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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Land Shark who wrote (993006)	1/10/2017 1:01:06 PM
From: Broken_Clock	1 Recommendation Recommended By Mick Mørmøny Respond to of 1575422

LOL I support medicare for all dimwit. You are supporting the Nixon/Hillary/Romney/Obama corporate welfare. You must have been excited this day: -------- Doctors, Single Payer Activists Arrested Published on Tuesday, May 05, 2009 by CommonDreams.org Doctors, Single Payer Activists Arrested by Donna Smith It has finally happened right here in the United States. Citizens who believe healthcare is a human right have been arrested and are being processed like criminals through the Southeast District of Columbia police station. Their crime? Asking for single payer healthcare reform - publicly funded, privately delivered healthcare - to be discussed during the Congressional hearings on reform. Doctors and other single payer activists were handcuffed and went to jail today speaking up for single payer to be at the table in the Senate finance Committee's roundtable discussion on healthcare access and coverage. In stark contrast, Karen Ignagni, head of the industry lobby group American Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) was escorted into the room like royalty by staff members of the Senate committee. Clearly, the position of the United States Senate is not with the majority of Americans who support a national, public insurance system. It made me physically ill to see Maryland pediatrician Margaret Flowers cuffed like a criminal and pushed out the door as the Senators waited to begin their staged roundtable discussion. It made me want to scream. It made me proud of them for being bold but ashamed that not one Senator spoke up for their own citizen-protestors and asked that they at least be allowed to speak. But the insistence that the citizens rising in protest be arrested continued from the chair with each incident. Simply asking to have single payer be included and fully vetted is a crime. Profiting as the for-profit health insurance companies do at the expense of 22,000 American lives every year, however, gets you a run of the table in this healthcare reform discussion. Just ask the Senators who are drafting what this nation's health system will look like - and watch their behavior today - if you want evidence of how your voice will be heard in the process. The protestors were stoic and respectful but direct. One by one they stood. One by one they asked why single payer reform was not "at the table" of 15 witnesses Senator Max Baucus and his finance Committee gathered to map out what sort of coverage Americans might expect in the Senate reform bill now being crafted. Sen. Baucus eventually spoke and indicated that he was respectful of those who believe in single payer - as he acknowledged many of his constituents in Montana do - but he made no attempt to explain why no single payer voice has been included in any Senate discussion to date. He urged any others in the audience who might have any designs on speaking up like the protestors did to not do so, and then he moved on to his roundtable discussion. The press seated comfortably at the press table first looked amused and then puzzled by the procession of protest in the chamber. The C-SPAN cameras fixed on both the Committee's table at the front of the room and the witness table directly across from them could have easily picked up the protests but the network chose to keep their cameras fixed only on Chairman Baucus - though the protestors' words could be heard in the audience. Only two reporters of the 20 or so assembled were curious enough or industrious enough to rise and exit the room to see the arrests being carried out in the hallway. While neither the Finance Committee or the press allowed their proceedings to be disrupted for very long, the air in the room and the atmosphere had changed -- the giddy and gleeful assembly of industry lobbyists who had been chattering in rapt anticipation of the coming of their carefully chosen witnesses could not deny that some brave and patriotic fellow citizens had just been hauled out for arrest for nothing more than demanding that a point of view held by a majority of patients, nurses, physicians and other healthcare providers be included in the national discussion. While this Congress may pass something very different than single payer reform, it will not do so without hearing the cries of the people left so openly exposed to personal health and financial ruin by the corrupt system that celebrates only profit. The citizens who stood for the thousands and thousands of dead today will not let this democracy give itself completely over to the big money interests in healthcare. Not without a fight. Not on their lives or yours or mine.

To: Land Shark who wrote (993006)

1/10/2017 2:03:00 PM

From: jlallen

4 Recommendations

Recommended By
locogringo
Mick Mørmøny
TideGlider
tntpal

Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 1575422

Obozo, Clown POTUS.....abject failure.



The Obama Legacy A Presidency of great promise ends in rancor and disappointment. Jan. 9, 2017 7:05 p.m. ET WSJ Opinion President Obama once said that as President he aspired to be the progressive Ronald Reagan, and as he prepares to leave office he has succeeded in fundamental if ironic ways. While Reagan left behind a calmer, more optimistic country, Mr. Obama leaves a more divided and rancorous one. While the Gipper helped elect a successor to extend his legacy, Mr. Obama will be succeeded by a man who campaigned to repudiate the President’s agenda. Barack Obama has been a historic President but perhaps not a consequential one. * Mr. Obama was always going to be a historic President by dint of his election as the first African-American to hold the office. His victory affirmed the American ideal that anyone can aspire and win political power. This affirmation was all the better because Mr. Obama won in large part thanks to his cool temperament amid the financial crisis and his considerable personal talents. Yet his Presidency has been a disappointment at home and abroad, a fact ironically underscored by Mr. Obama’s relentless insistence that he has been a success. In his many farewell interviews, he has laid out what he regards as his main achievements: reviving the economy after the Great Recession, a giant step toward national health care, new domestic regulations and a global pact to combat climate change, the Iran nuclear deal, and a world where America is merely one nation among many others in settling global disputes rather than promoting its democratic values. Even on their own terms those achievements look evanescent. Congress has teed up ObamaCare for repeal, and Donald Trump will erase the climate rules. The global climate pact is built on promises without enforcement, and Mr. Trump ran against and won in part on the slow economic recovery. Authoritarians are on the march around the world as they haven’t been since the 1970s, and perhaps the 1930s. * These results flow both from the progressive agenda he pursued and the way he tried to implement it. He took power in 2009 with historic Democratic majorities, and he made the mistake of using them to fulfill 40 years of unmet progressive dreams. From his first days he let Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi write the stimulus and ObamaCare, to the exclusion of Republicans. “I won,” he famously replied when Eric Cantor asked him to consider Republican economic ideas. The result is that his legislative achievements were built on partisan votes that now make them vulnerable to partisan repeal. Mr. Obama rejected bipartisanship even after he lost Congress—the House in 2010 and Senate in 2014. He walked away from a budget deal with John Boehner in 2011 at the last minute because he wanted more tax increases. In his second term he all but disdained Congress, preferring to rule by regulation. This was a gamble that he could elect a Democratic successor to protect his executive orders, but his immigration and other rules can be erased by Mr. Trump or Congress. By rejecting the hard work of building political consensus, Mr. Obama built much of his legacy on sand. * Mr. Obama’s progressive agenda failed most acutely on its core promise of economic “fairness.” The President made income redistribution to address inequality his top policy priority, above economic growth. The result has been the slowest expansion since World War II and even more inequality. Higher taxes and wave after wave of new regulation dampened investment, while expanded entitlements and transfer payments lured more Americans out of the workforce. After the 2009 spending bill failed to spur durable growth, the White House relied almost entirely on the Federal Reserve to prevent another recession. The Fed was able to raise asset prices, which has helped the relatively affluent who own assets, but it couldn’t ignite the broad-based expansion and new business creation to lift average incomes. The Reagan and Bill Clinton expansions left the public in an optimistic mood. Illegal immigration and trade deficits were larger than during the Obama years, but Americans worried less about both because they could see the tide rising for everyone. The slow-growth Obama years created the dry political tinder for Mr. Trump’s campaign against immigration and foreign trade. * The story is in many ways even worse on foreign policy. When Reagan left office the Soviet Union was in retreat and the Cold War nearing its end. As Mr. Obama leaves office, the gains of the post-Cold War era are being lost as world disorder spreads. This too flows from Mr. Obama’s progressive worldview. He fulfilled his 2008 campaign promise to reduce America’s global involvement, especially in the Middle East, but his willy-nilly retreat has led to more chaos. He deposed a dictator in Libya but walked away from the aftermath. His decision to leave Iraq let him claim the “tide of war is receding” as he ran for re-election in 2012, but it allowed Islamic State to gestate there and in Syria as he let its civil war burn out of control. The President’s calls for a world without nuclear weapons have been met by the acceleration of nuclear programs in North Korea and Pakistan. A “reset” with Moscow did nothing to alter Vladimir Putin’s revanchism in Ukraine and beyond. Reductions in U.S. military spending have emboldened China to press for regional dominance in East and Southeast Asia. Whether his deal with Iran prevents that country from becoming a nuclear power won’t be known for several years, but it has already helped Iran fund its terrorist proxies in Syria, Lebanon and Yemen. His outreach to Cuba may be historic but so far it has yielded no benefits for the Cuban people. *** Perhaps the most decisive verdict on the Obama era is the sour public mood. While Americans like and respect the President personally, which explains his approval rating, on Election Day they said by nearly 2 to 1 that the country is on the wrong track. Even race relations, which should have improved under Mr. Obama’s leadership and example, seem to have become worse. His polarizing Presidency has now yielded an equally polarizing successor. The lesson is not that Mr. Obama lacked good intentions or political gifts. Few Presidents have entered office with so much goodwill. The lesson is that progressive policies won’t work when they abjure the realities of economic incentives at home and the necessity of American leadership abroad.