On our way to a full blown Corporatocracy

Corporatocracy


Thursday, November 19, 2009
Harry Reid, and What Happened to the Public Option

First there was Medicare for all 300 million of us. But that was a non-starter because private insurers and Big Pharma wouldn't hear of it, and Republicans and "centrists" thought it was too much like what they have up in Canada -- which, by the way, cost Canadians only 10 percent of their GDP and covers every Canadian. (Our current system of private for-profit insurers costs 16 percent of GDP and leaves out 45 million people.)

So the compromise was to give all Americans the option of buying into a "Medicare-like plan" that competed with private insurers. Who could be against freedom of choice? Fully 70 percent of Americans polled supported the idea. Open to all Americans, such a plan would have the scale and authority to negotiate low prices with drug companies and other providers, and force private insurers to provide better service at lower costs. But private insurers and Big Pharma wouldn't hear of it, and Republicans and "centrists" thought it would end up too much like what they have up in Canada.

So the compromise was to give the public option only to Americans who wouldn't be covered either by their employers or by Medicaid. And give them coverage pegged to Medicare rates. But private insurers and ... you know the rest.

So the compromise that ended up in the House bill is to have a mere public option, open only to the 6 million Americans not otherwise covered. The Congressional Budget Office warns this shrunken public option will have no real bargaining leverage and would attract mainly people who need lots of medical care to begin with. So it will actually cost more than it saves.


CONTINUED:
http://robertreich.blogspot.com/2009/11/harry-reid-and-what-happened-to-public.html

we're all completely doomed.

It's socialism for the wealthy few and capitalism for the rest of us.


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The marriage of goverment and business. Its been going on for a while And it has gotten WORSE with the Dems in power. WTF IS UP WITH THAT?!! The Feds now own banks, auto companies, and are now going to be forking over taxpayer money to the insurance companies. And if they cant do it, they will FORCE you to do it with the "mandate". The two major attirbutes of Fascism is the govt in bed with business (check), and totalitarism (check,see health care "mandate") Oh arent these swell times!

A government that's completely in bed with corporations isn't fascist, just corrupt.

I don't know where people are getting this stupid definition of fascism. I'd wish they'd pull their heads out.

"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini

I place much more stock in the rantings of anonymous internet posters.

But I don't put much stock in Benito Mussolini.

http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_blackshirt.html

http://www.knowledgerush.com/kr/encyclopedia/Fascist_Party/

Fascism (in Italian, fascismo), capitalized, refers to the authoritarian political movement which ruled Italy 1922-1943 under the leadership of Benito Mussolini. The name comes from fascio, which may mean "bundle", as in a political group or a nation, but also fasces, the Roman symbol of a bundle of rods and axe-head. The Italian 'Fascisti' were also known as Black Shirts for their style of uniform incorporating a black shirt (see; Political Colours).

"Fasces" were first used as a symbol by roman tribunes - popular speakers.

Definition

The word fascism has come to mean any system of government resembling Mussolini's, that exalts nation and often race above the individual, and uses violence and modern techniques of propaganda and censorship to forcibly suppress political opposition, engages in severe economic and social regimentation, and espouses nationalism and sometimes racism (ethnic nationalism). Nazism is usually considered as a kind of fascism, but it should be understood that Nazism sought the state's purpose in serving an ideal to valuing what its content should be: its people, race, and the social engineering of these aspects of culture to the ends of the greatest possible prosperity for them at the expense of all else (an 'introverted' socialism). In contrast, Mussolini's Fascism held to the ideology that all of these factors existed to serve the state and that it wasn't necessarily in the state's interest to serve or engineer any of these particulars within its sphere as any priority. The only purpose of the government under Fascism proper was to value itself as the highest priority to its culture in just being the state in itself, the larger scope of which, the better, and for these reasons it can be said to have been a governmental statolatry. While Nazism was a metapolitical form of socialist statism seeing itself only as a utility by which an allegorical condition of its people was its goal, Fascism was a squarely anti-socialist form of statism that existed by virtue and as an ends in and of itself.

As a political science, the philosophical pretext to the literal Fascism of the historical Italian type believes the state's nature is superior to that of the sum of the individual's comprising it, and that they exist for the state rather than the state existing to serve them. The resources individuals provide from participating in the community are conceived as a productive duty of individual progress serving an entity greater than the sum of its parts. therefore all individual's business is the state's business, the state's existence is the sole duty of the individal. In its Corporativist model of totalitarian but private management the various functions of the state were trades conceived as individualized entities making that state, and that it is in the state's interest to oversee them for that reason, but not direct them or make them public by the rationale that such functioning in government hands undermines the development of what the state is. Private activity is in a sense contracted to the state so that the state may suspend the infrastructure of any entity in accord to their usefulness and direction, or health to the state.


<snip>

And do you expect Benito Mussolini to offer an honest, correct, and critical analysis of Fascism?

I don't know what else you could call it when you privatize the profits and socialize the risks.

What else could you call allowing insolvent (and poorly-managed) corporations to transfer their liabilities to the government -- for free?

just saying...

Seriously folks. Can you say that word without laughing?

:(

:eyes:

of immense proportions and getting worse every day.

Yes, I say it without laughing. I never laugh when I say it. At least, I haven't laughed to date.

... that corporations are people.

It's the Supreme Court that deemed corporations possess personhood.

Looks exactly like it did 20 years ago. STill 5-4.

The online encyclopedia provides this definition of "cracy": -cracy repr. F. -cratie, medL. -cratia, Gr. -kratíā power, rule (f. krátos strength, might, authority) in Gr. originals of ARISTOCRACY, DEMOCRACY, PLUTOCRACY. The suffix has in modern times acquired the sense of ‘ruling body or class’ of the kind denoted by the first element.

So, at least the knuckledraggers have a true sense of word meanings, as opposed to some DU'ers who just spout off on subjects they know nothing about.

Corporations being "people" has nothing to do with this discussion. Corporations being controlling entities that exercise power over our governmental processes is what is at issue here. Anyone who is familiar with the Morgans, Mellons, Rockefellers, Duponts and many others knows that these families established corporations in order to consolidate and disguise their families' power over our "democracy". It matters not that any single "person" or group of "people" die or relinquish the reins of power in a corporation because the corporation through its bylaws and its officers lives on.

To deny that our nation is controlled by corporations, hence it has become a corporatocracy, is to deny the reality of our system of governance. We have effectively passed from being a democratic republic to being a corporatocracy that uses the trappings of a democratic republic to disguise its true identity and its true rulers.

"Upbeat policy wonks and political spinners who tend to see only portions of cups that are full will point out some good things: no pre-existing conditions, insurance exchanges, 30 million more Americans covered. But in reality, the cup is 90 percent empty. Most of us will remain stuck with little or no choice"



He must spend time here

The Ted Kennedy Medicare-For-All Act

Private insurers have had over a decade since they defeated Democrats' last attempts to get national health insurance to show us that "the wisdom of the private sector" could do better for us all. What do we have to show for letting them win last time? Millions more uninsured through "recision" and ever-increasing premiums and millions more bankrupt paying for medical bills. Any triggers of human decency have long ago blown off their hinges.

And still, the private insurers had millions in their coffers to pay amoral right wing PR firms to fund FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity and others we don't know about to stir up dangerous fear and hatred in desperate people merely to protect their private profits. They were willing to go that far to protect their gravy trains.

I agree with the term Corporatocracy. Just as aristocracies are groups of elite families who rule their societies, corporatocracies are groups of rulers linked together as corporations. Pretending that corporations should have the same rights as people due to a footnote to a supreme court decision of over a century ago. http://www.thomhartmann.com/2009/10/08/transcript-thoms-corporate-personhood-rant-09-september-2009/ and http://www.reclaimdemocracy.org/personhood/

I used to wonder why our automakers wouldn't be pushing for national health insurance because their international competitors all had their governments picking up the expensive healthcare bills. How different would international competition have been if our automakers and other industries also had the government paying for the basic human right of medical care?

Indeed, I would have expected the American Chamber of Commerce to be one of the strongest advocates for national health insurance, if they really were champions of US business. I'd think they'd want US companies to have all the advantages their foreign competitors did, including government financed health insurance at least.

But I never heard US businesses leading the call for national health insurance to free them of this major expense that their competitors didn't have to pay.

>>> Crickets <<<

I think some Democrats along the way have made that point, but they didn't get major corporate financing of their campaigns to push the idea of freeing US businesses from the burden of ever-escalating health insurance premiums.

Instead, it seemed like one business grouping, the Medical Industrial Complex, let the others know that if they supported "government interference" in their business sector, the MIC would be sure their industries were also more heavily regulated. The most powerful corporate groups stuck together AGAINST national health security, in favor of "keeping government out" of private profits.

Instead of giving our companies the same advantages as their international competitors by supporting and passing national health insurance, our major corporations poured millions into defeating any attempt to even the playing field in tough international markets. They preferred to pressure our remaining unions to give up more benefits and accept more wage cuts.

That has proven to me how corporate power is more important in the USA than giving our small businesses a better chance to compete globally in a so-called "free market."

Our corporate conglomerates are perfectly willing to allow Americans to die early just to defeat the intrusion of good government that frees our people from the terror of medical emergencies and gives our small businesses more help with international competition.

If we were not a Corporatocracy but really valued the small businesses that create most of the jobs in this country, national health insurance would have passed last time, in the early 90's. Our citizens would have had years to feel the deep security that the absence of medical terror provides. I lived abroad and had national health insurance for 5 years, even as a resident alien. It felt great.

We know we have a Corporatocracy because it even trumps the eternal popularity of the Democratic Party. If the Democrats had stayed together last time and passed national health insurance, that would have made the party very popular. As our fellow citizens enjoyed the deep sense of calm that comes from knowing you can see a doctor and not worry about the costs, they would have appreciated the party that brought them that freedom from medical terror. But even the prospect of great popularity for decades to come couldn't get the Democrats to stay together and push through national health insurance.

And here we are again-- the triggers of human decency have long ago blown off their hinges if 45,000 of us die early because of lack of health insurance, and millions who have dutifully paid the punishing premiums all along are still driven to bankruptcy by their co-pays on the inadequate policies hollowed out by "recision" aka coverage-stripping and patient dumping over the past decade.

Yet here we are with ConservaDems and Republicans talking about how unfair it would be to make the private sector compete with the US government. The same government they tell us is wasteful and inefficient as they try to privatize more and more of it.

Economic logic-- our international competitors have government financed medical benefits, we should too-- has been defeated.

Decency-- millions have died earlier in the USA, unable to afford medical insurance or mercilessly dropped from coverage when they needed it most-- has been defeated.

Yet we are struggling and pushing to retain the merest traces of a public option in the 2010 Health Care Reform Bill.

Sadly, I know what rules our country-- Corporate Power, divorced from human decency, governed by the imperative of increasing private quarterly profits.

...let us "recommend" for the greatest page.


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I just hop in to the existing topics and save some of my longer commentaries into my DU journal.

:dem:

-Laelth

I think we're w-a-y down that road already.

that Eisenhower was already describing (telling us to "beware") back in January 1961.

Or that C. Wright Mills had called "The Power Elite" in 1956.

We've been there a long time, and even now, with its effects so obvious, there are enough people still able to deny it.

already.

Our private, for-profit health insurance system, designed to fatten the profits of private health insurers and Big Pharma, is about to be turned over to ... our private, for-profit health care system. Except that now private health insurers and Big Pharma will be getting some 30 million additional customers, paid for by the rest of us.

Upbeat policy wonks and political spinners who tend to see only portions of cups that are full will point out some good things: no pre-existing conditions, insurance exchanges, 30 million more Americans covered. But in reality, the cup is 90 percent empty. Most of us will remain stuck with little or no choice -- dependent on private insurers who care only about the bottom line, who deny our claims, who charge us more and more for co-payments and deductibles, who bury us in forms, who don't take our calls.

I'm still not giving up. I want every Senator who's not in the pocket of the private insurers or Big Pharma to introduce and vote for a "Ted Kennedy Medicare for All" amendment to whatever bill Reid takes to the floor. And if this fails, a "Ted Kennedy Real Public Option for All" amendment. Let every Senate Democratic who doesn't have the guts to vote for either of them be known and counted.

posted by Robert Reich | 7:58 AM

:dem:

-Laelth

....if these stupid Dems have the audacity to pass a shitty healthcare bill (and we will determine what's shitty or not) they will lose on all counts....they'll lose their base, they'll lose the independents and they'll lose the Congress....

....the only way these greedy corporate bastards will be able to consider next Novembers defeat a success will be to sign up now for all the free insurance lobby money they can get their greedy little hands on....

....corporatocracy?....the fact that we can only elect a corporate sanctioned capitalist to high office in this country is telling us something....what would that be?

now that it's in the Senate.