Friday, June 29, 2012

Fake fight! Health care for insurance corporations' profits

Chief Justice John Roberts is a liberal, all lined up with the most progressive Obama goals, including health care for all? There is new hope for the egalitarian future of the Roberts court?


Oh please. Obamacare was always just another boondoggle massive gift to corporations. The insurance companies are the primary profiteers with this law, who will gain 20-23 million new forced customers, but all the pundits wax on about some great victory for Obama. Maybe so, but Obama is hardly a hero for pushing through a law that once again benefits an industry that contributes nothing, produces nothing, and lives off the misery of people who simply need and deserve universally available health care. We regard US military assassination and child-killing drone strikes in other peoples' sovereign nations as our right, but health care is a privilege that must result in private profiteering. From the now mostly privatized (read corporate war profiteering) war system to the profiteering health insurance system, the one percent tries quite successfully to present staged fights that make it seem like politicians are substantively and principally divided. It is a ruse.

Politics is rapidly becoming professional wrestling; it looks like a fight, some contestants get hurt, but it's all orchestrated and the 'athletes' are actors. Stentorian tones and ersatz sincerity notwithstanding, most of these 'fights' give heavy profits to corporations no matter who 'wins.' The Miles family peace band at Anathoth Farm in Wisconsin sings about this sort of fixed fight with their song No Matter Who Wins, We Win, attributed to Hermann Goering as he laughed at the descent of morals amongst the Allied powers as WWII dragged on. Goering was reported to have said that exact thing, that no matter who wins, we [Nazis] win. The military contractors laugh too as they watch Congress argue about whether to cut Social Security or education. No matter who wins, they win. And the insurance companies got a big guffaw out of the pitched "battle" over Obamacare. Ask 'em if they give a fig.

In the health care economy we have created, the river runs toward corporate profits no matter what ephemeral wind is whipping up surface waves moving here and there. Can we start to look at this? Can we begin to investigate these profiteers and reconstruct politics to offer actual choices? Our economy and our democracy depend upon it.

3 comments:

Joe Anybody said...

Well said Tom - thanks for putting a perspective on this debacle!

Tom H. Hastings said...

Thanks, Mike. Hey, up here at Seabeck, starting a good peace conference, the 54th annual (hope we end the war machine soon!).

Joe Anybody said...

Tom with folks like you in the way of the war machine and leaving a wake of inspiration and knowledge as you plow forward I actually do have hope of ending the war machine soon.