Musings of a Liberal Texan

Mr Obama! Tear. Down. This. Wall! Tear down the graft. Tear away the facade. Tear apart the greed. Tear it down.

Tonight I had the example of what is wrong with my country, what I see as the flagrant cruelty inherent in the current system. There is a company, a Texas company, that is extremely profitable and doing a booming business. This company has a strict code of conduct, policies and procedures by which an employee must abide. An employee, for example, must come to work sick. If that employee is too sick to come to work, he/she will not be allowed to return to work without a doctor's note. Regardless of severity, regardless of cause, this employee who might be suffering from a cold, experiencing a stomach virus, etc. must go to a doctor. This from a company does not provide any health insurance to its employees. That's right. Not only does this employee that is earning just above poverty wages lose a day's pay, the employee has to pay top dollar, in the vicinity of $100, for a doctor's visit as well as any medication that might be prescribed. This is what's wrong about ou...

All this Tea Party and shouting about Healthcare Reform has no credibility to me. Why? Because supposedly it's about big government spending, spending money we don't have, adding to a deficit that our children's children will have to pay. But I didn't see one of these guys out during the bush years when we were thrown into horrendous debt with an unjustified war. Why has this become the issue du jour NOW? Why after 8 years of unprecedented spending, infringement on our civil liberties and flagrant disregard for law is this particular issue suddenly worth freakin' out about? But to Healthcare. This is what I want to know. Why do we have health insurance? Why are we hanging onto this industry that exists to take money from people, take a cut and then disperse the remainder to those that actually do the work? Health insurance is a middle man. It provides no service. It obviously does not attempt to negotiate some stellar deal for its consumers. It instead, takes money ...

If you haven't read the Rolling Stone article "Sick and Wrong" by Matt Taibbi, you need to stop reading this and go read that. It is a seven page gut wrencher. I want to believe that it being a slow news period that every single smidge of news is exaggerated and blown into a weird distortion all for ratings. I want to believe that Obama is playing the cool card. The no drama, unruffle-able, calm leader of the free world. I want to believe that the democrats will break from history and unite with purpose and strength with one objective - to get this done. And to get it done properly. But every single word in that article rang true to me. Every penny in the coffer of the representatives and senators from the entities fighting reform was a nail in the coffin of its demise. I believe we will not only get squat, I believe we will see the destruction of a brilliant opportunity squandered. Squandered and sullied. No other president has been given this kind of an opportunity. The...

"We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace: business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering," President Franklin Roosevelt told an audience in Madison Square Garden in 1936. "They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me and I welcome their hatred." As he told his audience in 1936, "It is an old strategy of tyrants to delude their victims into fighting their battles for them."