Re: Arianna Huffington: “Hope” Has Been a Bust, It’s Time for Hope 2.0, Arianna Huffington, Posted: January 18, 2010 04:43 PM
On the eve of the first anniversary of President Obama’s inauguration, it’s become painfully obvious that elected officials are not going to save us. The 2008 election was all about “Hope.” But Hope is simply not cutting it.
What we need is Hope 2.0: the realization that our system is too broken to be fixed by politicians, however well intentioned — that change is going to have to come from outside Washington.
…The perfect example of this came in March 1965. In an effort to push for voting rights legislation, King met with President Lyndon Johnson. But LBJ was convinced that the votes needed for passage weren’t there. King left the meeting certain that the votes would never be found in Washington until he turned up the heat in the rest of the country. And that’s what he set out to do: produce the votes in Washington by getting the people to demand it. Two days later, the “Bloody Sunday” confrontation in Selma — in which marchers were met with tear gas and truncheons — captured the conscience of the nation. And five months later, on August 6th, LBJ signed the National Voting Rights Act into law, with King and Rosa Parks by his side.
…One year later, wracked with conflict and discord, and battered by petty grievances, false promises, and worn out dogmas, we stand on the verge of passing a giant boon to health insurance companies and calling it “reform.”
The reason we are given? What else: the votes just aren’t there for a real reform bill.
That’s where Hope 2.0 comes in. If the votes aren’t there, the people need to create them. Just like King did. They need to build a movement. And to make that happen, we need to adopt another of the great lessons of Dr. King’s life: elevating the role empathy must play in our society.
Dr. King went out and made it happen. He made Washington sit up and listen. Now, Arianna comes along and speaks so eloquently to our hearts that empathy must reign and we must, if our Democracy is to survive, create the votes needed to make change happen.
The only problem with all this is the one little, itty bitty problem that is standing in the way of us taking her advice and hitting the streets with the pitch forks. We did that against the war in Iraq and it barely caused a blip on the radar.
Without the media, namely Arianna Huffington and company, behind such a move – building on it by keeping it in the news cycle 24/7 – then it will fail just as surely as the world-wide Iraq war protest failed in March of 2003.
Arianna wants us to go out and make it happen, like Dr. King did. But we don’t have Dr. King leading us across that bridge into Selma. We don’t have a figurehead who could grab the headlines with his compassion and fiery oratory, or someone to lay in his bed in the throes of self induced starvation for the sake of peace.
If Arianna thinks Hope 2.0 is the answer, then she should be willing to put herself out in front of it and motivate all these keyboard-bound Democrats to close their laptops and grab some signs.
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Americans Want Health Care Reform, not Republican Nonsense
Re: POLL: Nearly Two-Thirds Of Americans Want Congress To Keep Trying On Health Care
Despite what you hear from the Republican leadership in Congress claiming that Americans don’t want health care reform, there is yet another poll out today that states otherwise:
The GOP claims that they have had a bipartisan agenda on health care reform from day one. Can you believe that? The Senate HELP Committee bent over backwards to include Republican amendments to the mark-up, and they still try to blame Democrats as being partisan. The version that was passed was open to amendment on the floor of the Senate and the Republicans took advantage of it. Most of the Republican amendments failed. Why? Most were attempts to kill the bill, stall the bill, humiliate Obama, and offerings that were purely right-wing talking points meant to just waste time and grandstand. In other words, the Republican Senators offered nothing substantial. Here is a couple of the Republican amendments copied here from Slate.com, who kept track:
What makes Crapo’s amendment so stupid is that there are no provisions in the bill that imposes tax on those who make less than $200,000 in the first place.
They had their chance to add constructive measures to the health care bill, but they did not attempt any serious governance. Why? It is their position to set back an criticize putting all the responsibility on the Democrats. The Dems complained that the right has not offered anything useful, true, but the Republicans don’t care. They are playing a different game. Their agenda is to gain back power, not govern.
Republican leadership gets in front of the cameras at press conferences and make wild claims that a majority of Americans don’t want this health care bill. They are not entirely wrong because the key word is “this” bill. Right-wing mouth-breathing bottom-feeders got worked up to a froth this past summer over Obama’s plan to execute their grandparents and the reason I mention this here is because the those protests were not grassroots, rather top-down driven events for the purpose of spoiling any real insurance reform. The insurance industry and Pharma pumped cash into the organization of the protests and insured the media was on hand to televise the paid hecklers at Democratic Representatives and Senatorial town hall meetings. The campaign to smear health care reform worked to a degree. Now the Republicans in charge can boast that Americans are against it.
But, according to many polls like the one that came out today, a big majority of Americans are actually FOR health care reform.
Republicans aren’t concerned about the whims of the majority. What does concern them are the cares of the right wing minority, which they keep amply supplied with reasons to be against Obama and health care reform. They care about how they can use the health care debate to propel their propaganda.
What can the Dems do to counter their strategy? They can simply do the right thing and pass health care reform anyway, preferably with the public option.
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