Article: So Much For A Representative Democracy

In a few hours, The U.S. House of Representatives will decide whether or not to allow Dennis Kucinich's amendment to allow individual states to opt out of the federal insurance reform bill. For the last two years in Pennsylvania, many of us worked hard to support a state system that would save money immediately, while insuring everyone in the state. The cost would be a modest two percent added to the individual income tax, and ten percent payroll taxes for business. Businesses would no longer need to carry health insurance. It got wheels a few months ago, and wings just a couple of weeks ago.

The biggest question I had was why weren't the insurance companies interested in what we were doing on the state level. It seems that the ruling bodies, in American politics, already worked out a deal with them. That deal was not to block the Dennis Kucinich amendment, but to simply stop him from ever getting on the floor. God knows we don't need another Paul Wellstone. God forbid if the states got to manage health care the way they do medicare. God knows the contributions for my next campaign won't be coming from the tired, the sick, and the poor.

What God really knows is that the Democratic party will be playing into the Republican party's hands. Violation of State's Rights will be a trump card for the secessionists. The end-timers, fueled by Nostradamus, if not the Mayan Calendar, will be appeased by the fact that we are already waiting until 2014 for any federal implementation of whatever plan the insurance industry comes up with, not for us, the U.S, but for THEM, the health elimination and mayhem plan of 2009.

The ever expanding bubble of oligarchy continues to inflate with the gas of empty promises from the people we elect to represent us. Don't despair Americans. You were lied to. You were conned. You were deceived. You were taught to think about which pharmaceutical was right for you, not about the corrupting influence of government and how it will affect your children, if you do not care about your own lives. We need to send more ink to Washington, it still takes over 900 pages to screw everyone but the wealthy. Now there is a secure job in a secure industry. What do you do, John? Oh I supply the ink for the screwing of America.

We no longer share one similarity with The Republic of South Africa, they have single payer health insurance. We do have another similarity, to be, as far as the future is concerned: The lawmakers of today, who are in the back pockets of the banks and the health insurance industry, the weapons manufacturers, the mega farmers who are paid not to grow anything in a world where one fourth of the population is starving. The lawmakers of today who will not even allow a bill to be heard on the floor because it might enact the guilty conscious clause of their deepest and darkest psyches, will, in time, be documented in history as being inattentive to the health and needs of the people they represented. Their children and grandchildren will be forced to read about their exploits-even in the most protective of private educational institutions. They will be the ancestor who stood in the way of health care for all, of fair credit rates, of education for the poor; but, not in the way of global warming.

There is another similarity to South Africa in American politics. If something is wrong with what they are doing, and people bring it to their attention, they put them in jail. Nelson Mandela always was a hero. He survived his struggle for what was right, because he was right. The heroines, and I say heroines because most of the men are still in the board room, of today and tomorrow will bring a great country to its knees. America needs to be brought to its knees, not only to avoid decapitation, but to insure that there is a place for real consideration of what makes a being human, what makes a bill intolerable, and what makes paper and promises more important than anything else in the world-including the world.

Margaret Flowers, you are our Mandela. You and the Baucus Eight. You and the Baucus 10 million to come. In the end, if we are to survive as a nation and as a world, we need the people who think they have everything, and the people who want everything, to stop getting their security requirements filled at the expense of the last breath of a child who has never had anything. If we all slow down just a bit, we might see that the face of the person we are trying to escape from is our own soul-longing for love and attention.

At the behest of my wife, and the single payer movement in the state of Pennsylvania, I called George Miller, Stenny Hoyer, and Nancy Pelosi. I could not leave a message. All the mailboxes were full. In this time of crises, wouldn't it be great to see some temporary workers answering phones with our tax payer dollars? When my wife, Kathleen, did get through to George Miller's office, they transferred her over to media services. The media services individual would not take a message, and hung up.

Is there another call in line for the insurance industry? Does that mail box get full too? I'll bet it doesn't. I'll bet that if there is a line at all, it is linked to just one phone, and I will bet it is the black phone because being in the black is really important for business. And I'll bet that the rest of us, the one's out there still thinking that they are living in a representative government, I'll bet that that line is connected to a red phone. Not in the sense that it must be answered immediately, but the converse. More like a stop light. It could be red for other reasons though. It could be red because the people who want to give government and big business a conscience, are really communists.

It could also be red because the people who are bleeding red don't much matter anymore.

Tom Harner and Kate Loving Shenk