Hurricane George, Four Years Later

From Greg Palast:

There's another floater. Four years on, there's another victim face down in the waters of Hurricane Katrina, Dr. Ivor van Heerden.

[...]

On the night of August 29, 2005, van Heerden was shut in at the state emergency center in Baton Rouge, providing technical advice to the rescue effort. As Hurricane Katrina came ashore, van Heerden and the State Police there were high-fiving it: Katrina missed the city of New Orleans, turning east.

What they did not know was that the levees had cracked. For crucial hours, the White House knew, but withheld the information that the levees of New Orleans had broken and that the city was about to drown. Bush's boys did not notify the State of the flood to come which would have allowed police to launch an emergency hunt for the thousands that remained stranded.

Read it all here.

On the anniversary of the disaster that was Hurricane Katrina, Greg Palast reminds us that the Bush Administration was a hell of a lot more Nazi-like than Obama.

The White House knew the levees broke; didn't tell anyone.

My run in with some Teabaggers

Apparently, no one is "entitled" to any health care.

I posted the other day that these people are not our enemies and that we just need to get louder and maybe get punched at one of these town hall meetings. Well, I didn't get punched, but outside the town hall meeting in Baytown with Gene Green, I'm sure some members of the San Jacinto Tea Party were ready to punch me if I got too out of hand.

When the man with the bull horn actually said that there was socialized medicine in the House bill, I went off. First I yelled, "No it's not!" and a couple in front of me turned around and basically dared me to go up there, thinking I would shut up. But I walked up closer to the mob, closer to the man with the bull horn and kept yelling, "There is no socialized health care in the bill!" The closer I got, the louder I got, and the braver I got. I must admit, regardless of who was right or wrong, it felt good to yell at this mob.

Earlier these people had been chastising Rep. Gene Green about restricting the attendance to this meeting. There were two restrictions: room space, and actually being from Green's district (TX 29th). The really funny thing was that this group of teabaggers wasn't even standing in the line of people waiting to get in, and it grew to be several hundred people long, while the meeting room at Sterling Municipal Library only held about 100 to 150. In any case, they put on the show that they had been specifically shunned from this meeting, as they ralleyed outside.

They pretended to open up the discussion to any and everyone, saying "Come on up to the bull horn and speak your mind [...] Republican or Democrat, it doesn't matter." Or something to that effect. Well I was up there, I had something to say, I was yelling it, I was able to get everyone's attention for a few seconds without the bull horn, but I was only met with jeers from the mob and some comments from the bull horn man which I could only make out as, "If you wanna disrupt our gathering..."

The irony doesn't stop there. Many of these people appeared to be of retirement age or getting near it, people destined to be on Medicare. They were all railing away about government insurance as if they weren't, or knew no one, who benefitted from Medicare or Medicaid.

After speaking privately with a few of them who engaged me in some civil discussion, it all seemed to be coming back to the freeloaders who were already leaching off of the system. I was told of people in gold jewelry and Escalades lining up to get their Food Stamps. I was told that these people didn't know how to save money, I was told one man's personal story of working as a young man, supporting his family, not leaving the house "If I couldn't afford to make a phone call or put gas in my care." These people were well meaning, but never considered what it might be like to be a black or Latino person in America. I tried to tell them that some people can't just save money like that anymore, and that the job market is getting worse and worse anyhow; some people just can't afford insurance on their own. But to no avail. I needed to read more on the issues, I needed to support moderate politicians. I was young, ignorant, foolish, and idealistic.

One thing I forgot to say to everyone was, "Don't believe every chain email you receive."

From Reform to DEform

From Alternet.org on the Administration's wavering stance on a public insurance option:

Startlingly, the clearest signal that the administration is preparing to jettison the public option came from Obama himself. Speaking at a town hall event in Colorado, the President referred to the public plan as merely a "sliver" of his reform agenda and said: "The public option, whether we have it or we don't have it, is not the entirety of healthcare reform."

On this, Obama is right. The public option has already been so dumbed-down and neutered that it is little more than a sliver. The problem is that it may be the only sliver of real reform in his program.

[...]

That's because the "reforms" currently under consideration threaten to undermine Medicare and Medicaid -- with radical cost-cutting schemes -- while steering hundreds of billions in federal dollars into the accounts of for-profit insurers and the pharmaceutical industry.

This is not "change we can believe in." This is change that serious reformers will find "very difficult" to support, as Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson, D-Texas, said Sunday on CNN. Johnson explained that progressives would have a tough time backing legislation that did not include a public option.

[...]

Congresswoman Johnson is exactly right. Without a robust public option, what the Obama administration and compromised Democrats in the House and Senate are talking about is not "health care reform."

It is "health care deform" that does not begin to address the crisis created by insurance industry profiteering -- and that could well make the "cure" worse than the disease.

Read it all right here.

The only reason why it appears that a substantial portion of the population is against a public option, and furthermore a nationalized health care system, is because just enough misinformed and dishonest people are so much louder and in-your-face than the rest of the people who disagree with them and know better.

Anyone who is really disgusted by the lack of progress that is thus far being made by this supposed "liberal" administration ought to GET LOUDER than our deranged counterparts at the town hall meetings. These people are not evil, they're not necessarily stupid, and they're not our enemies. It's not them we need to yell at, it's the Administration we need to reach. We've got to be louder than the people who are closest to Obama who have been keeping him corporate since his campaign started; we've got to be louder than the corporate owned pundits in the "liberal" media who are controlling the debate in such a dishonest fashion. We don't have to punch people at town hall meetings, but we may have to get punched. We ought to be yelling at Democrats as well, but we ought to be yelling the truth and telling them what the true majority of Americans want. We've got to be calling their offices every week and putting in our two progressive liberal cents just as much as the ditto heads are doing now with their chain email false-facts. They are an angry mob of people who have been lied to their whole lives; we can call them stupid all we want but we can't ignore the fact that they are actually having an impact on PUBLIC POLICY!

Let's GET LOUDER.

Nader clears the air on Obamacare

From Nader.org

"Now Make Me Do It"

Never much of a fighter against abusive corporate power, Barack Obama is making it increasingly clear that right from his start as President, he wanted health insurance reform that received the approval of the giant drug and health insurance industries.

Earlier this year he started inviting top bosses of these companies for intimate confabs in the White House. Business Week magazine, which proclaimed recently that “The Health Insurers Have Already Won” reported that the CEO of UnitedHealth, Stephen J. Hemsley, met with the President half a dozen times.

[...]

Further indication of Obama’s corporate dealings is that he never identified himself with a specific bill with a House and Senate number that he could rally the people around. No wonder people are confused, frustrated and angry. President Obama did not stand for an unambiguous proposal.

He thereby emboldened both the cash and carry Blue dog Democrats to rebel and the Republican yahoos to launch their lies and distortions via Rush Limbaugh and similar trash media.

Read it all here.

It's so bizarre how there's so much debate on the issue in general but not what's actually in any of the bills. There are hoards of ridiculous claims about what's in "the bill," and it seems like no one on either side knows whats in any of the bills. I've only read one of the bills myself, and not very much of it because it's so impossibly long.

But what's not included in any of the debate whatsoever is the fact that Obama has a really cozy relationship with the health insurance and drug industries. This information would come as a surprise to both Democrats and Republicans who are at each others throats over this, if they ever took the time to acknowledge Ralph Nader's existence.

The Great Health Care Reform Debate of 2009

Holy shit I haven't posted anything in a long time. I don't deserve to have anyone read this blog (and they don't).

Everyone's got an opinion on health care, health care reform, Obama, and "socialized medicine."

What really needs to be said, or rather heard, is that no one is proposing a government take over of health care. The House and Senate bills are proposing a "public option," which would just mean that your medical bills would be paid by the federal government rather than a private insurer IF you choose to be on the plan. This idea is only about money, not actual medical care. No one is forcing anyone to take a public health insurance option, no one is forcing anyone to see any particular doctor.

Some say we don't have the money, Obama says it will be "budget neutral," meaning they will get the money for the plan by making equal cuts in the budget and possibly raising taxes on the higher brackets (probably not gonna happen, wouldn't be much if it did. These are wussy Democrats, remember?).

I think it'd be smart to adopt a single payer system. Here's an interesting quote on that from Ralph Nader that I'll leave you with:

In 1950, when President Truman sent a universal health insurance bill to Congress, the American Medical Association (AMA) launched what was then a massive counterattack. The AMA claimed that government health insurance would lead to rationing of health care, higher prices, diminished choices and more bureaucracy. The AMA beat both Truman and the unions that were backing the legislation, using the phrase “socialized medicine” to scare the people.

Fifty-nine years later, “corporatized medicine” has produced all these consequences, along with stripping away the medical profession’s independence. Today, the irony is that the corporate supremacists are accusing reformers in Washington of what they themselves have produced throughout the country. Rationing, higher prices, less choice, and mounds of paperwork and corporate red tape. Plus, fifty million people without any health insurance at all.