Bottom line, the Senate bill takes billions of dollars in tax money and gives it to the health insurance companies, then leaves working families to spend their own money for crappy coverage that still costs more than real coverage in other countries.

The New Deal is over, and corporatists are prepared to take advantage of every crisis to privatize assets and profits and socialize the debts and losses. And Klein’s book was written before Goldman Sachs took us all to the cleaners.

The key, according to the shock doctrine, is to recognize opportunities to subvert democracy. The book cites several cases of democratically-elected governments that betrayed the people who voted for them in order to serve corporate interests. For example, Poland’s Solidarity government in 1989.

A little over a year ago, Rahm Emanuel told The Wall Street Journal:

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”

You know what, I don’t think he was talking about a New New Deal. I’m worried that he means the opposite of what the “hope and change” crowd voted for– more corporate power, more wage stagnation, more wars, more deficits.

And anybody who complains will be told that there’s a crisis, and unpopular policies have to be implemented. Which is the shock doctrine in a nutshell.

Here is the moment for me when I knew Obama was not negotiating honestly about health care reform:
I was watching a live Town Hall from Grand Junction, Colorado on CSPAN. Obama was taking questions. A middle aged heavily accented woman stood up and said she has polio and has had 52 surgeries. But a lot of those surgeries were with doctors not in Colorado, and they were outside her plan since they were in another state and she had to pay a huge pile of money more. So her simple question was, would health care reform solve the problem of her needing to see a specialist not in Colorado. To me this was a very honest and simple question. A good question addressing one of the many insane features of our current system. It also should have been a layup for Obama. The answer should have been “yes, we will fix that! Next question”. But no. Obama dodges the question, dances around the issue, babbles on about not paying people from San Diego to go to a doctor in Maine. And then he moves on.

So Obama was not serious about solving problems. He was not serious about listening to people’s genuine questions. But he had the time to meet privately with the drug companies to bribe them for $150MM in advertising support? And you blame all this on Republicans?

I’ve always believed that the Obama administration and the Dem congressional leadership planned to produce “bipartisan” corporate-friendly legislation, then blame the badness of their bills on the alleged need to get Republican votes. That plan failed, because the Republicans decided to be the Party of NO, and filibuster everything.

Divided government can be a good thing. In this case, we have a House majority for reform versus a corporatist, triangulating White House, and a Senate that has decided they need 60 votes to pass anything. I’m relying on the House to stop the Senate’s bad health care “reform” bill, and I’m relying on the Senate to stop the bad Obama administration ACES cap and trade bill (which passed the House after progressive members were threatened by Rahm Emanuel).

Not having been part of Obama’s electoral coalition, I see no need to hold it together just because Dems want to stay in power. Show me a bill that makes average Americans and future generations more prosperous and safer than the status quo, and I’ll support it.

No, I mean two great articles that explore interesting ideas from interesting perspectives. There’s a line in one of the articles pointing out that the bill is inferior to a hypothetical bill that could never have passed. I think a lot of us – myself included – would have preferred a bill creating a single payer system or even something like the Clinton proposal from 1993 (which would have created far reaching systemic reform). On the other hand, allowing the status quo to continue was not an option. If the senate bill is the best one we can get now and it lays the ground work for future reforms that move us to a truly universal system with the kind of cost controls being used effectively in other countries, then let’s take what we can get now and work to win even bigger the next go-round.

These articles have a certain third-grade social studies appeal to them. But they fail sadly in any analysis of what has really happened.

That Obama, and Harry Reid and his allies, hit that small target on the single issue that has eluded every progressive president before him is wonderful for both the health-care system, and for those millions who need care,

The truth is that Obama, Reid and Pelosi had a chance in history to do something great and they wasted it miserably. The stars were aligned when the Democrats had the White House and both houses of Congress by wide margins. They had an issue that in January 80% of Americans agreed upon.

So what did they do? They immediately sold themselves to the drug lobby the insurance lobby, the doctor lobby, the lawyer lobby, the union lobbies, and just about anyone else they could think of to prostitute themselves and this country and came up with a bill so bad that you couldn’t make it any worse if you tried. And then after you BRIBE the last few Democrats to get it passed you throw out the totally empty claim that Repblicans refused to engage in discussion while the GOP was offering constructive ideas such as eliminating the tax discrepency, eliminating the interstate policy barriers and malpractice reform.

Keep telling yourself that it doesn’t suck and the GOP refused to engage. Keep repeating it over and over. Like all lies repeated enough, it will be your own little truth.

The American Prospect has about as much intellectual credibility as the New York Post, but with much better graphics.