100 Slaves 100 Enemies

Joe Wilson called the president a liar on national television. Come on, that’s pretty cool. Even though Wilson is the liar, it probably doesn’t hurt to throw out that accusation now and again. “All governments lie,” said I.F. Stone.

And, after he spoke out donations poured into his campaign and his Democratic opponent’s. I think the lesson here is that so little happens on Capitol Hill that anyone can relate to that people are starving for something/someone they can get behind. Politicians could become extremely popular — the whole Democratic Party could become extremely popular, if they all got behind a meaningful change in health care — why? because the majority of people want it.

It seems that a public option would get the ball rolling, wouldn’t it? The for-profit health insurance companies that kick people out of their plans for being sick or having pre-existing conditions wouldn’t stand a chance against a non-profit government plan that aims to provide a service with no strings attached. Sooner or later the insurance companies wouldn’t be making the type of profits they want to make and they’d either get out of business or they’d start to shrink down in size which would probably slowly transform them into humane companies.

Anyway, the reason to hate Joe Wilson is not that he spoke up. The reason to hate him is that he is a political hack for weapons manufacturers and the health care industry:

Wilson was first elected to Congress in 2001, and over the course of his career, his committees have received about $455,800 from political action committees and individual employees within the health sector. The majority of this sum (about $267,900) comes from health professionals, which are Wilson’s No. 1 top industry backer. Individual employees and PACs associated with pharmaceutical manufacturers have contributed $100,650 to his committees over his career.

- Rep. Joe Wilson’s Comments and Connections Still in the Spotlight, OpenSecrets.org, September 14, 2009

Apparently, it is not Clifford’s alter-ego, but in fact a Democrat who receives almost, but not quite, as much money from special corporate interest groups such as the health insurance and financial industries as Republicans.

From today’s front page of the Washington Post, Blue Dogs Receive More Health Industry Backing Than Other Democrats (found via Beat the Press):

[The Blue Dog Coalition] has set a record pace for fundraising this year through its political action committee, surpassing other congressional leadership PACs in collecting more than $1.1 million through June. More than half the money came from the health-care, insurance and financial services industries, marking a notable surge in donations from those sectors compared with earlier years, according to an analysis by the Center for Public Integrity.

A look at career contribution patterns also shows that typical Blue Dogs receive significantly more money — about 25 percent — from the health-care and insurance sectors than other Democrats, putting them closer to Republicans in attracting industry support.

A little later in the article we get this:

“I know there were some that thought we were trying to stop health-care reform,” Ross said in an interview this week for The Washington Post’s “Voices of Power” series. “Nothing could be further from the truth. We simply wanted to slow the process down and ensure that we were working toward the kind of health-care reform that the American people need and want.“

According to these poll results, the American people want universal government-run health care. The Physicians for a National Health Program blog tells us that we could have this with the passage of one of three bills: “The House already has Rep. John Conyers’ H.R.676 and Rep. Jim McDermott’s H.R.1200, and now the Senate has Sen. Bernie Sanders’ S.703“.

OK, so that seems simple enough. So, why won’t Ross do what the majority of people want him to? Oh, right…

Ross has received nearly $1 million in contributions from the health-care sector and insurance industry during his five terms in Congress, according to an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks campaign contributions.

At the end of the article, Charles W. Stenholm, a former congressman from Texas who was part of the original Blue Dog group in the mid-1990s and who is now a agriculture and health care lobbyist answers criticism that money in politics is corrupting the political system by saying that the Blue Dogs “have played a tremendously important role in keeping the process from getting out of control.”

Indeed. Real health care reform would take health care out of the control of the health insurance corporations. And we can’t have that. As Noam Chomsky points out, universal health care “has no political support; only the majority of the public.”

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link: The Center for Responsive Politics’ health care reform section