When you buy somebody off to shut his mouth about some truth that may hurt your business, that's unethical and irredeemably shabby but it isn't illegal. When you buy off public officials and even whole countries in order to avoid consequences to your profits in defiance of the public good, that's called "corruption" and has been illegal since the time of the Babylonians. Which, as of today if not before, makes the Democrat party leaders - and President Obama directly - corrupt. Why?
Because the corrupt Democrat leadership bought off Ben Nelson's vote with a giant Medicaid payment for Nebraska only in order to get their shitful "reform" package, while President Obama bought off the entire Third World so polluting corporations could keep polluting.
And (I seem to be saying this a lot lately) I'm not kidding.
Nelson, D-Neb., said he made his decision after winning fresh concessions to limit the availability of abortions in insurance sold in newly created exchanges, as well as tens of million in federal Medicaid funds for his home state.
"I know this is hard for some of my colleagues to accept and I appreciate their right to disagree," he said at a news conference in the Capitol, referring to the abortion issue. "But I would not have voted for this bill without these provisions."
He also noted he had successfully fended off attempts to provide for a government-run insurance option to compete with private insurers.
He seems to be pretty proud of himself and his integrity-free wheeler-dealing. He's even bragging that he protected the thieves at the expense of their victims. God job, Ben! You're a winner.
But the cake has to be taken by Obama who just promised poor countries $$billions$$ in relief in exchange for a climate agreement that won't affect either the development of global warming or the profits of oil corpo's and such.
The historic U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen ended Saturday after a 31-hour negotiating marathon, narrowly avoiding collapse by accepting a compromise that gives billions to poor nations to deal with global warming but does not require the world's major polluters to make deeper cuts in their greenhouse gas emissions.
Clearly, Obama's priorities differ from Rahm's corporate sponsors not one whit, and he's willing to sacrifice the health of an entire planet to prove it. Thanx, Barry! Superb job of selling us all down the river. Even George W never managed that trick.
We are seriously fucked. Modern pols no longer accept even the idea that their job is to protect the majority of society. They will - and just did - sacrifice the health and safety of women, the health and safety of the Earth itself, in order to keep things just as they are even though keeping things just as they are means sliding down a steep slope to back-alley abortions (again) and the eventual destruction of our planet, and they just can't see that there's anything wrong with that. What's wrong with buying off anyone who doesn't agree with you? What's wrong with corpo's buying off pols for their votes even when those votes are clearly in the best interests of only a handful of the rich and powerful? That's not corruption, that's "the way the world works" and they're not even ashamed of it any more. Ben is bragging about holding women's health hostage to his long-since-proven-hopelessly-wrong conservative ideology, and Obama will shortly be crowing about his two "victories" - buying off Nelson and buying off Third World fears of global warming.
Corruption is now so common nobody thinks anything of it. What Goebells said about the Big Lie fits right in here.
I repeat. We are seriously fucked. Time to hit the streets.
UPDATE: (2pm) TBogg says Obama started his bragging-spin early, even before Benny pulled off his successful extortion, claiming that his opposition "want[s] to preserve a system that works better for the insurance industry than it does for the American people.” TBogg's reply says it all.
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