Rewarding the Turncoat

ARGH!!! So now that Democrats will in January have the White House, the House and the Senate, Joe Lieberman (Lieberman for Lieberman Party-CT) gets to keep his Senate committee chairmanships as if he were a Democrat. This after Lieberman campaigned for Republican John McCain and several other Republicans for Senate.

Now, far be it from me to try and define regular, ordinary words for politicians, who don’t seem to understand the meaning of regular, ordinary words. Words like “Party” and “Loyalty” and “Procedure” and “Majority” and “Governance.” Politicians don’t want to know these things, preferring instead to make things up as they go along.

During these past couple of years when Democrats didn’t have an actual majority in the Senate, Lieberman has been allowed to be a Republican mole in the Democratic Caucus, reporting to his puppeteers and financial backers every move planned by members. He has been allowed to hold several committee chairs, including Homeland Security, where he has steadfastly refused to enforce subpoenas, investigate illegalities of the Bush administration, or even to investigate FEMA’s horrendously inadequate response to hurricane Katrina.

So Lieberman has been rewarded with a pass from the now-actual Democratic majority, encouraged to do more of the same obstructionism that has made him so immensely unpopular outside of Israel.

One day soon, as the public wakes up to realize the Republicans are now a fringe party of right-wing wackos and religious nuts and the Democrats are what the Republicans were before they purged everyone with any sense, there will be a new Progressive Party for the “rest of us.” And it will, within 8-12 years, be electing more than a handful of representatives and Senators, way more than the fringe Republicans, Greens, Libertarians, Communists and Nazis can ever manage.

Sigh. The more things “Change,” it seems, the more they remain the same.

Filed under Appointees, Caucuses, Coalitions, Democrats, Hypocrisy, Outrage | Comment (0)

Health Insurers On The Warpath

As the economy continues to slip deeper into recession and the Presidential race becomes ever more one-sided in favor of real change, America’s Health Insurance Plans [AHIP] are hitting the road to defend their practice of “Murder By Spreadsheet.” Or, as one energetic activist calls the offensive, the Deceive America Tour.

AHIP is the trade and political lobbying association of DC insiders and overpaid executives for the health insurance industry. The industry that has wrecked health care delivery by bankrupting public hospitals, been targeted for racketeering suits under RICO, routinely refuses to pay claims while throwing families into bankruptcy, and continues to cripple American business competition in foreign trade with nations whose businesses do not hold primary responsibility for citizens’ health care costs.

2007 estimates of the number of uninsured Americans reached more than 75 million adults – 42% of all adults age 19 to 64 were uninsured or ‘underinsured’ – and the US has fallen to 47th in the world on life expectancy at birth. This week AHIP launched its Campaign for an American Solution tour in Columbus, Ohio, purporting to have A Plan to cure America’s health care woes without having to pay for any sick people’s actual health care or forego their profit margins, golden parachutes, luxury limousines and multi-million dollar salaries.

AHIP calls it a “listening tour” outreach, which means they’re quite likely to encounter some loud protests wherever they go in this effort to protect their bottom lines from reality. The speculative futures market in human suffering is just far too lucrative to lose, and the insurance hacks illegally practicing medicine these days have no intention of backing down.

Please check out the tour schedule for when these folks will be coming to your area, then you may wish to contact one of the single-payer activist groups listed below to lend your presence to the protests. It’s well past time for America to join the modern world.

National Organizations:

Physicians for National Health Program
Guaranteed Health Care [California Nurses Assn/Nat. Nurses Organizing Committee]
Health Care Now
Everybody In & Nobody Out

Everybody In & Nobody Out supports state organizations working at the grassroots level for universal care, and offers links to those state organizations. You can also find lists of state groups in your state at the other national organization sites.

Filed under Activism, Class War, Coalitions, For-Profit Insurance, Health Care, Marketing | Comment (0)

What’s Al Gore Up To These Days?

In a week where presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama sold out the base to savage the 4th Amendment (and retroactively forgive Bush administration lawbreaking while spying on citizens), I was a little intrigued by some television commercials that, while not very explanatory, do feature some rather surprising coalitions between figureheads of both the right and the left.

The ads are also showing up in print media, the June 12 issue of Rolling Stone features Al Sharpton and Pat Robertson sitting together on a couch on Virginia Beach. Now, THAT is a rather unlikely pairing! So… what are they selling?

The blurb, a mere four sentences long, goes like this…

It’s American to disagree. It’s also American to come together in the face of a challenge. And few challenges are as urgent as global climate change. Take one minute to join us at wecansolveit.org and add your voice to millions of others. Together we can solve the climate crisis.

So of course I went right on over to the website to find that it’s the “next step” in ex-VP Al Gore’s project on global warming. There are presenters (trained by Al Gore), action alerts, news feed and proposed solutions that include such commonsense items as:

• Clean Energy Economy
• Personal Choices
• Adoption of Renewables
• Enhanced Energy Efficiency
and
• Innovative Leadership

Yet so far, what the project is mostly doing is soliciting donations and signing up participants. That’s a start, and something a lot more hopeful than anything this ugly Presidential race can offer at this point.

There’s lots of information at the site, so do yourself a favor and check out wecansolveit.org.

Filed under Activism, Advertising, Climate Change, Coalitions, Commercials | Comment (0)