A vert private person (reprise)

[blindpig]

This is an excerpt of a conversation from Common Dreams.

"Howard Dean actually said it. In his brief moment of rebellion during the national health care debate, when he momentarily opposed the passage of the Obama "Health Insurance Reform" without a "Public Option", Dean was asked why. "Because it would irrevocably commit the United States to a purely private solution to health care", he said.

Not just health care...

The Obama administration has been beyond stubborn in its insistence on "private solutions". The point has been emphasized recently with the BP oil spill, from the attempts to cap the well, to the subsequent and inevitable clean-up. The machinery of the Federal government has been entirely sidelined as the responsibility for the leak and its aftermath have remained with BP. The word "responsibility" is not used in a legal or a moral sense here, but as a purely practical description. Whatever the degree of its supervisory role, or the sincerity or lack thereof of its motives, the government has made itself a mere spectator.

At the other end of the political football field stands the "Stimulus". With its satellite programs and associated spin-offs, the Obama stimulus represented more than $1 trillion of "anti-recessionary measures"... and in all of it, there was not a single example of a new, government-based, jobs measure. Other than aid for state and local budgets and a tiny proportion for locally initiated but privately directed "infrastructure" projects, the remainder went entirely to private concerns. Forget New Deal or even Hoover-style jobs initiatives. Nothing on the scale of even the Nixonian "jobs-training" programs was sponsored.

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/06/29-8

continued....