Business Breakage
It’s nice to hear that progressives in Congress have insisted that the “public option” is non-negotiable in crafting health care reform legislation (despite some comments from Rahm Emanuel.) The irony of the conservative objection that it will “destroy the health insurance industry” (as if that were a bad thing) is that the public option is designed to save the industry from our real need for a single-payer system. The real gripe is that health insurers might lose exhorbitant profits as competition from a government plan forces them to reduce rates.
I am still not holding my breath.
The same goes for “cap and trade,” a program meant to ease industrial production toward methods that consume less energy and emit fewer carbon emissions. The devil is in the details, of course; the plan passed by the House a few weeks ago seems to me incredibly forgiving of industrial polluters.
As for our food production, the last I looked the Congress had passed an agricultural bill that heavily favored corporate producers over small business farmers. When is THAT gonna change?
In the last panel I labeled Arianna Huffington, the doyen of the web site that is like a black hole of information theft. Next to her is Chris Anderson, Wired Mag guru and Wikipedia plagiarist currently promoting his new book advocating the release of information from the bonds of people expecting to be paid when they provide it. See Malcolm Gladwell’s takedown of this paradigm shift.
