I sat down to read this morning and rested a cup of coffee on the arm of my chair. Then reaching out to grab something, I spilled the coffee on our beige area rug. Instant panic – I am a Philistine! I rushed to the kitchen for paper towels, and then later started dabbing with a mild solution of dish soap and warm water.

Folk wisdom says that Woolite® does not work as well as simple shampoo on wool, but costs five times as much. It might even damage wool. As I dabbed at the carpet, the thought ran through my head – go to the store you Philistine … you’ve stained her beautiful carpet … go to the store, buy some carpet stain remover… buy some carpet stain remover. I thought about the Woolite factor, the 5X$ factor, then I thought about Philistines in the chapel, and I got in the car and headed to the store.

Bill Press was on talk radio, and health care was again the topic. He had on some guest, some guy, and the guest remarked that the Democratic National Committee had put together a remarkable machine to bring voters out to vote for Obama, but that machine sat there idly during the health care debate.

How could they not see what was coming? How could they be that naive? Are they that dumb? Why did they not put the machine to work to get health care passed?

These are savvy liberal talk show guys, I remind you. Savvy liberals.

RESOLVE® Triple Action Spot Carpet Cleaner 1) Penetrates, 2) Breaks Down, 3) Lifts out. (Note that certain stains may cause discoloration even after cleaning.)

I paid $6.15 for a bottle of RESOLVE®. If you walk in our house today, your eyes might be drawn to the coffee stain by my reading chair.

Man, what an easy mark I am.

As reported by The Hill, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs took a shot at Senator Max Baucus, saying that K Street had a copy of his bill before the White House saw it.

Gibbs said he was told that “K Street had a copy of the Baucus plan, meaning, not surprisingly, the special interests have gotten a copy of the plan that I understand was given to committee members today.”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said he had not seen Baucus’s draft either, when asked during a briefing at the White House after a meeting with Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

This is no surprise, but interpretations may vary. As my son said in a post below,

Max Baucus was never, ever, ever negotiating with Republicans.

That, most likely, was mere political theater, a stall to delay passage of any bill until the insurance industry had time to mount a good propaganda campaign. Hence, all we witnessed in August, aided and abetted by Max Baucus.

But far more likely, K Street lobbyists had a copy of the legislation long before Baucus did, as they are the authors of the proposed legislation.

Those of us who have lived through the evolution of the modern Congress are well aware that legislation these days is usually written by lobbyists and the money people behind them, and handed over the various sponsors for passage. Members of Congress do not write bills – they are merely carriers. Baucus and his Gang of Six did not write this bill. K Street did.

That much is painfully obvious.

It has been apparent from the beginning of the health care debate that the private health insurance industry has been pulling the strings. As the charade plays out, it is becoming even more apparent that in the future we are going to be more under the thumb of private insurers that ever. So the question I ask is this: Is private for-profit health insurance a moral undertaking?

Within the framework of right wing thought, of course, it is absolutely moral. Within the framework of left wing thought (mine, anyway), it is highly immoral.

Say that an observer is looking down at our planet from a spaceship. From his view, everything we do on this planet is amoral – nothing is right or wrong. We are, after all, living beings that need to eat other living beings to survive. “Evil” is a human construct. In nature, the wolf will attack an elk calf and kill it, and then share it with the rest of the members of his pack. All the wolves in that pack will benefit. Within the pack, the activity is necessary for survival of wolves, and might therefore be considered “moral”, so far as wolves are concerned. Elk might disagree.

A grizzly bear will attack an elk calf for his own nourishment. He will start eating it while it is still alive, inflicting horrible pain on it during its last surviving moments, and forever traumatizing the mother. The killing is necessary for the bear’s survival, though not the suffering the bear inflicts on the calf. Nonetheless, we don’t call it evil. It all as part of life and death on this planet.

Killing within our own species is usually frowned upon – the Christian Bible says that it is wrong. And yet the Catholic Church and other Christian sects accept the concept of “just war”, wherein we have the right to defend ourselves against aggression. We have a habit of defining everything we do as self-defense, but what it really means is that there are no constraints against killing people in other countries. “Thou shalt not kill” really means “Thou shalt not kill your own kind.”

Within each country, killing citizens of that country is frowned upon, except in self-defense. The death penalty is sometimes meted out, but only after thorough legal review of the circumstances surrounding the crime. We are very constrained about killing our own kind.

So this is our moral posture: It is wrong to kill your own kind, except in self defense.

By the means outlined above, we have attempted to introduce a bit of kindness into our cruel world. Call it morality, if you must.

Hannah Arendt in her work Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil described atrocities committed by a lowly and uneducated man, Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. She wondered how a man who behaved well within his own society, and who (supposedly) felt love and compassion for his own family and friends, could commit mass atrocities.

The answer lies within our societal structures. We delegate the responsibility for committing evil acts to subordinates, and insulate ourselves from having to witness those acts or their effects.

In the military, chain of command is essential to success of military operations. Orders given above must be carried out below without question. Otherwise the military enterprise cannot succeed. Within large corporations, the same structure exists, though less rigid, as employees have more options before them than soldiers. Nonetheless, the control exercised from above is critical to the success for both corporations and the military. (I might add that since the American military is really an agent in service of transnational corporations, that the military chain of command is subordinate to the corporate chain of command.)

So officers in large organizations have the ability to give orders and not be exposed to the consequences of those orders. A man can sit at his desk in Washington, DC, and order a bomb launched into a marketplace in Baghdad,and go home that evening to enjoy dinner with his children and sex with his wife, as if nothing horrible had happened. He is a “desk murderer”.

By unplanned circumstances health insurance in the United States came under the purview of large for-profit corporations. During calmer times, when costs were less and greed was not worshiped, it wasn’t much of a problem. But in 1965, 40% of senior citizens were without health insurance. Government stepped into cover their costs. That program, known as Medicare, now serves every citizen over age 64 in this country.

The plight of seniors in 1965 was indicative of a problem with private health insurance. It was internally contradictory – since it was a for-profit enterprise, payment of claims resulted in lower profits. Old people tended to have more claims, and so health insurers avoided them. To be profitable in the health insurance business, companies have to avoid sick people and avoid paying claims.

So by its very nature, for-profit health insurance has untoward effects. People die for lack of care, can’t get insurance at all, and even have their coverage taken away when they get really sick. This is all the result of decisions made by corporate executives who do not see or feel the pain and anguish they inflict on others. They are insulated. Because 20,000 people die each year in this country due to treatable and preventable diseases and injuries, responsibility for those deaths lies with the executives who made the decisions to exclude, deny, and rescind. They are desk murderers.

From the right side of the political spectrum, this is all a natural byproduct of the natural distribution of wealth, and is therefore a moral outcome. If private citizens want to help those who cannot help themselves, fine. But for government to do it, as with Medicare, is wrong. Right wingers fought Medicare from the beginning, and many still oppose it as immoral: in order to provide care, government must first take money from other people. That is, on the right wing, the original sin.

Medical care has gotten more expensive over the years, and now millions of people, either by choice or circumstance, do not carry health insurance. An ethos of greed pervades our society today, and for-profit health insurance companies are as caught up in it as any Wall Street financial house. Where once their executives might have been gray and dour upper-middle class suburbanites, today they are overpaid millionaires leaching on our health care system. There will be no getting rid of them soon or easily, as they have stitched themselves to the butt of the political system as well.

From the left side of the spectrum, this is immoral. Health care, according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (to which the United States is a signator) is not a privilege. It is a right. The consequences of lack of care, denial of care and rescission of coverage is death. The sentence is carried out in silence, the perpetrators protected from any exposure to suffering. This is the nature of Arendts “banality” of evil, or desk murder.

Other countries developed differently in the wake of World War II. The idea of profit-seeking in the field of health care was defined from the outset as immoral, and systems were constructed to provide health care for citizens without private for-profit health insurance. The result was universal coverage, and, oddly (from a right wing perspective anyway), much lower costs.

I have thought for years now that the essence of right wing thought can be boiled down to Social Darwinism. The idea that someone is not entitled to health care, that economic performance should dictate level of care, has at its root survival of the fittest. This is the Post War era, and we don’t talk like that anymore. Eugenics is condemned, as are master races, but survival of the fittest, as defined by the marketplace, is still the ethos of the right wing. It is immoral.

From our moral perspective, health care is a right. Health insurance corporations interfere with this right – in fact – seek to profit from our need for it, and are therefore immoral organizations.

We on the left seek to eliminate not the health insurance corporations, but rather the underlying profit motive. We want to offer quality care to all who need it, using the entire population as the premium base and the tax system as the funding mechanism. We do this not as economic beings, but as caring and compassionate and moral beings. We will not be harmed by use of government force in this area any more than the hundreds of millions of people in other industrialized countries who have universal health care.

For-profit health insurance is an immoral undertaking that facilitates killing of people in our society for profit. The executives of these companies are desk murderers. They should be punished, and their activities ended.