[Peace-discuss] When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder?

[C. G. Estabrook]

I'm constantly amazed at my inability to make myself clear to you, Mort, but
I'll try again:

  [1] I'm in favor of a single-payer system and have said so for years, on 
radio, TV, and in meetings.

  [2] Obamacare, the system that the administration is allowing to emerge from
the Congressional process, is not a single-payer system (even if it includes a
"public option") but an alternative to it that will protect and enhance the
profits of the medical/financial complex.  And it will probably be enacted.

  [3] The public distrust of Obamacare -- even when rudely expressed -- is based
on a well-founded suspicion about whom the administration is working for.

  [4] I think in fact the administration is happy to have a frenzied debate on
this matter because it's a cover for their lethal and unpopular plans for the
Mideast.

  [5] I'm hurt that you don't read my posts: I quoted the mystery guest's very 
words some time ago.  --CGE


Morton K. Brussel wrote:
> I'm always amazed at your duplicity, Carl.  A one payer system, which Swanson
> advocates, as do I, would be a government run system. It has nothing, get it,
> /nothing/, to do with your imagined "obamacare". Hence, your third paragraph
> is utterly debased, having nothing to do with what I, or Swanson, would
> advocate.  I am also surprised that you, with Wayne, are against such a
> single payer U.S. healthcare system.
> 
> --mkb
> 
> 
> On Aug 24, 2009, at 4:52 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
> 
>> Did you read the post from David Swanson, called "More Democrat perfidy"
>> here?
>> 
>> Obamacare is a contradictory to what is obviously needed, roughly Medicare
>> for all.  Obamacare recognizes the fundamental requirement of elite
>> politics in America: before you do anything at all, rich people must be
>> paid off.  Obama understands that very well.
>> 
>> Your contempt for those Americans who think the federal government is 
>> working in the interests of a very few rather than those of the vast 
>> majority does you no credit.  It's hardly surprising that the debasement of
>> political discussion in the neoliberal era has left a lot of bad ideas out
>> there.
>> 
>> And you don't win the prize.  --CGE
>> 
>> 
>> Morton K. Brussel wrote:
>>> À bas les gens progressifs! Down with government managed health care! I
>>> have no idea who your guy(?) is, but I don't think much of the drivel
>>> he(?) writes here. --mkb On Aug 24, 2009, at 12:55 PM, C. G. Estabrook
>>> wrote:
>>>> Ah, yes, the great mass of progressives...
>>>> 
>>>> And what's the price of admission to that unnumbered throng? 
>>>> Unquestioning fealty to the assertion that theological thinking is 
>>>> irrational?
>>>> 
>>>> Uh, if you're considering broadening the membership requirements at 
>>>> all, you might like the new book by the Marxist critic Terry Eagleton,
>>>> "Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate" (The
>>>> 2008 Terry Lectures -- delivered at, of all places, Yale).
>>>> 
>>>> +++
>>>> 
>>>> And now, for Today's Prize (to be announced along with the winner), 
>>>> name the Former Progressive -- now, sadly, apparently no longer a 
>>>> member of the Great Mass -- who recently wrote the following (no 
>>>> googling!):
>>>> 
>>>> "But what is a conservative meant to think? Since the major 
>>>> preoccupation of liberals for 30 years has been the right to kill 
>>>> embryos, why should they not be suspect in their intentions toward 
>>>> those gasping in the thin air of senility? There is a strong eugenic 
>>>> thread to American progressivism, most horribly expressed in its very
>>>> successful campaign across much of the twentieth century to sterilize
>>>> “imbeciles.” Abortion is now widening in its function as a eugenic
>>>> device. Women in their 40s take fertility drugs, then abort the
>>>> inconvenient twins, triplets or quadruplets when they show up on the
>>>> scan.
>>>> 
>>>> "In 1972, a year before the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision 
>>>> legalized abortion on demand nationwide, virtually all children with 
>>>> trisomy 21, or Down syndrome, were born. Less than a decade later, with
>>>> the widespread availability of pre-natal genetic testing, as many as 90
>>>> percent of women whose babies were pre-natally diagnosed with the
>>>> genetic condition chose to abort the child.
>>>> 
>>>> "One survey of 499 primary care physicians treating women carrying 
>>>> these babies, however, indicated that only 4 percent actively encourage
>>>> women to bring Down syndrome babies to term. A story on the CNS News
>>>> Service last year quoted Dr. Will Johnston, president of Canadian
>>>> Physicians for Life, reacted to the American College of Obstetricians
>>>> and Gynecologists (ACOG) pre-natal testing endorsement as another step
>>>> toward eugenics.“The progress of eugenic abortion into the heart of our
>>>> society is a classic example of “mission creep,’ ” Johnson said. “In
>>>> the 1960s, we were told that legal abortion would be a rare tragic act
>>>> in cases of exceptional hardship. In the ’70s abortion began to be both
>>>> decried and accepted as birth control. In the ’80s respected
>>>> geneticists pointed out that it was cheaper to hunt for and abort
>>>> Down’s babies than to raise them. By the ’90s that observation had been
>>>> widely put into action. Now we are refining and extending our eugenic
>>>> vision, with new tests and abortion as our central tools.”
>>>> 
>>>> "So if we have mission creep  in the opening round, what’s to persuade
>>>> people that there won’t be mission creep at the other and the kindly
>>>> official discussing living wills won’t tiptoe out of the ward and tell
>>>> the hospital that the old fellow he’s just conferred with is ripe to
>>>> meet his maker. The author of the provision – now dropped – in the
>>>> health bill before Congress – for  “end of life” counseling was
>>>> Democratic Rep Earl Blumenauer of Oregon. Blumenauer has denounced the
>>>> “death panel” description as a  “terrible falsehood.” Maybe so. But
>>>> Blumenauer is hot for “death with dignity”, as a speech he made in
>>>> Congress in 2000 makes clear: “A major concern [in an attempted
>>>> revision of the Balanced Budget Act]is a provision that would
>>>> criminalize decisions doctors make on pain management for the most
>>>> seriously ill and overturn Oregon's Death with Dignity Act. Oregonians
>>>> have twice voted to support the assisted suicide law. H.R. 2614 not
>>>> only is an attack on the Democratic process, but also threatens to pain
>>>> management. There is evidence that doctors are increasingly hesitant to
>>>> prescribe pain medications to terminally ill patients for fear of being
>>>> accused of unlawfully assisting a suicide. The on-going attempts by
>>>> Congress to criminalize the doctor-patient relationship are a threat to
>>>> pain management in all fifty states.”
>>>> 
>>>> "For forty years, every American president has deprecated the powers of
>>>> government to improve the public weal. Why now should Americans believe
>>>> that any government-backed “health reform” will do them any good, as
>>>> opposed to assigning them the appropriate lifespan, relative to their
>>>> income and contributions to the corporate bottom line, which is what
>>>> the present system amounts to?"
>>>> 
>>>> --CGE (who likes the title of this thread)
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> Morton K. Brussel wrote:
>>>>> This statement is what makes it so difficult to strengthen the 
>>>>> anti-war movement. Wayne's (and others') ideas about abortion and
>>>>> what the state should or should not do about it will never be
>>>>> accepted by a great mass of progressives. It's one of the
>>>>> destructive/divisive aspects of theological, i.e., irrational,
>>>>> thinking. --mkb On Aug 24, 2009, at 11:52 AM, E. Wayne Johnson wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>>> It's pretty hard to imagine that one ought to trust the beneficent 
>>>>>> benevolent care of the poor to a coercive government that promotes
>>>>>> and funds abortion, imperialism, endless war, corporate
>>>>>> malfeasance, and financial fraud. The new covenant message is that
>>>>>> people would be internally motivated to care for one another.  It's
>>>>>> been effective where people dare to apply it.
>