Reply With Quote
just to get this out for whatever feedback or disagreement anyone wants to offer. i wrote this as a rough draft for some underground online mag i sometimes blog for. just my own narcissistic contribution to the cyberspace.
drinking the socialist kool-aid
for months now, i have been hearing and reading tirade after tirade and rant after rant about the great socialist charge that president obama has been leading against the american people. the only thing louder than the din of all the crazed lackeys making such claims is that of resounding laughter, not from the amused, but rather from corporate america, who has to be resonating such jolly that the american public has been foolish enough to buy this nonsense.
conservatives have been trumpeting the charge that obama is really the incarnation of robert owen. really? a president who, once put into office, proceeded to put hundreds of billions of taxpayers' dollars into a failing wall street and cut a deal with pharmaceutical lobbyists is a student of marx?
some conservatives will actually have you believe that it is the pharmaceutical industry that is being duped by obama when they agreed to cut the price of medicine by eighty billion dollars over the next ten years. rush limbaugh even stated that obama is essentially extorting the drug companies by this deal by getting them to concede the 80 billion dollars in savings in exchange for the government no longer insisting that it regulate the cost of medicine (http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/200908120039).
what limbaugh does not go on to point out is that 80 billion dollars is only 2% of the drug companies' projected ten year earnings of roughly 2.8 trillion dollars (http://www.imshealth.com/imshealth/05_01_08MM&MPharmaTopDiana.pdf ). the price of schering-plough's top-selling allergy pill, claritin, was raised thirteen times over five years, for a net increase of over 50 percent which is over four times the rate of general inflation. so while other countries successfully regulate the cost of medicine (prices are 35 to 55 % lower in these nations http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/351/14/1375 , obama has just decided against the U.S. joining that list of more cost efficient nations. the VA manages to keep the cost of drugs down by bargaining and medicare once did as well until the Bush administration put a stop to that. obama has essentially perpetuated the fiscal irresponsibility of bush in this regard. yet, conservatives such as limbaugh will somehow sell us the socialist spin on this arrangement.
this, on top of the financial sector bailout, illustrates the theme of the obama administration: slightly alter the same species of capitalism we have had over the last thirty years to a slightly more regulated, benevolent breed without significantly altering the fundamentals traits.
the fomer chief economist of the international monetary fund (IMF), simon johnson, wrote an article, published in the atlantic, about obama's pandering to wall street led "the quiet coup". johnson argues that:
"Big banks...have only gained political strength since the crisis began... With the financial system so fragile, the damage that a major bank failure could cause...is much greater than it would be during ordinary times. The banks have been exploiting this fear as they wring favorable deals out of Washington. Bank of America obtained its second bailout package (in January) after warning the government that it might not be able to go through with the acquisition of Merrill Lynch, a prospect that Treasury did not want to consider." (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200905/imf-advice/4 ).
someone should telll limbaugh this is the real face of extortion and then proceed to notify all of those denizens buying into the 'socialist cries' that socialist governments do not negotiate bailouts with banks. in fact, had obama been more legitimately "progressive" he would have nationalized the bank industry. as johnson pointed out: "Nationalization would not imply permanent state ownership. The IMF’s advice would be, essentially: scale up the standard Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation process. An FDIC “intervention” is basically a government-managed bankruptcy procedure for banks. It would allow the government to wipe out bank shareholders, replace failed management, clean up the balance sheets, and then sell the banks back to the private sector." when obama added so many members of the financial sector to his administration i first became concerned at that point because of their backgrounds. it turns out that they have gone on to protect the industry at the expense of true reform.
and so while obama has warned wall street CEO's that his administration stands before the banks and the angry mobs with the pitchforks he has essentially nursed them. while he has suggested the government should regulate medicine , he has made compromises with the insurance and pharmaceutical industries and now stands on the brink of eliminating the single payer option. but has president obama metamorphasized while in office. not so much it seems. apparently, while initiating his projected run for office he voted in favor of the class action fairness act (CAFA), a bill that was essentially tort reform aimed at limiting the scope and power of the class action law suit against corporations. was obama tipping his hat to potential campaign contibutors? was this his wink and a nod to corporate sponsors?
yet conservative opponents argue that obama is a socialist and while on the surface such a position appears so ludicrous, once rethought, it appears to be ingenious (even if inadvertently so). why? because it gets people to assume that an obvious capitalist who operated his campaign under the au es of "change" is affecting the american economy, not because of running the same neoliberal polices that have churned through the white house over the last three decades, but due to his socialist tendencies. that is, get the masses to think that what is already capitalism is socialism and you get capitalism to shift even further to the right (through elections).
the right is not afraid of the left that exists on capitol hill. the right fears the shift of the american public to the left on certain issues. health care would be the perfect example on this and thus, we see the dramatic effort being made by the right againgt health care reform. it is not the proposed health care legislation of obama that the right is in opposition to. it is the health care reform desired by the people that is of concern.
"A Sept. 2-5, 2004, survey by the Civil Society Ins ute, a Newton Centre (Mass.) nonprofit group, found 67% of Americans think it's a good idea to guarantee health care for all U.S. citizens, as Canada and Britain do, with just 27% dissenting. Support for a government-directed universal insurance system is strong, despite GOP warnings about socialized medicine." http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_20/b3933001_mz001.htm
Reflecting a shift in thinking over the past five years among U.S. physicians, a new study shows a solid majority of doctors — 59 percent — now supports national health insurance. http://www.pnhp.org/news/2008/march/...rs_support.php
business week's poll and article was essentially indicating that people and voters looking for safety nets are not so much aligned to policies by ideology as they are by pragmatics. to combat the resonance of urgency, charlatan opponents of changes that would diminish profits for the elite, rush in with their tactics of chaos. the strategy ? confuse the electorate with misinformation. tell them that health care reform is about death squads and socialism. HR676, or the single-payer health insurance plan, would cut administrative costs that account for one-third of every health care dollar spent. $300 billion in annual savings would serve to cover the uninsured and expand coverage to those who already have insurance. the president's plan leaves the health insurance corporation's administrative costs in place - this was pointed out in the michael moore film "sicko" (a film that was vehemently attacked by the right and the insurance industry), when he stated that "obama wants the insurance companies to help us develop a new health care plan-the same companies who have created the mess in the first place."
despite this, conservatives are hoping that people will be gullable enough to believe the notion that obama has appointed his czar, ezekiel emmanuel, to serve as the government's appointed dr. death. sarah palin even noted on her facebook page (one has to wonder what thomas jefferson could have done with a facebook page) that "the America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel'… Such a system is downright evil.". the right is somehow trying to distort a ten page section of the legislation that deals with "advanced care planning" consultations.
during an interview on the fred thompson show, former new york lieutenant governor betsey mccaughey stated " "this is a vicious assault on elderly people, all to do what's in society's best interest, or your family's best, and cut your life short" but the intent of the measure is not for doctors to tell patients what to do, but rather to give doctors more incentives to talk to patients about all of their options. the problem that does exist, however, really goes back to the health insurance companies because of the issues regarding medicare advantage. insurers are in the practice of lemon dropping patients by creating beaureaucratic snags for patients who are then forced to drop their insurer in favor of medicare. for the insurance industry, reform means expanding their business paradigm to include more individuals in their plans while shifting the higher costs to the government (taxpayers). basically, they want high-risk people in a separate program to be funded by the government. i am not sure how sarah palin would defend this model of health insurance coverage.
so as health care reform issues, auto industry and financial sector bailouts
continue to demand the attention of the american public we will continue to see the right press on with the insane charges that somehow we have inherited a president who has gone fidel castro on us, all the while snickering over the fact that there are people out there actually drinking the kool-aid.
Don't give up your day job.
