I watched President Obama’s speech on health care, and I watched Rep. Joe Wilson’s little outburst on the floor of Congress in the middle of the speech. I’m with the people who have all but accurately noticed that it must have been incredibly hard for Wilson to cut off the “boy!” on the end of his “you lie!” statement. Oh yes – his little outburst and lack of respect for the President of the United States could only have been precipitated by an underlying predisposition to President Obama – not his office.
If a Democrat had called President Bush a liar on the floor of Congress even when he WAS actually lying, there would have been outrage. They would have been called unamerican and unpatriotic, and there would have been calls for that legislator’s resignation. There will be no such things in this case, although I think that Representative Wilson should at least be censured by his peers for breaking not just Congressional standards but his own party’s rules of decorum. That being said, there are a few things worth knowing about Representative Wilson, and exactly what kind of person he really is. Here are some of my favorites of that list of 14:
. Wilson is a member of the organization, Sons of Confederate Veterans, reports Dave Niewert of Crooks and Liars, which “as the Southern Poverty Law Center has detailed assiduously, has been taken over in the past decade by radical neo-Confederates who favor secession and defend slavery as a benign institution.” (Not that Wilson’s affiliation has anything to do with his unprecedented heckling, during a presidential address before a joint session of Congress, of our first African-American president.)
3. Wilson served as an aide to the late segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond, who is credited with conducting the longest filibuster in Senate history — against the 1957 civil rights bill.
4. When Thurmond’s bi-racial daughter, fathered out of wedlock with an African-American teenage girl, came forward in 2003 — after Thurmond’s death — Wilson castigated Thurmond’s daughter, saying he did not believe her story. Essie Mae Washington-Williams was conceived of a union Thurmond had with his family’s 16-year-old maid. Thurmond was 22 at the time. “It’s a smear on the image that [Thurmond] has as a person of high integrity who has been so loyal to the people of South Carolina,” Wilson said, according to TPM. Wilson later apologized to Washington-Williams.
5. A large percentage of Wilson’s campaign contributions come from the health sector, according to OpenSecrets.org. Over the course of his eight-year congressional career, Wilson has collected $414,000 from the health sector, topped only by contribution from what OpenSecrets calls the “finance, insurance & real estate” sector, from which he has gleaned $455,000.
Ah, so there you have it. Not only is Wilson likely racist, but he’s also getting tons of money from the health sector – enough that he’ll do whatever they ask, even if that means try banal and disrespectful town-hall tactics in the hallowed halls of government. The same people who whined during Bush’s presidency that you should “respect the office even if you don’t respect the officer” are calling Wilson a hero. Ah yes, the hyprocritical right. We know you well.
Thankfully, the whole incident has energized the base of both Wilson and more importantly his Democratic opponent for his House seat. His opponent has raised well over a million dollars in the days after the event. Make sure to sign the petition and find out how to donate at JoeTheHeckler.com.
[ 14 Things You Need to Know About Obama Heckler, Rep. Joe Wilson ]
Source: AlterNet
There’s a lot of talk about the “public option” in health care. I still don’t believe there are people who believe that the private sector can do healthcare better at this stage: you would figure we would have learned from the crash of the financial markets that the private sector is a masive, self-mutilating, self-devouring machine that’s driven by accountants aiming to make bottom lines look as fat as possible and please shareholders – not at all dedicated to the mission or goals of any organization, regardless of what that organization is.
In the case of health care, this goes back to the core question of why taking care of the lives and livlihoods of our families, friends, and neighbors is allowed to be a for-profit initiative in this country. It also goes to prove the point that considering thousands of Americans die every year because of lack of health care or sub-standard health care, and the fact that the rest of us may be grateful for the coverage we get but we’re still stuck only seeing the doctor for 15 minutes while they rush between patients, don’t get a chance to build a personal relationship with our primary care physician (if we have one and don’t instead just use urgent care or the ER), and never wind up with the opportunity to get preventative care, the private sector isn’t doing terribly well at it.
All things considered, what do we have to lose? If people are somehow worried about how the government could handle health care (even though Medicare, Medicaid, and Military and Veteran’s Health are all government administered programs and are all highly lauded) all they need to do is turn around and look at the private sector. Can it really get much worse? Conservatives trot on the 5% of any population that dislikes their local universal health care plan (but still participates in it anyway) to decry those systems, when the other 95% of the population of any of those countries look at the debate going on in the US as if we’re all mad.
In fact, there are numerous “public options” in American life, with many of them rooted deep in the nation’s history. In the area of education, there are public schools; in recreation, public parks; in travel, public roads; in fire-fighting, public fire departments; in law enforcement, public police forces; in culture, public libraries; in transportation, public bus and train lines; in mail delivery, the post office; in sanitation, public water supply plumbing, and sewers; in energy, public power; in old-age security, Social Security; in nutrition, public school lunch programs. Where did the notion ever come from that public programs were somehow “un-American”?
Even in the disputed area of health care, there exist public hospitals, Medicare, Medicaid, the Veterans Administration and the National Institutes of Health.
These and other public programs, while not perfect – and often challenged by private competitors – seem to work well enough most of the time. If they did not, Americans would be clamoring to abolish them. But, with the exception of the wealthy and their supporters, who dislike paying for their share of these social benefits through progressive taxation, most Americans seem reasonably contented with them. And when they are not, they use their democratic rights to reform and refine public services until they get them into more acceptable shape.
But then, conservatives will whine, what about the cost? Yeah, the reason these programs cost money is because they serve the public – a sheer massive amount of people – the difference is that the money comes from tax dollars and not bankruptcy-inducing fees and bills, as from the private sector. Even so, for some reason people find it easier to complain about taxes when they’re actually getting a service than complain about bills, fees, and price gouging when they’re not getting served at all.
To that end, Lawrence Wittner ends his piece:
A key justification for budget cutbacks is that government “can’t afford” to maintain the public sector. But why can’t government afford such programs? The reason, aside from the bloated US military budget, is that conservative ideologues have pushed through dramatic tax cuts for the wealthy. This practice has not only helped turn their millionaire patrons into billionaires, but has produced unbalanced budgets that are then used to justify cutting back public services. And this, in turn, helps guarantee that the public sector fails to produce substantial benefits for the public. What such ideologues avoid dealing with is their own culpability in this matter. Nor do they say what would happen if there were no public sector at all, and Americans had to rely entirely on the generosity of private corporations to cope with their health, education and welfare.
Overall, then, public options serve the public well to the degree that the public exercises effective control of the government. Under dictatorial rule, the public almost inevitably gets the short end of the stick. And even in democracies, public programs can sometimes be weakened when private interests use the influence provided by their vast wealth to exercise disproportionate power. But where an active citizenry avails itself of its democratic rights to provide for the general welfare, public options work just fine. Let’s use and cherish them.
[ When "Public Options" Serve the Public - and When They Don't ]
Source: TruthOut
