Obama has made sure that significant health care reform will fail. Since this time he could not at all hide his pro-plutocratic maneuvers behind Paulson, Bush, and colossal fake naivety, he devised a very clever trick.
Progressives may want to be fully aware of that dirty trick before it snaps on, and crushes any chance of forcing a significant health care reform through Congress.
What Obama did was to sabotage his own administration, very discreetly. He sounds as if he wants to build a bridge towards better health care, but he has already mined the bridge. Just in case somebody would find a way to complete it. The health care profiteers thus got a down payment on his sincerity, towards them.
By European standards, the Obama administration is completely corrupt. And everybody in Europe will see, when they pay attention.
The Obama administration gave, lent or guaranteed, without any compensation or any debate, US $24,000 billion of taxpayer money to the richest people in the world, so that they could keep on exerting their power, and keep their riches. This is so ludicrous, the greatest heist in history, and so completely unexplainable that we are drawn to the dreadful conclusion that Obama and his accomplices intent to profit personally from it.
Obama boosted enormously the ridiculous and immoral, bound-to-fail war in Afghanistan, without any caution. And there again the lives and treasure and moral authority of the USA were squandered, and the debate was nonexistent.
Then Obama turns around and says the few billion dollars he needs for health care will have to be paid for by cuts; to cure Americans, he has no money. To kill Afghans, he has plenty of money. For the banksters, he has money to no end, and calls them the "financial system" (when he is not calling them his "friends", in a rare lapse of sincerity).
Obama has one doctor as an adviser, Ezekiel Emanuel, who is on the record in a thousand places and journals, explaining that people less than 15 and more than 40 are too young, or too old, to receive full medical treatment, that older people with serious ailments ought not to be treated at all, and that not "fully participating citizens" ought not to be treated either. No country in the world does such a thing, because it would be viewed as deeply inhuman.
Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the Obama health adviser, explains that the 3 year old is not as valuable as the 18 year old. Presumably the later can be his valet, or die in Afghanistan, fighting who Obama has decided are Muslim extremists. Not even the worst of Islamist fundamentalist has not suggested such a calculus of death. But Dr. Emanuel is a health adviser of Obama.
Why did Obama nominate such a monster as a health adviser? It is not an oversight, it is a crafty scheme. This is Obama navigating, progressing, taking care of Obama. Dr. Emanuel is in the role of making sure that any health reform of Obama will be profit friendly. Dr. Emanuel is a guarantee, because he guarantees that, if worse comes to worse, and Congress revolts, and some significant, progressive, human health care reform seems unavoidable, the enemies of reform will be able to point out at Dr. Emanuel, and call him Dr. Death (because he is!), and kill reform (they already called him so). In other words, Obama himself has made sure that his own alleged will to reform health care will fail. And the health profiteers know it, so they are nice to him, and trust him. This is high level Machiavellianism.
Still another Obama health adviser accuses research and new treatments as the source of increased costs.
In all of this, they forget to mention extravagant profits of health care organizations, from health insurance to big Pharma, to HMOs.
Politicians such as Valerie Jarrett and Michelle Obama would be on trial for corruption in France: for getting huge amounts of money while sitting on a hospital board, and not having medical licenses. That amounts to influence trafficking. They took medical decisions affecting an entire society, according to the principle of minimizing the treatment of the poor. Michelle Obama was instrumental in these huge medical decisions, such as busing far away poor patients.
But what else to expect? The day after his election, Obama went to work inside a hedge fund. His Chief of Staff got 16.2 million dollars from a bank, in 2 years, although he does not hold a degree in finance or economics. Obama chose the destroyer of the American economy, and Roosevelt's financial and economic reforms, Larry Summers, as his chief economic adviser, and so on.
From reading his memoirs, discourses, side remarks, and who he associates with and how, the psychological and cognitive portrait of president Obama can now be made. He believes in the advancement of himself, and what he calls "navigating", apparently his ultimate value. His body of wisdom and knowledge is just enough to allow him to say what sounds good, but he does not really believe in progress for others.
As far as Obama is concerned, since he knows little and believes in even less, mouthing religiously what the powers that be tell him to say is enough. For health care, he was told to put "lipstick on the pig", so he does. Requiring private health insurance without a public plan will boost enormously the health care providers' profits. Obama knows this.
So why did Obama cut this absurdly naive secret deal with the drug companies and other health care profiteers?
Well, because, the way Obama and his accomplices see it, precisely because they are not naive, as those who care about the progress of others are.
Obama cut secret deals with the health care profiteers, to make sure that they will not finance the opposition in 2010. That's navigating for you. Obama wanted to be president, he is president, he wants to stay president. He will do what it takes for that, whatever it is. That's all it is, the first half of his entire plan. Obamacare: taking care of Obama.
And Obama keeps an eye on the sort of gigantic fortune Clinton piled up by influence trafficking. Obama has noticed that Clinton did not infuriate the powers that be, but, instead did what Nixon, Reagan and Bush did not dare do: dismantling the work of president Roosevelt and his Congress, the Banking Act of 1933. To progress further that way, Obama put back in command the Rubin team, that allowed Clinton to dismantle Roosevelt.
The Rubin team is headed by that genius of dissemblance, Larry Summers. Today's "navigation", tomorrow's profit. As Obama says: "Look where I am!" Progress is the progress of Obama, and that way, Obama is doing pretty well. Obama considers that the progressives that got him elected have no power whatsoever, of the sort of power he cares about, and that, whenever he needs those suckers, he could fix them as needed, with another seduction dance.
His real bosses got their 24,000 billion dollars, just in banking. Now the bosses are going to make more of a fortune, by forcing the losers in American society to pay for private profits in health care, as Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel wants them to.
Those who disagree with that cost saving health care plan are probably demented, and Dr. Ezekiel will see to it that they get no treatment (don't scream at me that I am a fascist because I describe, and decry, fascism: Dr. Ezekiel has written that dements ought not to get medical treatment; only one regime tried that before, Hitler's regime, and the outcry was such, the Nazis had to stop...).
I am dismayed by the evolution, or rather, revelation of Obama. But that is the way it is. We have to anticipate his next move in Obamacare, if we do not want a furthering progress that does not just serve Obama and his hypocritical retinue. ***
Patrice Ayme http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/
