Curt, the necessity for us ALL to be able to communicate is exactly the point I was trying to make in this post:
Texas now wants help from the Federal Government?
You just have a much more eloquent way of putting it.
And Paul... I hear ya... but I just think it's gotten so totally out of control that as a country we're becoming a disaster in the making.
http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/201...-fix-politics/Not to be overly melodramatic, but at the moment, it’s becoming more and more apparent that corporate America and political elites of both parties are locked in an embrace that threatens to scuttle the world economy, the environment and our system of representative democracy.
And we don’t even have a language to talk about it. We measure every political debate along a right-left axis, with rhetoric left over from the culture wars of the 90s. But in doing so, we’re firing past the true villains — the Masters of the Universe who skillfully manipulate tribal prejudices to insure that it is their interests, and not those of the public, that are the ones always being served.
So how does this system work? Well, it starts with crony capitalism –defined as “an economy in which success in business depends on close relationships between businesspeople and government officials.”
And are they ever close. During the past decade the most hotly contested political battle in Washington DC has not been over gay rights or abortion or taxes or the war – it’s been the battle for PhRMA’s money.
When George Bush was in the White House Congress passed Medicare Part D, with the caveat that the government couldn’t negotiate for pharmaceutical prices. Now how does a Congress obsessed with “fiscal responsibility” pass a law forcing the government to pay whatever price an industry want to charge them?
And yet, they did.
So when the Democrats took back Congress in 2006, they made a big show of passing drug price negotiation, championed by Nancy Pelosi, Rahm Emanuel and Barack Obama. But since George Bush would never sign it, there was no danger of it actually passing.
And when Barack Obama could sign it, the Democrats cut a deal with the pharmaceutical companies that guaranteed there would be no prescription drug price negotiations – in exchange for the low low price of $150 million in political advertising.
The public never heard about the true struggle that drove the health care debate because the national media and the political dialog is incapable of much above the level of demagoguery. And in the end, the blogs that had been powerful independent voices during the Bush era became largely subsumed by partisan dynamics.
But the deal that drove $300 billion into PhRMA‘s coffers is not an isolated example. They are the rule, not the exception. And what do companies do when they know their profits are thus guaranteed?
That their markets are protected from competition?
That no matter what kind of a mess they make, they can just take those profits and plow a small fraction of them back into the political system, and lay their losses off on the taxpayers?
They take excessive risk, knowing they will never have to pick up the tab if things go wrong.
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Originally Posted by Nynus
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