice who were more interested in postcolonial studies than I, had political axes to grind. Not for me the romance of resistance. I was a good skeptic, an empiricist; and if there was a problem in Israel it was clear to me it had to do wi th Muslim fundamentalism, terrorism, and the clash between Enlightenment values and democracy on the one hand and premodern tribalism and totalitarianism on the other.

Flash forward a couple of years.
I’m through with grad school, I finally have some time and money, and I embark on a self-directed course of study on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I have my feelings, sure, but I realize that I don’t know a whole lot, that a lot of smart people disagree with me, and now I want to make a good faith effort to learn about the issue and test my prejudices against the scholarship in the field. I read Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said, Benny Morris, Patrick Seale, David Fromkin, Juan Cole, Efraim Karsh, Tom Segev, William Cleveland, Bernard Rougier, Albert Hourani. I read your book and article on anti-Americanism. And I spend two weeks traveling through Syria, Lebanon, Jerusalem and the West Bank. In sum, I read about forty books from a number of different standpoints and travel through the region to see what is going on with my own eyes.

The result? Well, the whole experience essentially knocked me on my butt. I was wrong about a great many things. And not just wrong b ut deeply wrong. Wrong to a degree that to realize it has left me shaken, wondering how exactly I got to be so intellectually, and in this case morally, obtuse. Just a taste of the data that undid my worldview:

1) The Arab people I met in Syria, Lebanon and the West Bank (and Jerusalem), the vast majority of them Muslims, were almost uniformly lovely, warm, and welcoming. I wasn’t expecting20passersby in the street in all of these places to invite me into their homes for tea to discuss how much they "hate George Bush, but like Americans." (This happened too often to count.) Pretty much everyone thought U.S. policy was a disaster. But they were angry about policy and lovely to me in ways that make the "they hate us for our freedom" line not only inaccurate but criminal. Among the people I met: a 20 year old Shiite Muslim named Mohammed whom I met in the Bequaa Valley. Mohammed supports Hezbollah because of their 1) resistance to Israeli incursions into Lebanon (he didn’t say anything about Hezbollah provocations), 2) their welfare programs, and 3) their support of the20Palestinian cause (all his words). He’s been to Mosque no more than twice in his life, eats pork, and likes nothing more than going dancing in Beirut. That is to say, he is entirely secular. With Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington as my guides, I have no way to make sense of such an encounter.

2) Driving through the West Bank at night allows one to see the proliferation of illegal Israeli settlements with immediate and striking force. They are everywhere, some small, some huge, in the high ground lit up like prisons. I thought the reason why the two-state solution had failed was Palestinian intransigence. A look at the settlements – even a quick look – demolishes such a simple explanation. Traveling through the West Bank at=2 0night, and later visiting and talking with people in Ramallah, reinforced an essential point: Israel, at least powerful forces within Israel, is actively pursuing policies to colonize and annex the West Bank while simultaneously making life so difficult for Palestinians that they will pick up and leave. The evidence was there for anyone with eyes to see, irrefutable and horrible in its obviousness. How I got duped by the "Israel wants peace behind the 1 967 borders but extremists deny it to them" line is a question I will be asking myself again and again with embarrassment and not a little shame.

I could go on, but this (unsolicited) e-mail has gone on long enough and you get the point. What I’m saying is this: keep writing, keep telling U.S. citizens to better inform themselves about what is going on in their name and with their tax dollars. If they’re honest, and they go see for themselves what’s going on, I can guarantee that the reasonableness of what you and others have written on the matter will soon become apparent.