Thinking on George Washington and Barack Obama at Thankgiving

“You can’t effect change from the inside,” she has concluded. “We have a huge imbalance of power. Until we have a shift in power we won’t get effective change in any area, whether financial, climate, you name it. With the wealth inequalities, with the road we are headed down, we face serious problems. Those who work and advocate for social and economic justice have to now join together. We have to be independent of political parties and the major funders. The revolution will not be funded. This is very true.”

“Those who are working for effective change are not going to get foundation dollars,” she stated. “Once a foundation or a wealthy individual agrees to give money they control how that money is used. You have to report to them how you spend that money. They control what you can and cannot do. Robert Wood Johnson [the foundation], for example, funds many public health departments. They fund groups that advocate for health care reform, but those groups are not allowed to pursue or talk about single-payer. Robert Wood Johnson only supports work that is done to create what they call public/private partnership. And we know this is totally ineffective. We tried this before. It is allowing private insurers to exist but developing programs to fill the gaps. Robert Wood Johnson actually works against a single-payer health care system. The Health Care for America Now coalition was another example. It only supported what the Democrats supported.

There are a lot of activist groups controlled by the Democratic Party, including Families USA and MoveOn. MoveOn is a very good example. If you look at polls of Democrats on single-payer, about 80 percent support it. But at MoveOn meetings, which is made up mostly of Democrats, when people raised the idea of working for single-payer they were told by MoveOn leaders that the organization was not doing that. And this took place while the Democrats were busy selling out women’s rights, immigrant rights to health care and abandoning the public option. Yet all these groups continued to work for the bill. They argued, in the end, that the health care bill had to be supported because it was not really about health care. It was about the viability of President Obama and the Democratic Party. This is why, in the end, we had to pass it.”

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About Thanksgiving 2010
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Thinking on George Washington and Barack Obama at Thankgiving

Dr. Margaret Flowers, a pediatrician from Maryland who volunteers for Physicians for a National Health Program, knows what it is like to challenge the corporate leviathan. She was blacklisted by the corporate media. She was locked out of the debate on health care reform by the Democratic Party and liberal organizations such as MoveOn. She was abandoned by those in Congress who had once backed calls for a rational health care policy. And when she and seven other activists demanded that the argument for universal health care be considered at the hearings held by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, they were forcibly removed from the hearing room. 

“The reform process exposed how broken our system is,” Flowers said when we spoke a few days ago. “The health reform debate was never an actual debate. Those in power were very reluctant to have single-payer advocates testify or come to the table. They would not seriously consider our proposal because it was based on evidence of what works. And they did not want this evidence placed before the public. They needed the reform to be based on what they thought was politically feasible and acceptable to the industries that fund their campaigns.” 

“There was nobody in the House or the Senate who held fast on universal health care,” she lamented. “Sen. [Bernie] Sanders from Vermont introduced a single-payer bill, S 703. He introduced an amendment that would have substituted S 703 for what the Senate was putting together. We had to push pretty hard to get that to the Senate floor, but in the end he was forced by the leadership to withdraw it. He was our strongest person. In the House we saw Chairman John Conyers, who is the lead sponsor for the House single-payer bill, give up pushing for single-payer very early in the process in 2009. Dennis Kucinich pushed to get an amendment that would help give states the ability to pass single-payer. He was not successful in getting that kept in the final House bill. He held out for the longest, but in the end he caved.”

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Thinking on George Washington and Barack Obama at Thankgiving

The most important read of the day...perhaps of the year:

Power and the Tiny Acts of Rebellion
By Chris Hedges
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Time to Give Thanks for Profiles in Political Courage

The most important read of the day...perhaps of the year:

Power and the Tiny Acts of Rebellion
By Chris Hedges
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Barack Obama Pardons National Thanksgiving Turkey (PHOTOS)

It drives you 0bamab0ts nvtz when the schemes are exposed.

Numbers don't l!e -- From Gallup to Rasmussen, McClatchey-Marist, CNN, NBC-WSJ, Democratic voters want Obama primaried.  And each time that Obama ignores the public's backlash to his policies, each time he digs his heels in, his numbers get worse, and he gets all 'folksy', inserting quaint old-fashioned idioms into his speech, dropping the g's off the ends of his words.  

Obama's not the first (or only) politician to do it.

It's just a real eye-opener for Democratic voters that any real Democratic politician would think that dropping g's (instead of dropping his Republican-like policies and legislation) would get Democratic voters back on board with him.
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Palin Slams Michelle Obama Again, This Time For Anti-Obesity Campaign

The Tea Party is an effective nemesis for Obama: A paper tiger.  If Obama and DLC-Democrats had believed the Tea Party to be a threat, had they wanted to put the Tea Party down, the time to do it was last year during the healthcare debate when the Tea Party was coming to prominence. When Democratic members of Congress were cancelling Town Halls because of the escalating threats of violence by gvn-toting teabaggers, disrupting Americans' long-honored traditions of peaceful debate in the public square. 

Instead of taking to the bully pulpit, announcing increased security on government properties hosting these events, Obama disappeared from the healthcare debate (to cut secret deals with Big Insurance, PhRma, hospitals, the AMA, etc., and then l!e about it) as the Tea Party grew & bullied at Town Halls.

What Obama did instead during the same Town Hall time period: Unleashed federal security forces to Pittsburgh to break up peaceful protests of the G20 meeting (using the new weaponry on dissenters who the 'establishment elites' really fear) and stem the unrest that actually threatens the 'elites', i.e., the American people taking back their government - 
Obama has no problem quelling dissent or inspiring our better angels when he wants or needs to.

Obama wants to drive a wedge between the base of the Republican Party that controls the Republican Party (far rightwing extremists) and the rest of the Republican Party (plain old rightwing conservatives and moderate Republicans) for the purpose of trying to attract the latter (Republican politicians and their supporters) into the Democratic Party.  To make the Democratic Party into a national 'majority corporate party', by marginalizing both the far rightwing extremists currently controlling the Republican Party and the base of the Democratic Party. In order "to govern, from the center, for 100 years".  

The Tea Party serves this end it several ways.  Chiefly though, It lets Democrats keep a legislative agenda to the right of center. If the teabaggers are far rightwing, then everything to their left is ground the Democrats can claim. And that's a lot of corporate-money ground.

Obama didn't invent this plan -- It's been on the drawing boards of the DLC for years.  The midterm elections did nothing to change the plan.  
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Barack Obama Pardons National Thanksgiving Turkey (PHOTOS)

The lower his poll numbers go, the more colloquial his speech; he gets all 'folksy'.

I'd prefer it were his policies that got the 'common touch', instead of his speech.
About Thanksgiving 2010
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