YOUR LETTERS ON HEALTH CARE, AFGHANISTAN AND MORE

September 10th, 2009 - by: danny

Nora and Marshall write:

If, you’re like us, you probably want real health care reform – that’s the kind of change our country really needs.

We want to help President Obama stand by his campaign pledge and hope the Democrats in Congress will pass the legislation we so urgently need.

That’s why we’ve made a series of images in support of the Public Health Insurance Plan Option – The Bottom Line – to distribute over the internet.

While the Public Option is not a perfect plan, serious health care reform is not possible without it.

Please feel free to download the images from our website http://www.bottomlinehealthcare.com. (Site works best in Firefox/Safari browsers.)

Send them in emails to your friends and family, let them know there is no health care reform without a strong Public Option.

Sue Fandi writes:

Thank you for your article in Common Dreams calling the President out on his remarks about the economy.

Everyone, or at least Liberals, Democrats, whatever we call ourselves, are afraid to criticize Barack Obama for his actions.
Well, except for our truth-teller, the people’s representative, Dennis Kucinich. We are incredibly lucky to have him, our only common man with a voice and a conscience in Congress.

As I refuse to listen to any of the President’s speeches, I learned from your article that he actually had the nerve to claim credit for saving the economy (ie. paying off the banks when his campaign was largely financed by them). Is it an outrage and should people be angry? Absolutely.

However, I am convinced that spending time in the streets has no impact and I am not being apathetic. When protests are planned and permits are obtained and people walk on the sidewalks in orderly fashion — this is not a protest. It does not disrupt people’s lives or the President’s life or Congress’ lives. It rarely or ever makes the news including online.

The time for the people to have made a difference was at the voting booth. We had our chance with Dennis Kucinich — where were the people out on the streets protesting the government-owned media’s locking Dennis out of the debates? He has been consistent in his votes, his words, his actions for the people. I am not saying real protests should not be taking place and that our voices should not be heard, but most people will not risk arrest, myself included, and it accomplishes nothing anyway. So we are back to voting. Maybe Dennis will run again. One can only hope?

If you have any suggestions, I would like to hear them.

Anyway, thanks again for speaking the truth.

“Our lives begin to end the day we remain silent about things that matter”. — Martin Luther King Jr.

RE MY SUGGESTiONS: Watch for my upcoming film and book on THE CRIME OF OUR TIME. DS

Nancy asks: WHAT REFORM?

Obama and the Democrats refuse to pass healthcare reform. That’s the only honest headline. What Obama and the Democrats instead announced last night is that they will do nothing at all to help the public. They are compelling 40 million Americans to buy health insurance, sending hundreds of millions of dollars of more business to the same criminals who are robbing us blind, but for the rest of us: nothing. No Reform. No Change.

The whole thing was just entertainment for the masses to deceive and defraud the public. What a show it was. Did you notice that all the Democratic women wore red, so they could try to pretend, try to fool the public into thinking this was just as important as the State of the Union? Like a revival carnival tent, I kept waiting for someone to bring out the bearded lady or the two-headed snake.

Everytime Obama opened his mouth the Democrats cheered like it was VE Day all over again. I kept expecting them to have the cameras cut to Times Square where male Democratic employees would be grabbing women, bending them over backwards, and giving them a big kiss, with excited journalists and flashbulbs recording the moment for all time.

“Good Evening” (wild cheers). “How are you?” (standing ovation). I almost think maybe Biden was standing behind Obama with signs, holding them up to the audience when the cameras weren’t looking, like they do in the daytime game shows. Which is pretty much what this was. The Democrats took hundreds of millions of dollars from the health care industry — insurance, doctors, drug companies — in exchange for doing absolutely nothing to provide healthcare to the public. Instead of the TV Listings describing this as “Presidential Address to Congress,” they should have just called it “The Price Is Right.”

Obama got all puffed up when he announced that he will put some price controls on “co-pays and out of pocket expenses,” but notice that he’s not going to restrict the amount charged for premiums. The big money is the monthly premium. The co-pay is like forty bucks. Most people can afford forty bucks, but they can’t afford the monthly premiums. So thanks for nothing. Obama claims that he will not allow the insurance companies to “charge extra” for mammograms or check-ups or colonoscopies, but he pretends that he’s unaware of the fact that most people have a deductible. All of those items would not exceed the deductible, meaning the individual has to pay for it one way or the other, well over a thousand dollars. If Obama believes mammograms and colonoscopies are such life-saving tests (which they are), then why doesn’t the government pay for all of us to have them? Because he’s spending all the public’s money on the wars against Iraq, Afghanistan, his new (undeclared) war against Pakistan, the eight new bases in Columbia, the coups in Honduras by the assassins from the School of Americas. Everything for War, nothing for the people.

Oh yeah. That whole “public option?” Keith Olbermann (on short notice, in fairness to him) kept referring to the fact that there would be a public option. Not really folks. Read the speech. Four years from now there will be a non-profit program set up to pay for healthcare for the uninsured who are too poor to be compelled to buy it for themselves. But only a maximum of 5% of the population can participate. I’m guessing skid row, jail, prison — that type of medical care, to people who have not one penny and no ability to pay. For all the rest of us: nothing. No help, no public option, no Medicare for All, Nothing. And just as an aside: why wait four years to provide health care assistance to the poorest people in our country? My guess is that in four years there will be a quiet announcement that this will not be funded after all.

The big pronouncement that Obama will forbid the exclusion of pre-existing conditions? Big deal. The insurance companies will charge such high premiums that insurance will be unaffordable to anyone with a preexisting condition. Just like it is today.

The pronouncement by Obama that nobody better try to stop him: that was aimed at the Democrats in the House, not the Republicans.

This is a complete sell-out of the public. The only true words spoken came from the Republican who called Obama a liar, because any claim that this represents health care “reform” is a lie.

Michael Brenner writes on Aghanistan:

Permit me two further comments on the Afghan dilemma. I think them worth raising because they pertain to our other interventions in the Greater Middle East as well.

One is the unstated notion that we have the intelligence and skills to manipulate the politics of foreign peoples to our advantage. The fallacy lies not just is the cavalier oversight of cultural and social complexities that, as several contributors have noted, characterize Afghanistan. Even more insidious is the subliminal belief that we are smarter, cleverer, just better than they. They are ‘they’ — we are Americans. A look at the recent record should disabuse us of that conceit.

In Iraq, al-Maliki et al have run rings around Petraeus, Gates, Crocker, etc. They still can’t figured out what has happened. Before and during the SOFA talks, and subsequently, the Iraqis have pursued a complicated, subtle strategy that we didn’t even recognize, much less move to counteract. Some folks in Washington have yet to catch on to the ignoble fact that we were used and now discarded. The Iranians also outmaneuvered us in Iraq from the days of Ahmed Chalabi (the largest piece of whom they owned) onwards.

In Pakistan, the army leadership have succeeded in a precarious balancing act — dictated by their own self-defined interests — to which we first were blind and now are impotent to alter. Our crude attempt to rig internal Pakistani politics via a shotgun wedding between Musharaff and Bhutto (whom we sought to blackmail into being our instrument) while exiling Sharif literally backfired before it became completely unstuck as Sharif has outplayed them all — including us.

In Somalia, we cleverly used Ethiopian Christians to suppress Islamist groups in bolstering an Interim Government that ruled downtown Mogadishu. Now that both the Ethiopians and that government’s leaders have fled, we are trying to prop up a ‘moderate’ Islamist government (since relabeled ‘good guys’) against even ‘worser’ Islamists who are besieging the latest Mayor of Mogadishu.

As for Palestine, and our all-out campaign to boost Fatah against the democratically elected Hamas government, let’s just say that it fits this pattern of politico-diplomatic incompetence.

The second point is the notion that you can fine-tune interventions. Send in ‘X’ number of troops for ‘X’ number of months, rejigger the military/civilian teams, then do a reassessment and adjust the modalities. The real world simply doesn’t permit experimental occupations. There are dynamics that deny us those luxuries. Dynamics at home, dynamics in the military, dynamics in country ‘A,’ dynamics in the region, etc. As one cynical commentator sourly remarked: “I sometimes think that when adolescents addicted to computer games grow up they become counter-insurgency experts.” That caricature is unfair to a corps of able and dedicated persons who have taken on onerous responsibilities. Still, it is no more inaccurate than postulating an ability to calibrate — and recalibrate – strategy/tactics for controlling the affairs of a place like Afghanistan.

SIGN OF BAD THINGS TO COME IN AFGHANISTAN – From Bradley Laing

Da’ud X Mohammad on the radio show this week:

“good hearing your Thursday broadcast of News Dissector Radio today!
maybe Progressive Radio Network could live-stream you daily, like
Walter usta be on TV every night. Your guests on Afghanistan dropped
that one 800 pound bomb in the room about the CIA making a conscious
decision to get Usama bin Laden the hell out of Africa, and send him to
pre-9/11 Afghanistan instead? yeah, true, but what seems to have gone
unnoticed is that the CIA was well enough into Afghanistan,
operationally speaking, to let it happen quite that way. And how is it
that they were there in the first 5,000 places? Same old off-the-shelf
CIA story as everywhere else; running guns and drugs to support their
worldwide doings. Never mind that there is so much money in drugs to
skim for their personal use they can’t quit.”

Comment on my recent article on Obama and the economy:

“The men at the top are oblivious to the pain they helped cause.”

i think they are aware of the pain they helped cause, it’s just that they don’t care.

nice article.”

Jim Veeder writes:

A good article, I am not criticizing it. But I thought for sure, as you developed your thesis, that you would mention that Obama’s major campaign contributor was Goldman-Sachs.

Another “Comment”, Make That a Screed We Have Heard Before featuring every message point and propaganda claim that is pumped out in the right wing echo chamber, in all CAPS of course:

“THIS GUY IS A LIAR, HE HAS ONLY HUNG WITH ANTI-AMERICAN PEOPLE ALL HIS LIFE, HE BOWS TO TERRORISTS WHILE PUTTING RETURNING VETERANS ON THE TERRORIST LIST, JUST ASK HIS JANET RENO TYPE HOMELAND SECURITY BABE……….SO IT IS NO SURPRISE THAT IN LESS THAN 9 MONTHS HE HAS PUSHED A NATION ON THE SKIDS RIGHT OVER……..HE STEALS PRIVATE COMPANIES AND HANDS THEM OFF TO THE UNIONS, HE SPENT 1 TRILLION DOLLARS IN THE FIRST 4 MONTHS……….HE DOES THE LARGEST SPENDING BILL IN HISTORY AND NONE OF IT USED TO CREATE JOBS………….HE HATES AMERICA AND ITS EVIL CAPITALISM AND HE AND HIS CZARS WILL DETAIL JUST HOW MUCH THEY HATE IT………….AND THE CULT OF LOVERS OF THE SWEET TALKING LAWYER LAP IT UP DAILY………..I DON’T THINK THEY HATE AMERICA TOO BUT THEY JUST JUMPED ON BOARD HIS HOPE AND CHANGE MESSAGE……(HITLER USED CHANGE IN HIS MESSAGE TOOOOO) AND DIDN’T REALIZE IT MEANT THAT HE WAS GOING TO “CHANGE” AMERICA FROM A FREE COUNTRY TO A FORCED SHARE THE WEALTH COUNTY……
…………AND HE “HOPES” YOU WON’T NOTICE……….

THAT IS WHY HE TELLS LIES LIKE THE ECONOMIC PROBLEMS ARE OVER TO OUR FACES AND BRAGS THAT HE FIXED IT

OR THAT HIS HEALTHCARE ISN’T FOR ILLEGALS WHICH THE DEMOCRATS FOUGHT FOR THE ILLEGALS RIGHTS

IT IS A GREAT LIAR AND IT GOT HIM IN THE WHITE HOUSE…………WHY WOULD HE START TRUTHING NOW

HE KNOWS THE DEMOCRATS WON’T QUESTION HIS LIES……….JUST GO DOWN THE ROAD UNTIL THEY HAVE NOTHING…..”

ONGOING: Treatment of intersexed African athlete appalling

Thank you. Have a great 9-11. I can’t believe I am writing that. I was also on with Laura Flanders on GRIT TV—watch Friday on Free Speech TV—also up on Firedoglake.

THAT URL OF THURSDAY’S NEWS DISSECTOR RADIO SHOW AGAIN

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