baloney

Dennis Kucinich's conversion notwithstanding, I can make no better comment on so-called health care reform than to refer people to Norman Solomon's comments on this sad parody running at Common Dreams.

Three months ago Howard Dean said, "If I were a senator, I would not vote for the current healthcare bill. Any measure that expands private insurers' monopoly over healthcare and transfers millions of taxpayer dollars to private corporations is not real healthcare reform."

I held with that position then and I still do, because, as Solomon remarks, "I continue to believe that guaranteed healthcare -- a.k.a. single-payer or enhanced Medicare for all -- is the only way to solve this country's enormous healthcare crisis. But early last year, before the public option shrank and shrank some more and then disappeared under the bus of the Obama administration, it appeared to possibly be a significant step forward...But the White House, even while claiming to want a public option, was cutting deals with the pharmaceutical and hospital industries while ditching the public option..."

For any who might doubt the truth of Norman Solomon's assertions, he refers readers to the documentation provided by the Huffington Post's Miles Mogulescu.

"It's remarkable and sadly revealing," Solomon concludes, "that boosters of the bill have scarcely mentioned -- much less publicly come to terms with -- the dire implications of a nearly enacted law that requires people to have health insurance and offers no option other than further enriching the private insurance industry."

If this is and the expanding Afghan War are the kind of change Obama has in mind he can keep it. His first year along with the performance of his made-to-order Democratic Congress have shown conclusively that Democrats are the tools of the corporate oligarchy just as much as Republicans are. They're cosmetically different, that's all.

Seven years ago Doris Haddock, the 100-year-old activist who died a few days ago said, of this oligarchy,"The CEO's of their corporations make tens of millions of dollars a year, not on the long range expectations of profits, but on this year's, this quarter's profits, and how those profits affect stock prices. They can't think more than a year out. The real problem is that they also own all the broadcast networks now, and they finance the careers of most of the politicians."

This is why politics has become so intolerably boring lately. Our rulers have set on themselves on a self-destructive course, but the slow collapse is occurring in what we today call "real time," and they're still firmly in charge. Nothing will change in the short run.

The only escape lies in the future, and on learning how to be in the future now. To paraphrase the Vietnamese monk Thich Naht Hanh, it's not enough to just want the future, you have to be the future.