Conversations with the Living: The Haitian AIDS Crisis

I think it’s safe to say we know where Barack Obama’s principals lie – wherever the money is. I also think it’s safe to say that the only true winners of the past week has been that all pervasive, omnipotent beast known as Big Business. Two of the weeks biggest events – the second week of Copenhagen and the U.S. Senate’s 60-vote passage of their version of health care reform – amounted to nothing more than Big Government posturing.

Firstly, Copenhagen, aka Hopenhagen, but better referred to as Brokenhagen because even the mainstream press and “anonymous sources” acknowledged that it was nothing short of a chaotic embarrassment for the United Nations. But what do you expect from a conference 100% about global politics, economics, and power and 0% about the environment. Meanwhile, without any agreement between nations, it’s business as usual for industries across the globe. (Though even if a ‘legally binding’ agreement had been put together, it’s doubtful anyone would pay attention to it.) Anyway you look at the past two weeks in Copenhagen, it was an absolute failure and the Obama administration’s insistence that it and their amateur efforts at diplomacy were anything else is pure Panglossian nonsense.

And so-called health care reform? Let’s put it this way. Obama’s right-hand man/Chief of Staff, Rahm Emmanuel, is a veteran of the Clinton White House. If there’s one thing that absolutely scarred that administration, it was the crash-and-burn train-wreck that was derisively known as Hillarycare. Emmanuel and the Democratic party, in general, suffer from serious PTSD when it comes to that.

So what did they learn?

Robert Cuttner, an economist and editor of the American Prospect, put it best during an interview on Bill Moyers Journal:

Rahm Emanuel’s take away from Bill Clinton’s failure to get health insurance passed was ‘don’t get on the wrong side of the insurance companies.’ So their strategy was cut a deal with the insurance companies, the drug industry going in. And the deal was, we’re not going to attack your customer base, we’re going to subsidize a new customer base. And that script was pre-cooked so it’s not surprising that this is what comes out the other side.

As a result of some very cynical policy making, we get the charade so painfully being played out in the houses of Congress and Pennsylvania Ave.

For Barack Hussein Obama, it’s business as usual in the Beltway. Don’t think so? Take a look at the two hold-overs from the Bush administration – Ben Bernanke (The man in charge of America’s money) and Robert Gates (The man in charge of America’s multiple wars and proxy-wars).

Still willing to grant the President the benefit of the doubt? Look at Obama’s appointment of Timothy Geithner, a man who embodies Wall Street in the flesh, as his Secretary of the Treasury. Geithner in turn appointed a former Goldman Sachs lobbyist as his top aid. Is a career Wall Street insider supposed to be expected to reform Wall Street? More Panglossian thinking from the White House.

I’ll close with another bit of trivia: Goldman Sachs was one of the President’s biggest campaign campaign contributors.

Panglossian? No. Cynical? Absolutely. (Oh sorry, it’s “pragmatic,” not cynical).

- Marc L.

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