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TechnoratiWhere Are the Fighting Dems?
Let's hear it for false fact studies from lobbyists! This one seems to have served as a declaration of war. Last week, America's Health Insurance Plans released a study claiming that healthcare reform would cause Americans' premiums to soar, and hey presto...
Suddenly, the Democrats are acting like they're actually in a fight. Nancy Pelosi has vowed to bring a plan with a robust public option to the House floor, and even Senate leader Harry Reid Twittered his intention to strip insurance companies of their protections from anti-trust laws.
Reid says that the law allows insurers to fix prices and monopolize markets in ways that are illegal and uncompetitive. Surprise surprise, some senior Democrats are starting to back him up. The President even mentioned the exemption in his weekly address.
So are Democrats finally growing spine? Well, not so fast. Obama still won't commit to ending the exemption that allows insurance companies to do with our health what we don't let Microsoft do with computer software. And he hasn't declared a war for Medicare for all. Getting insurers to agree to cover everyone is nice -- but without a public option, it does nothing to drive down price.
With new polls showing that public support for the public option has only increased since August, it's time for Obama to take a stand. Americans didn't elect a president of insurance, they elected a president of the country. It's Obama's job to lead on this issue, to fight for the promises he made on the campaign trail: a public plan to keep insurance companies honest, no individual mandate and no taxes on employer-provided care. It's time for the Democrats to fight for measures that will actually improve care, not just sound nice on CNN. Go for it.
42 Comments so far
Show AllThey're evading the draft once again.
Signed,
A fighting mad liberal/progressive disgusted with the current Democratic Party office holders
"Where Are the Fighting Dems?"
1. They hang out on the Huffington Post...run by the phony "liberal" and pretend "progressive" Arianna Huffington
2. They wait for the RACIST Bill Maher to show up on HBO
3. Hide and seek in the movies watching the Fraud Michael Moore....
4. Watch the Phonies on Microsoft/GE-Run MSNBC which is so corporate and anti-Union it would make any sane or authentic "liberal" not watch or trust anything these phonies say!!!!
5. They keep supporting the neoliberal Dems who utter or flatter them with liberal sounding words and platitudes.
6. They are asleep as the Dems do nothing to end BIG MILITARY SPENDING BUDGETS UNDER OBAMA and the DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONGRESS!!!!!
7. They DO NOTHING
8. They SAY NOTHING
9. They BEND OVER for the Spineless Democrats
10. They Wait as NOTHING Gets done by the Dems on Healthcare.
"Where Are the Fighting Dems?"
Spending all the bribes, kickbacks and payoffs they got from Big Pharma and the insurance companies in grand style and in the way only a corrupt politician can.
Another misleading commondreams article that implies healthcare for all, but misses the target.
Public option is not the same as single payer health care. Until we get single payer health care there is no health reform, just business as usual.
Single payer or single term. Public option is not an option.
The words Fighting Democrats is an oxymoron, with emphasis on moron.
WHERE IS THE BONELESS SCOTCH?
"Where Are the Fighting Dems?"
The Fighting Democrats will show up when Ralph Nader or someone like him turns out to be a real threat.
"It's Obama's job to lead on this issue, to fight for the promises he made on the campaign trail: a public plan to keep insurance companies honest, no individual mandate and no taxes on employer-provided care. "
He promised no such thing. He was open to a public plan but he never said that he would support such.
They're being scanned at the checkout counter....
Hopefully the real Democrats are fighting to kill this abortion of a bill that does nothing for Americans or their families.
Hopefully they won't follow Pelosi and Waxman into further disgrace.
Demcorat Fight Club
The 1st rule of Democrat Fight Club is: In any fight, immediately lay on the ground and pretend you are unconcious, then piss yourself like a beaten dog.
"The only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mind about nothing, to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts." - John Keats
Did we all just get out last mailing from Obama with a postcard of him with an envelope asking for more money? Did we all get the Joe Biden email asking for more money to help in the final push to get Health Care done? Yet we keep hearing how things aren't looking so good for us. Obama wants a program we can "afford". How the hell does he know how much "WE", those who have lost their home or are about to lose their home can afford? Where's the disconnect Obama? What dot are you missing in being able to connect NO JOBS means NO MONEY?
Our states are in deficits, we shutting down and cutting beyond recognition. We can't afford the basic necessities of life much less exist healthy in a polluted, poisoned atmosphere that is void of any health care and that jackass needs more of our money! Guess he figures once you're out on the streets starving and freezing to death he won't have to deal with you anymore.
I got a deal for you Obama. Get something done for us before you have the nerve to ask us for more money. And please, let me be the first to wish you a Happy Thanksgiving and a Merry Christmas.
Obama didn't wonder if we could afford the bankster bailout. Obama didn't wonder if we could afford the surge in Afghanistan. How come he only worries if we can afford a program like Medicare for all when it is something for the people of our nation? He doesn't worry if we can afford it when he sends phosporous bombs to Israel to rain down on the civilian population of Gaza, now does he?
I'm confident that the Obama family and all the other very wealthy American families will have a lovely Thanksgiving and Christmas. I'm not so sure about working class families in our nation. Might get a little cold and damp out there living in the open.
You pointed out very clearly the paradoxical truth about the current administration.
How can it possibly truly care about the health of Americans when it is simultaneously killing innocent civilians in a foreign country?????
Had a short debate with an R-nut the other day.
I asked a simple question: you pay over $2K/year for health insurance. What, exactly, does your health insurance company do for you in return for that $2K/year?
No answer.
I followed up: What if, for, say, a quarter of what you pay now, without any restrictions on choice of doctors, you could have Universal Health Coverage with no deductibles, co-payments, or any chances of denial of services for any reason? Wouldn't that be better than the system you're a part of currently?
I guess, he responded.
Then we agree, both R-nuts and D-nuts - health insurance companies have no reason to exist. At all. Period. Our government could be just as lousy a middleman as most HI corporations, who cares - at least we'd be paying nearly wholesale (instead of triple retail) and not being denied life-saving treatment because we had a pimple in junior high...
Plus, most of those who will lose their jobs/careers when HI corps are vanished will be able to immediately put their experience to work w/the new Universal Health Care Agency...
why do we need the repeated buracreacy of the VA, Medicaid, Medicare, that S-Chip thing and on and on. I bet there is a trillion dollars in waste in all that twin, triplet, octo-buracreacy. Lets add a new one - gov't option, SEIU wants to get bigger. The Democrats just want to pass a bill so Obama "wins" and AM radio "loses."
But you have no prolems with the trillion dollars being divided equally between the CEOs of Cigna, United Health Care, Blue Cross Blue Shield? The 50+ million Americans who don't have health insurance and the thousands to die as a result every year be damned, right? So, so, so much better!
You might find some here:
http://www.banksterusa.org/
Some are fighting and some aren't. I still don't give up on siding with the majority of progressives who are for pushing the party to the left.
Pushing the party to the left? Oh, that's really funny. You still think that after all those years, that same failed plan will work this time around? Good luck trying. First raise billions of dollars and then you might succeed in that mission. LOL !
Right on RoboCop99! Those who think, like Michael Moore, they can push the Democratic Party "to the left" need to read some history. It has been tried time and time again. The DSA in the 1970's and more lately, the PDA's. What is there to show for their efforts? "Single payer is off the table" from the get go.
People need to understand a couple of things:
1) the Democratic Party is a Capitalist Party and in no way represents the interests of everyday working people. If they were, they would be advocating for a national health care program or, at the very least, a single payer system. No, the Democratic Party catersa slightly more liberal sector of the ruling class. The ruling class doesn't want to dismantle the health insurance industry, so they are resistant to to those real comprehensive health care reform.
2) Activists for social change when their issues become important enough will subject to seduction attempts by the Democratic Party with promises of "getting something done". Don't be tricked (again!) by promises of "being relevant" or having "access to power" in the Democratic Party. The Left must build a grassroots movement which maintains a long term and complete independence from *both* of the Capitalist Parties.
It still boggles my mind how many progressive got behind Obomba. It was clear from the start that he was never a peace candidate nor was he particularly progressive in general. It is like either people were scared to death of a potential McCain/Palin administration or they just turned off their capacity for critical thinking.
An old friend once told us about the Function of the Democratic Party in the American Political System. Here's what he said:
The Democratic Party plays an indispensable role in society's political machinery. This doesn't mean it has any power, in terms of controlling the state or setting policy. It means that without the existence of the Dem Party, the US could no longer maintain the pretense that it's a "democracy." If the Dem Party disintegrated, the US would be revealed for what it really is -- a one-party state ruled by a narrow alliance of business interests.
In terms of defending the general population against the depredations of this business consortium, the Dem Party gave up the ghost in the mid-1960's. Their threadbare act as the "Party of the People" serves not to defend the well-being of the population, but merely to persuade ordinary citizens that within the official political system's framework, there's at least some faint hope for eventual progressive change. Their focus is not so much being on our side, as convincing us that they're on our side -- without the slightest serious examination of what that might entail.
The party's true function is thus largely theatrical. It doesn't exist to fight for change, but only to pose as a force which one fine distant day might possibly bestir itself to fight for change. Thus the whole magic of the Dem Party -- the essential service it renders to the US power structure -- lies not in what it does, but in its mere existence: by simply existing, and doing nothing, it pretends to be something it's not; and this is enough to relieve despair & to let the system portray itself as a "democracy."
As long as the Dem Party exists, most Americans will believe we have a "democracy" and a "choice" in how we are ruled. They will not despair, and will not revolt, as long as they have this hope for "change within the system." From the system's point of view, this mechanism serves as the ultimate safety valve -- it insures against a despairing populace, thus eliminates the threat of rebellion; yet guarantees that no serious change to the system will be mounted, because the Dems weren't designed to play that role in the first place.
Aren't the Dems The Lesser Evil?
The Democrats are not the "lesser evil;" they are an auxiliary subdivision of the same evil. To understand the political system, one must step back and regard its operation as an integrated whole. The system can't be properly understood if one's study of it begins with an uncritical acceptance of the 2-party system, and the conventional characterizations of the two parties. (Indeed, the fact that society encourages one to view it in this latter way, is perhaps a warning that this perspective should not be trusted.)
Any given piece of reactionary legislation is invariably supported by a higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats. Does this show that the Democrats are "less evil?" If one focuses on the noble efforts of the few outspoken dissenters, it's easy to feel that the Democrats are somewhat less evil. But in the larger picture, Democrats invariably submit to what Republicans more ardently promulgate, & the entire range of official opinion thereby shifts to the right. Thus the overall function of Democrats is not so much to fight, as to quasi-passively participate in this ever-rightward-moving process. Just as the Harlem Globetrotters need their Washington Generals to make their basketball games properly entertaining, Republicans need the Democrats for effective staging of the political show.
The Democrats are permitted to exist because their vague hint of eventual progressive change keeps large numbers of people from bolting the political system altogether. Emma Goldman once said, "If voting made a difference, it would be illegal." Similarly, if the Democrats potentially threatened any sort of serious change, they would be banned. The fact that they are fully accepted by the corporations and political establishment tells us at once that their ultimate function must be wholly in line with the interests of those ruling groups.
Doesn't the presence of the Dennis Kuciniches, Cynthia McKinneys, et al "prove" that the Democrats are progressive? No. The Kuciniches and McKinneys are indeed significantly different from the Hillary types -- but there are compelling reasons not to get too excited about them, either. First, they are used by the party as a "Left decoration," simply to keep potential left defectors in tow. Secondly, the party power brokers will NEVER in a million years let the Kucinich-McKinney faction have any real power.
In other words, the very modestly-sized progressive Dem faction is cynically used as a marketing tool by the national party. They are dangled before your eyes to make you think that the Dems are the "lesser evil" (since the Republicans offer no such Left decorations). The existence of a few decent Dems makes no real difference in the overall alignment of the party, and they will never be internally influential. They are a distraction.
For the Democratic Party to even begin to serve as a vehicle for opposing the absolute rule of capital, it would at a minimum have to be capable of acknowledging the conflict that exists between the interests of capital and the rest of the population; and of expressing a principled determination to take the side of the population in this conflict.
A party whose controlling elements are millionaires, lobbyists, fund-raisers, careerist apparatchiks, consultants, and corporate lawyers; that has stood by prostrate and helpless (when not actively collaborating) in the face of stolen elections, illegal wars, torture, CIA concentration camps, lies as state policy, and one assault on the Bill of Rights after the next, is not likely to take that position.
"Emma Goldman once said, "If voting made a difference, it would be illegal." –(mcoyote)
–Thank you for resurrecting one of my favorite political maxims.
It remains unassailable to this day, if not more so in the dysfunctional wreckage and scrap heap of American non-politics.
For a modern consideration of the 'voting' problem see Alain Badiou's "On Parlimentary 'Democracy': The French Presidential Elections of 2002," "Polemics," (Verso Books).
Great post. Couldn't agree more. Thanks for the Goldman quote.
It's the old Good Cop - Bad Cop routine.
Bad Cop-Worse Cop
"The only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mind about nothing, to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts." - John Keats
Dennis Kucinich, are you listening? I have supported you with shoe leather and money through your two presidential campaigns, but for just the reasons laid out here, I will support you no more as a Democratic candidate. Your inside-outside strategy doesn't work, as you never get outside the insides of the monster which has swallowed you.
"Your inside-outside strategy doesn't work, as you never get outside the insides of the monster which has swallowed you." –(Jerry D. Rose)
–As concise and cogent a criticism of Democratic Party 'progressivism' as can be asked for in the 'mainstream' of American non-politics.
The "monster' is the monster and will remain the monster. The little fish, 'saying all the right things' in the belly of the monster can no longer hope to mean much of anything at all.
Progressives within the Democratic party are not progressives because they are in the belly of the beast by choice.
Principled discourse within the Democratic party is a contradiction in terms: It only succeeds in providing the means of its own mockery.
The 'inside' strategy is all but a living corpse. There is only the practice of 'outside.'
"The dictatorship is necessary because it is a case, not of partial changes, but of the very EXISTENCE of the bourgeoisie."
–(Leon Trotsky)
The question this quotation begs is not who holds power– whether a dictatorship or a democratic coalition– but how the very field in which the total political process takes place is structured or articulated.
There will be no Glenn Becks, Douglas Feith's or Nancy Pelosi's. Hillary Clinton in jail for life? Dianne Feinstein facing a firing squad?
"Anything that can be imagined is an image of truth." –(William Blake)
–(Jill Bains)
Very good.
http://vote.org/
Dems voted for a leader and all they got was a referee.
Fighting Democrats?
Now THAT'S a laugh. With the exception of Grayson, Kucinich, Waters, Feingold, and a few others, there has been a dearth of "fighting' Democrats for the last 8 years.
Remember when impeachment of the greatest war criminal in American history was taken "off the table"?
Obama will never take a stand. He will occassionally toss an obligatory crumb and immediately sweep it away after much fanfare over the tossing a crumb.
The title of the article is wrong.
The author admits that "the Democrats are acting like they're actually in a fight." So we're not looking for fighting Democrats anymore. They have appeared; we know who they are; and they have made impressive progress against tremendous odds.
As Flanders goes on to note, it's Obama who is failing us. Worse, he has been undercutting us at every step--breaking promises, making secret deals, etc.
Ms. Flanders cannot be that naive to believe in fariy tales could she? The two-party (de-facto one-party) system is a joke, a sham, a charade, a public relations trick. The vast majority of Democrats have no incentive to listen to public opinion. As Bill Clinton commented over a decade ago: "what are they going to do? Vote Republican?"
How many more decades is it going to take to figure out that the system is corrupt from the foundation up. We need to build a new one.
Well said. It is amazing that this narrative is still operative. The corporate Democrats don't lack spine. Their allegiance is to the corporate interests that pay for their campaigns. Duh.
. . . it's time for Obama to take a stand.
Put a very large pile of cash on the ground and Obama will stand on it until the armored car comes to carry it to DLC HQ.
"Put a very large pile of cash on the ground and Obama will stand on it until the armored car comes to carry it to DLC HQ."
–(Mordechai Shiblikov)
Yes. Where it will then be re-routed to Goldman-Sachs headquarters in Manhattan to be invested in speculating on energy futures, raising the cost of gasoline.
Alternatively, the money can be put into war profiteering stocks to insure that Israel has the most technologically advanced weaponry from which to prosecute the state terror so close to its genocidal heart.
That is what the Democratic Party is!–(Jill Bains)
The Fighting Democrats are probably located somewhere near the Compassionate Republicans...lost in your imagination
"The only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mind about nothing, to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts." - John Keats
Same place as the fighting (and I use that term lightly) journalists like yourself. Taking refuge in the wings for fear of offending your Master and Wimp, Obama.
exactly.
to be sure there are the longterm ones , pelosi, reid, etc...that also "define" what is to be "discussed"...but at the end of the day...the "leader of the party" IS the POTUS.
it is HE that uses the position to "whip" the rest into action.
IF HE is "committed" - they are under pressure to get around his commitment.
so - the critical point in the article:
"OBAMA STILL HAS NOT COMMITTED".
it is possible, in situations to lay the responsibility on a SINGLE person's position. THIS is one such case.
Obama is surrounded by "allies" who can be pushed TO the left or are coming FROm the left.
it is HE that has to make a choice - is he TO the right or the left.?
NO more ambiguities and "playing both fields".
there is no such thing as a "compromise" concerning where "america must go" even if the steps taken towards that are incremental, if reality dictates it that way. BUT the DIRECTION has to be CLEAR...
either it goes RIGHT or LEFT inexhorably...and the movement or direction has to begin NOW. and the POTUS is the one people are looking to, whether from congress, no matter how powerful the members are, or the americans.
at the end of the day (i am speaking of symbolic) - obama has to CHOOSE...is he for the PEOPLE , ordinary americans, OR for the corporations and the very rich?.
he can not straddle both sides of the fence. if he continues to do that he will only end up getting something up his behind..
he CAN't be BOTH for the "corporations AND the people"
because in the USA - corporations and people are NOT cohered...as the article elsewhere says.
corporations USE people.
corporations, usa model, or in essence REPLACE people as THE "person".
he has to choose, and america has to choose, whether between REAL people or FICTION.
that's what it boils down to.
Anyone who has been paying attention all along would know that the fighting Democrats have always been around but for the wrong people. The party already has a spine that's being used in the wrong direction. 100% of the public could support the lame "public option" and neither party would gives a rat's hair about it. Expecting the Democrats to pass health care reform would be like expecting the Republican Party to overturn Roe v Wade. Not gonna happen.
Next question please !
And that's about the long and the short of it.
We need to replace the elite scum in Congress. Not with different scum, but with *us*.
No more 'Ave bossa nova, similis bossa seneca'. We can't afford it, if we want to live.