The next thing you know, Paul Krugman will be attacking Paul Krugman – probably from the left! It would go something like, “Krugman is not liberal enough!”
At least it’s not Obama this time.
Anyway, his attack today is not without some justification. There are some old, pasty, white men in the Senate that has taken so much money for so long from big pharma and big medicine that they have forgotten little you and me, the voters. Krugman mentions a couple of these guys in his article today in the opinion section of the NY Times. He mentions two by name, Senators Ben Nelson and Kent Conrad, but there are more than just those two, maybe enough to kill the public health care plan – even enough to kill it using the reconciliation process.
via Op-Ed Columnist – Health Care Showdown – NYTimes.com.
America’s political scene has changed immensely since the last time a Democratic president tried to reform health care. So has the health care picture: with costs soaring and insurance dwindling, nobody can now say with a straight face that the U.S. health care system is O.K. And if surveys like the New York Times/CBS News poll released last weekend are any indication, voters are ready for major change.
The question now is whether we will nonetheless fail to get that change, because a handful of Democratic senators are still determined to party like it’s 1993.
And yes, I mean Democratic senators. The Republicans, with a few possible exceptions, have decided to do all they can to make the Obama administration a failure. Their role in the health care debate is purely that of spoilers who keep shouting the old slogans — Government-run health care! Socialism! Europe! — hoping that someone still cares.
The polls suggest that hardly anyone does. Voters, it seems, strongly favor a universal guarantee of coverage, and they mostly accept the idea that higher taxes may be needed to achieve that guarantee. What’s more, they overwhelmingly favor precisely the feature of Democratic plans that Republicans denounce most fiercely as “socialized medicine” — the creation of a public health insurance option that competes with private insurers.
He chides the Republicans for doing “all they can do to make the Obama administration a failure”, but he forgets that he himself has done plenty to achieve that same goal as I have railed about here, and here, and here, and more. Krugman is constantly finding fault with the Obama administration and, in effect, is doing just as much or more damage to Obama than the Republicans because his base, all you good readers out there, just gush over Paul Krugman.
This time he’s yelling at some Senators for not being progressive enough, and maybe, just maybe this time he might be on the right track.
What the balking Democrats seem most determined to do is to kill the public option, either by eliminating it or by carrying out a bait-and-switch, replacing a true public option with something meaningless. For the record, neither regional health cooperatives nor state-level public plans, both of which have been proposed as alternatives, would have the financial stability and bargaining power needed to bring down health care costs.
Whatever may be motivating these Democrats, they don’t seem able to explain their reasons in public.
Senator Ben Nelson
Senator Kent Conrad
Thus Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska initially declared that the public option — which, remember, has overwhelming popular support — was a “deal-breaker.” Why? Because he didn’t think private insurers could compete: “At the end of the day, the public plan wins the day.” Um, isn’t the purpose of health care reform to protect American citizens, not insurance companies?
Mr. Nelson softened his stand after reform advocates began a public campaign targeting him for his position on the public option.
And Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota offers a perfectly circular argument: we can’t have the public option, because if we do, health care reform won’t get the votes of senators like him. “In a 60-vote environment,” he says (implicitly rejecting the idea, embraced by President Obama, of bypassing the filibuster if necessary), “you’ve got to attract some Republicans as well as holding virtually all the Democrats together, and that, I don’t believe, is possible with a pure public option.”
Honestly, I don’t know what these Democrats are trying to achieve. Yes, some of the balking senators receive large campaign contributions from the medical-industrial complex — but who in politics doesn’t? If I had to guess, I’d say that what’s really going on is that relatively conservative Democrats still cling to the old dream of becoming kingmakers, of recreating the bipartisan center that used to run America.
It is my opinion that these old, pasty, Democrats have lived in the DC bubble so long that the only contact they have with outside interests are the well paid lobbyists that continually speak congenially with these Senators in the hallways of Congress and over business luncheons. It has gone on for so long that these lobbyists have become their friends and have given them huge, overly-generous campaign contributions.
The lobbyists have been SCREAMING against the public health care plan, so loudly in fact that all the Senators hear now is how wrong the plan is and how unfair it would be to compete with the insurance industry. They aren’t really scared of being “driven out” of the market as the AMA has said recently, but they are terrified of the competition that would cram down their huge profits, their gravy train.
This makes me wonder why “we the people” can’t organize a lobby to counter the corporate greed. It’s a fantasy, I suppose. But it would be nice to have an organization, like say Move On, to have well paid lobbyists roaming the halls of Congress pressing the flesh and pushing the progressive agenda. We could hire some lobbyists who are passionate about the liberal side and could be most effective by getting close to Senators and Congressmen, instead of just sitting back and hurling spit wads at the President.
Maybe we could hire Paul Krugman!?
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A Second Look | Daryl Hannah Talks Dirty (About Coal Mining)
via Daryl Hannah: Why I Was Arrested in Coal River, West Virginia.
When politicians, Obama included, talk of “clean coal” they are not speaking of any new processes invented to finally make coal healthy. What they, these politicians and their echo network, are doing is whitewashing a serious ecological and human health catastrophe caused by coal mining.
It is a trick perfected by the right-wing. They come up with a two or three word phrase that strikes a chord with voters to promote their agenda and keep us from looking behind the curtain at what is really happening. This very effective trick is called framing. The frame clean coal is one of many piles of wool the right wing has pulled over our eyes during the Bush administration and is continuing today with Obama’s continued use of the phrase.
Another famous frame was stay the course. You know where that got us.
Hannah and others were arrested last week protesting the continued use of the method of mining called Mountain Top Removal (MTR). Hannah explains why in her own words:
Mountain Top Removal uses explosives to loosen the mountain top, then machines scrape the dirt off the coal vein and dump the spoil into the valleys and intermittent streams. Entire ecological systems are destroyed in the process.
Some photos of Mountain Top Removal:
The aftermath of mountaintop removal.
If you want to see a real good close-up of the damage done by MTR go here.
What’s worse than this utter destruction of our precious and beautiful America is the toll this mining takes on human health. The part of Hannah’s saga having the most impact is her sharing of personal stories sent from Appalachian residents who have to breathe the sulfur packed air and drink the mercury and other carcinogens from the polluted water.
From the article:
Don’t listen to anyone who promotes the frame “clean coal”. It is a lie. The reason it resonates is that the power companies that dump billions of tons of CO2 into our atmosphere have changed the color of the smoke from their chimneys making the gases emitted appear clean.
All they have done is remove the ash, which is toxic by the way, and dump it by the ton into small ponds called impoundments. The ponds are not lined and mercury, arsenic, and other toxins leech into the West Virginia and Kentucky drinking water. They might as well have done nothing. They cannot capture the CO2 (greenhouse gas) because they do not have the technology as of now.
But there is invisible smoke now, so the uninformed think coal must be clean.
The frame “clean coal” exists and satisfies the right-wing mouth-breathers’ need for an excuse to keep the status quo.
Real clean coal, though, does not exist. It is just another right-wing lie.
Posted in: Remote Posts.
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