We Fight Low Information
Norman Solomon: For a year now, leading Democrats have steadily embraced more corporate formulas for “healthcare reform.” In the name of political realism, they have demobilized and demoralized the Democratic base. In the process, they’ve fueled right-wing populism.
Dick Price & Sharon Kyle: After riding a euphoric crest of progressive support into the White House last year, President Barack Obama faces a very different challenge going into 2010: Regaining the trust and support of his own political base.
Brad Parker: If our former Chair of the CDP was correct, that the Democratic Party is a business, then it follows that it is also just another in the current line of American businesses that can’t or won’t Stand & Deliver on its Goods & Services
NNU and nurses will continue to work with the thousands of grassroots activists across the nation to campaign for the best reform, which would be to expand Medicare to cover everyone, the same type of system working more effectively in every other industrial country. The day of that reform will come.
After a year of escalation in Afghanistan, solicitude toward Wall Street and the incredible shrinking healthcare reform, we ought to be able to see that the biggest problem among progressives has been undue deference to the Obama administration.
Washington DC is so stuck in its traditions it is literally the land that time and technology forgot. Press galleries off the House and Senate floors are musty old museum chambers lined with musty leather couches, antiquated black wall telephones and 1940s era phone booths. One could envision reporters of that age bursting from the floor vote to call or Telex in their copy to the National desk then retire to a local tavern.
The official position of the California Democratic Party is unequivocally in favor of single-payer healthcare. And yet Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, did what she could to sabotage the single-payer position of her own party in her own state.
First, haven’t we all had our fill of tepid Democrats? Blue Dogs, Red State moderates, careerists, call them what you will; we don’t need any more Democrats in Congress who pose as up-from-the-grassroots voices for the common man, only to climb right in bed with the vested interests the moment they get to Washington.
Nine months into the Obama era, it’s not simply the Right that is detached from the perspectives of everyday people, and not just the Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck crowd that express an “I told you so” attitude toward the President’s actions.
But if Obama doesn’t weigh in forcefully and say “no” to the hush money for Big Pharma, big insurance, and the AMA, America’s middle class will get walloped. And if the walloping starts before 2012, Sarah Palin or some other right wing-nut populist will wallop Obama.
For those of who believe, as we do, that the tepid healthcare reforms rising to the top right now will either be too weak to benefit Americans who need help the most or will benefit most the insurance companies and others who already profit handsomely by withholding life-giving care, this is the time to press forward universal healthcare options that will actually solve the country’s healthcare crisis.
President Obama presented a strong hybrid speech last night. He reached out to Republicans who clearly will not vote for it, encouraged Democrats to grow a spine, and went back to his community organising sharp elbowed Chicago political style.
If healthcare reform is to succeed, its proponents must reframe the issue as one of nationwide criminality. The current health insurance system is a recurring act of national theft.
Meanwhile, to my knowledge, only one elected Republican official has called for this to stop. I guess crazy is a pre-existing condition, as Paul Krugman notes in his blog.
In the words of US Senator Ted Kennedy, “we will end the disgrace of America as the only major industrialized nation in the world that doesn’t guarantee health care for all of its people.”
Drawn from a presentation Dr. Matt Hendrickson gave at a Single-Payer Healthcare forum given in Santa Monica last month, our LA Progressive survey was designed to underscore just how dire America’s healthcare system has become—and to give you a chance to test your knowledge and intuitions.
While progressive talk radio may not attract the numbers Limbaugh attracts, there is hope on the horizon. One ray of hope is radio talk show host Mario Solis Marich. Recently, we were invited to do a spot on his show, the Mario Solis Marich Show on Progressive Talk Radio AM 1150 in Los Angeles.
Major media outlets have failed the public again.
itigroup — the giant Wall Street bank still on life-support courtesy of $45 billion from American taxpayers — wants to pay its 25 top executives an average of $10 million each this year, and award its best trader $100 million. Whaaaaaat?
Red-Baiting and Racism: Socialism as the New Black Bogeyman. This noise is about race. It is about “othering” a President who is seen as a symbol of white dispossession: dispossession of white hegemony, white entitlement, white expectation, and white power, unquestioned and unchallenged from the darker skinned other. -Tim Wise McClintock’s Neocon “Morality” Tortures the [...]
This video was provided by Bill Moyer’s PBS Television show. It is available on YouTube. Here, Bill Moyer’s interviews Wendell Potter a former healthcare insurance executive. The interview is approximately 37 mins long. The following message was sent to the LA Progressive by a reader who calls himself jacksmith: We have the 37th worst quality [...]
Fewer than Half of Returning Vets Suffering Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome Seek Help, VA Doctor Says. Veterans returning from the fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq are displaying many of the same post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms of troops that fought in Viet Nam, yet most do not seek treatment. -Sherwood Ross Lou Dobbs Show Cites Fear [...]
This Republican disruption strategy will fail. 2010 will not be 1994. There’s too much momentum behind universal health care right now to stop it.
Under pressure from industry and their lobbyists, the public plan has been watered down to a small and ineffectual option at best, if it ever survives to being enacted
Bachmann doesn’t point out that 9.5 million of uninsured noncitizens that she cites includes both legal and undocumented immigrants.
Berry Craig: Called the “Ride for Respect,” the demonstration at Walmart corporate headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, will be modeled on civil rights volunteers who rode buses into the South in the 1960s to protest Jim Crow racial injustice.
Charles Hayes: What 42 makes crystal clear is how shallow and superficial the strain of contempt is that enables and sustains racism as prejudice is handed down from one generation to the next.
Walter Moss: What unites us, as it did the early Progressives, is resistance to–in John Muir’s memorable phrase–“trying to make everything dollarable.”
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