Brian Zepp Jamieson: Liarman Strikes

What corporate power has made of a once proud country.

Bryan Zepp Jamieson, October 31, 2009

Joe Lieberman has come to represent what America has become.

Unfortunately, that’s a pretty ugly sight.

Lieberman, who became an Independent in order to cling to power back in
2006 when disgusted Democratic voters tried to kick his ass out in the
state primary, was able to keep his seat that year in part by
campaigning for universal health care. He lured Republican voters by
promising to support Bush’s ruinous tax policies, and to unswervingly
support the hundreds of billions wasted on the twin occupations in Asia.

So he came out Wednesday and told the world that he was going to join
the GOP in filibustering against the health care reform bill because he
was afraid of what it would do to the deficit.

Even Republicans had to be sucking their cheeks in and wincing in
private. What Joe was doing was basically the equivalent of a young
woman loitering in red pumps, a micro-dress and crotchless panties in
front of the police station.

It’s unlikely that 25 people in the country bought Joe’s explanation.
Even Faux News and talk radio, usually fast to lionize a defector from
Democratic ranks, were curiously subdued about it. Oh, they crowed that
it would kill health care reform, but about Joe himself they were pretty
quiet. Even by their standards, his was a pretty disgraceful performance.

By traditional politics, as has been pointed out by many pundits, Joe’s
stance was inexplicable. Health reform will save the country tens of
billions a year, even in a weakened form. With a robust public option,
it would save hundreds of billions, and reduce the deficit.

Nor does he have public support. In his home state of Connecticut,
public option has the support of 68% of voters. Health care reform has
the support of nearly 80%.

He can’t even argue that he is philosophically opposed, because he ran
on a platform of supporting universal health care in 2006.

He did complain that “We’re trying to do too much at once”, an objection
that apparently didn’t occur to him when he voted to lavishly fund the
occupations of two Asian countries, and supported the PATRIOT ACT, which
basically gave government the power to ask your phone company to spy on
you, and to eliminate four of the ten items on the Bill of Rights.

As recently as 2006, Lieberman could claim to be a progressive on most
things, but whatever progressive ideals he had evaporated in a hurry
during his frantic efforts to cling to power in 2006.

Here’s what he says about the relatively mild public option – a step in
the direction of universal health care – today. “I feel so strongly
about the creation of another government health insurance entitlement,
the government going into the health insurance business, I think it’s
such a mistake that I would use the power I have as a single senator to
stop a final vote.”

He’s become such a whore to the Republicans and the Insurance companies
and HMOs (who chipped in $1.6 million to get him elected as an
Independent after Democratic voters threw his ass out of the election
process) that he can’t even allow a simple up-or-down vote.

It’s the sort of behavior you expect from Republicans.

Joe Lieberman is a Republican. It doesn’t matter what he calls himself,
he sold out, and he’s a Republican. The minute he votes to end cloture,
the Democrats need to throw him out of the caucus and strip him of his
seniority. They let him keep those in return for supporting the party on
important votes, and he betrayed them as much as he betrayed his own
constituents.

Not everyone in Congress is a whore for the insurance industry or Big
Pharm or the HMOs. But that’s the way to bet. If your Congressional rep
is a Republican, then it doesn’t matter what his or her personal beliefs
are: the party demands utter lock-step obedience, and will destroy the
career of anyone who deviates on any significant issue. So even if your
rep isn’t a whore personally, that rep is marching in lock-step with all
the other whores, and personal integrity has nothing to do with how that
rep will vote.

With Democrats, there’s some variation. Some, like Senator Baucus, are
as just as bought out as Lieberman, and are scrambling to do the bidding
of the industries. At the other end is Dennis Kucinich, the House
representative from Cleveland who is still pressing for a House vote on
single payer.

Single payer is far too radical for the timid, bought-out clowns of
Congress to even consider. Mind you, this is the highly successful
program Canada has. Doctors and hospitals are private businesses.
Patients can choose any doctor they want. It enjoys nearly universal
approval in Canada, costs 60% of what Americans pay per capita, and
covers everyone in Canada. It’s a nearly perfect blending of private
business and government social service.

But just as the contemptible Lieberman is fighting to prevent the Senate
from even DEBATING the even milder public-option, Democrats in the House
are fighting to prevent a floor vote on single payer. Probably the large
number of bought-out Democrats such a vote would reveal is too
embarrassing.

That leaves the tepid public option, which is a kind of a baby step
toward single payer. It provides for a public insurance company to
provide coverage to people who cannot get it through private insurance
companies. It was originally proposed as a alternative to regulating the
insurance companies, and demanding that they end the practices of
pre-existing conditions, rescissions, and other abuses. The insurance
companies thought this was a good idea, until they realized that despite
what their own propaganda claimed, such a government program would work,
and undercut them by at least 40% on the premiums.

In the Randian world of the free market, the last thing the consortium
of private enterprises want to see is actual competition. What they want
is a nice, gentlemanly competition such as exists between oil companies,
where prices are never more than a couple of pennies apart, and they
have absolute control over retail “independent” outlets and what they
charge. This gives them absolute control of the market and prevents the
horror of a centrally-run economy.

As a result, with nearly utter control of all Republicans, and control
of a good chunk of Democrats, they have an ideal goal: in which a reform
bill goes through that contains no actual substantive reform at all, and
indeed might just tighten things up, making it easier for insurance
companies to gouge and cheat customers, while making sure that they only
have to deal with the type of customer who is worth gouging and
cheating. No more messing about with sick people, or poor people.

And more and more, it looks like that’s what this pathetic excuse for a
Congress will give us: a “reform” bill so hopelessly watered down that
it won’t even qualify as soup, or possibly even something that makes
things worse. It could be like the Medicare “reforms” of the Bush
administration that took a highly successful and popular program and
made it a bureaucratic nightmare that bankrupts people and costs more
and loses money hand-over-fist.

So Lieberman, slimy little whore that he is, might actually be right:
Nothing might be better than any “reform” that comes along now.

If we get fake reform, we’re probably stuck with that for a generation,
as happened with the Nixon “reforms” that inflicted HMOs on us.

If we get nothing, people can make health care reform THE issue of the
2010 election, and use it to throw out Republicans and Liebermans, and
as many industry whores as they can. It will be easy to do: don’t listen
to what any candidate says. Just look to see if he is getting
significant money from HMOs, insurance companies, Big Pharm, the Chamber
of Commerce, or other major industries. If they are, throw them out!

I think we’re near the point where a total loss now might be our best
option for meaningful reform in the near future.

If Kucinich gets his floor vote, we’ll have a pretty good idea of who
has to go first.