-"Step Three: Be Bold, Take On the Corporations With "Sidecar Reconciliation""

Hmmmm...If the Dems were unwilling to displease their corporate paymasters when they had 60 votes, how will they now turn around and say "ooops, we don't need 60 after all, nor even 59, all we need is 51!"

The Dems may calculate that even their most loyal supporters are not that thick.

And are we not forgetting, the senate bill, in its present form is what Obama agreed to in the meetings with industry at the beginning of this process. Would he go back on that now, even given the recent electoral losses? More likely he is finding ways to "retune the message".

Note to Jane Hamsher; Don't forget to add that Robert Creamer drafted from prison while serving a felony conviction the game plan for creating the health care 'crisis.'

"The only real question this morning is, how more Democrats will lose their seats before they decide to stand up to the corporations?"

All of them.

The party will not stand up to the corporations. Individuals may (and, subsequently, be left out to dry by the party apparatus), but the party will not. This has been demonstrated continuously for at least 30 years.

Any credibility that the Democrats have with the left-of-center rests with the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in the '60s and, to a lesser extent, the Watergate hearings in the '70s.

Stand up to corporations. Yeah. Good one.

We have yet to see those Progressives who have PROMISED to stand by this or that actually do so.

Progressives in Congress get NO RESPECT because they GIVE NO CONSEQUENCES to those who are steamrolling the worst corporate giveaways in our country's history. Rahm lectures them and they go quaking away back to their corners. Then, after the vote they go whining to the press about how there was nothing they could do.

Hey, check out Stupak and Lieberman. Each was ONE person...who says one can't have an impact on the final bill???

Coakley's loss is a bellwether our Dem's so-called leadership would do well to analyse more closely. Massachusetts HAS MANDATED health insurance, so they KNOW how BAD that is.

Even suppose for a moment that the Dems decided it's in their political interest to act in behalf of 'health care reform' or any of the other pressing issues facing Americans and the world. First, we would have to doubt their sincerity, duh. But second, does that mean that at best we would have terrible years alternating with slightly better ones, depending upon some unknown formula describing the tipping point of power between politicos and (the pressure from) people? Crumbs every other year, election years, is not good enough.

Too late Jane, Obama has spoken:

Obama urges pared-back health care bill
AP

By RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR, Associated Press Writer Ricardo Alonso-zaldivar, Associated Press Writer – 4 mins ago

WASHINGTON – Chastened by the Democratic Senate loss in Massachusetts, President Barack Obama and congressional allies signaled Wednesday they will try to scale back his sweeping health care overhaul in an effort to at least keep parts of it alive.

A simpler, less ambitious bill emerged as an alternative only hours after the loss of the party's crucial 60th Senate seat forced the Democrats to slow their all-out drive to pass Obama's signature legislation and reconsider all options.

No decisions have been made, lawmakers said, but they laid out a new approach that could still include these provisions: limiting the ability of insurance companies to deny coverage to people with medical problems, allowing young adults to stay on their parents' policies, helping small businesses and low-income people pay premiums and changing Medicare to encourage payment for quality care instead of sheer volume of services.

Obama urged lawmakers not to try to jam a bill through, but scale the proposal down to what he called "those elements of the package that people agree on."

...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100120/ap_on_bi_ge/us_health_care_overhaul

There is zero chance that our system can be fixed through the officially-approved mechanisms. Whether overtly recognized or not, there’s a war going on — the US ruling class against all the rest of us. It’s essentially a class war. The rulers want
you to remain a Democrat, because the D’s are a ruling-class institution, whose job is guiding the Dem half of the populace in paths that are safe for the rulers. To remain a Dem voter, and to swallow whatever slop the party dishes up, is to passively assent to this arrangement.

Therefore, your primary focus should be on resisting & criticizing the system, not on adapting yourself to it. You should be talking with your friends & family about the very real things that are wrong. You should be trying to make whatever contribution you can to elevating political consciousness. Accepting the slop of the Dem Party is the opposite of all that: it deadens political consciousness, & only makes your enemies stronger.

Voting for candidates only works when there are decent candidates — but that’s not our situation. We betray ourselves if we fail to recognize that.

Well, looking at it historically, the “solution” has to be a break from the officially-approved mechanisms. It must have the form of a broad movement based on the interests of the bottom 80-90% of the population, rather than on the interests of the top 1%. It has to be what they call “radical” politics — something that big business and the media are definitely not going to like, any more than they like antiwar protestors.

The 2 parties are really just a mechanism of social control. They’re not a way for “the people” to express their will; they’re a way for rulers to control the people — partly by making them believe that they (the peeps) have some say (which they don’t). Building a movement to oppose this takes time. But its sine qua non is political consciousness — the type that socialists understand & try to cultivate; and that the big-business parties & media try to suppress & eradicate.

We need Latin American-style "socialist" revolution in the streets, complemented by effective traditional political organizing, social-class based. Genuine socialism is good. An honest look at history shows that it's what the ruling class truly fears.

The Democratic party is now officially defunct, as is the Republican Party, as far as truly representing the middle class, workers, homeowners, students, and the poor.

Only a People's Movement, uniting progressives and Tea Partiers who have had it with both corrupt wings of the One Corporate Party can even begin to have a tiny glimmer of hope of rescuing our country from the corporatist-militarists who now run it.

If a People's Party comes out of that movement, and both progressive and libertarian politicians genuinely sick of war and predatory corporate capitalism wake up and leave the Democratic and Republican Parties, respectively, fine. Welcome to them.

If not, we'll have to do it ourselves and consign them all to history's dustbin. As CSN&Y sang in "Ohio": "We're finally on our own."

If every progressive, anti-war, environmental, peace & justice, feminist, minority rights, gay rights, and even anti-tax group worked together to end the legal farce called "corporate personhood," got corporate $$$ out of politics, ran local & state candidates who represented us, boycotted all corporate media and warmakers, demanded paper ballots and instant run-off elections, and, if all else failed, staged a General Strike (starting one state at a time, then going national), we may begin to have real change, not Obama hype and lies.

Remember Joe Hill's advice: "Don't mourn. Organize!"

I find it odd that the left-end-of-the-possible bloggers like Hamsher are expecting us to rally behind the addition of this completely inadequate "public option".

Any kind of "public option" that could be contemplated at this point is still unacceptable. Kill the bill. Start from scratch. Single payer.

I am sure Ms. Hamsher means well, but how is the US Senate representative of the people of the US in the first place? She assumes that the democratic process is functioning, which it clearly is not.

In very simple terms, how can there be a functioning democratic process and line of accountability when public opinion can be ignored with impunity year after year, decade after decade? (health care, wars, education, for examples)

It's power to US People, anyway!

This is really simple folks. There is NO health care reform without universal single payer, period, full stop, end of argument. There is NO reform without removing the profit from the payment for health care. EVERY other developed country knows this and has done this in one way or another with their health care system. We are the only idiots who keep trying to fix something that can't be fixed. every other country gets good health care for ALL at nominally 10% of GDP. We pay 16% for coverage that excludes millions outright and threaten practically everyone with no access and yields some of the poorest average outcomes of any developed countries. Well of course it does because for profit corporations are skimming close to 50% of our health care dollars. This IS NOT rocket science. REMOVE THE PROFIT........

Universal Free Healthcare
Author : Fidel Castro

Makes one think about our 'free' enterprise system...

Dear Jane Hamsher:

Time to stop your bullshit campaign for the public option and fight for real reform.

This means – stop pleading with Democratic Party officials to do the right thing.

This means – stop pretending that the Democrats are working for the people.

They are not.

They are working for their corporate paymasters.

I've been predicting for a long time that Obama would destroy the Democratic Party. But there's no way I thought he--with plenty of help from Congress--would do it in a year's time.

*** Comment deleted by site administrators for using all capital letters. ***

see: http://www.commondreams.org/comment-policy

To the Democrats, HARD TO PORT AND DAMN THE TORPEDOES!

Putting the Mass. election ( rejection) in perspective

http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2010010320/poll-shouts-message-massachusetts-voters-were-sending

The poll focused on Massachusetts residents who voted for President Obama in 2008 but who either voted for Senate republican candidate Scott Brown or did not vote at all. These responses from Brown voters should stand out:

* Generally speaking do you think Barack Obama and Democrats in Washington, DC are delivering enough on the change Obama promised to bring to America during the campaign?

Yes 31%
No 57%
Not sure 12%

* Do you think Democrats in Washington, D.C. are fighting hard enough to challenge the Republican policies of the Bush years, aren’t fighting hard enough to change those policies, or are fighting about right?

Not Enough 37%
About Right 21%
Too Hard 15%
Not Sure 27%

* If the Democratic Congress passed a bill that laid down stronger rules of the road for Wall Street and cut bonuses for the executives of companies that received government bailouts, would that make you more likely or less likely to vote Democratic in the 2010 general election?

More likely 53%
Less likely 14%
No effect 33%

* What would do more to improve our nation’s economic conditions: Decreasing government spending OR tightening government regulation of Wall Street and corporate executives?

Cut spending 43%
Tighten regulation 25%

* Democrats in Washington are more on my side than on the side of the lobbyists and special interests, OR Democrats in Washington are more on the side of the lobbyists and special interests than on the side of people like me.

The lobbyists 47%
People like me 23%
Not sure 30%

* (Asked of people who opposed the Senate healthg care reform bill:) Do you think it goes too far or doesn’t go far enough?

Too far 23%
Not far enough 36%

* Would you favor or oppose the national government offering everyone the choice of a government administered health insurance plan — something like the Medicare coverage that people 65 and older get — that would compete with private health insurance plans?

Favor 82%
Oppose 14%
Not Sure 4%

It's also noteworthy that in each of those questions, people who self-identified as independents were nearly identical in their views to self-identified Democrats.for Clinton

Maybe Harvard should have a course on how to be president! Obama should have hit the deck running following his election. He should have presented his own health care bill the day of swearing in! The Democrats only hope now is to heap as much misery on Wall Street as they have heaped on the rest of the country.

Only the Huffington Post could come up with such cynical "Dear President Obama" article. Obama's laughing his behind off with this one.

OBMA tried to cut a deal with the right and big pharma and got mugged

As one who voted for Obama, I can say that I am disappointed with his performance thus far. Yes, the crap that the Democrats are proposing as healthcare reform will turn around to bite them in the ass down the road. Massachusetts is just an example.

Real healthcare reform is dead. It died last Spring when Max Baucus ejected single payer activists from the Senate Finance Committee hearings and had them tossed in jail! It died when Obama refused to endorse Medicare For All (single payer). Since 2003 Baucus has received almost $4 million from the healthcare cartel. This same cartel awarded $20 million to Obhama for his presidential campaign in 2008! Any wonder why REAL healthcare reform will NOT happen?

What is grossly needed is a viable third party alternative that is NOT controlled or influenced by the corporate monster! Other countries have more than two political parties, why can't we? If this alternative cannot become a reality, perhaps it is time for American Revolution II!

Dear President Obama

I come to you today to praise you and to criticize you and to petition you.

I want to tell you a true story which just happened a few days ago. I came into this world 4 years after World War II. When I grew up partly in New York City and Partly in Nassau Country New York, as a young boy I would watch Meet the Press. I watched this show as a boy of 6 or 7. I watched the people of the era talk about the issues. I also watched Mike Wallace's You are there as well. I recall seeing other programs about famous people. I saw newsreels of a man who wore a white sheet. NO! not that kind of white sheet! Mohandas Gandhi, wore a white sheet of cotton. Why did Gandhi wear white sheets? He wanted to set an example for his people to make their own cloth and not buy goods from his oppressors who occupied his country.

He appeared a modern day Moses, but of another religion. I have a number of heroes like Gandhi. Most of them died, except for Nelson Mandela and Bishop Desmond Tutu. Considering myself a Jewish person, I find that good that people from other religions and other people's can serve as examples for heroes as it tends to unite people of different backgrounds. Each of these heroes, Moses, Martin Luther King Jr., Cesar Chavez, Nelson Mandela, Bishop Tutu eventually brought their oppressors down by not cooperating with their oppressors.

The other day, I spoke to the great grandson of Mohandas Gandhi. I had sought to speak to his father, the grandson of Mohandas Gandhi. I never expected to ever speak to anyone in this family of Gandhi. I told him that I thanked his great grandfather for his work and that he inspired me as I used to see newsreels of his great grandfather during the 1950's and 1960's and especially using boycotts to eventually uniting his people of India to eject their oppressors out of their country. I told Gandhi's great grandson of my electronic PAMPHLET on the web and again thanked him and said good day.

See the rest of this letter at http://liberal.posterous.com

http://www.democratz.org