Single Payer
I see upon my return ( I live without computer or news throughout the week) that they have brought out the "Big Guns" to fight against any form of "public option" in the healthcare reform battle. Excellent. It confirms my own instinctual reaction that this fight is more critical than the Employee free Choice Act because it directly confronts the logic of capitalism in all it's hateful perversity. Coming to the defence of the Market System are the enemies of the working class and never in my lifetime have the lines been so clearly drawn. The pigs are so greedy they won't even let any crumbs fall to the floor so it's time to take the whole cake.
Which side are you on? The elite wealth hoarders, the Chamber of Commerce, Corporate Profiteers, their paid politician bootlickers, the media and the AMA on one side. The excluded citizenry of the USA, tired of being raped and abused on the other. At question is not just our personal welfare but our hollowed out "democracy". Combined with the global economic collapse, the glaring contradictions of the "free" enterprise system are in such stark relief that the conservative ideological facade is glaringly becoming more and more transparent. Raw power and greed are in stark relief. If there is any remnant of the rebel left in the American working class character they will not stand for such blatant abuse.
The Power Lobbyists fill the halls of Congress. The money changes hands. Big Pharma, Insurance, Finance, hope they can break out the old tried and true myths and methods one more time, fear of Evil Socialism, Faith in the Invisible Hand, the Biblical Struggle between the Self-Reliant Individual and Big Totalitarian Government, blah blah blah. Liberals "hope" for a compromise they can live with, Democrats plead for understanding but it might just be that the People have had enough this time. Their wages have been stagnant for thirty years, their homes foreclosed, their 401ks decimated, their jobs shipped overseas, their healthcare driving them into bankruptcy. How much more will they take?
posted by troutsky @ 8:09 AM
18 comments
18 Comments:
Trot - In reply to this post and your comment on the last post.
As long as they (the people) cling to the same myth of 'self-reliant individualism' they will be suckers for any abuses the system wants to heap on them...they are 'fools for freedom' and do not understand how this illusion of freedom and radical individualism is their death-knell, doesn't matter if its Big Pharma or Big Brother...we are scared to believe we are independent agents with completely free choice. But primal instincts are correct; it is the mask of self-reliance, independence, freedom of choice, etc that is hiding the truth from us. We have become trained monkeys in a circus that we helped, unwittingly, to create...We can no longer feel the call of our primal nature, it is hidden too many layers beneath the facade of civility. We are small tribe, communal by nature... but we no longer have the freedom to forage and to be at home on mother earth!
You are far too influenced by the political myths espoused by Thomas Hobbes and The Leviathan. Primal, pre-civilized life was not “mean,” ugly, brutish and short as Hobbes argued. I want you to read three books this year: After Eden: The Evolution of Human Domination, by Kirkpatrick Sale, The Evolution of Political Society: An Essay In Political Anthropology, by Morton Fried and The Neanderthal Enigma, by James Shreeve. These will straighten you out on the tenor of precivilized life, politics and community. Also, go and reread Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essay On The Origin of Inequality.
Of course Augustine, and everyone else, would like to reconcile reason and revelation, because that would make them feel good, a rational trajectory of progress, and a transcendent telos for mankind. How effective to control the civilized masses.
And what makes the concept of “justice” transcendent? Justice is a term invented by legislators, also to domesticate and control populations. There is nothing transcendent about it. It is a rational construct, perhaps less than 1000 years old, from the old French, ‘justitia’ or the Latin root ‘justus.’ And it refers to the use of authority in assigning right and wrong, and thus a legislative framework.
Yes capitalism did lead to dog eat dog; one against all, as did the relatively modern concepts of individualism and freedom. But this is not to be confused with the world of our primal fore bearers…as I said, Hobbes was telling fairytales!!
I should have said "we are scared into believing we are independent..."
We need to get the Bolsheviks out of the mix and let the markets work.
The lunatic who shot up the Holocaust museum sounds much like your favorite Nazi LWB. Compare his lunacy with the usual comments on Ren's site and he fits right in.If we gave Von Brunn a few bong hits
he would likely write like Graeme.
but we no longer have the freedom to forage and to be at home on mother earth!
This "freedom" was so wonderful that people gave it up to partake in the capitalist revolution. You are still free to go bum around mother earth; it's just not a very good option.
Also, go and reread Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essay On The Origin of Inequality.
If you could get Troustsky to join in, this would be a good book to read and discuss on the web. I'd recommend reading Camille Paglia's demolition of Rousseau's naive view of benevolent human nature in Sexual Personae. Here's a sample quote:
The French Revolution, degenerating into the bloody Reign of Terror and ending in the restoration of monarchy in imperial Napoleon, was the first failed Rousseauist experiment. Rousseau believes man naturally good. p. 232
The problem is that man is a fallen creature. Civilization represents his attempts to fight back the brutal barbarism to which he naturally sinks.
Wiser:
Yes; man has a 'fallen nature'; while I dislike religious language, man is not naturally base and evil -- aand your assumption that they are is why you fucking communists want to terrorize us just like Stalin. The fall refers, in my opinion to the condition after the birth of big Agriculture, cities, polities, etc. Maybe you also should read the other works I mentioned for Trout!!
love and kisses,
kultur
Wiser... Lesbians have their own political axes to grind.
aand your assumption that they are is why you fucking communists want to terrorize us just like Stalin
I'm not sure what you're getting at here. I'm a libertarian, so I'm not about to go Stalin on anybody. At most, I'll try to denounce you in scurrilous prose, but that's about it.
kultur, Again you seem to treat "primal nature" as a fixed, static and totally hegemonic entity which is totally by-passed by evolution,yet the title of the recommended books suggest change as a dominant principle.
Is instinct exempt from change?
I totally agree that individual-ISM is a fetish and destructive as such but "self" ( as opposed to communal mind)Ive always taken as essential. Are you arguing against individual identity?
As for " mean, ugly, brutish" I have little anthropology background and would never defend Hobbes ( or Marx) in their use of the science. I will try to locate the recommended readings but again,the point is the political possibilities of the here and now. Do you subscribe to Goldmans Lord of the Flies notion, that moderns turned wild would succumb to hierarchical structures based on violent force? If not,isn't a return to the political the only way out?
As for justice, it is a concept which separates humans from other animals. It suggests a framework, not yet realized, around which fairness can replace force as an organizing principle. Again, I believe the task before us is to nurture the full development of the new man, not to try to recapture some ancient essence. "Freedom to forage"requires some form of adjudication or political mediation so that it does not become "each against all". By the way, Wiser is no Stalinist, believe me.
Wiser, This is exactly why the "human nature" question is so pointless. There is no proof, no logical conclusion, no final agreement. That's not to say a discussion of Rousseau couldn't be fruitful on many other aspects but I believe the times call for a re-reading of Machiavelli on the relations of power.
I disagree with your narrative. It is not the fact that healthcare is more threatening than EFCA. The point is Obama won't deliver on either.
Wiser - sorry, I misread your position!
ANd yes Trout, I suppose the only solution for mankind today is political. We have been corrupted beyond repair. And yes, I do recognize change. We have changed drammatically over the past 8 millenium, and radically over the past 400 years. But, that does not alter the fact that more primal instincts are burried underneath, and yes, I suppose with Freud, those instincts have undergone change (sublimation) as well.
The nature of the 'self' as an entity is another question. And what is the 'self' in a preagricultural, preliterate field of relatedness, we don't know. But this reified sense of ego, locked away in a bag of skin, reinforced by personal and historical narrative; this concept of the 'individual' is something relatively new in hominid 'history'.
I am not saying there is only a communal self in prehistory; I don't know what the experience of 'selfhood' was lke then, nor could I. But we can only guess, it was not as it is now, or has been for the past 400 years.
All else about justice, fairness, equity... these are all frameworks necessary to control masses of humanity as a function of urbanization and then industrialization.
I don't understand why the right is in such a lather over this health insurance "plan".
Even the health insurance companies know the jig is up and they'll bankrupt the nation if this keeps on (remember, they maintain a lot of Medicare and keep a good bit of the costs). So they have Obama coming up with a plan that let's them stay in the game and look as if they're being good guys.
This is a non event even for this administration.
Beak, congratulations on working the Holocaust Museum shooting into a thread on health insurance. It seemed like a stretch Bodhisattva but you came through.
Wiser, This is exactly why the "human nature" question is so pointless. There is no proof, no logical conclusion, no final agreement.
If we can't agree that man has done, will do, and is almost always doing bad things, then I give up. Chesterton rightly calls original sin the only doctrine of Christianity which can really be proved. I quote from Orthodoxy:
Some [people of his day], in their almost too fastidious spirituality, admit divine sinlessness, which they cannot see even in their dreams. But they essentially deny human sin, which they can see in the street. The strongest saints and the strongest sceptics alike took positive evil as the starting-point of their argument. If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat.
own instinctual reaction that this fight is more critical than the Employee free Choice Act because it directly confronts the logic of capitalism in all it's hateful perversity
Wow, Trout, you have instincts that sussed out the solution to problems created by a civilization developed to replace instincts with logic? It would seem you have mislabeled your deepest, indisputable convictions just to make them seem naturally right. There's a big difference.
Ren, My wife also does not believe that most angry citizens relate single-payer with anti-capitalism, but I still thinkthe deeper analysis is unavoidable and explains the Corporate dedication to this fight.
Kultur, You use "control the masses" as a pejorative but I guess I believe some sort of administration or organization is necessary. I just want it to be radically democratic, those are the politics.
Wiser, Thats your ultimatum? accept Original Sin or discussion over? You show me someone who is "exquisitely happy skinning a cat" and I'll show you pathology, not real happiness.
Yodood, the question becomes,then, what is instinct, what is reason? How can we discern? I will show you a rational argument for changing the healthcare system. If it works you will say it was "instinctual" ,if it fails you will say it was my civilizational training.
Another excellent discussion everybody, thanks.
And what is this generalized news cycle discussion about Obamam wanting to put bureaucrats between patients and doctors? That was the argument against HMOs and Managed Care generally; yet that is what we have had for over a decade. But the managed care bureaucrats are motivated strictly by profitability targets, and not by quality or patient-centered care. At ;east governmentt bureaucrats, paid by the taxpayor, will feel more compelled to satisfy the taxpayor/consumer. Tell the conservatives to go bend over a fuck themselves. DONT LOOSE YOUR BALLS OBAMA11111
Wiser, Thats your ultimatum? accept Original Sin or discussion over? You show me someone who is "exquisitely happy skinning a cat" and I'll show you pathology, not real happiness.
The essential point isn't that someone who is sinning is possibly unhappy, but that in their attempts to increase happiness they've resorted to doing evil.
We can pretend that evil is something only a few of us do, but this is clearly nonsense. The only way we can insist humans were somehow sinless is to take a time in which we know nothing about them--pre-history--and make up a rather convenient lie.
Trout,
Do you actually not know the difference between instinct and reason? Which is it, your instinct or your reason that tells you I will react negatively to any outcome you predict?
Further thoughts on Single Payer:
Mythmaking in America: The Public Option
It is no surprise how the usual suspects keep regurgitating the same old myths about implementing a public option for healthcare coverage in America.
The first myth is, of course, that the public option will end up rationing and limiting our access to healthcare services. What are these mythmakers (business and politically conservative elements) kidding us about; our access to healthcare services under the current insurance and other managed-care options is already restricted. Unless you have the ‘Cadillac’ of insurance programs, and pay the substantial premiums that go along with it, your access to healthcare is already rationed, and closely managed.
Who among us can just walk into a specialist these days, without first getting permission from our primary care provider (PCP)? And then, when the PCP finally looks you over and tells you how everything seems fine… ‘just take some more cough syrup and go home’…but leave your $20 co-pay on the way out first.
And if you do get the chance to see the specialist, you are lucky if insurance covers the visit; and god-forbid if that specialist suggests further tests, higher-priced drugs or surgery. Now the care-manager assigned to your case from the insurance company begins to monitor your care, and moderate between you and your provider – reviewing your charts, history, and determining the limits of the company’s liability for covered services. Remember, these folks are motivated by maximizing profits and, thus, reducing operating costs. So you are at the mercy of the typical short-term thinking and corporate greed that goes into managing for quarterly or monthly performance.
Myth two. The Government option will drive the other commercial insurers out of business. Hardly! Big yawn! Those buyers who are well-paid and well-heeled will always opt for the more expensive plan. There may be fewer insurers in the market, with smaller ones falling by the wayside. And cost competition should bring some of the profitability margins down with the bigger ones. But, a government option will not lead to the annihilation of commercial options. Especially in the USA, there are just too many rich-folk who will always pay for the expensive alternative, whether or not the service is significantly better.
The final myth is that the delivery of healthcare services will deteriorate across the board, especially in the public-option. But, the logic does not follow. The public-option is financed by the taxpayer; and so the focus would seem to be on servicing those who are ‘capitalizing’ the venture (the taxpayers), and not lining the pockets of corporate managers or profit-hungry capitalist investors.
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