Holte's corner

RIP Health Care Reform

The headline says "Single Payer dies in Senate." But what died in the Senate wasn't single payer, it was honest reform of the system. Both the notion of enabling a "public option" for ordinary systems through "medicaid for all" or through a State run alternative; never even got to the floor except as an amendment offered by Bernie Sanders. What is coming instead is a mishmash of lobbied initiatives meant to satisfy the giant corporations that run our country while appearing to do the will of ordinary people. In short we've been conned by the con men again. I'm with Howard Dean, might as well trash the whole thing, and launch a campaign to clean house in the next set of elections.

Not that this is anything new. Our various chambers of commerce, and the people who own them, have been trying to run the world from behind the scenes since the 19th century. Only their rivalries and incompetence have kept them at bay. If the French, British, and German oligarchs could have agreed on how to divide up the world, they'd still, probably, be running a dysfunctional and increasingly dystopic world. But the marriage alliances between bankers and royalty, didn't manage to reduce the inbreeding of either set enough to keep the various grandchildren of Queen Victoria from warring with one another and almost destroying Europe in the Process. People forget that in some ways World War I was as destructive in its own way as World War II was. Indeed the two wars were pretty much a continuation of each other, as the cold war has been a fallout from World War II.

This struggle for health care reform echoes back to World War I also. We had soldiers fighting in that war who were exposed to punishment worse than anything soldiers have been exposed to since. They were hit with chemical warfare agents that killed their lungs, messed with their immune system, and poisoned them as badly and as thoroughly as a nuclear strike. Teddy Roosevelt's speech starting the initiative came on the heels of them coming home and his compassion, and warrior's empathy, at seeing them.

Some other things were presaged by that war. The false prophet, Marx, was sure that "Capitalism" would destroy itself and bring in a Golden Age. He was half right.

Capitalism is self destructive. But no golden age followed from his prescriptions. The man felt that "history" was God, and that it was a historical inevitability that the workers would overthrow their bosses and install a collectivist world where "Government" would whither away. As a means, folks like Lenin added the notion of a "vanguard of the proletariate" and intellectuals, labor leaders, and ambitious others enlisted themselves to bring about this "worker's paradise." Instead of bringing about a workers paradise they brought about amplified conflict. And their "ends justify the means" morality meant that they used immoral means to seek abstract goals, which inevitably meant immoral results and degraded goals. The Communists won in some instances, were suppressed in others, and held their own in other places. Where they lost most abjectly is where they succeeded. The "vanguard of the proletariate" became what Trotsky would come to call a "nomenclatura" -- a new class of bureaucrats. And since Byzantine bureaucracies have a way of surviving changes of rulers, the only effect they had was to cause a lot of suffering and death and poison the countries they controlled.

Meanwhile theories were developed to fight communism. And guess what, those theories were designed to also attack any critics of capitalism around and to demonstrate that any degree of socialism, local democracy, or worker power was bad for workers. The counter-reformation was on; Minimum wage -- bad for workers. Universal health care -- bad for workers. "Die Quickly" -- good for workers. And that counter-reformation ideology is what just killed health care reform.

That and tons of money poured into advertising campaigns, campaign coffers, astro-turfing, and the dividends of years of investment in astro-turfed institutes and Universities. It is probably fitting that the founder of one of these Universities died last night. He went from petitioning God to take him if he didn't bring in enough money to bringing in so much money that he couldn't refuse the temptation to take some of it for his own aggrandizement. Nevertheless, He lived to see many of his graduates work for the Bush Administration. And since bureaucracies work that way, also work for the Obama administration.