Emperor's Rants and Observations

This Isn’t Reform, It’s Robbery « Dprogram.net

The current health care debate in Congress has nothing to do with death panels or public options or socialized medicine. The real debate, the only one that counts, is how much money our blood-sucking insurance, pharmaceutical and for-profit health services are going to be able to siphon off from new health care legislation. The proposed plans rattling around Congress all ensure that the profits for these corporations will increase and the misery for ordinary Americans will be compounded. The corporate state, enabled by both Democrats and Republicans, is yet again cannibalizing the Treasury. It is yet again pushing Americans, especially the poor and the working class, into levels of despair and rage that will continue to fuel the violent, proto-fascist movements leaping up around the edges of American society. And the traditional watchdogs—those in public office, the press and citizens groups—are as useless as the perfumed fops of another era who busied their days with court intrigue at Versailles. Canada never looked so good.

As bad as that sounds, at this point just about ANYTHING would be better than doing nothing at all.

The fact of the matter is that the insurance/pharmaceutical industry and trial lawyers are too invested in the status quo and have put most of the current leadership of congress into office. Change is a scary thing for most people, and the vested interests in the status quo are using that fear to their advantage. They lie, distort, deflect and demean others to protect their greedy self interests.

This is a recurring rant, but until and unless we radically change the manner that political campaigns are financed and elections are conducted we are doomed to have the best government that money can buy.

Right now everyone in DC is most concerned about whether they will get re-elected. Even staff members are worried about if their boss gets re-elected or not, because their job depends on it. In that environment EVERYTHING gets measured by how much something hurts or helps the chances of re-election. For the really ambitious, it gets measured by whether it hurts or helps the possibility of moving up in the political food chain. Moving up could mean higher office, or it could mean a position on a high profile committee. That’s just human nature and believing any differently is simply naive. Re-election depends on contributions, and you don’t stay in office long if you piss off the wrong people. Constituents can be bought off fairly cheaply with some hunks of pork, glad handing, and pandering. Get on the wrong side of deep pockets though and you’re doomed.

So the reality of the situation is we have to gain as much ground as we can in this battle. Understanding that the war is far from over, and any ground taken today may be lost tomorrow. We are battling inertia, and if we quit pushing the rock up hill, it can roll back over the top of us. We have a little momentum on our side, we just have to keep pushing, gaining ground inch by inch, step by step, day by day until we overcome inertia (resistance to change) and momentum takes over.

Let’s not let the fact we aren’t getting everything we want stop us from getting what we can.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 28th, 2009 at 12:34 am and is filed under Campaign Finance, Election Reform, Health Care, Politics, Social Issues, Uncategorized. 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.