Dump the Dems 14: Now That We Know They’re Just Pubs Without Knives, Where Do We Go From Here?

If the Healthcare “Reform” Kabuki has done nothing else, it has laid bare the truth of what I’ve been saying for several years now: The Democrat Party is nothing But the GOP in drag. Jon Walker at FDL lays it all out and, as he says, there can no longer be any doubt that voting Democrat is pretty much the same as voting Republican. Same policies, same intense dislike of the “public”, same indifference to what the “public” actually wants, same chickenshit toadying to corporations and the rich, even the same bullying tactics and lying strategies.

After a full year of debate and dozens of excuses, the Democratic leadership now stands naked in their opposition to the public option. President Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid all claimed they that wanted one. They are the three most powerful people in Washington and have huge margins in both chambers. It is ridiculous to believe that the public option could not have become law if the leadership really wanted it. Yet, for months, people were lied to so the Democratic leadership could maintain the insane myth that the public option’s death was not their fault, but the fault of some insurmountable obstacle. What this mythic “insurmountable obstacle” actually was has shifted so many times it is hard to keep track.

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It is foolish to believe that a President, Senate Majority Leader, and Speaker of the House with historically large majorities couldn’t get a public option–which roughly 65% of the country supported–if they really wanted one. Clearly, if they all really wanted to include a public option, they could have done it using reconciliation. To accept their many different excuses of powerlessness requires one to completely suspend reality.

Occam’s razor teaches us the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. Here, the simplest explanation is that, months ago, Obama promised to kill the public option as part of a secret deal with the for-profit hospital lobby, and that for months he lied to the American people about supporting the public option while working behind the scenes to stop it.

The same can be said for phony banking “reform”, the phony “jobs” bill, and the upcoming phony Social Security and Medicare “reforms”. As impossible as it may have been for most people to picture 2 years ago, it is equally impossible now to dismiss the reality that Obama is just a black Bush with a smoother rap and a better suit, and the Dems just another corporate-owned conservative “party” and could now fit comfortably as Fellows of the American Enterprise Institute or the Heritage Foundation (after all, the healthcare “reform” bill they just passed was originally proposed at AEI in ’94). Here’s Bruce Dixon of Black Agenda Report (via Avedon)

The fifteen month running battle between Obama Democrats and tea party Republicans was never much more real than televised professional wrestling. Like the opposing wrestlers, both sides work for the same bosses, for Big Pharma, Big Insurance, and the biggest medical providers. The real health care fight waged by the Obama administration has not been against Republicans, who never had the votes to stop, let alone dictate or pass anything.

The administration’s effort all along has been to pass the worst bill possible, with the greatest amounts of corporate welfare and loopholes, and the fewest protections for patients, while silencing, neutering and coercing the voices of most Democrats, who have favored some form of single payer, or Medicare For All from the beginning.

So comes the question that’s been hanging fire all this time while the people who backed Obama became increasingly disillusioned as his Bushie agenda became more consistent and more open: if both major political parties are really the same party with a slightly different emphasis and marginally different tactics aimed at the exact same goals – keeping the rich happy and fucking over the rest of us – where do we go from here? How do we get a voice in what’s happening, short of outright revolution or getting so rich ourselves we can buy a new party?

There are several options. I discussed the most obvious of them in “Dump the Dems 9“.

The traditional Democrats are there, busting their humps and ready to take the party back to the center-Left, which is where most of the country is at this point. They’re standing up to Obama, they’re defending the Constitution, and they’re doing it without notice from the press when hardly anybody knows they’re doing it…..What if we do it? What if we support them, take over their issues and play them up? What if we work to defeat conservative Democrats who stymie them?

The majority of elected officials in the Democratic party are liberals or populist progressives, yet the party is run by a few conservative Blue Dog obstructionists who pool resources – and votes – with their GOP counterparts. In fact, about the only thing they don’t do with the GOP is caucus with them even if it seems like they do because they always come up with the same TP’s as the Pubs. Yet despite their minority status, these BD’s rule the Democrat party with an iron fist. The leadership are all BDs and they control committee assignments. They determine policy, staff assignments, tactics and floor strategy, and which arguments will be spun to the media.

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Bluntly, us liberals, progressives, and populists really don’t have much to lose, especially since the polls are with us, not the conservative Democrats. We could make a HUGE point of backing FDR Dems in primaries against conDems and make sure the Blue Dog is defeated. If we do that in enough places – and it won’t have to be that many – we can return the Democratic party to its traditional, non-corporate roots. You remember? When it used to be on our side?

I wrote that a little over a year ago, and at that time it seemed a viable option. Since then, the Obama/Emanuel Hammer has beaten most of the lib/progs into compliant toadies by making it perfectly clear that anybody who doesn’t go along will be crushed. Even Colorado’s Michael Bennet, a reliable liberal vote up to now, is backing away from his promise to bring a public option bill to the Senate floor after intense pressure from Rahm and the Dem leadership. It has become an open question now whether or not there’s any spine left in the Democrat party, and the idea of a possible internal rebellion seems pretty far-fetched at this point.

What other alternatives do we have if the libs locked inside a conservative party organization aren’t going to stand up for their beliefs (assuming they still have any besides opportunism and expediency)?

Next: Third Parties and What They’re Good For

Teachers? We Don’t Need No Steenking Teachers

Joel Pett, Lexington, KY Herald-Leader

Obama Embraces the Right-Wing Fantasy of Massive Medicare/Medicaid Fraud

Barack Obama’s Blue Dog Presidency took another step toward Bushist crackpottery yesterday when he actively and enthusiastically reached to to Bushist crackpots by embracing a theme almost as close to their dear little paranoid hearts as voter fraud and SocSec fraud: the supposedly massive fraud in Medicare and Medicaid that has for 30 years been their go-to reason for killing both programs.

President Barack Obama made his case for an overhaul of the U.S. medical system to Missouri voters, emphasizing his efforts to curb waste and fraud in government health programs.

“The health-care system has billions of dollars that should go to patient care and they’re lost each and every year to fraud, to abuse, to massive subsidies that line the pockets of the insurance industry,” he said yesterday at a high school in the St. Louis suburb of St. Charles, Missouri.

Obama is trying to rally public support for the biggest changes to U.S. health care in 45 years in the face of unanimous Republican opposition. He said his proposals show there are ways to pay for expanding insurance coverage to tens of millions of Americans without running up the federal budget deficit.

“So much of the money currently in our health-care system is being misspent,” he said. “If we can have a smarter health- care system, then yes, we can provide help to middle-class folks who need it and, at the same time, actually reduce the burden on taxpayers.”

His spirited endorsement included some of the same probably bogus figures in the charges Republicans have been making for decades – figures they’ve never been able to back up with evidence. The Pres claims he has such evidence through a pilot program in several states.

Last year, the Medicare and Medicaid programs for seniors and low-income Americans made $54 billion in unwarranted payments to healthcare providers, according to White House.

To combat the problem, Obama has proposed expanding a program to reward private bounty hunters who find waste by auditing government payments through what are called “payment recapture audits.”

The White House reported that a pilot program in California, New York and Texas yielded $900 million in Medicare savings between 2005 and 2009.

Gee, I hate to say it but this all sounds very familiar. Isn’t there someone else who used to be president who made unsourced claims based on interior White House studies we never saw that were supposedly prepared by people who were never named?

Whenever FoxNews or George W or Darth Cheney wanted to beef up their credibility when they made incredible statements of fantasy as if they were fact, they, too, would, like, pick a big number – say, a BILLION – and subtract 100 million or so from it so it would sound real. “$897MIL” sounds so much more believable, like numbers were actually crunched to produce it. Except that we would find out months – or years – later that they’d simply made the numbers up, that those “facts” had never existed in the real world.

So before I get all excited about how badly we’re being ripped of by our elderly parents and grandparents, I’d like to a) know who ran this pilot program, b) see the study numbers that reached that conclusion, and c) find out how exactly these paragons of virtue defined “waste”. After all, to a health insurance company any money whatever spent on anybody over 65 is a “waste” since they’re just going to die in a few years anyway.

None of this information was included in either news report. None. Maybe because it doesn’t exist.

Yah think?

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The New Wall Street Reality

Bruce Beattie, Daytona Beach News-Journal

My Life in Savannah

The rainy season in Savannah runs from July 5th to May 31. Just in case you were wondering.

Obama Tries to Shame Health Insurance Execs; Next Up, He Tries to Chop Down a Redwood With a Herring

So H&HS Sec Kathleen Sibelius (no known relation to the famous Finnish composer) is having this meeting with top health insurance execs, trying to convince them that, you know, their industry needs regulating.

So President Obama decides to help and interrupts the meeting to read them a letter from a woman who suffered from predatory acts by her insurance company – namely, paying $11K in premiums and medical costs while her so-called “insurance” company paid out less than a $grand.

Apparently his object was to shame them. I’m dying to know how that worked out for him.

Really.

I am.

I can’t imagine.

Another Great Idea From Our Brilliant GOP

Lee Judge, Kansas City Star

Actually, if it meant the Dems were going to turn a corporate-friendly giveaway into a citizen-friendly public health service, I’d be all in favor. But I’m pretty sure that’s not what the Pubs have in mind.