The Health Care Lobby is feeling its oats. They must think that by smearing the President and by creating irrelevant objections, they can stop the movement towards a sensible health care plan. Or they believe that they can reduce it to one at far less valuable than the many far better plans elsewhere, even in less affluent countries than ours. The Neocons had better be careful. Better the devil you know (the public health care option) than the devil you don’t know. (Full blown Socialism.) History shows that when capitalism fails, the people do not become serfs or peasants. Not any longer. They become Communists and Socialists.
A lot of us are no longer interested in being told everything will be better when the corporate taxes or the taxes on the rich are low enough. We are tired of being told that we need “freedom of choice” when what they mean is freedom for corporate interests. Freedom to choose turned out to be fake mortgages, excessive and unfathomable credit card charges, and tax cuts that give millionaires a $43,000 per million annual bonus while giving the average citizen $600. The Neocon Republicans sold the old siren song of lower taxes while we all forgot that there is no such thing as a free lunch. And the stimulus is no free lunch. We’re paying.
In fact, what we’re doing right now can’t even be called “spending” the way the Neocons would like to frame it. We are investing. In roads, in clean energy, in weaning ourselves off Arab, terrorist-sponsoring gasoline. We’re investing $50 billion in education. It’s being delivered by the guy who made the Chicago school system work. He’s earned his creds. He taught in the ghettos. He made it work when he had no money and no support to make it work. Now we’ll eventually have a good educational system for all our kids to compete with the devastating brilliance of the Indians and the Asians. When it comes to smarts, they’re eating our lunch. But Obama is a smart guy. The money went into education first, so it can’t be stopped. It is almost all allocated. Your kids will have the opportunity to have a good education. Whether they use it or not is up to them.
In addition, the President is creating jobs so that people can at least make a living rather than being on unemployment and bread lines. Is that wrong? Do more people without money make it easier to jump start an economy? He is creating jobs for the roughly four or five additional millions of workers displaced by the Bush financial crisis last of October. We already had lost over 3.5 million jobs in Bush’s last year in office. Before the Obama administration took over we were already $11 trillion in debt.
This situation is as close to a Depression as any of us should ever want to get. It won’t be over soon. Even with the grudging $787 billion that the Republicans complain about every day, most economists know it is too little. But the Republicans left us with an $11 trillion debt and a tax base that does not collect enough to run even the pared-down government we have. Bush started two wars. Does anyone remember how much that costs? Our military budget is over $600 billion and that is only the part we know about. We only take in about $2.2 trillion in taxes. We spend more on military than all the rest of the free world, plus the Russians, combined. And because of how great and secure the Republican military spending kept us, 19 Arabs killed 3000 people and knocked down our two tallest buildings.
Do you think the election solved everything? It solved nothing except to give Americans a breathing spell. Bill Kristol has not been kicked out of the country. Rush Limbaugh isn’t dead of syphilis or a heart attack. Dick Cheney is not in jail. Alberto Gonsalves is not on food stamps. Sean Hannity makes hundreds of millions conning Red State Americans into doing exactly the opposite of what is best for them. The Brits have had the good sense to tell us to keep Michael Savage here. But that means we’re stuck with the racist pig and he still broadcasts his vile bigoted trash.
When all these people are against Obama, and against his health care plan, which side do you think you should be on? Do you think that the same people who praise Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff and ENRON are your buddies? Do you really think that guys who spend all their time sniffing around trying to get bigger and more corrupt contracts for their friends like Halliburton, who moved their headquarters to Dubai…are your friends? They are against health care. It will somehow cost them money and give you at least the power to control your own health care. They do not want that to happen. When Newt Gingrich says that the Obama plan is a terrible idea…what should that tell you? Newt is the reason why tens of millions of Americans have no health care. When you hear that Newt is against it, you should be adamantly and enthusiastically and aggressively in favor of it.
You’d better get a grip. This is not Barack Obama’s health care plan. He has the government health care plan. He’s trying to get YOU a health care plan. Let’s go through it one more time–it is affordable. It can easily be paid for in a number of ways. There will be no more rationing than there is right now with Medicare. In fact, there will be little or none. Part of the plan is that we will have more family physicans who will be better paid, more rural health care, more health and wellness incentives, and more of the best research results introduced quickly into daily practice. This is all about fashioning a good, solid plan to reform health care and make it people-focused and not money-focused. The direction changes everything.
So why are so many Senators and Congressmen looking the other way, wringing their hands over it? Because they are paid literally millions of dollars by the health care insurance industry and by the pharmaceutical companies. For example, Senator Baucus–a Democrat–has been paid nearly $4,000,000 in campaign contributions by the health insurance industry. So how much do you think they are paying Republicans? Do you think that those campaign contributions might have anything to do with Baucus and the Republican Senators not allowing a public option to be entered into the legislation from the finance committee that he runs? Campaigns costing what they do, he wants and needs that money, he thinks, to get reelected.
The Health Care Lobby thinks that they are winning. Are they? We’ve put the names of the Democrats who are resisiting a public health care option in other posts on this blog, with their numbers and Email addresses. You MUST call them or never again wonder why you or your kids or your neighbors or friends do not have health insurance. Have you called them? If not, as Pogo said, we have met the enemy and it is US!
A lot of people are tired of being treated like servants by a group of wealthy oligarchs who have become richer and richer with every succeeding Republican Adiministration. People are tired of being run over by big corporations who lay them off and outsource their jobs to India and China. And when these people lose an election, what do they do. The remaining representatives spend all their time, all day, every day demeaning and attempting to obstruct legislation that the People elected other representatives to put forward.
Affordable health care is being lied about every single minute of the day by those lobbyist-pandering Republican members of congress. This is how the Neoconservative Republicans earn their pieces of silver from the lobbyists. Remember, the health care companies control your health. You don’t. You can only see a doctor as long as they will let you. You are at their mercy, at their whim. Think about it. You do not control your own health care. Or your children’s. We (through Obama) can control our destiny. But you need to fight for the public option and you need to get everyone you know to fight for it.
There was a poll today held by AOL. In that kind of poll, the lobbyists have all their paid propagandists write in. (their additional staff, hired with the $1.5 million a day.) It’s not an official poll. It is not a legitimate sample. So they can stock it with all kinds of people voting against the President as often as they want. If you want to counter that kind of propaganda, you’d better fight back before it is too late and a lot of dummies begin to believe it and lose confidence in the fight. Call the numbers for the Senators, all of them. Tell their staff members that you will work as hard as you can, do whatever it takes to see to it that any Democrat who votes against health care will never be in the Senate or the House of Representatives again. If that is too tough for you, then you probably will never have guaranteed health care.
We scared Joe Lieberman straight. He’s on board with more liberal causes again, because Connecticutt voters put up a strong Democrat against him and forced him to run and barely win as an Independent. He knows that we will run someone against him again, and this time see to it that the Democrat is elected, unless, like Bernie Sanders, he once again becomes a true Progressive. Senator Spector switched parties so that he would not lose an election. He knew that if he voted with the Republicans against health care the people of Pennsylvania would vote him out. His best shot was to join the Democrats.
There is a lot of sound and fury associated with spending $1,500,000 per DAY to prevent the American people from having a guaranteed health care option. The lies are the same, no matter what kind of legislation. It is the same old story by the Neocons. Try to clean up the environment…they say it will cost jobs. Try to create alternatives to Arab oil…the refineries are too old and the environmantalists won’t let us build new ones, plus ethanol is too inefficient. (So lets, Drill Baby Drill? Is that the solution?) Food inspections should be more careful….it will send food prices through the roof. We won’t have food!
Another technique is to use false propaganda to discredit the leader. The Republicans are trying to hang the huge unemployment figures on Obama. This is his recession FAUX News likes to say. Well, the propaganda doesn’t work. The stimulus is working. But at 600,000 jobs lost a month for the last seven months, how would anyone be able to bring the economy back in only 90 days? He’s done a good job. The economy is more stable than it was. All of the pooh-poohers, all the nay-sayers, all the Republicans are downplaying the stimulus. So ask yourself this? Why has the stock market risen quietly but steadily almost 2000 points since Obama took over, to nearly 9,000 as of today? Certainly neither Obama nor any of his economic advisors are touting it. On the contrary, they are playing down any numbers for recovery. The Republicans are the investor class, not the unionized-Democrats. So they must think something is going right.
If someone is pretty smart and they say things that don’t make sense, what does that mean? They have either suddenly become stupid, or they are lying. Which do you think about the otherwise relatively savvy Republicans? The situation is pretty clear. They are out to destroy a health care plan that may well be the fall-back position for a hundred million Americans. The things that they say have been debunked time and again.
Don’t worry about Obama; he has and will have health care for four years at least. Worry about yourself. Get on the phone to your Senator and get that public-option plan. You can do it!