Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Yes, and to tie back to the Stein Vader post, is it any wonder why the AFL-ack continues to spin down the toilet-hole?

Look at this stunning multi-turd-wad President Sweeney has issued forth:

"At stake is nothing less than insurers' power to control what doctors we see, what treatments we get and how much of our wage dollars go to their fat profits.

"President Obama's proposal would put people and their doctors in charge of their own health care, reduce health care cost inflation, outlaw insurance company abuses, give doctors better decision-making tools for care, and require insurers to compete with a public health insurance option.

"Hundreds of millions of dollars – including lots of our insurance premium dollars – are being spent by an unholy alliance of insurers, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News and the Republican right [but not the Democrats, despite the horror of the legislation before Sweeney's very nose!] in an aggressive campaign to stop health reform.

"The question for us is: will we let them make health care "Obama's Waterloo" or will we make it the next big step in our march to Turn Around America?"

I ask it again: How in the world could this guy NOT be on the take? You have work hard to weave this many lies together in so few words.

As far as I know, he gets his rake-offs legally, with "legally" understood as thoroughly corrupt, but not likely to be prosecuted.

Well, I know that a big part of the take is the salaries these crooks pay themselves. Sweeney makes almost $300,000 and has a fat pension coming -- all on top of a platinum expense account.

I suppose this kind of unconscionable graft goes back to the Red Scare and the eviction of the political union leaders...

Meanwhile, the problem with the otherwise excellent BW story is that it neglects to mention the complicity of the entire DP in letting big insurance use the Blue Dogs. An ounce of genuine reform would have swept those fuckers right along.

The truth is the the BDs are the true, honest voice of the DP. In this case, they are doing their job by serving as the spear-catchers for the pitchfork blunters.

Harry Kelber (googled search of his site), has a fair amount of muck raked from the pile Sweeney has left. I'd call it strong circumstantial evidence

I agree with you completely regarding the Blue Dogs.

I was pleasantly surprised by the BW story. I'm not a reader of the mag, ordinarily. Are they often that good? I wouldn't have even looked at it were it not for the apposite comment from the BAR commenter.

Guys ...guys

Please afl-xxx
Chief sweeney
Is corrupt only in the best sense of that naughty word

He hardly knows what he's saying on national policy shit like pub op
And a national health insurance
Exchange

This is progress folks
I mean the exchange and universality plan

We are backing into the future as usual
Our corporate masters rowing against a tide beyond their strength to resist

Human scale horrors aside
These institutional hijinx
Are like supreme court rulings
They all will
have a king kanute ending

Maybe so, Owen. I hope so. Meanwhile, it would do my heart good to see Brother Sweeney twist in the wind a little, in one of those shining cages on a hill you proposed.

BAR's sobriety is a refreshing relief after reading Robinson's red alert http://www.alternet.org/rights/141819/is_the_u.s._on_the_brink_of_fascism/ on Alternet. Given her new stature as a "certified futurist", maybe she can get on with SPLC's marketing division. Bound to be money in somewhere in progressive hyperbole.

A couple summers ago, I posted a commentary http://skookumgeoduck.blogspot.com/2007/06/lions-tigers-and-bears.html on inflating anxieties for political purposes. As my comments apply as well to progressives seeking profit or prestige from continually crying wolf, I am providing the contained link.

"why not lower the Medicare eligibility age three years every January till everybody is covered."

a sane rally pole ??

slow-cialism

overt incremental single payerism

maybe we goose it a little
with 3 year increments at both ends
up to meet down in 2020

~24 million each year enter less
the ~4 million that would otherwise join

20 mill net gains per year

that give "the system"
plenty of time to dismantle
the present corporate megaplex
and re-emply the 600k or so
now pri medi-insu-corp employed
jobbled souls
....all of em decent regular
white collar folks
quaking at the thought
of their phoney macroni jobs
going pooo-fff

Any incremental expansion of Medicare eligibility would have been good. The prescription drug time bomb built in by the Bushies would then have had to be defused. But, yeah, incremental would work out okay for a lot of people and, sure, it would give the "private sector" decent regular white collar decent people (who are decent) time to find another gig.

It was clear, though, that a "public option" had to be designed to avoid even the most modest expansion of Medicare. Or, indeed, any mention of Medicare in the context of a public option. If it could be expanded once, why not again? Why, why, why pretty soon no one would be terrified of losing their jobs! Meliorism in general scares the shit out of the controlling classes. They live in a fever panic of events exceeding their capacity for dominance. Their mindset and intellectual culture is very medieval and very maximalist, when you come right down to it. Little barons, totally absorbed with themselves and with petty faction feuds, with fiefdoms and estates that groan under the entailments they took on to fund the maintenance of control. Their only unity comes from that fever panic. And that's enough for now, unfortunately.

Uncle Ralph had the skeleton of an organization for a big meliorist push ready to go back around the inaugural. None of the pwogs screaming "Fascism! Brownshirts!" were willing to join, needless to say. Too frightened of being lumped in with potential scapegoats.

"a "public option" had to be designed to avoid even the most modest expansion of Medicare. Or, indeed, any mention of Medicare in the context of a public option."

absolutely
i don't share the pwog doldrums on this
by a crooked misery cluttered path
the medi-insure-sec retreats
toward single payer
or its for profit equivalent
managed oligopoly
thru this national exchange
two "for sures"
corporate amerika wants out of the bene biz
and
the national health care cost spiral
must be contained

so it will be contained
so it will be "socialized"

whatever series of interim institutional fetish-forms it takes
and despite the wage-smurf enhancing
outlook yeomanizing
job independent bene systems entail

----------------
"...the skeleton of an organization for a big meliorist push ready to go .."

the paradox of grift
do look a grift horse in the mouth
but we don't
seems if as one off souls
we all face grifters enough in daily market/corporate life
even your own resurrectionary orgs
look like grifts to us
or worse
hopeless quixoticism

we got to be forced to the wall i guess
and despite ourselves
win a round or two
with a surprising autonomic group flinch

like a riot ..a real job site riot
that buckles the elite knees

i hasten to note

the present frog pond posturing
looks like anarcho-opportunism
which is not quite what scares the profit pants
off the executive suite
30 years
of real corporate bossnaps
in latin columbia and its still
too damn close to
trans nat biz as usual
throughout
that "class troubled" continent

a robust inside out
job rights movement

now that's worth it to us wage hogs

to deepen and widen that current
its for sure time we go out dancing
with the meliorists

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