It is discouraging – after writing yesterday about how Dennis Kucinich was the lone wolf, one of the few who could stand up to power, he folded. He’s on board the Obama train now. Prepare now for some cowboy foreplay-“Brace yerself honey.” They are ramming this bill through.

This is a huge victory for Obama and the DLC Dems – they are rubbing our faces in it, teabagging us, letting us know that there is no place for progressives in their party. They will take a huge drubbing at the polls this fall because millions of us just won’t have the energy to vote for people so unprincipled. I suspect that matters less to them than the mere fact that they defeat any nascent progressive movement in this land.

This gives lie to the Democratic fall-back that the votes just aren’t there for true health care reform. The votes are there, and the means to get those votes has always been there. However, Obama and the Democratic Party leadership have never wanted reform. The bill they are passing, a corporate-written bill ushered through in a scripted process, has always been what they were after. And they are persuasive and powerful. No doubt Kucinich was reminded that he can be challenged in the primaries, that big money will go after him, that he would receive no support from the party. Maybe he’s been wiretapped, maybe he’s got a skeleton. There were probably some positive enticements too. Obama can be persuasive. Yet never once – never once! – has he used those powers in favor of true reform.

It’s disgraceful, discouraging. Kucinich was a man of honor in defeat. Now he’s just another mealy-mouthed Democrat. So his defeat at the polls, as with all the others, would be of no consequence.

As they say, a man who places faith in politicians is doomed to disappointment. Damned if I didn’t have faith in him.

The good news is this: Obama appointee and Wall Street/health insurance-funded Senator Michael Bennet was defeated in the caucuses last night here in Colorado by Andrew Romanoff, who appears to be somewhat progressive. In an obnoxious and heavy-handed move last month, Obama elected to interfere in a local primary in support of Bennet. The results last night are a slap to Obama, and a message to Bennet that if he wants to win, he had better hide his funding sources.

All in all, not a good day. Power wins a big one, loses a small one. No doubt Bennet’s people right now are crafting ads about how he’s a man of the people, and Kucinich is putting together a press conference to somehow salvage his manhood.
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PS: I suggest that anyone who calls or emails Kucinich to complain include the words “I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart.

Some time ago, maybe a year ago, a group 80+ of House “progressives” took a stand on behalf of the American public regarding health care. They said that they would not support any bill that did not contain a public option. Nancy Pelosi laughed out loud at the time – she (supposedly a progressive herself) knew that it was an expression of weakness, that they would be destroyed. The power they were up against was simply too much for them.

The Health Care “Reform” debate has been an impressive demonstration of power. Every one of those progressives caved but one: Dennis Kucinich still stands tall, but alone. Here is something really, really interesting – Marcus Molitas of Daily Kos says that Kucinich – Kucinich!!! is one who is now in need of a primary opponent.*

It is a good time again to examine, if only with a surface glance or two, the nature of power. The fact that 86 “progressives” folded their tents is not just a victory for the insurance companies and the White House – it is a not even just a staggering victory. It is shock and awe.

So let’s examine it further. How does one man get another man to become his servant?

In employment, it’s the paycheck. But the power goes deeper than that – the employee might be burdened by mortgages, kids, student loans and the inability to get health insurance somewhere else. Further, few employees are of such caliber that there is any meaningful competition for their services, so that a mere job-jump is not an option. Even if the employee gets so fed up that he makes that jump, he will face a period of unemployment, and with that will come inability to pay bills, loss of credit standing, debt, loss of social standing. (And, his résumé will be tainted if he is perceived as rebellious.)

So for most people, the power of the boss over the employee is complete and total.

Transfer this relationship to that of the office holder and the (generic) “lobbyist.” The lobbyist needs leverage. Where does he find it?

Money is part of it, and is a two-edged sword. Money given to an office holder is useful – he can use it to buy TV ads and get reelected. TV is the only pathway to the voter, who is generally not paying attention. But it is more than that, as the office holder must assume that any money he does not take will go to an opponent. So the power of money is magnified by the ability of the lobbyist to leverage it by offering it to an opponent too.

If it were only money, we would not be in such trouble, because the “lobbyist” has a weakness. He is up against other lobbyists, and while there is seldom significant differences on large objectives – wars, subsidies, tax breaks and the like, there can be competing objectives, so that the office holder can at times leverage one lobbyist against another.

So the lobbyist needs more than just money, though money is powerful and mostly legal. There are other legal ways of making the office holder behave.

One is the fact that most of our “mainstream” media is in fact owned and controlled by the elite moneyed sectors who hire the lobbyists. Office holders need access to this media to be considered credible. Bad actors like Kucinich or Bernie Sanders will never appear on a Sunday talk show. It is well-understood among office holders that a stint on Democracy Now!, the only true news show around, will not cement voter approval – and might even stigmatize them.

So lobbyists have further control over office holders by controlling, in a general sense (there is no one lever to pull, no one lever-puller), access to favorable media. Further, negative press is a weapon – if an office holder stumbles over his words and accidentally says something that is true, or gets a DUI, becomes confrontational or gets out of line, negative editorials will appear in his home district, footage might leak to YouTube – it is somewhat disheveled and disorganized, but office holders have to be careful never to say anything in affront to lobbyists for fear of bad PR.

But even that is not enough. There are yet other legal ways of controlling the office holder. There is so much money floating around this country and in DC that an office holder of low scruples can avail himself of it in many ways. He can accept lucrative employment after leaving office, as, for instance, former South Dakota senate minority leader Tom Daschle becoming a health insurance lobbyist. (Chris Dodd will be interesting to watch – even after announcing his resignation, he is still working on behalf of Wall Street lobbyists. Does lucrative employment await?)

There are also employment opportunities for family members, as with Joe’s son, Beau Biden, working for MNBA back in Delaware, and Evan Bayh’s wife drawing lucrative salaries from health insurance companies … if we had investigative journalists, it would be interesting to do some research on employment of family members in Washington.

In fact, most loyal office holders, even the lowly Conrad Burns, can turn to a career in lobbying after leaving office, and rewards will be there for the rest of their useful lives.

All of that is, unfortunately, legal. But there is yet more. During the Bush years we learned of the prevalence of the wire tap – certainly not new (nor has it been discontinued under Obama). Most members of the media had their phones tapped by NSA or other agencies. The same is most likely true of most members of Congress. If such a weapon were available, and we know it is, how could it not be used?

No matter what it is, whether tryst with a secretary or a drunken party in the Bahamas, somebody in DC knows about it, and such information will be presented to the office holder at some critical juncture.

If only it stopped there. But there is also “sheepdipping”, aka “ABSCAMming”, where an office holder can be made to look guilty or lured into a compromising situation. This happened to Gary Hart, and many years before, Wilbur Mills. John Edwards might be a victim, though he certainly merits no sympathy. Most recently, former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, and before him, New York Governor Elliot Spitzer were “exposed.” The question that is not asked is “How many are culpable, but not exposed?”

These men were being watched – people were looking for dirt, and they found it. And even if the dirt does not turn up naturally, it can be planted. Any potential hire for an office holder can present a threat – she could be the next Donna Rice, Monica, or Linda Tripp.

So the control over our elected officials appears almost complete and total. A man has to be pure and innocent to be immune from such pressures. He has to forgo corporate money and lead a squeaky-clean life. Such a man is Bernie Sanders ….. but wait!

Sanders, Vermont’s socialist senator, seems a rogue, a man able to walk about freely and speak his mind. He’s not hobbled by the Democratic Party, and doesn’t take corporate money, so the regular levers don’t work on him. Yet, when the Senate Health “Reform” bill, written by the health insurance lobbyists, needed 60 votes to get out of the senate, he provided the 60th vote.

We had been treated to spectacles before where certain senators like Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson used their “60th vote” status to leverage massive changes in the bill, preventing a public option, for instance. Senator Sanders, the 60th vote for that bill, had incredible power to command changes favorable to ordinary citizens.

And he did not do so. He did not use his power, meaning he did not have power.

What’s up with that, Bernie? Skeletons in your closet?
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*This is not hard to understand, on further reflection. Molitas made that statement while be interviewed on a cable news show. He would not have access to such forums if he held unworthy views. He has succumbed, and is probably a passenger on the ego train. He’s apparently been compromised in some fashion.

My thanks to Raj Patel for adding some clarity to all of this madness about us about “free markets.” The idea is like a virus, or maybe a parasite, as markets may yet destroy their host … our habitat.

Patel introduced me to the concept of “exclusion,” probably well-known to anyone in Econ 101. But as he describes it, exclusion is the nature of the marketplace itself – without it, we have only commons.

Say, for example, a town exists around a well, and all of the townspeople depend on it for water. Suppose that the local merchant ropes off the area, sets up guards, gets a court order behind him, and prevents people from using the well without paying him. The well has become his “property”, and the towns people, now excluded, are “free” to engage in commerce to get water.

Before they lost access to the well, they were freer than after it was excluded from the commons. But in the Orwellian parlance of our time, that is actually supposed to be a net gain in personal freedom.

In health, insurance companies have roped off medical care to limit access, excluding the poor and already sick and charging everyone else. As a result, we are now subject to huge fees for common services, and insurers make money off of us by the simple means of placement, like the merchant and the well. They “own” what was formerly our commons, access to health care.

Again, the free marketers call this freedom. They stand logic on its head. Exclusion is at the heart of servitude. Governments, which do not exclude people from services, but rather collect taxes and disperse them without discrimination, offer more freedom than markets. But the notion that governments enslave us while markets free us, the curse of our times, is dominant.
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I was listening to Dr. Marcia Angell interviewed by Bill Moyers this morning. Moyers, who is soon to retire, did another excellent show on health care. Angell wondered out loud whether Anthem Blue Cross, which is raising its rates by as much as 39% in California, is gaming us.

She calls it the “briar patch” game, as in “please don’t throw us in there.” In the scenario, Anthem, oblivious to public hatred and criticism, is rubbing our face in rate increases as a way of angering us to the point where we turn to the government to pass the health care “reform” bill.

That would be a good deal for Anthem, as the bill that is on the table, the one that Obama is (finally) fighting for, will bring Anthem millions of new clients, billions in subsidies, and with no public option, no threat of competition. All wiithout cost controls.

Who knows. We are practically owned at this point by the public relations industry – the whole health care “reform” process has been a game. This might be the ninth inning. Key Democrats are being forced out of Congress, others are surely feel the heat. Dennis Kucinich, a holdout, will surely have to endure corporate attacks in his district in the wake of Citizens United.

But it’s hard to know. Anthem is raking it in in our current system, so can’t be hurt either way.

Liberals and progressives fail to understand two things: 1) The Administration and the Democratic leadership is not “weak.” It is simply compromised and corporate. The apparent weakness is simply a perception management tool to avoid giving progressives and liberals what they want; and 2) the nature of power.

The health care bill is a horrible bill, a massive gift to the greed and avarice set that run the health insurance industry. Republicans could not pass such a bill, as Democratic opposition would gel and prevent passage. Because the bill is being pushed by Democrats, liberals and progressives are frozen in their footsteps, their herd instincts overriding their intellects.

This from Eric Massa, D-NY, who will now step down from office, clearing the way for passage of the bill:

“Mine is now the deciding vote on the health care bill, and this administration and this House leadership have said, quote-unquote, they will stop at nothing to pass this health care bill. And now they’ve gotten rid of me and it will pass. You connect the dots.”