Obama. Obama. Obama. The purveyor of grand illusions. I'm not not exactly in love with Barack Obama, perhaps the perfect demagogue for an overextended empire at a time of serious trouble. (I know I'll get a ton of vituperation from this site, which is home to many Obamaniacs and unthinking Democratic party supporters...) Still, the facts are undeniable, and becoming more irrefutable by the day. Yes, you can say that praise by Obama's legion of apologists and support from loyal --if misguided—followers (understandably, many in the African American community) has not shown signs of significant erosion—yet. But the cracks are already there in the vast chasm rapidly opening between Obama's implicit promises and his willingness to act decisively to fix the crisis at the root.
This, of course, he will not do. Six months of what is in essence a classical study in bumbling opportunism (and some would say shameless cynicism) have already told us enough about this politician's cautious centrist style and m.o., and yielded little of consequence for the health of the nation. More damnable, in three critical areas where radical change is long overdue, in fact indispensable—health care, the Wall Street/high finance circus (including economic democratization), and the cancerous imperial war complex--the man may have done worse than nothing, he may have buried the opportunity to introduce real remedies short of revolution for at least a whole generation. All of that potential and energized momentum is now clearly lost, squandered actually on Obama, which is exactly what those who put this man in the White House wanted to secure in the first place. For Obama's "change" program was never intended to touch any of the vastly parasitic power arrangements that have doomed American society to its role as an example of yawning capitalist inequality and constant destructiveness at home and abroad. (Spare me the insulting comments telling me that I'm a troll, or that the McCain/Palin ticket would have been much worse for the nation. I realize that, but the answer never was to lock ourselves forever in the game the system lays for us every four years, trapping us in "lesser evil" choices that are really no choices at all.)
Well, anyhow, enough of this. The purpose of this post is to alert my fellow DailyKos readers to the fact that while the Right wing wackos are making all that obnoxious, disruptive noise at town-hall meetings organized by Democratic politicians under the rubric of real democracy in action...the TRUTH behind these putative exercises in democracy is different, cruelly different considering the subject at hand: we're being had, by the best manipulators that money can buy, and I say that quite literally. In fact, the hugest irony of the situation is that ObamaCare is a fraud, and that the imbecilic right wing noise is actually conferring a patina of progressive authenticity to Obama's Rube Goldberg con-job plan...Only in America I suppose.
In any case, read what Dave Lindorff has to say about this issue. He ain't being fooled, and neither should you.
—Patrice Greanville
Cyrano's Journal Online
Progressives Should be Shutting Down These So-Called 'Health Care Town Meetings' Too
By Dave Lindorff
Many progressives are getting all bent out of shape over the "brown shirt" rabble organized by health industry PR firms to disrupt the so-called "town meetings" being organized all over the country by Democratic members of Congress.
What they are conveniently forgetting is that these are not really "town meetings" at all, at least in the sense of the town meetings I grew up with, and started out covering as a young journalist in Connecticut--that is, meetings called and run democratically, with leaders elected from the floor, open to all residents of a community.
These "town meetings" are really nothing but propaganda sessions run by members of Congress who are trying to burnish their fraudulent credentials as public servants, and trying to perpetrate a huge fraud of a health care bill that purports to be a progressive "reform" of the US health care system, but that actually further entrenches the control of that system by the insurance industry, and to a lesser extent, the hospital and drug industry.
ObamaCare is to health reform what bank bailouts are to financial system reform, which is to say it is the opposite of what its name implies.
The right-wing nuts who cry that ObamaCare is introducing euthanasia for the elderly and infirm, or that it is socialism, are ignorant wackos, to be sure, but they are right about one thing: Americans are about to be royally screwed on health care reform by the president and the Democratic Congress, just as they've been screwed by them on financial system "reform."
The appropriate response to this screw-job is the one the right has adopted: shut these sham "town meetings" down, and run the sell-out politicians out of town on a rail, preferably coated in tar and feathers they way the snake-oil salesmen of old used to be handled!
This is not about civil discourse. This is about propaganda. The Obama administration and the Democratic Congressional leadership have sold out health care reform for the tainted coin of the medical-industrial industry, and are holding, or trying to hold, these meetings around the country to promote legislation that has essentially been written for them by that industry--legislation that will force everyone to pay for insurance as offered, and priced, by the private insurance industry. What a deal for those companies--a captive market of 300 million people! There will be little or no effort to control prices, and the higher costs will be financed through higher taxes, and through cuts in Medicare benefits.
This isn't "reform." It's corruption, pure and simple.
Any mention of a system that works--single payer--the system we already have in the form of Medicare for the elderly and disabled, and the system that has proved successful for almost four decades in Canada-- has been systematically blocked and censored out of the discussion. Every effort has been made to bury an excellent bill, HR 676, offered up by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), which would cover every American by simply expanding Medicare to cover everyone.
The only proper response at this point is obstruction, and the more militant and boisterous that obstruction, the better.
Instead of opposing the right-wing hecklers at these events, progressives should be making common cause with them. Instead of calling them fascists, we should be working to turn them, by showing them that the enemy is not the left; it is the corporations that own both Democrats and Republicans alike.
The only proper approach to the wretched health care legislation currently working its way through Congress at this point is to kill it and start over. At these "town meeting" staged events, Obama and the Democrats need to hear, in no uncertain terms, that we don't want no stinkin' ObamaCare. We want Medicare for all.
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DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of “Marketplace Medicine: The Rise of the For-Profit Hospital Chains” (Bantam Books, 1992), and more recently of “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net[1]