Things to consider—

Since early 2011, Obama's been waging proxy war on Syria. Imported death squads masquerade as freedom fighters. The scheme's familiar. It repeats. It reflects US imperialism's dark side. In the 1980s, CIA-recruited mujahideen fighters battled Afghanistan's Soviet occupiers. Ronald Reagan called them "the moral equivalent of our founding fathers." He characterized Contra killers the same way. —Stephen LendmanFor over a century now US ambassadors have acted as fifth columns in the nations they are embedded in, their role chiefly to foster corporate and plutocratic power and coordinate machinations against any truly pro-democratic government.•••••"The dead end identity politics of SF Pride, which sells out a peace hero like Bradley Manning to curry favor with the American ruling class, is what I had in mind. The empire loves your tameness, irrelevance and cowardice, SF Pride. You don’t bother the American ruling class — a five foot two, 105 pound soldier does because he has a conscience and because he didn’t make comfort the guiding principle of his life...." —Randy Shields

Pure Transformation or Persistent Deterioration? What Next Wisconsin? America? The World?

 ACTIVISTS & HEROES, EDITORIALS, HEADLINERS, OpEds  1 Response »
Jun 092012
 

By Kristine Mattis

And as it was in the beginning, so shall it be in the end
That bullshit is bullshit, it just goes by different names …

Paul Weller (The Jam)

Scott Walker's triumph reflects not only the enduring power of money in US politics, but the confusion among voters in all parts of the nation, and a general disgust with Democratic party politics due to numerous betrayals.

We all know the old Albert Einstein adage that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. What does that say about Wisconsin? June 5th 2012 saw an exact rematch of the 2010 gubernatorial election between Republican Scott Walker and Democrat Tom Barrett – and the exact same result, the only difference being that Walker won by an even wider margin than before.

While pundits have been pontificating about the causes of such a seemingly absurd victory by Scott Walker after the enormous groundswell of citizens fighting for sixteen months against the governor and his Tea Party Republican administration, most of the discussion has been shallow and fraught with inaccuracies. Furthermore, mere speculation on the causes of the Walker win only point to the ease with which our society retreats back to often unfounded conventional wisdom. Walker outspending Barrett 7 to 1, an ignorant electorate hell bent on voting against their own interests, and poor “messaging” by the Democratic party/candidate may all have played a part in the crushing Walker win, but these observations only scratch the surface of the problems facing Wisconsin, the country, and the world and serve to fuel the media’s incessant focus on the horse race. This insistence on focusing on the superficial always serves, by design, to impede the discourse on substantive issues. Continue reading »

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Top Ten Answers To Excuses For Obama’s Betrayals and Failures

 CITIZEN TOOLS, CLASS STRUGGLE, Obama  Comments Off
Apr 282011
 

Looking for answers to the flood of excuses offered for the betrayals and failures of the Obama presidency. We offer our gentle readers this handy list of ten of the most frequently encountered excuses for the misfeasance, malfeasance, non-feasance and disappointments of the Obama presidency.

One of America’s top radical Black intellectuals and activists demolishes the carefully constructed image of Obama as a champion of popular interests.

By BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon | 04/27/2011

Early this month, panelists on MSNBC’s corporate “Black Agenda” show agreed that black dissatisfaction, disappointment and disaffection with the Obama administration was growing. The brick and mortar of the Black Wall Around Barack Obama are the plentiful and often contradictory excuses which black misleaders and ordinary people offer and accept for his administration’s many failures and betrayals. These excuses are important because the illusion of nearly unanimous black support, no matter what he does or does not do remains President Obama’s most vital political asset. Continue reading »

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Freedom Rider: Attack of the Cruise Missile Liberals

 ASSHOLES, BASTARDS & CRIMINALS, INDECENT SLIMEBALLS, LIBERAL BETRAYALS, MEDIA SCUM  1 Response »
Mar 312011
 

Liberals Love War

By BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley | Created 03/30/2011

Americans are warlike – as long as they think they can be victorious. These nominal Democrats and Republicans “differ only on who they want to see doing the dominating.” Today, a Black Democrat is the head killer in charge, allowing the likes of Ed Schultz, Bill Maher and Juan Cole to endorse the criminal assault on Libya. When the chips are down, fraudulent anti-war liberals show their true racist, Manifest Destiny-loving colors. “The true anti-war movement must reawaken itself and hit the streets in the hundreds of thousands.” Continue reading »

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Obama Prepares to Triangulate Himself

 ASSHOLES, BASTARDS & CRIMINALS  Comments Off
Oct 202010
 

By BAR executive editor Glen Ford  |  Wed, 10/20/2010

[print_link]
WHAT A GUY! Barack Obama has neutralized Blacks, the white left, and the majority of his own party in service to Wall Street, and some still call him “liberal” (The insane call him “socialist.”) With Social Security and Medicare in his sights, “the stage is set for a performance of presidential political gymnastics that will make Bill Clinton, once known as the Great Triangulator, bow down to the master.”
With Social Security and Medicare in his sights, “the stage is set for a performance of presidential political gymnastics that will make Bill Clinton, once known as the Great Triangulator, bow down to the master.”
“Obama invented the deficit reduction commission as his customized vehicle to subvert his own party’s cherished ‘entitlement’ programs.”
One thing is certain: the corporations will win and civilization will lose on November 2nd. The outcome is foreordained, since the dwindling electoral forces of civilization don’t have enough candidates in contention even to fill an effective caucus.
With 83 nominal members, the Progressive Congressional Caucus [5] is, on paper, the largest of the House ideological groupings, but has been neutered since Barack Obama entered the White House. The Congressional Black Caucus has not been a coherent force for progressive change for most of this century, and now behaves as if lobotomized by the presence of a Black chief executive. Having allowed themselves to be whipped, kicked and scorned by a White House concerned only for the president’s most narrow interests and schemes, “left” Democrats are at their nadir of legislative influence, despite their chairmanships.
Whether the GOP actually wins one or both chambers of Congress or not, the people’s interests are in deep trouble. The most immediate threat looms, not from the Tea Party, which will no doubt have its own little caucus in the next Congress, but from Barack Obama and his President’s National Commission [6] on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. When the right-heavy commission makes its recommendations in early December, the stage will be set for a performance of presidential political gymnastics that will make Bill Clinton, once known as the Great Triangulator, bow down to the master.
Barack Obama will triangulate himself.
“’Left’ Democrats are at their nadir of legislative influence, despite their chairmanships.”
President Clinton skillfully triangulated his own Democrats, seeking to position himself between the party’s liberal-ish core and the Republicans, thus moving the center of political gravity rightward through the Nineties. Obama, whose first major act while still a candidate was to save the Bush bank bailout after it failed a first vote in October, 2008, has elevated Clinton-style triangulation to what he hopes passes for statesmanship. Obama likes to calls it “non-partisan,” “consensus-building” politics and other variations on the theme, but the result is always the same: the fundamental interests of corporations are protected at the beginning of the process, which can only end with the people in worse shape than before it started. This is how a broad and deep public demand for comprehensive health reform was transformed into a guaranteed, subsidized, central role in the national health system for the hated insurance and drug companies for the foreseeable future.
Obama, a genius at creating opportunities for himself while undermining the life prospects of others, invented the deficit reduction commission as his customized vehicle to subvert his own party’s cherished “entitlement” programs: Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, and others. Republicans didn’t force his hand or box him in. Instead, Obama set the torpedoes in motion against entitlements in the days before his inauguration, declaring, on January 8, 2009 [7], that an overhaul of Medicare and Social Security would be “a central part” of his presidency. Not long afterwards, he said that Social Security and other entitlements would be “on the table” for cutting. All this, before any Republican had blurted an angry word about Obama in congressional debate.
“Obama has elevated Clinton-style triangulation to what he hopes passes for statesmanship.”
Obama’s ambush of entitlements is premeditated. He was determined from the very start to succeed where George Bush failed – by gutting Social Security. That’s how Obama measures greatness.
The problem was, most Republicans remembered Bush’s Social Security debacle of 2005 [8], and were not anxious to relive the experience, while debating Social Security was the last thing on Democratic congressional minds. With Republicans in no mood to launch a legislative attack on Social Security, there was nobody for Obama to make one of his grand comprises with. So, in February of this year, he issued an executive order [9] creating his own anti-entitlement missile, the 18-person [10] panel that quickly became known as the “cat food” commission [11], harkening back to the pre-Social Security days when many of the elderly where reduced to eating cat food.
Obama’s trick was to conjure up a political demand for the gutting of entitlements when no serious movement in that direction existed in the Congress. The commission route allowed him to concoct a majority right-wing constituency in a bottle, so to speak, by weighting the membership with pro-corporate players.
No one doubts that the panel is rigged to recommend cuts that Democrats (and a few Republicans) would be prepared to fight tooth and nail if proposed by the GOP. Blood would flow in the halls of the House and Senate, and in the end the assailants would likely lose. But by packaging the poison in a commission, Obama is allowed to behave as if the entitlement debate has oozed from the ether, demanding to be made manifest.
“The commission route allowed him to concoct a majority right-wing constituency in a bottle, so to speak.”
Now comes the good part. In a classic triangulation, Obama would position himself as close to the Republican legislative position as politically convenient. However, that’s easier said than done, and full of risks, in the heat of debate on tricky congressional terrain. Instead, the presidential commission, acting as the supposed “deliberator” of the fate of the nation’s sick and elderly, will spew forth a range of recommendations from which Obama will pick and choose. He will vow to protect “the most vulnerable” from the more draconian ideas put forward by his commission. In the end he will stake out and occupy a “non-partisan,” “consensus” center as defined by the makeup of the commission, the president’s own creation.
Obama will have triangulated himself, and screwed us all. Mark my words.
.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com [12].
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Medicare for all, made simple

 american way of life, Corporate Media, Healthcare struggle, MEDIA SCUM, Obama, Policies & Politicians, THE USA  4 Responses »
Mar 272010
 
The profoundly misguided rightwingers oppose the bill for the wrong reasons.

Alan Grayson’s Four-Page Medicare Buy-In Bill Introduced

WATCH THE VIDEO BELOW

By: David Dayen Wednesday March 10, 2010 8:54 am  [print_link]

EDITOR’S NOTE: If Barack Obama had been serious about getting a real healthcare reform program approved, all he needed to do was to introduce a “Medicare for All” bill, which would have been almost immune to attacks by the Republicans, and easily understood and defended by the majority. As Alan Grayson’s proposal demonstrates, this approach would have insured victory and opened the gates to more real progressive legislation. But Obama and the Democratic leadership chose to squander this historical opportunity and saddle the nation with a grotesquely complicated and inadequate piece of legislation.— P. Greanville

As quixotic efforts go, I’ll take Alan Grayson’s HR 4789, a four page bill which “allows any American to buy into Medicare at cost.” You cannot possibly get more simple than that, it would not add one cent to the federal deficit, and it would offer people the option of purchasing Medicare (and its provider network) or purchasing an insurance product from a private company. Howie Klein writes:

The profoundly misguided rightwingers oppose the bill for the wrong reasons.

The profoundly misguided rightwingers oppose the bill for the wrong reasons. Although they don't realize it, they lend credence to the fake reform passed by the Democrats.

This evening Alan Grayson, Orlando’s spectacular and effective fighter for ordinary working families in a Congress that overwhelmingly caters to wealthy and powerful special interests, introduced the most real and straight forward healthcare reform bill that’s come up so far. Unless Obama makes the House leadership kill H.R. 4789– a distinct possibility– this should pass the House more easily than anything that’s been proposed for healthcare reform so far. And I bet it could even win cloture in the Senate! His bill offers the opportunity for everyone in the country to buy into Medicare. “Obviously,” said Grayson, “America wants and needs more competition in health coverage, and a public option offers that. But it’s just as important that we offer people not just another choice, but another kind of choice. A lot of people don’t want to be at the mercy of greedy insurance companies that will make money by denying them the care that they need to stay healthy, or to stay alive. We deserve to have a real alternative… The government spent billions of dollars creating a Medicare network of providers that is only open to one-eighth of the population. That’s like saying, ‘Only people 65 and over can use federal highways.’ It is a waste of a very valuable resource and it is not fair. This idea is simple, it makes sense, and it deserves an up-or-down vote.”

[flv width="300" height="240"]http://www.greanvillepost.com/videos/GraysonOnMedicare4all.flv[/flv]

I’m not as sanguine about its prospects, but I don’t expect HR 4789 to go away. This bill, like other public option or single payer bills, ought to be introduced year after year, with a movement built around them, and stands taken in primaries, and discharge petitions attempted. Grayson seems like a better candidate to actually accomplish this – under his leadership, an audit the Fed bill that Ron Paul had sitting on a shelf somewhere for two decades got well over 300 co-sponsors in the House.

I’m also thoroughly unsurprised that Grayson pitched the most readable, simplest, most intuitive health care proposal of this entire two-year debate.

UPDATE: And there’s already a companion website at WeWantMedicare.com.

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A cruel and dangerous hoax

 American "Way of Life", COLUMNS, Liberaloids & Radical Centrists, Obama, Policies & Politicians  Comments Off
Mar 252010
 
healthcare-stakeholders.binah_shah

Obama Democrats VS Tea Party Republicans: A Fake Fight Over Fake Reform

Created 03/25/2010 – 11:05

By BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

healthcare-stakeholders.binah_shahTHERE ARE REAL FIGHTS and there are fake fights, engineered to distract attention away from the real deal. The shouting match between Obama’s Dems and the Tea party Repubs is one of those fake fights. The health care legislation passed by the Obama Democrats is incomparably worse than anything they could have passed right after the presidential election, and significantly worse than anything Democrats could have passed at midyear 2009. The president and his minions have delayed as long as possible to guarantee the worst, not the best bill for patients, and the best deal possible for Big Insurance, Big Pharma and Big Medicine.

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.

The Fake Reform

On the whole, the Obama health care legislation is just plain bad. It’s fake reform. Most of the people getting medical coverage for the first time under its provisions will get through an expansion of Medicaid. The Medicaid expansion and inclusion of children in their parents’ policies till the age of 24 are perhaps the only unambiguously positive aspects of the bill, and both these could have been passed through the House and Senate at any time since the end of 2006.

Supposedly, insurers can’t refuse to insure anybody, or jack prices on the basis of pre-existing conditions, and can’t revoke policies when people get sick enough to actually use them. But so many loopholes and end runs have been written into the legislation that these and other widely ballyhooed provisions to safeguard the interests of patients are in fact meaningless. The ban on pre-existing conditions for example is negated by allowing insurers to offer “wellness” discounts. The older, the fatter, the less physically fit and the already sick need not apply for these discounts, and the fit will lose them when they gain a few pounds.

Insurance policies will continue to cherry pick their customers in the marketing, and like the credit card industry, insurers will now be able to evade already weak state regulators by selling policies across state lines. This will undoubtedly lead to concentrations of insurance companies in the least regulated states, and a race to the bottom. Health coverage that many working Americans now get will be steeply taxed, and to evade this tax employers will simply offer policies worth less, provoking yet another downward stampede.

Big pharmaceutical companies are assured exclusive rights for even longer periods than before to new classes of drugs, and insurance companies are prohibited from paying for the re-importation of drugs originally manufactured here from Canada, or combining to negotiate drug prices downward.

The ban on selling low-cost health insurance to the nation’s twelve or fifteen million undocumented means the border will now extend to every doctor’s office and emergency room in the land. And insurance policies offered through “the exchange” are prohibited from covering abortions or a list of reproductive health services.

Private insurance companies will use their all-too-real death panels to continue to decide which procedures they will cover, and which ones they won’t, and how much they will pay for them. Health insurance premiums will be capped at just under ten percent of a family’s income, but this will not include already high co-payments, or deductibles. In Massachusetts, where a version of the president’s plan has been law since 2006, sick people are forgoing treatment because they cannot afford the high co-payments and deductibles, and the flood of bankruptcies from unpayable medical bills is continuing.

The legislation is not a step toward single payer, as it removes none of the legal obstacles facing states which choose that path on their own. It’s almost a good thing that most of the bill’s provisions don’t take effect till 2014.

And of course the too big to fail private health insurers get a stream of compulsory customers, some of them paid for in part with government money.

The Fake Fight

The legislation just passed is a million miles away from anything Democrats campaigned on in the 2006-2008 run for the White House, and incomparably worse than anything House Democrats would have passed in the first months of the Obama administration. The 2007-2008 class of House Democrats included 99 co-sponsors of HR 676, the Single Payer Medicare For All. All but one or two of these were sworn in for the current Congress.

What happened? Persistent and single-minded interventions of the White House and its minions in the Senate and House Democratic leadership have relentlessly censored and excluded single payer viewpoints from the public conversation and pushed the actual legislation further and further in the directions the insurance companies, the drug companies, and the biggest medical providers desired.

The White House met continuously in early 2009 with representatives of pharmaceutical companies, and insisted that their super-profits be protected. A former VP of WellPoint, one of the nation’s top insurers was allowed to write large portions of the Senate version of the Obama bill. Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid handed the writing of its legislation over to a committee of senators who had more money from private insurers and Big Pharma than any of their fellows, and which gave its Republican members veto power over its final product.

To cover their own impotence, Democrats who had once supported single payer became outspoken advocates of a phantom policy called “the public option,” which polled well because it sounded something like universal health care or single payer, but never in fact existed. The president definitively stomped on their fake public option back in September 2009, when he said his version of it would only apply to fiver percent of the market at most, and was not essential to his proposal anyhow. House leaders balked a little, and corralled their members behind whatever the president wanted, and whatever the pea party fanatics declared they didn’t want.

A much better health care bill could have been passed at mid-year 2009, and a less good, but still somewhat better one was possible at year’s end. But the Obama administration was convinced that still more could be given to Big Insurance and Big Pharma, and so delayed the bill into 2010. Even as late as December a majority of Democratic senators were willing to pay lip service to the public option. For the Obama administration, that meant it was still too soon to pass its version of heath care.

The Real Fight

The margin and distribution of votes last weekend reveals White House effort to blame Republican obstruction and Democratic progressives for the delay in passing health care to have been utter scams. Not one Republican voted for the bill, and no Republican votes were ever needed. While the White House allowed 26 of 58 Democratic Blue Dogs to vote against the bill, including Art Davis of Alabama and John Marshall and John Barrow of Georgia, it applied incredible pressure against Dennis Kucinch and other advocates of single payer to line up behind the pro-corporate, anti health care bill. They, and the movement for real universal health care, for single payer, were the White House’s real foes.

It’s Not Over. For the next several years 18 or 20 thousand people will sicken and die each year who don’t have to, thanks now to Barack Obama and his hand picked Democratic leaders in the House and Senate. The most awful failures of this legislation will not be obvious for several years, as most of it does not even take effect till 2014. More than six hundred thousand bankruptcies truggered by unpayable medical expenses will continue to happen yearly at least till then, with their numbers not greatly reduced on the other side.

The Single Payer Movement, among whose leading organizations are the National Nurses Union [1], HealthCare NOW [2], and Physicians For a National Health Care Plan [3] are preparing for a long struggle. Not this year or the next, but in a decade or less [4], many predict, single payer will be enacted. California has passed single payer three times now, but has never had a governor with the guts to sign it. Pennsylvania and a few other states are thought to be close to passing single payer on their own. That’s how it happened in Canada. One province did it, everybody saw how it worked, and it became national policy.

In health care, as in war and peace, as in the environment and education, as in the rights of women and immigrants, the First Black President’s historic role is clear. His job is to smile and speechify and neutralize the left on every front, while taking the country further to the right than his white Republican predecessor would ever have been able.

Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report, and based in Atlanta. He can be reached at bruce.dixon@blackagendareport.com

 

Source URL: http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/obama-democrats-vs-tea-party-republicans-fake-fight-over-fake-reform

Links:
[1] http://www.nationalnursesunited.org/
[2] http://www.healthcare-now.org/
[3] http://pnhp.org/
[4] http://pnhp.org/blog/2010/03/17/sen-snowes-policy-advisor-single-payer-in-a-decade/
[5] http://www.addtoany.com/share_save?linkurl=http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/obama-democrats-vs-tea-party-republicans-fake-fight-over-fake-reform&linkname=Obama Democrats VS Tea Party Republicans: A Fake Fight Over Fake Reform


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