Is the Right Out Organizing the Left on Healthcare?

Is the Right out organizing the Left on health care reform? I am afraid so. There has been a little noise lately about how this "tea bagger" movement is putting on demonstrations to shout down any kind of health care reform discussion at "townhall meetings", even the corporate insurance sponsored kind most of us here don't want. The links within this message are from John Amato of the soft-left liberal blog Crooks and Liars. Within those blog posts are embedded videos of these tea-baggers in action, shouting down members of Congress.

In one of the videos Rachel Maddow dismisses these protests as simply being orchestrated by right-wing think tanks and lobbying firms; aided and abetted by talk radio and Fox News. But it really doesn't matter, they are mobilizing people against health care reform. Some may say that that is just fine if they derail the Democrat's corporate welfare health care plan. Maybe it is to a certain extent. However, as far as the right-wing tea-bag protesters are concerned the details are inconsequential, they already think they are protesting against "socialized medicine" or the single-payer plan.

Carrol Cox opined on some thread here on this list that single-payer won't be won until people are in the street demanding it. He's probably right. But shouldn't we also be at these "townhall meetings" exposing the bullshit of the dominant Democratic plan and demanding a single-payer plan be put back on the table? Are we really going to let these right-wing idiots who don't even know what the hell they are fighting against out organize us?

I would like to hear lbo-sters opinion on this.

(The above is a post I wrote for Doug Henwood's Left Business Observer email-list, just so the reader understands the context of the message).

No, You Give Me A Break!

Now this is just the most silly argument from John Stossel for whatever kind of health care reform, no matter how shitty.

"That's what health insurance does to medical care. Patients rarely even ask what anything costs. Doctors often don't know. Often nobody even gives a damn. Patients rarely ask, "Is that MRI really necessary? Is there a cheaper place?" We consume without thinking. By contrast, in areas of medicine where most patients pay their own way, service gets better, while prices fall.

Why not just have a free market where people can buy whatever kind of health insurance they want? Competition would then bring prices down."

No, people are not going to consume as much health insurance as they can. And no, competition is not going to magically lower prices. But cutting out the executive salaries and stock dividends that go to for-profit insurance company investors would. And generally people don't sit around and say, "Hey, I feel fine, but I think I will go get poked and prodded by a doctor and nurse, because hey, what the heck it free."

I am sure for a well paid free-market ideologue propagandist like Stossel he actually believes that it is a simple matter to go out and buy the health insurance ones needs. This is far outside of the reality of most working Americans. Their reality is that if they don't get insurance through a group plan from their employers, then they can't afford it period. They can't even come close to affording it. I know, I did shop around for it before I had my present job, and I could only afford to pay for my son, leaving myself uninsured.

It is easy to make these delusional "free-market" arguments from one's perch in the elite corporate media. But it just doesn't fly here in working-class America!

Sotamayor, Not So Empathetic After All, Sticks to the Letter of Bourgeios Law

As is well known, President Obama has said that one of the qualities, among many, he would like in his supreme court nominees is that of "empathy". And of course the mainstream idiot-right that so dominates American political discourse seized upon this one word to criticize Obama and his nominee Sotamayor. They have of course also seized upon the words of a speech by Sotamayor, saying that the "rich experiences of a wise Latina woman" might lead a judge to make better decisions than a white-male judge. Never mind that much of the noise by the idiot-right is without substance.

On the other hand, their has been some substantive talk about Sotomayor and her judicial record. Republican Senator John Kyle would at least seem to be a little more reasonable, but of course within the boundaries of Bourgeois Democracy. From CBS News:

Kyl on the other hand said she will definitely have to assure members
of the Judiciary Committee that she will live by the oath of the Supreme Court.

The Republican Senator took out a piece of paper and read the oath which reads, "'I will administer justice without respect to persons and do equal right to the poor and to the rich.'"

Kyl said that oath means that she will have "not bring in her empathy for the poor person, for example. If the law is on the side of the rich person, then she has to rule
in favor of the rich person. If she will do that, then I think she'll have no trouble in her confirmation hearing."

I don't think law makers such as Kyle, whether Democrats or Republicans, who make laws that favor the rich and corporate interests in the first place have anything to worry about.

Former attorney and famous Salon.com blogger Glen Greenwald has written about the idiot-right's silly noise about the Sotomayor nomination, and he has also brought to light facts about Sotomayor's actual judicial record. I highly recommend these articles.

As it so happens, Greenwald was actually the attorney for a plaintiff that lost a race and age discrimination lawsuit against a hospital. I have copied and pasted the parts I want to emphasize here below, and I snipped a bunch, so do read the original if interested.

Thursday May 28, 2009 07:29 EDT A Revealing Anecdote About Sonia Sotomayor

(snipped intro)

My writing about this issue from the start has not been based on my
view that Sotomayor is the best choice for the Court. There is still too
much unknown about her to reach a conclusion in that regard (though see this
encouraging snippet of her at Oral Argument in a critical case). My
interest has been due to the fact that the smears against her were both totally
unrecognizable, driven by very ugly sentiments and enabled by reckless
"reporting" methods. Along those lines, I want to recount the facts behind
a case I had before Judge Sotomayor because it helps to demonstrate just how
false and baseless are the attacks thus far against her:

That case, Norville v. Staten Island University Hospital, involved one
of the most sympathetic plaintiffs I had in my legal career. The
plaintiff, Wendy Norville, was a black woman who grew up in poverty in the
Caribbean, moved to the U.S., and put herself through nursing school while
working as a maid and raising her children as a single mother. After
graduating at the age of 44, she went to work at SIU hospital as an R.N. in the
neurology unit, where, for the next 12 years, she compiled an exemplary record
of uniformly excellent performance reviews.

During her 13th year as an R.N., while working in the neurology
unit, a very tall male patient had a seizure while lying on a table.
Norville attempted to restrain the patient to prevent him from injuring himself
or falling on the floor, and when doing so, she sustained a very severe back
injury. She was unable to work for a full year, but after extensive
rehabilitation, she told the hospital she wanted to return to work, but her
back injury imposed some mild physical restrictions -- such as limitations on
her ability to lift heavy objects -- and she requested that they find a nursing
position for her where heavy lifting was not required.

The hospital claimed that the only positions they could offer her
were ones that were part-time or would require her to lose all of her union
seniority and benefits, and after a couple of months of pretending to search
more, the hospital notified her that there were no comparable positions for her
and they thus fired her. Because she was 56 years old and disabled by
then, she was unable to get hired by another hospital. So after working
for 12 years as an R.N., she was left fired and unemployed -- all because of an
injury she sustained on the job, while helping a patient. She then
sued the hospital (which was large and fully insured) for failing to
accommodate her disability under the ADA and for race and age
discrimination (they had accommodated white nurses far more injured than
she and also rejected her for the one open nursing position in favor of a much
younger nurse).

If ever there was a case where one's "emotions" for "the
downtrodden, the powerless and the voiceless" would be strong, it was this
one. This was a poor, black and highly admirable woman who -- through
no fault of her own -- was left jobless and impoverished at the age of 56, suing
a large and fully insured corporation. And her case was not only
emotionally compelling, but legally strong as well: the federal judge
presiding over the case from the start refused to dismiss any of her claims at
the close of discovery, holding that there was ample evidence to support all of
her claims and to enable a jury to decide in her favor.

Right before her trial was to begin, that judge got caught up in a
massive criminal trial, and as a result, a federal judge from Louisiana was
shipped to New York to preside over the trial. This visiting judge hated
the case and the plaintiff from the start. At trial, he excluded most of
her best evidence showing discrimination, then dismissed her race and age
discrimination claims before they even got to the jury, and then -- on her sole
remaining claim for violations of the ADA -- gave the jury patently
unfavorable and inaccurate instructions about the law that caused the jury to
decide against her.

That was the state of the case as it was appealed to a three-judge
panel of the Second Circuit. Judge Sotomayor was by far the most active
questioner at Oral Argument and it was she who wrote the opinion for the unanimous appellate court. Without a trace of sympathy or even interest in the plight of the plaintiff, Sotomayor methodically recounted the evidence of discrimination and, in as cold and legalistic a manner as possible, concluded that Norville "produced insufficient evidence at trial to show that the hospital"
discriminated against her. She thus affirmed the trial judge's
dismissal of Norville's claims of race and age discrimination.

So there you have it, evidence that Sotomayor isn't that empathetic at all. "In a cold and legalistic manner" she sided with the wealthy owners of the hospital and insurance companies. And that is how the system is set up, defend the interests of the wealthy, and dispose of people no longer useful to the profits-first capitalist system.

Shrill Alarmism From Morris, Forgets Who U.S. Allies Are

Why does anybody take this Dick Morris clown seriously? Just listen to the first few seconds of this video where Dick (very appropriate name) Morris just simply "forgets" well known obvious facts. He complains that:

"....he (Obama) is visiting Egypt and Saudi Arabia, but not visiting our one ally in the region, Israel."

Saudi Arabia and Egypt are not U.S. allies? Morris knows of course that they are, but he just says this kind of stuff for the ideological consumption of Fox News watchers. These people will say anything to criticize Obama, but never anything of substance. They are like adolescents mocking and dissing their peers on any straw that they can grasp.

A Doctor who Performed Abortions and was Singled Out by Bill O'Reilly was Murdered Today

A hat-tip to the Daily Doubter blog where I first picked this up. Wichita Kansas doctor George Tiller was murdered at his church today. First news outlet provided by Google news with this story is CNN.

Of further significance is that this doctor had often been singled out by Bill O'Reilly on both his television and radio show. The Daily Doubter has commentary and links to other blog sources documenting and discussing this.

Of course there is no way to directly link what right-wing commentators say with the violent actions of those who decide to take those actions. However, they are indirectly responsible for creating a political climate that encourages actions through their rhetoric.

On Republicans Attempting to Re-brand the Democrats as Socialists

Well everybody has heard about the Republicans attempting to brand the Democrats as the "Democratic Socialist Party" or some such silly thing like that. If you haven't here is the link to a YouTube video, but I am not going to clutter up my pretty blog and embed it here, so just click on the link. These guys are just going loopy!

Here is what I had to say in the comments:

First of all, there are already genuine socialist parties like The Socialist Party. This is just bull shit. It was the banks and the auto industry that came begging for bailouts, not a hostile expropriation from the Obama administration! Oh how I wish it had been otherwise though as a genuine socialist!

So how about rebranding Republicans as:

The Republican Greedy White Man (with a few Uncle Toms) Party?

Or how about the Republican Capitalist Pig Party?

Or maybe the War, Torture, and Exploitation Party.

Or maybe just Republican Idiots Party.

Then another commenter said this:

"The GOP are the Party of the Wealthy, the Corporations, and people that don't know any better."

That about says it all. I will have to get back to the subject of the accurate branding of the Democrats as the party of false progressive hope. Another day.

Deja Vu, U.S. Weapons Fall into the Hands of Insurgents Fighting U.S. Forces

From the May 20th edition of the New York Times:
Arms Sent by U.S. May Be Falling Into Taliban Hands

KABUL — Insurgents in Afghanistan, fighting from some of the poorest and most remote regions on earth, have managed for years to maintain an intensive guerrilla war against materially superior American and Afghan forces.

But military officials, arms analysts and dealers say it points to a worrisome possibility: With only spotty American and Afghan controls on the vast inventory of weapons and ammunition sent into Afghanistan during an eight-year conflict, poor discipline and outright corruption among Afghan forces may have helped insurgents stay supplied.

Left-Wing Wacko Commentary:

If any of this sounds familiar, there have been previous stories about this sort of thing occurring in the Iraq war as well. I am skeptical that the blame can be placed solely on Afghan or Iraqi "corruption". But it is noteworthy that U.S. imperialist forces are aligned with probably significant numbers of people who really don't believe in the cause that they are allegedly being supported in.

You know how right-wing ideologues always have complaints about why various U.S. war efforts go poorly? You know, things like "Our troops have to fight the enemy with one arm tied behind their backs" and which it is usually implied that it is liberal Democrats, or "political correctness" that has done the arm tyeing? Then there is the blaming of the allegedly "liberal" mainstream media or the American anti-war movement that in some way or the other has undermined the war effort. This rhetoric has been commonplace both during the Vietnam era and today during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Remember this story when you hear this bullshit in the future. A good rebuttal will be to remind the right-wing ideologue that the U.S. military was arming its own enemies! Ahh, the follies of empire!