Healthcare Reform: Greedy Insurance Parasites Stoop To A New Low

I looked out the window on September 23rd and guess what? The sky was not falling as the reactionaries in the Republican party promised me. No ominous rumbling of tank treads shaking the streets or black garbed agents rounding up unwilling citizens and herding them into FEMA camps, forcing them to get flu shots. The Teabagger Nation must be somewhat disappointed.
Of course September 23rd was the day a number of Obamacare provisions went into effect. And in the fucked- up logic that right wing assholes are famous for, the most controversial was the law that prevents bloodsucking insurance companies from turning down children with pre- existing conditions. That is such a decent thing to stand for that I figured even the most black hearted GOP corporate lickspittle could get behind it. Guess I was wrong.
The controversy began almost immediately when several insurance companies threw their collective hands up in the air and basically said, " Fuck it! We just won't insure any children!" The blame was then placed squarely on President Obama's shoulders, the human lice that own these insurance companies claiming that not being allowed to turn away a kid dying of leukemia was going to bankrupt them.
Isn't this picture as fucked up as a football bat? If the very limited health care reforms hadn't have gone through the dying child would not receive insurance coverage. But now that it has gone through, the child receives no insurance coverage. Best health care system in the world, right? Sheeeeeeit...
But that's what teabaggin' favorite Mike Huckabee still claims. His argument for turning down a kid dying from a preventable condition is a blue ribbon winner in the Bullshit Argument category. You know, where you compare two unrelated scenarios and pretend that it makes sense to apply the same solution:
" It sounds so good and it's such a warm message to say we're not gonna deny anyone from a pre- existing condition. Look, I think that sounds terrific, but I want to ask you something from a common sense perspective. Suppose we applied that principle [ to ] our property insurance. And you call your insurance agent and say, ' I'd like to buy some insurance for my house.' He'd say ' Tell me about your house.' ' Well sir, it burned down yesterday, but I'd like to insure it today.' And he'll say ' I'm sorry, but we can't insure it after it's all ready burned.' Well, no pre- existing conditions."
This nugget of " common sense" ( teabaggerese for " this is the excuse I have for being a complete and inhuman asshole " ) was spewed forth at the hugely ironically named Values Voter Conference. O.K., listen you ignorant teabaggin' assholes out there in Dumbfuckistan: if your idea of " values" is fighting like hell to force women to endure unwanted pregnancies and then do everything in your power to deny the kid basic medical treatment once it is born, you got a pretty fucked up moral compass. You need to pull your heads out of your asses and realize that someday your kid could need life saving surgery, but you aren't going to be able to afford it because of a pre- existing condition. If you vote for a corporate tool like Huckabee, Palin, or O' Donnel, you are basically voting to kill children. It is as basic as that.
That's a hell of a price to pay just for the chance to flip off the Liberal Elite.

The Recession is dead; long live the Recession!

According to the National Bureau of Economic Research's Business Cycle Dating Committee, the "Great Recession" officially ended in June 2009, reports the Wall Street Journal. It's always nice to know when the academics define these things. It helps to have a good handle on how we use our economic terms.

And the article goes on to make plenty of sense. Americans still have no job prospects, they're exhausted, Obama has done nothing. Jobs may not come back until 2013 (plenty of time for a new Republican administration, or at least legislature, to claim victory for cut-throat economic policies that will rob working people of decent living standards). And those gains in employment - will they be largely service-sector jobs? Inquiring minds would like to know.

There might be solutions under capitalism, but they're not very ambitious ones. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), an international non-government organization (NGO) says the government could help by providing "additional job training and education programs to better match workers' skills to business needs."

But I find that questionable. What, exactly, are the "business needs" of today? The bottom line is - the bottom line. Businesses aren't hiring much because they can't profit off of it. Productivity soared on the heels of the recession as the bosses squeezed what workers remained for all they were worth (literally!). Now productivity has, according to one WSJ blog, hit its cap, so to speak. This leaves only hiring as a way to increase output.

But there's no reason to increase output if the revenue isn't there. And where is the money going to come from? It isn't infinite. It has to come from sales. The American middle class is not just broke - it's in debt up to its eyeballs and has only seen the tiniest relief. Mergers seem to be the tactic of the moment, with airlines and other industries looking to gobble down "post"-recession (stagnation?) deals. But any dolt who paid attention in high school economics knows that this leads to that most awful of capitalism's by-products, the (gulp) monopoly. (And Mr. Mathias makes the amazingly astute point at the end of his article, one we Marxists have been saying for forever - monopolies are the perfect opportunity to nationalize the industries that provide for people's needs.)

Republicans, Tea Baggers, Libertarians, and other denizens of free-market-fantasy-land (including many liberals and moderates) will probably insist that the ony way to deal with today's resultant monopolies is to bust them up the ole fashioned way (thank you President Taft). This is actually an idealist back-peddle, to think you can drive corporations backwards through time and make them behave like a small business again.

The only way to build jobs, to really build jobs and fix the economy, would be to take the monopolies and cartels (healthcare and finance and energy especially) and nationalize them. Then it wouldn't be up to the fickle whims of the capitalists to provide people jobs; federal aid would be direct and efficient. Not as a temporary stop-gap until the free market feels like playing ball again, but as a threat to corporate sovereignty altogether. Only then will we see actual nation-wide programs to create a green economy, float aid to the unemployed, and provide healthcare (and healthcare training!) to every American.

But it's clear the Democrats won't do that, so what are our other options at this point?

Twilight Of The Moderates

Poor Evan Bayh. All he tried to do was to keep leftist extremists and the hard line right of the two parties from derailing the Congress. But they refused to work with him, so now he has to save America the only way he can- by going into business in the private sector and creating jobs. Well, a couple of them anyway.
That's his spin on his abrupt decision to quit his Senate seat. Reality is that he is full of shit.
Although there are a number of clueless pundits out there who mourn the loss of the moderates in Congress, truth is there is no such thing as a " middle" in the American political system. To have a middle, you have to have a right- wing and a left- wing. What we have in this nation is a right and then the extreme batshit right. As much as the crew at FOX News wants you to believe that Obama and the Democrats are socialists and the Republicans are the true blue defenders of flag, country, and apple pie, truth is both parties, in the end, are corporate parties. They aren't so much parties as two factions of the ruling class fighting over the rotting carcass of capitalism.
Sure, they have different ways of getting into power and they represent different markets of big business, but essentially they serve the same master- global capitalism.
The real role of " moderates" in a capitalist republic is to mediate between the two main factions ( either the two parties of the American system or the coalitions of parliaments) and get legislation passed that benefits both. Presently in America, this is not happening. One of the two factions- the Republicans- are no longer willing to share the loot and power with their competitors, the Democrats. Hence, the absolute gridlock in the Congress. The Republicans know the great weakness of their opponents is that while they are the party of outright capitalism, the Democrats have to make at least a token gesture to their ideology of community service. While doing this, they have to make sure that it does not inconvenience their corporate backers in the slightest. All the GOP has to do is block whatever bill the Obama administration tries to pass to make the Democrats seem ineffectual and weak to the voting public.
The irony is that if Obama and the Democrats did back a progressive measure like single- payer health care, which the majority of Americans are in favor of they would be unstoppable, even with the loss of the super- majority. But they are reigned in by the people they are beholden to first- their corporate backers. The people of the United States come in a very poor second.
So I am not really sure why anyone should feel bad that Evan Bayh, or any other moderate checks out of the Senate. They don't do anything for us, the citizens, and they aren't really all that bad off themselves.
Maybe his wife Susan can get Ev a cushy job at one of the insurance companies she worked for. Of course that didn't have anything to do with Bayh's support the Senate's version of the Health care Bill- the " reform" of mandated insurance without a public option. Moderates are the good guys, right? They wouldn't chuck their Senate seat for a higher paying position in a company they lobbied for- would they?
To quote the Geico man: "Does 10 pounds of flour make a really big biscuit? "