A House Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand

The current proposals for health care reform that the Congress is considering are fatally flawed due to the massive harmful influence of the for-profit sickness industry conglomerates, including the insurance corporations. These corporations have controlled and dictated the reform legislation being considered by the Democratic Party. And these corporations have also fueled and controlled the virulent organized opposition to any meaningful health care reform that continues to be mounted by the Republican Party.

For the last year, the Democratic Party has tried to submerge the crying need of the American people for real health care reform in America in a scheme that provides ineffective band-aid reforms that will simultaneously further enrich those corporations, as well as solidify their death grip on what should be our health care system. The proposals being considered will be worse than the status quo, because the status quo can not long continue, and the proposals (if they become law) will make the reforms that we do need, even more difficult for us to obtain than they have been. The Democratic Party seeks some political traction and distinction by ameliorating somewhat some of the most egregious and notorious manifestations of a corporate-controlled, for-profit “healthcare” system. But the Democratic Party is as dominated and controlled by those sickness business corporations as is the “opposition” Republican Party, which has chosen to try to confuse people with irrelevant or inconsequential red-herring distractions and “solutions” that won’t touch the real health care problems real people face everyday. But most importantly, the Republican Party has sought for generations to discredit and demolish any and every significant health care reform effort that comes along.

The Republican Party has invariably, for all of our lives, sought to derail each and every significant effort to establish a health care system that serves the needs of the people instead of one designed to deliver ever increasing profits to the corporations. The Republican Party has made no pretense of addressing the real health care crisis, has completely ignored the true causes of the crisis, and has continued, for decades, right up until the present, to deny even the existence of the real health care crisis facing American families. The Republican Party has nurtured divisiveness, and widened chasms between the people with lies and propaganda, turning the health care crisis and necessary reform efforts into just another political wedge issue for partisan advantage. They know that keeping us fighting amongst ourselves keeps us from solving our problems. (The Republican Party crossed the line on one rare occasion and took a page from the Democratic playbook when it initiated prescription drug coverage under Medicare part D which actually prohibited the Medicare administration from negotiating prices with pharmaceutical corporations, thus forcing taxpayers to pay whatever the drug companies wanted to charge, and providing massively profitable corporate welfare subsidies. Part D also established the notorious, cruel and gaping “donut hole” for prescription drug coverage.)

Neither major party is willing to even consider, and hold open public hearings on the simple, obvious solution to our health care crisis, which is the 30 page HR 676, Enhanced Medicare for All. Public hearings providing a careful evaluation of HR 676 should, without any doubt whatsoever, have been held by the Congress. The adamant refusal of both parties to openly discuss HR 676, and to schedule public hearings, is prima facie evidence that our Congress, and both major political parties, are corrupted through and through, and owned by the corporations. I can do nothing but clearly oppose both major parties’ positions on health care reform, and continue to advocate on the principles of the issue and a solution that serves the people.

I don’t, however, see the two major parties as “Tweedle dee and Tweedle dum”. Those names more appropriately describe how the two major parties are perceived by those at the top of the huge corporate entities which simultaneously provide huge sums of money to both parties and their politicians, in order to control both. As far as everyday people are concerned, the two major parties are different in the way that they serve the interests of the corporations and the super-rich. Democratic strategists seek to quiet public dissent with concessions and mild reforms, while protecting and even enhancing corporate profits and power. Republicans try to repress public dissent with oppression, fear, and denial while extending corporate power.

And the two major parties are markedly different in the stances they each take with regards to issues of no consequence whatsoever to the corporations and the super-rich (such as abortion and definition of marriage, the death penalty and injustices in the judicial system). With regards to the political struggle being waged between the two major parties, at this particular moment in history, it is clear to me that the Republican Party is “outed” as public enemy number 1. The Republican Party today stands unequivocally for Rovian politics of divide (and thus conquer) the people , trickle-down economics, unjustified preemptive war, unlimited power and freedom to corporations, unrelenting hostility to organized labor and civil rights movements, accelerating the re-distribution of wealth and income from all the rest of us to the super-rich, and unregulated destructive exploitation of the environment and the commons for short-term profit to enrich a few.

While I cannot support the Democratic Party and Congress’ actions in the last year with regards to the health care crisis, or with regards to the massive blank check bailout of Wall Street financial and insurance corporations and derivatives hustlers, even less am I able to support the actions of the Republican Party strategists and legislators, which have been way more harmful to American families and our future. At this stage of history, of the two major parties in existence today, it is the Republican Party that most needs to be fully discredited and rejected by the people.