Democratic Party

By Dave Lindorff

So much for economic “green shoots.”

The Obama administration and the Federal Reserve, along with the servile corporate media, have been quick to grasp at and trumpet every little suggestion that things might be improving, as they did when the Labor Dept. announced last week that new unemployment claims had dropped to “just” 434,000, from a high of 684,000 in the week ended March 28 or last year.

Or when the Commerce Dept. reported last month that November housing starts had risen by 8.9% compared to the prior month.

By Dave Lindorff

Attorneys General from 13 states--all of them Republicans--are saying that they are going to sue to block the health insurance reform bill if, when it is finally passed, it still includes a measure giving Nebraska an extra $100 million in Medicaid funds. They charge that this “bribe” was used to get Nebraska’s conservative Democratic Senator Ben Nelson to join fellow Democrats to get the Senate’s version of the bill passed.

By Dave Lindorff

You know, the year 2009 started out kind of nicely. We watched Barack Obama take the oath of office, serenaded by the awesome Aretha Franklin (wearing her awesome hat), after first hearing Pete Seeger sing the real Woody Guthrie verses to "This Land Is Your Land" on the steps of the Lincoln Monument.

By Dave Lindorff

Give credit to Howard Dean. This still practicing physician, former
governor of Vermont, former chair of the Democratic Party and former
Democratic presidential candidate has called for progressive members of
Congress in both houses to join their Republican colleagues in killing
what he rightly says has become "an insurance company's dream."

Those namby-pamby, self-described "progressives" in the Democratic
Party who claim that the health bill can still be saved with the
inclusion of a fake, carefully circumscribed and thoroughly emasculated
"public option" government insurance plan that at best would only be
able to offer lousy coverage at high rates to a small number of
self-employed poor people are wrong. This supposed attempt at reforming
the US health care system--the costliest and least effective in the
developed world--is simply past saving.

By Dave Lindorff

Ordinary, average, struggling Americans might be scratching their
heads over the news today, as the Labor Department reports that
unemployment is up by four-tenths of a percent for the month to a
record 10.2%, fully three-tenths of a percent higher than economists
had been forecasting, and stocks do what? Rise by a quarter of a
percent!

What’s going on here?

Well, the tube analysts are quick to say, unemployment figures are
a “lagging” indicator. That is, employment generally lags the overall
economy, with layoffs coming after a recession kicks in, and hiring
waiting until a recovery is well underway.

By Dave Lindorff

It would be easy to read too much into the few statewide races that
were decided last night, but I think it’s fair to say that the results
in New Jersey and Virginia, where Republican gubernatorial candidates
won--in New Jersey’s case knocking off a well-funded Democratic
incumbent--that the results were a blow to the Barack Obama/Rahm
Emanuel strategy of playing to the right, of avoiding confrontation in
Congress and of ignoring the progressive voters whose enthusiasm and
effort back in the 2008 campaign put Obama in office.

By Dave Lindorff

The Democrats in Congress, and their main man Barack Obama in the
White House, have taken tens of millions in legal bribes from the
health insurance industry over the past year, and have obligingly been
hammering out in Congress a health “reform” bill that, instead of
helping people, has been designed to help the insurance industry.

They started out by immediately blackballing any discussion of real
health reform in the form of an expansion of Medicare to cover everyone
of every age, which of course would have ended the problem of the
uninsured, while cutting the nation’s overall health bill by at least a
third, but in the process shutting down the private health insurance
business.