Spintested

Obama Medicare Plan: No Voucher But Maybe A Bill

Saturday, September 29, 2012

Dr. Margaret Flowers, a pediatrician from Maryland who volunteers for Physicians for a National Health Program, knows what it's like to challenge the corporate leviathan. She was blacklisted by the corporate media. She was locked out of the debate on healthcare reform by the Democratic Party & 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.”

KEEP READING
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Hina Rabbani Khar, Pakistan Foreign Minister: Drones Are Top Cause Of Anti-Americanism

Which is why I wrote the last line. I'll repeat it here:

I've laid out what the options are in some detail here.

FWIW, When there's no guarantee that your vote will get counted, or accurately (it seems that voting machines can be hacked over the phone), Hedges may be right on that topic, too.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/25/voting-machine-report-paper-ballots_n_1702357.html

http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/8/82185.html?1343731078
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Obama Cabinet Fails Disclosure Test With 19 In 20 Ignoring FOIA Requirements

Doing dastardly acts, but with a gentle demeanor and an engaging smile, that's part of how Obama manages to accomplish the Democrats' version of Nixon-going-to-China (what couldn't have been accomplished by Democrats, because Republicans had branded Democrats as "reds" and "commie-lovers").

Another part is what I call "Obama doing Bush-speak" - Obama, in his own words:

"On transparency", "About inviting the people back into their government again", and "Part of the job of the next American president is making Americans believe that our government is working for them, because right now they don't feel like it's working for them. They feel like it's working for special interests and it's working for corporations"

Not actually making government work for Americans, but making Americans believe that government is working for them.

Here's another one:

"We need a president who sees the government not as a tool to enrich well connected friends and high-priced lobbyists, but as a defender of fairness and opportunity for every single American. That's what this country's been about and that's the kind of president I intend to be"

Talk ("defender of fairness and opportunity for every single American") isn't doing.

This is weasel lawyer-talk, and Obama excels at it.
About Barack Obama
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Obama Cabinet Fails Disclosure Test With 19 In 20 Ignoring FOIA Requirements

Articles such as this one are such Kabuki theater. It's not just his Cabinet; it's Obama.

Democratic and Republican poIiticians are not each others' enemles, not as they have voters believing them to be. Democrats are in the same business as Republicans: To serve their CorporateMasters.

Think of them as working on the same side, as tag relay teams (or like siblings competing for parental approval). 'Good cop/bad cop'. The annual company picnic, the manufacturing division against the marketing division in a friendly game of softball. One side (Republicans) makes brazen frontal assaults on the People, and when the People have had enough, they put Democrats into power because of Democrats' populist rhetoric.

Once in power, Democrats consolidate Republicans' gains from previous years, continue on with Republican policies but renamed, with new advertising campaigns. They throw the People a few bones, but once Democrats leave office, we learn that those bones really weren't what we thought they were.

Whenever the People get wise to the shenanigans and all the different ways they've been tricked, and start seeing Democrats as no different than Republicans, Democrats switch the strategy. They invent new reasons for failing to achieve the People's business.

Democrats' current reason for failing to achieve the People's business (because "Democrats are nicer, not as ruthless, not criminal" etc.) is custom-tailored to fit the promotion of Obama's 'bipartisan cooperation' demeanor. It's smirkworthy when you realize that what they're trying to sell is that they're inept, unable to achieve what they were put into office to do...And their ineptitude, like that's somehow "a good thing".

When it comes to achieving corporations' business, Democrats are remarkably competent. Obama is even more competent in that he's been able to give himself some distance from policies that displease Democratic voters ('plausible deniability') in a variety of ways that keep his favorable ratings high. Whether it's renaming Republican legislation ("Romney healthcare" to "Affordable Health Insurance Act") to getting other legislators like Joe Lieberman to actually do the heavy lifting legislatively, Obama's 'most ardent admirers' lay themselves on the line for him out of their ignorance of what he's actually doing.

Like when Obama got Lieberman to gut the FOIA, then sign the legislation in private and wait a few weeks, when he's in China, to have RobertGates destroy the torture photos. It worked so well, Obama left the country as he launcheds the war against Libya without authorization by the Congress.

Getting Obama's 'most ardent supporters' to understand that he and DLC-controlled Democratic politicians have been taking us all for suckers and patsies is the most immediate problem and the challenge.

KEEP READING
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Obama Cabinet Fails Disclosure Test With 19 In 20 Ignoring FOIA Requirements

It's not just his cabinet; Obama has a modus operandi:

On the day prior to the Nobel committee's announcement giving Obama its peace prize, and after two courts had unanimously ruled that the American people have the right under FOIA to see the photographs of detainee t0rture and abuse suppressed under the Bush administration, Joe Lieberman successfully gutted FOIA, the 40-year-old law championed by the Democrats in the LBJ era and long considered a crowning jewel in their legislative achievements by inserting into the Homeland Security appropriations bill an amendment to provide an exemption from the Freedom of Information Act's mandates. The amendment empowered the Defense Secretary to suppress and destroy the photographic evidence of American war crimes.

http://www.salon.com/2009/10/08/photos_11/

Obama's support for the Graham-Lieberman Secrecy Law

Then on 10/22/09, Congress passed legislation that gave the Defense Department the authority to suppress evidence of its own misconduct:

In an unprecedented move, Congress passed legislation Tuesday including an amendment which would maintain one of the most contentious hangovers of the Bush administration, allowing the Department of Defense to exempt torture photos of US detainees overseas from public access under Freedom of Information Act requests.

An amendment sponsored by Sen. Joe Lieberman, slashes a huge hole in FOIA. Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) was a key figure in stopping Lieberman's photo suppression bill the first time around. Slaughter explained that this time, the provision was slipped into the Homeland Security spending bill during the conference between House and Senate negotiators -- "apparently under direct orders from the Administration."

See here.

Obama signed the bill into law a week later out of public view, and when he was safely out of the country (in China), SoD Bob Gates permanently 'buried' the evidence. For those who don't recall, Obama ran on releasing those photographs for the American people to see just what was done "in their names" during the Bush administration.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost