This Can't Be Happening!

So now it turns out that the whole Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) was a flop or more likely a scam. Remember Bush Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson telling us last September that credit markets had locked up, and then, after half of the $750 billion that he extorted out of Congress was handed out to Wall Street firms, new President Barack Obama justifying the spending of the second half of the money because we needed to “get the banks lending again”?

When the White House or Democrats in Congress talk about health care reform, and about wanting to preserve the central role of the private insurance industry in health care, it pays to look at just what it is that they they’re so anxious to preserve.

According to the Health and Human Service’s department’s National Health Expenditures report, private insurers will pay out $854 billion in medical claims for health insurance policyholders this year. That represents about one-third of the nation’s estimated $2.5-trillion medical care bill for this year. But that’s not the whole story. The premiums paid for those claims payments will total $1.2 trillion, which includes $179 billion in “administrative” costs (21% or over $1 out of every $5 dollars spent on health care) and another 150 billion in profits (a tidy 15% return). That is money that was paid out in premiums by individuals and by employers (who every year are shifting more of the cost of health coverage onto employees).

In an article in the Sunday New York Times, headlined “Medicare for All? ‘Crazy,’ ‘Socialized’ and Unlikely,”reporter Katherine Q. Seelye did her best to damn the idea of government insurance for all with faint praise.

Corporations have no more place in a democracy than carpenter ants and mold have in the beams of an old barn

For the last two weeks, I’ve been contemplating the mysteries of a post-and-beam barn, trying to work out how to rescue the long-ignored structure from the fate of many barns of its vintage (probably about 150 years old), which is total collapse.

Liberals are acting all righteous and offended that a member of the Republican opposition, Rep. “Joe” Wilson of South Carolina, would deign to besmirch the “dignity of the presidency” by calling out “Liar!” in the middle of President Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday evening.

But what’s wrong with that? Whatever the veracity of Obama’s claim that his proposed health care “reform” would not pay for the health care of illegal immigrants residing in the US (and one can only hope that statement was fatuous, because at a minimum we would certainly want the government to pay for the care of an illegal immigrant in childbirth, or of an illegal immigrant who came down with a contagious disease), and even if Rep. Wilson is a racist bozo who wrongly thinks or wants to imply that Obama's plan would be out there enrolling undocumented workers in the millions at taxpayer expense, why shouldn’t members of Congress call out a president if they think he’s lying to them from the podium?

The Obama administration's freak out, as expressed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, over the Associated Press Agency's belated circulation of a photograph of a dying US soldier in Afghanistan, Lance Cpl. Joshua Bernard, is the latest of example of the hypocrisy of US authorities who claim to be concerned about the feelings of American military families, while really simply desiring to censor the war's horrors from the eyes of the American people.

Lance Cpl. Josua Bernard, fatally wounded in Afghanistan

Question: How many Democrats does it take to change a light bulb?

Answer: In Theory, one. But to hear the Democrats tell it, at least 60, because they claim that even 59 of them aren't enough to keep 40 Republicans from pushing them off the stepladder (although for the prior eight years, far fewer than 60 Republicans always seemed to be able to manage the job).

Question: How may Democrats does it take to kill a good idea?

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My Fellow Americans.

I stand before you a chastened president. I made a mistake. Two mistakes really. (wild applause from Republican side)

I thought that Congress could do its job and through the deliberative process, produce a health care reform plan that would win broad support across the aisle and among all of you. But I’m afraid that I was wrong. Health care is an enormous industry—maybe the biggest and most powerful industry in the country—and it has far too much power in this capital. Literally thousands of lobbyists, carrying tens of billions of dollars in campaign contributions—have invaded these halls (and my house!) (relieved laughter)and distorted the process, and in the end have stymied reform. (some hissing)

Meanwhile, I have realized that the answer has been staring us in the face all along.

It is refreshing to hear the new head of the AFL-CIO, former mineworker and Mineworkers President Richard Trumka, get mad at sell-out Democrats and make a threat not to “support” them next year.

As Trumka pointed out in a talk to the Center for American Progress this week, for years, Democratic politicians, and the Democrats as a Party, have counted on the labor movement to get out the vote of its membership on Election Day, only to turn on workers after getting to Washington, on the issues that really matter, like jobs-killing free trade agreements, the gutting of bankruptcy law and credit law protections, and, most recently, the undermining of needed labor law reform.

Trumka, quoting from a famous Florence Reece song popularized by Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger, said that going forward, Democrats will have to make it clear to labor “Which side are you on?”

But really, that’s only half the question.