Here's an example of Republican and conservatives fear mongering about healthcare reform. Posted on Right Wing anti-healthcare reform website "60 Plus Association"
But their argument is just plain wrong. There is no plan to make cuts to healthcare which would harm America's senior citizens. It is the healthcare industry which wastes 300 billion a year . If the United States overhauled the healthcare system to Universal Healthcare all Americans would benefit and the Healthcare Insurance Industry would no longer be standing between American citizens right to healthcare and the hospitals ,medical professionals. The problem is as bill Moyers and a few others have pointed out healthcare shouldn't be treated as just another commodity to be sold to consumers based upon profit margins or Cost benefit analysis. Healthcare in other countries is treated as a basic right in a civilized nation. Instead the Republicans, conservatives and Neo-liberals argue that those who can not afford decent healthcare should not be helped out in any way shape or form because afterall they argue it is the individuals fault if they can not afford decent healthcare so "screw them".
But hasn't this always been an American traditional value that caring about the poor and other "LOSERS" is a sign of weakness. The American philosophy has always been to reward the prosperous and therefore the FITTEST while ignoring or punishing those who are not the FITTEST. Odd how Republicans, the Religious Right ,Neoconservatives and even Neo-liberals buy into this 19th century era Social Darwinism while other civilized nations in Europe and elsewhere have abandoned this heartless, cold soulless extremist Dog-Eat -Dog philosophy of humanity. The attitude could be summed up as "To each whatever he can get by any means necessary and to hell with those who cannot compete" . See for instance the book American Backlash by Michael Adams 2005 in which he details that growing acceptance of violence and of torture by American society is a factor of American's lack of "empathy" for others and their "winners versus Losers " philosophy ( Gospel of Prosperity) which is then dressed up in quasi-Christian language to justify such an ANTI-CHRISTIAN message. How else can American Christians justify their mania for Material Wealth, consumerism and related beliefs such Self-interest , selfishness,hedonism, one-upmanism , and a lack of concern for one's well being that is divorced from the amassing of material wealth. In America the "pursuit of Happiness" is equated in fact with material wealth and being more prosperous than your neighbors.
On the other hand the same people who accept this form of Social Darwinism reject Darwin's scientific theory of evolution because they claim it is blasphemy, an abomination, pernicious , an all corrupting world review which is anti-GOD and Anti-Christian. But how can they claim that "Social Darwinism is a statement on Natural Law which they believe supports unfettered "Laissez-Faire " Capitalism while rejecting that humanity has evolved as a life-form out of the evolution of life-forms on earth over the last 4 billion years.
Odd too how Americans claim to be the nation chosen by God and that they see themselves as the "Real Christians" and yet they reject most of Jesus' teachings especially THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT" But their version of Jesus is a middle-class businessman who prefers the company of the successful, the prosperous and the wealthy. As Pastor Hagee says about the poor "LET THEM STARVE !!! " What he and other believers in American Christianity claim is that God rewards the prosperous who by definition are God's Chosen People and the poor and others who are not successful are HATED by God and Jesus as they are unworthy and so get to not just suffer in this life but also for all eternity in the Christian Hell.
Don't pay for health care reform on the backs of our seniors.
Here's another excellent video from The Liberal Viewer at Youtube this time he is focusing on how Republicans and Fox News helped to smear Van Jones leading to his resignation. The smear was based on exaggeration and misrepresentation of the facts.
Fox News Smears Van Jones on His Way Out?
The resignation last week of Van Jones, the Special Advisor for Green Jobs at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, did not stop the smearing of Van Jones on Fox News this week, as I show in this video.
The two clips of Megyn Kelly I use in this video come from Fox News' program "America's Newsroom" broadcast on September 7, 2009
The two clips of Howard Dean I use in this video come from Fox News' program "Fox News Sunday" broadcast on September 6, 2009.
And still the left and right continue to fight "all sound and fury signifying nothing"-the right makes wild claims about the Obama administrations health care reform claiming it is part of his secret agenda to turn America into a collectivist communist nation.
While in reality as reported by liberals and progressives the Obama administration's health care reforms are really just a bit of tinkering with a failing system that provides little help to many Americans while leaving some 47 million without any health insurance. But if more people are added to the system it will mainly benefit the health insurance industry Big Pharma private run hospitals etc. So little change will take place if Obama continues on his path of appeasement to the Republicans, the conservative movement, the Hate Radio & TV crowd of fear mongers and his surrender to the America Medical industry which has little sympathy for the average Americans since it is operated and motivated upon ever increasing profits.
In the end Bill Moyers appears to be right on the money when he describes the fight over health care "The Biggest Show/con-game /circus/on earth.
How Washington is Screwing Up Health Care Reform – and Why It May Take a Revolt to Fix It By Matt Taibbi "Rolling Stone" Sept. 7,2009
-- Let's start with the obvious: America has not only the worst but the dumbest health care system in the developed world. It's become a black leprosy eating away at the American experiment - a bureaucracy so insipid and mean and illogical that even our darkest criminal minds wouldn't be equal to dreaming it up on purpose.
The system doesn't work for anyone. It cheats patients and leaves them to die, denies insurance to 47 million Americans, forces hospitals to spend billions haggling over claims, and systematically bleeds and harasses doctors with the specter of catastrophic litigation. Even as a mechanism for delivering bonuses to insurance-company fat cats, it's a miserable failure: Greedy insurance bosses who spent a generation denying preventive care to patients now see their profits sapped by millions of customers who enter the system only when they're sick with incurably expensive illnesses.
The cost of all of this to society, in illness and death and lost productivity and a soaring federal deficit and plain old anxiety and anger, is incalculable - and that's the good news. The bad news is our failed health care system won't get fixed, because it exists entirely within the confines of yet another failed system: the political entity known as the United States of America.
Just as we have a medical system that is not really designed to care for the sick, we have a government that is not equipped to fix actual crises. What our government is good at is something else entirely: effecting the appearance of action, while leaving the actual reform behind in a diabolical labyrinth of ingenious legislative maneuvers.
Over the course of this summer, those two failed systems have collided in a spectacular crossroads moment in American history. We have an urgent national emergency on the one hand, and on the other, a comfortable majority of ostensibly simpatico Democrats who were elected by an angry population, in large part, specifically to reform health care. When they all sat down in Washington to tackle the problem, it amounted to a referendum on whether or not we actually have a functioning government.
...Heading into the health care debate, there was only ever one genuinely dangerous idea out there, and that was a single-payer system. Used by every single developed country outside the United States (with the partial exceptions of Holland and Switzerland, which offer limited and highly regulated private-insurance options), single-payer allows doctors and hospitals to bill and be reimbursed by a single government entity. In America, the system would eliminate private insurance, while allowing doctors to continue operating privately.
In the real world, nothing except a single-payer system makes any sense. There are currently more than 1,300 private insurers in this country, forcing doctors to fill out different forms and follow different reimbursement procedures for each and every one. This drowns medical facilities in idiotic paperwork and jacks up prices: Nearly a third of all health care costs in America are associated with wasteful administration. Fully $350 billion a year could be saved on paperwork alone if the U.S. went to a single-payer system - more than enough to pay for the whole goddamned thing, if anyone had the balls to stand up and say so.
Everyone knows this, including the president. Last spring, when he met with Rep. Lynn Woolsey, the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Obama openly said so. "He said if he were starting from scratch, he would have a single-payer system," says Woolsey. "But he thought it wasn't possible, because it would disrupt the health care industry."
Huh? This isn't a small point: The president and the Democrats decided not to press for the only plan that makes sense for everyone, in order to preserve an industry that is not only cruel and stupid and dysfunctional, but through its rank inefficiency has necessitated the very reforms now being debated. Even though the Democrats enjoy a political monopoly and could have started from a very strong bargaining position, they chose instead to concede at least half the battle before it even began.
...It's a joke, the whole thing, a parody of Solomonic governance. By the time all the various bills are combined, health care will be a baby not split in half but in fourths and eighths and fractions of eighths. It's what happens when a government accustomed to dealing on the level of perception tries to take on a profound emergency that exists in reality. No matter how hard Congress may try, though, it simply is not possible to paper over a crisis this vast.
Then again, some of the blame has to go to all of us. It's more than a little conspicuous that the same electorate that poured its heart out last year for the Hallmark-card story line of the Obama campaign has not been seen much in this health care debate. The handful of legislators - the Weiners, Kuciniches, Wydens and Sanderses - who are fighting for something real should be doing so with armies at their back. Instead, all the noise is being made on the other side. Not so stupid after all - they, at least, understand that politics is a fight that does not end with the wearing of a T-shirt in November.
And now a commentary on an article published at Right-wing website "Let Freedom Ring".
Obama Takes a Page From Alinsky Handbook at Freedom News at Let Freedom Ring Sep 7, 2009
Obama told his supporters their mass support would be essential to keeping the pressure on Washington to accomplish his goals.
Since taking office, Obama has not ceased engaging in activities that could derive from Alinsky’s playbook.
What appears to some as the president’s apparent flip-flop on healthcare could be one example. In 2003, Obama told an NAACP gathering that he favored a single-payer system as the way to reform healthcare, but by the time the 2008 campaign came around he adopted a more pragmatic approach that he has kept into the present debate.
“If I were designing a system from scratch, I would probably move in the direction of a single-payer plan,” Obama told a gathering of community organizers on Dec. 1, 2007, at the Iowa Heartland Presidential Forum.
Obama’s actions make perfect sense because Alinsky instructed organizers to be “pragmatic” and “nondogmatic” in pursuit of their goals, and to view compromise as a “key and beautiful word.”
He taught that organizers should always adapt to changing situations, and Obama has likely correctly identified that it is impossible to pass a single-payer system through Congress at this point in time.
“If you start with nothing, and demand 100 percent, then compromise for 30 percent, then you are 30 percent ahead,” Alinsky wrote.
Alinsky also advised that revolution can only happen after a period of “reformation” because a revolution needs popular support to survive; consequently, compromise becomes a revolutionary tool. And Obama likely will compromise on healthcare to get “30 percent” closer to his ideal situation of a single-payer system over time if he continues to follow the lessons he learned from Alinsky.
Both Obama and his administration have mastered the use of Alinsky’s 13th Rule for Radicals, which calls for organizers to “pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”
His administration has singled out opponents such as talk show host Rush Limbaugh in an effort to polarize the nation against him and ridiculed him as “the leader of the Republican Party,” although the effort ultimately failed.
Obama’s underlings have also turned their efforts polarization and ridicule efforts against diverse groups of people, including corporate CEOs, the “Birthers” who question his legitimacy and opponents in the healthcare debate who have been labeled as “crazies.”
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What the article presents is the view that Obama and his supporters unfairly without justification targeted Rush Limbaugh, corporate CEOs, the Birthers etc. What is of note is that the writers are giving some credibility to such conspiracy theorists as "the Bithers" and the cantankerous racist views of Rush Limbaugh and other Hate Radio talk show hosts and the propaganda spread by Fox News esp. Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck & Lou Dobbs at CNN.
The article suggest that CEOs almost never do wrong and whatever they do is in the end somehow good for the country. So CEO increasing their salaries by 2or 3 hundred percent and their lavish life style supported by the corporations . So CEOs deciding to shut down industrial plants or even Telemarketing outlets to have these plants shipped to foreign countries where they get employees at less pay and benefits than what they would have to pay American workers. Or if a company is losing money and still insists on more outrageous salary increases and bonuses for CEOs while telling its employees that they must tighten their belts and agree to wage cuts and the loss of some of their benefits this again is somehow good for America. Or when CEOs fly company jets around the country to attend meetings rather than travel by commercial airline or just have these meetings take place through tele-conferencing this too benefits the American people. Part of the Big Lie is that these self-interested greedy power hungry CEOs are actually concerned about the American people. They may care about America as a place where they can do business without all the restrictions which other nations governments have put into plac. But these are not "Real Patriots" if there was somewhere outside the US they could go and make even greater profits and have fewer regulation restrictions and where the taxes on their profits were less most of these CEOs would ditch America in a heart beat.
For instance the Republicans and the Conservatives in the health care debate tend to gloss over the outrageous profits of the Medical industry including the health insurance industry. There are several reasons for their profits. One they increase the premiums people pay and increase the deductibles while refusing to take on people as clients for instance have a pre-existing medical condition or are a high risk group and if they do take them on as clients they do so by raising their premiums even more and then there's the fact that many Americans who have health insurance discover due to the fine print that some medical expenses are not covered and if a client is faced with a catastrophic medical condition the insurance company may according to its contract with the client just arbitrarily cut the client off from any pay-out. These contracts are often written in somewhat obscure or arcane legalese in such a way that the health insurance company can quite often get away with not giving financial help to clients who find themselves facing expensive ,serious and long term medical needs.
But who then benefits the health insurance companies but also Big Pharma and the private medical industry which also insists that it needs to increase its profits year after year and therefore charge higher and higher rates for their services without any real government oversight . So the insurance industries increases premiums because Big Pharma and the private hospitals increase their charges for their services One cannot expect an industry to just regulate itself when its only raison d'etre is profit and not the well being of the average American.
So the whole Medical industry from health insurance to pharmaceutical companies to corporate run hospitals and clinics are part of an ongoing PONZI SCHEME which make a few people quite rich while others who can not afford the services being offered are left to suffer and to die and this many Americans believe this is just how the system ought to work. They believe if you are not financially successful that's nobody's fault but your own and so why should those who are successful give a hoot about someone whom they see as a failure. This they believe is the Natural law of the Capitalist Jungle in which the strongest and the fittest survive- those who don't survive are those who are not worthy of survival they are too lazy, too stupid or not healthy enough physically or mentally to be part of the American ethos of winner take all and the losers be damned.
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About Let Freedom Ring, Inc.
Let Freedom Ring is a non-profit, nonpartisan public policy membership organization, with a three-pronged mission statement.
Our mission is to promote:
* Constitutional government
o Original intent of the Framers of the Constitution
o Limited (Federal) government
o Separation of powers (Judiciary not legislating, etc.)
* Economic Freedom
o Free enterprise and equal opportunity
o Social Security Reform -- to achieve financial independence, not dependence
o Profit as an economic incentive
* Traditional values
o Family as the basic building block of society
o Sanctity of life
o Religious liberty, not restraint of religious speech
About Let Freedom Ring
Let Freedom Ring was formed to counter the attacks of anti-conservative groups on patriotic candidates as well as attacks on the important issues of our day – those that affect the core of our society: the family, marriage, the economy, energy, abortion, health care and foreign policy, to name just a few. We also work to keep our constituents and the media informed about what our founding fathers’ intentions were and how history shapes laws and our culture today. Through seminars, workshops, ad campaigns, leadership and grassroots training and educational materials, Let Freedom Ring strives to motivate, activate and educate those who are interested in keeping America the great nation it has always been.
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and Let Freedom Ring is also promoting a bill to be introduced to Congress which would require representatives in Congress to read a bill before passing it. This is just another talking point of the Tea Party crowd for how could one verify that each member of Congress read and understood a particular bill.
at Let Freedom Ring: The Responsible Healthcare Pledge
Hold your Senators and Members of Congress accountable for reading any healthcare reform legislation up for vote by having them sign our pledge.
and so it goes,
GORD.
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