The Politicians who are Supposedly Progressive Disappear into Puffs of Smoke

Basically, every single Obama voter was thrown overboard into the churning sea, as the deck chairs on the Titanic were rearranged and lifeboats were readied, in order for the crazed Democrats, in desperate need of a passed bill regardless of how lame it is, to ram their garbage through by, um, three votes. Laugh out loud (but it's not really funny) how during this ramming through, the Kucinich plans, the Weiner plans, all the other progressive plans and proposals all disappeared in puffs of smoke, while a nasty anti-abortion amendment ended up very alive and very real. Why, it’s as if Kucinich and Weiner themselves disappeared into puffs of smoke.

And Conyers was never there in the first place, laugh out loud.

There is an important lesson here. Very simply, if you are smart enough to read Common Dreams, you should be smart enough to NEVER again (assuming you ever have) vote for a Democrat or a Republican. Obviously, both of those parties are right wing parties. All non-right wing parties need to unify into a marketable party with a name that has not and can not be severely harmed by propaganda, such as New Democratic Party-US.

Don't look at me, I have a long track record of having little knowledge or capability of politically organizing. I'm a fish out of water there. I'm just trying to tell you that any political party without the right branding and marketing is never going to break into the Democrats-Republicans monopoly. Forget Greens, Independent, Socialist, forget all of those limited and/or damaged brands. The branding has to be just right and the marketing has to be just right to capture that guy in Peoria who needs a job.

Y'all have a good weekend and a good holiday next week.

The above was written in response to this article at Common Dreams.

"You Need to Break Down into Percentages What you are Willing to pay for Things"

GUEST COMMENT

rtdrury November 21st, 2009 5:47 pm
"historic health care reform"

The elites started editing the history books before they even made the non-history. Their plan was to pretend to do something worthwhile, while actually making things worst, get paid for it, and write themselves a positive review in the media.

The elites are exploiting the people's hope, trust and loyalty, and manufacturing weapons from that to turn against the people. This is a particularly vicious form of oppression. The weapon of mandatory insurance premiums to a cartel of corporate crooks will persuade the people to shut up and continue paying twice for healthcare what people pay in other countries. The cartel has publicly threatened to raise the cost to five times that in a decade and the people have to be softened up for this slated surge of their enslavement. The elite faction in the Whitey House figures the more enslaved the people are the more the people will enjoy it.

If the people are looking for an alternate paradigm, consider breaking down into percentages what you are willing to pay for things. To figure what you should pay for healthcare, you consider that a national insurance pool makes the most sense, so we can talk about average costs, per capita. Now look at the average cost in the countries with the best value, Canada being a great example, and divide that by the average income in Canada, and with the average hours worked you can figure best value healthcare costs in percent of your time. It's not set in stone. You can look to see if for example Canadians happen to be workaholics to some extent and if so then their percent of time figure for healthcare and everything else is probably too high. So you can demand even greater value, and get it. Do this for all the stuff you need and always know what it costs to do things for yourself too. Show your figures to people and ask if they would like an opportunity to serve you at the specified rate. Write up a contract for long term business based on mutual satisfaction with the terms. Make sure the people you do busness with are involved in independent enterprises of ten man-powers or less, and local.

"new purchasing marketplaces called exchanges where self-employed individuals and small businesses could go to shop for and compare coverage plans."

This would be hilarious if it weren't so sad. The elites are fully aware that the people could someday learn to think for themselves. So the elites call on the Bernays disciples to create a new facade which is the "exchange" described in the quote. It's freaky in its idiocy. We ALREADY HAVE a health insurance marketplace and it sucks, because the prices are fixed illegally at twice the cost in other countries. USans are so blinded by the light, they can't see through it. It's criminal for elites to continue cultivating/exploiting this human weakness.

UNITY-PROGRESS RESPONSE
You have the right idea there. Americans need to set some kind of a limit on what percentage of their income they will pay for health expenses (ALL of them COMBINED) if they wish to avoid bankruptcy every ten years and God only knows what kind of destitution in between those bankruptcies every ten years. And if they wish to avoid slavery to health insurance executives, homelessness, and so forth.

Whether your limit will be lower or higher than what the Democrats think your limit should be will depend on individual circumstances, but I can guarantee you that there will be a lot of people who would be wise to set a lower limit than what the right of center Democrats are setting for them. The Democrats, even after all of their at first glance nice sounding limits and regulations are factored in, are effectively setting annual health spending limits for many millions of Americans at well in excess of 20% of anyone's annual income, topping out at, for the sick, as a rough estimate to be improved later, 35% of income. This is of course criminally insane.

You can't defy the laws of personal microeconomics in America or anywhere else. If you pay out 25% or 30% or 35% of your income to health insurance expenses, there are going to be serious consequences for the success or lack of success of your overall personal spending program. There is a lot more that needs expenditure than health care in any rational personal spending program. You have to avoid freezing or starving to death for example.

It would also be nice if there was some money available for job creation outside of the health industry, especially since the banks have taken the economy hostage and are refusing to lend to small and medium sized businesses.

With a target date of the end of the year, I am producing an excel file that will clearly show reasonably good estimates of the real costs of health care in various countries across several disparate income levels, with easy to see comparisons to the far higher US costs. One of several important objectives will be to try to blast away some of the ignorance about premiums being the only or even the main health care expense in the US: as nasty as the premiums alone can be, there is a lot more than just premiums to worry about in the US.

The excel will also, eventually at least, include future year estimations, for 2015, 2020, 2025, and 2030. In short, it will be a clear and quick look at the extent to which Americans are being and will be fleeced. The differences between what Americans pay and what almost everyone else pays are so great, and are destined to grow even greater, that the word "fleeced" is fully justified.

Good weekend and holiday next week to all.

The above very outstanding guest comment and our comment were in response to this article at Common Dreams.

A Collapsed System, and the Dean of the Harvard Medical School Declares the Health Reform to be a Failure

Donna Smith has been a hard working advocate for a truly good health care system. Her pre-Thanksgiving article on Common Dreams brought up her common themes.

UNITY-PROGRESS COMMENTARY
Not a single job in more than 10 years. And despite the increase since March, not a single dollar added to the stock market averages in more than 11 years. Interest rates on savings are below 2 percent. Homelessness, hunger, abandoned housing etc. are all at, by far, all-time records. Adding both insult and additional injury is that there is even a half-abandoned city: New Orleans, Louisiana. Detroit Michigan and other cities are also virtually half abandoned.

This is obviously a collapsed, failed system, yet it grinds on because of the super forces of greed and arrogance, because of the closed, corporate-controlled political system, because of good old-fashioned living in the past, and perhaps because non-right-wing people do not seem to understand the concept of political marketing, as for example the Canadians running the New Democratic Party do and as many Europeans, Asians, Australians, New Zealanders, South Americans, and still others understand, as shown by the healthy existence of their successful to one extent or another non-right-wing parties.

Meanwhile, in America there is just this big political hole and this show of futility by marginalized figures like Dennis Kucinich, Howard Dean, and Bernie Sanders, in the background. Overall, it seems that American non-right-wingers are more likely to be arrested where they are not welcome for trying to make their views known than they are to be serving in Government!

As a result of the futility of the non-right-wing in the US, there is virtually no real representation in US government anymore for workers, so it will be no surprise if we reach a 15 or even a 20 year milestone with no jobs.

By the way, is it actually essentially a conspiracy that American non-right wing forces develop only futile political parties, such as the Greens, who are inevitably tagged as one-issue wonders? Very plausibly so, because although it is the right wingers who are known as the great marketers, it seems hard to believe that ALL non right wingers could be naturally less than competent at political marketing. I mean, I know I am probably less than competent at political marketing, but are ALL non-right-wingers less than competent? I find that hard to believe, thus the conspiracy theory.

Anyhow, it was nice not only to check out this Donna Smith article, but also this from Jeffrey Flier, the Dean of the Harvard Medical School:

Dean of the Harvard Medical School Declares Health Care Reform a Failure

As you can see if you go there, the Dean of the Harvard Medical School knows that this legislation is dead on arrival in the sense that it does almost nothing about what was most in need of doing, which was real, true, no pretending, and no kidding cost control. What was by far most needed was left out.

As a major member of the establishment, Mr. Flier had to support the mandate, since there has been an unstated rule in 2009 that every respectable member of the establishment must support the mandate. He had to support people, unless they wisely dodge it, being on the hook for the gross overcharging for health insurance. But at least he was honest about the overall failure and futility of this legislation, which when all is said and done is simply about the Democrats being able to say they did something.

Let's face it, American politicians, the ones in the two corporate parties anyway, in the context of a collapsed system that has been very, very right wing for 30 years and counting, are most likely not going to think of themselves as being responsible for passing legislation that is actually good and effective.

Admittedly, it’s a lot harder to pass truly good legislation in the present context than it was before the system collapsed. So maybe we should have some sympathy for their passing garbage? No, common sense tells you that no one in government should ever be excused from peddling garbage and playing pretend games.

Which brings us back to the need for a non-right wing party that is not a dead on arrival marketing failure like, unfortunately, the Socialists and the Greens and the Independents are. A New Democratic Party-US would be one option that would actually work.