Got a few stories today that need dot-connecting. They may not seem to have much to do with each other at first but we're going to try to make the relationships visible. It's about how the healthcare "reform" package is showing one of the most important sectors of our society to be not exactly what it seems to be. And not in a good way.
Let's start with the "reform" package itself. Not to put too fine a point on it, it is, as we've been saying all along, a dawg. FDL's Jon Walker counts the ways by contrasting all the plans directly and ranking them from the "perfect" down through the "decent" and" acceptable" to the really really bad". Guess where the Ben Nelson/Joe Lieberman/Blue Dog Senate Plan winds up?
No fair. You guessed.
The Bad
The Senate bill is just a bad corporate giveaway with a very few good things in it. It has some good new regulations but leaves enforcement up to the states. This is recipe for regulations which are not enforced and are therefore meaningless.
The new regulations only impact the small group market; they don’t apply to the majority of private insurance in this country. The weird “free rider” provision instead of a real employer mandate creates some bad hiring incentives along with incentives to drop coverage.
The quality of the insurance people will be forced to buy is incredibly low and the subsidies are insufficient. People will have no other choice but to buy coverage from very inefficient and wasteful private insurance companies.
The bill lacks real cost control and the new poorly-designed excise tax will result in millions of Americans getting lower quality health insurance. The bill is not even a good foundation for future reform because it works on a state-by-state basis while directing huge amounts of money and power to the industries which opposed real reform.
The Senate bill does not provide anything close to universal coverage; it also contains a major roll back of women’s reproductive health rights.
The true horribleness of this bill really stands out when it's contrasted to other plans and possibilities, especially the ones in Canada and Europe which each manage to avoid the worst pitfalls and deliver some form of actual healthcare instead of pretend corporate healthcare, and at 1/10th the cost. So why is it acceptable to our supposed representatives to ignore our demands for something like what Canada has in order to create a monstrosity no one but the corporate insurers themselves want?
Take yesterday's meeting with Labor leaders angry about the forced purchase of bad plans and the high tax on them.
A Monday evening meeting at the White House between Obama and about a dozen heads of the country's biggest labor unions capped a day when two union leaders fired broadsides at Obama and Senate Democrats over their plans to pay for overhauling the nation's health care system with a tax union leaders fear could hurt their workers.
The 40 percent tax would fall on employer health plans worth more than $8,500 for an individual or $23,000 for a family. Although Obama terms them "Cadillac" plans, union leaders say numerous working-class Americans who've negotiated good benefits in exchange for lesser pay would be hurt.
The president of the AFL-CIO, Richard Trumka, warned that Democrats risk catastrophic election defeats similar to 1994 if they fail to come up with a health bill labor likes.
"A bad bill could have that kind of effect — a place where people sit at home" — as happened in 1994, when Democrats lost 54 House seats and eight in the Senate, costing them control of Congress, Trumka told reporters.
The head of the International Association of Firefighters, Harold A. Schaitberger, made similarly threatening remarks in a statement Monday. "The president's support for the excise tax is a huge disappointment and cannot be ignored. If President Obama continues to support it and signs a bill that includes the excise tax on workers, we will hold him accountable," said Schaitberger, who was not among the attendees at the White House meeting.
Harsh words and an open threat from one of Obama's biggest supporters. Labor went to the mat, spending millions on issue ads and getting likely Democratic voters to the polls. They may have made the difference, yet Rahm and the rest of the Obama Admin act as if they don't owe Labor anything but a "meeting", telling them straight out the excise tax was going to stay no matter what. In a democratic political system, how can they simply blow off a constituency that's so important to them?
So that's - let's see - 3 sectors of their constituency they've blown off: the party activists, who are frustrated beyond belief by Obama's resumption of Bushian policies; Labor, who poured $$$ and energy into getting Obama elected based on promises made to them that he has now consistently broken, from card-check to the "reform" bill; and a sizable chunk of the population as a whole, the part that voted for him because he was going to fix the healthcare mess, end the wars, and FDR the economy, the part that no longer believes it makes any difference who they vote for because they'll just be lied to and the winner will do what he's told by the powerful and the wealthy.
In one short year, Obama has turned excitement into apathy and hope into depression and even despair. And why have he and the Democrat leadership done this? To make, it appears, John McCain & friends happy even if it costs him his friends, who, thanks to conservative bozos like McCain, can't even get a pro-worker guy on the NLRB.
McCain placed a hold on Becker for, get this, Becker’s views that workers should have a voice at work for having a union without employer interference. The horror!
McCain voiced similar concerns in a letter to HELP Committee Chairman Tom Harkin of Iowa, also seeking a hearing. McCain wrote that Becker’s writings “indicate that he would prevent employers from having a role in union representation elections in their workplaces by doing away with requiring fair, secret ballot union elections when requested by an employer.” McCain added that he wanted a chance to question Becker about these positions in person and in public.
Of course, McCain neglected to mention they haven’t held such a hearing for almost 30 years.
Workers represented in corporate Washington on a govt board tasked with protecting workers from predatory employer practices who actually believes that workers should be protected from predatory employer practices? Bush would NEVER have done such a thing. It's a scandal! Michael Whitney sums up:
Here’s the thing. We’ve got to a point where a nominee for the National Labor Relations Board – the impotent government body charged with enforcing labor laws – can’t be confirmed because a senator objects to the nominee supports making it easier for workers to join unions. Yes, these are the same folks who objected to, and held the nomination of, Hilda Solis as Secretary of Labor because she supported workers rights. When it comes to labor, conservatives are well trained to not budge an inch.
So Obama will have to fight to get a pro-worker rep on the supposedly pro-worker Labor Board. Raise your hand if you think he'll do that.
Are you getting the picture here? The New Democrat party isn't interested in its old constituencies any more. They're only interested in attracting as much as possible of what remains of the old, pre-Gingrich GOP and hauling it by whatever means necessary - bribery and surrender seem to be their 2 favorite tactics - into the New Democrat party.
They don't want us. Real Democrats are for regular people. They're pro-women, pro-worker, pro-citizen, and anti-war. They think healthcare reform should actually reform something, like insurance company theft, inefficiency, and greed. The New Democrat leadership is pro-business, pro-NAFTA, pro-war, and anti-worker. We'd just screw things up for em. They'd really rather we just went away somewhere and, you know, died.
See, all this political warfare isn't between Democrats and Republicans. It's between the old GOP of Eisenhower and Bob Michel represented by the New Democrats of Clinton and Obama, and the New GOP represented by Reagan and Gingrich, between the Old GOP of Edward Brooke and Lowell Weicker and the New GOP of Mitch McConnell, Rush Limbo, and Palin/Beck in '12. Democrats are not only not in the game, they're barely in the stands. And they don't even seem to know it.
The Democrats barely exist except as a front for the GOP enablers who lead the New Democrat party, leaders who do their best to pretend real Democrats don't exist. How else do you explain Byron Dorgan?
Byron Dorgan worked on drug reimportation for 10 years. It would have saved consumers a minimum of $100 billion over ten years, and 4-5 times that if it had succeeded in bringing US pharmaceutical prices down. Dorgan had the magic “60 votes” for an amendment too, but that would have violated the secret PhRMA deal negotiated by the White House. And after all, as Tom Carper said, PhRMA paid for it with advertising. Harry Reid kept the vote off the floor until PhRMA managed to whip the votes against it.
Of course he did. Dorgan is an actual Democrat and as we all know by now actual Democrats are radical leftists, probably Commies, and DFH's. They're anti-American, terrist-loving fascists and whiny, politically-correct dorks. Who needs them? Or their stoopid pro-public policies. Yuk.
So for all those depressed, disappointed, and disillusioned Obamanoids who thought he betrayed them: Relax. He didn't "betray" you. He lied to you. H ewas never what you thought he was, and as you watch the kabuki of this political war, all real Democrats should remember one thing:
Fellas, you don't even have a dawg in this fight. Your dawg is lying at your feet waiting for you to tell him it's his turn. You wanna wake him up?
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