March 18, 2010

Public option, private deals

As Miles Mogulescu writes at Huffington Post, even as Obama promoted the public option as a politically feasible compromise instead of Medicare for all -- and most analysts considered it to be politically necessary if not having health insurance was to be criminalized -- he had already promised the pharmaceutical and hospital industries that it would not be in the final bill.

One big sham.

The Democrats now do the work of the Republicans, and the Republicans benefit by opposing the obviously shitty result, eventually regaining control of government, when they in turn will provide the means for the Democrats to regain control. Round and round we go, both parties taking turns being the spokesman for the same moneyed interests, a tiresome game of good cop–bad cop but with grave consequences that nobody can any longer deny (endless expanding war, widening gap between rich and poor, disappearance of the middle class).

Unfortunately, that's how our "democracy" is set up: like a sports contest. Winner-takes-all is not representative democracy. And it has now been perfected to the opposite of democracy, in which our only choice is to vote against someone, since there is nothing to vote for.

[Election Reform]