"Which one of you is going to stand up and tell the parents of those children, 'The game is over'?"

[paft.livejournal.com]

Bill Pascrell,to Republicans during Obamacare hearing: What are you going to do about the approximately 17 million children with pre-existing conditions who can no longer be denied health insurance coverage? You want to go back? You want to say, “You are no longer covered any longer?” You gonna tell the parents of those kids? Which one of you is going to stand up and tell the parents of those children, “The game is over, sorry?"

When someone persists in lying to you, there comes a point where you have to stop merely refuting the lies. You have to look them in the face and simply say "You are lying."

That's where Democrats like Bill Pascrell are now. The lie he's confronting here is the fiction that the current Republican attacks on the ACA are rooted in genuine concern for Americans' access to healthcare. It's easily exposed by simply citing recent history. Which Parscrell does, much to the obvious discomfort of Republican Tim Griffin (whose resemblance to Frank Burns* in this clip is positively uncanny.)



The extreme free market right wing in this country has grown to the extent that charitable assumptions about such basics as an allegiance to common usage and common decency are no longer safe. Does someone insist, in the face of all history and reality, that Hitler was a liberal? Be persistent and you'll likely find out s/he's using an extra special definition of "liberal" that s/he knows perfectly well is at odds with how most people define it. Is someone blandly declaring that the United States has the best healthcare system in the world? Dig. Ask the right questions. You may discover that the person does not base this assertion on the mistaken belief that our infant mortality rate is lower than it actually is. It may very well be based on the belief that watching each other die from untreated illnesses is a laudatory life-lesson for people who've been unable to save enough money to pay out of pocket for medical care. They may even call dying from a treatable disease because you can't pay for it a "choice."

Of course, saying early on and publicly "I'm radically redefining the word liberal/racist/socialist/torture/etc." or "I think our high infant mortality rate is a dandy way of dealing with the surplus population" would be the honest way to approach argument, but it would also quickly destroy the arguer's credibility. The people who believe these things know this, so they often count on the naivete of whomever they're debating. They buy time, emit clouds of jargon the way frightened squids spew ink, avoid at all costs any discussion of the actual human consequences of their policies.

Because they know that it's not just their definitions of "racist," "torture," "socialist" etc., that are at odds with common usage. Their definition of "good" and "humane" aren't what most other people have in mind when using those terms.

*Mendacious, snivelling villain from the '70s era sitcom M*A*S*H, brilliantly played by Larry Linville.

Foxes in Charge of the Henhouse

[brother-dour.livejournal.com]

...and they are greedy foxes.

Ladies and gentlemen, please turn your attention to the Huffington Post article I found today via an anti-lobbying community I watch on Facebook (yeah, I know, talk about shooting for the moon):

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mansur-gidfar/theres-something-absolute_b_4177330.html?utm_hp_ref=politics

In a nutshell: there is a bill currently in the U.S. House of Representatives which eliminates key anti-speculation regulations in the Frank-Dodd Act which supposedly has 'broad bipartisan support'.  This is what is destroying the U.S., and by association the rest of the world: corporate lobbying run rampant.  Special interest groups which have essentially unlimited lobbying power in the U.S., to the point that U.S. politicians are allowing them to write bills.  Sure, there were other examples- SOPA comes to mind, being as it was pretty much exclusively written by MPAA and RIAA shills.  But in both cases, this is proof that the U.S. is no longer anything like a representative government- it is a plutocracy, plain and simple.

And while it is easy to say 'lobbying must stop', unfortunately I see three problems here (and two are fundamental with the U.S. system of governnance).  One, the very people who in the United States would be drafting and approving anti-lobbying legislation are the same people who benefit the most from lobbying - the foxes (U.S. Congresspeople).  You can hardly expect anyone to cut their own throats, especially career politicians!  Second, thanks to SCOTUS rulings on corporate personhood and campaign contributions, any kind of meaningful lobbying reform, will most likely require a Constitutional amendment. And who traditionally implements Constitutional Amendments? That's right: Congress.  The third and possibly most insidious problem, though, is public apathy.  We argue back and forth about Left versus Right, Conservative versus Liberal, with gusto here and all the time.  But really, those arguments are pointless while the system is fundamentally broken.  The fact that most Americans even are totally ignorant of how lobbying affects them and how much it has diluted the political power of the voter only makes the status quo more resilient to change.

EDIT: so we know what must change to prevent another 2008 housing collapse, or another 2013 government shutdown / borderline default.  The question is: given the above, how do we change it?