The Chris Moeller Archives

The stupidity of the American people

Our government has been hijacked by corporate goons. This has been obvious for anyone to see for decades. Our lawmakers have been able to store up so much institutional immunity to their acceptance of corporate bribes, these criminal legislators don't even bother to hide it anymore. On Thursday, Arkansas Representative Mike Ross... (insert cough)... a Democrat, publicly admitted he was in the employ of Big Pharma and not the 4th District residents of the Natural State when he helped kill single-payer health care this week:

"We ensured that if there is a government option, it will be just that-- an option-- and it won't be mandated on anybody. If it had been based on Medicare rates, I can assure you that it would have eventually ended up resulting in a single payer-type system, because Medicare has really good rates, because they're negotiating for every senior in America. Private insurance companies could not have competed with that. And so we would have at the end of the day ended up with single payer. Now we've leveled the playing field, if there is a government option, they'll have to go out again and negotiate with providers just like private insurance companies do. That was important to me to insure that we don't end up with some type of single payer system.

Do you get it now? Maintaining the private insurance program isn't really about choice and competition, it's about eliminating choice and competition for the for-profit providers. We're forever being told that government-run health care would be bloated, bureaucratic, and inefficient, and yet private insurers need Congress to protection from having to compete with it. Rep. Ross has only concerned himself with "level(ing) the playing field" between people's health and maintaining the billion dollar profits of the insurance, pharmaceutical, and hospital industries.

But then at health care forums across the country, we've got reactionary conservatives disrupting the proceedings, and issuing death threats against unions and pro-reform legislators. Egged on by television and radio demagogues in a manner reminiscent of the great Miami-Dade County Brooks Brothers Riot of 2000, they fight to the death in defense of corporate bribery. "Save the status quo!" they shout. Quite literally, an elderly protester at an event in South Carolina this week yelled into the microphone, "Keep your government hands off my Medicare!" which is so woefully ignorant of the issues being debated, I dropped my shredded wheat spoon when I read it. I'm reminded of the old story of the pedestrian who stumbles into a group of Communists picketing in the street. He watches innocently enough until a cop starts clubbing everybody in sight. As the cop moves towards the pedestrian, the man shouts, "I'm an anti-Communist, I'm an anti-Communist!" The cop, continuing to flail away, shouts back, "I don't care what kind of Communist you are!"

I'm a defender of humanity, in general, and a big believer in the collective and native intelligence of the American people, especially living, as we do, during an era of so many sophisticated media campaigns of distortion and misinformation by our corporate paymasters, but I admit I'm frustrated by the amount of bullshit the American people seem to be willing to swallow lately. At what point do we have to take responsibility not just for our personal sins of commission, but for our sins of omission in failing to educate and steel ourselves from this constant misinformation?

I refuse to believe that the American people, as a whole, are stupid, yet I have decided to give the other side equal time to present their case: the text of Bill Maher's comments on his "Real Time" HBO show last night.

posted by CM @ 9:22 AM