Thursday, September 23, 2010

Who Has 'No Access' to What???

Why must there always be bad news with the good? 

Yesterday the Wall Street Journal headlined the good news: we're getting rid of Larry Summers, co-architect of the great recession and of the recovery efforts that rewarded rich and incompetent CEOs while failing to provide jobs for millions of unemployed working men and women.

Tucked within the article was the bad news: unnamed sources have told the Journal that Dr. Kidglove is going to appoint a CEO -- yes, a corporate CEO! -- to replace Summers.  Such an appointment, the article said, would assuage concerns that corporations don't have access to the White House.  The article gave no source of the "concerns" other than the author's own fantasies, or his Murdoch editor's, or the minds of the two remaining corporate CEOs who have not yet been given the opportunity to write economic or social legislation for the entire country.  Like the Journal's sources, the two CEOs asked not to be named because of the embarrassment of not having set foot in the White House except for social occasions in more than two years.

Like snowballs, gobs of bovine excrement roll downhill.  By today, the media consensus is that the administration must assuage "concerns" about corporate access to the White House by appointing a CEO to succeed Summers.

As Art Buchwald used to say, you couldn't make this stuff up.

No corporate access?

Who in the hell crammed into the Oval office to accept Dr. Kidglove's sellout of the public option in the health care bill?  If those weren't the top people from pharmaceutical manufacturing corporations, then Labron James isn't in Heat.

Who the hell wrote the loopholes in the health care act that the insurers have already begun using to raise rates to intolerable levels, refuse coverage to children with prior illnesses and put unrealistically low limits on lifetime coverage for major health problems?  It wasn't any of the now 50 million Americans with no health care plans.  It wasn't any of the young cancer victims I know through my work in cancer survivors' organizations.  It wasn't Dennis Kucinich.  It was insurance c--o-r-p-o-r-a-t-i-o-n-s.

Who the hell fueled the bizarre thought process that persuaded the Gang of Five on the Supreme Court to give corporations a license for unlimited spending to buy candidates for every elected office in the land?  Mother Theresa?

Who the hell bamboozled the Oval Office into botching the BP oil spill!  Who the hell bulldozed Dr. Kidglove into backing away from a really tough climate and energy bill?  Hint: look up the richest billionaires in the energy industry.  They run c-o-r-p-o-r-a-t-i-o-n-s.

Who the hell do you think has intimidated Dr. Kidglove to endorse the mindless but oh, so profitable policy of endless war?  It couldn't possibly have been the defense industry c-o-r-p-o-r-a-t-i-o-n-s and the Pentagon, also known as the military-industrial complex, could it? Nah.  Had to be Islam.

Once upon a time a president with gonads fired a big-ego general who defied him, reminding Dugout Doug that the Constitution made the president the commander-in-chief.  Today, Gen. Petraeus defies Dr. Kidglove and says he'll keep troops in Afghanistan as long as he damned well pleases.  No contrary word has been heard fro you-know-who.

He is, after all, Corporate Amnerica's general.  Ain't no power on earth stronger than that.