Home » Robert Reich’s September Songs: on health care reform, what a difference two years makes

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Robert Reich’s September Songs: on health care reform, what a difference two years makes — 37 Comments

  1. neo invents new writing style only possible in the embedded live media age.

    short on prose, long on think for yourself, see with your eyes, decide on your own, complete with muscal interlude (also to make one think).

    basically the more we watch the more the average joe may realize that they have no side but one, communism. which requires changability on a dime to ALL other sides and options. today they can be for it, tomorrow against it, and the next day, express that they had no opinion on it, and all would pass a lie detector, as they are fanatical enough to test truthful.

    as i said a long time before they are used to using the tools that work when there is no ability to record things. a biological throwback to the time when creating such people in a population with short memories is creating a sub population of parasites that do better than others. however their genetic predispositions mean nothing as the environment has changed and they are not adapting to people having their own memories, their own hard drives full of copious amounts of useful trash, and that all this augments them to no longer behave as our primitive ancestors did when faced with a past that exists only in memory.

    as i said, gossip factrued into bullitins and notices, which became news papers, which fell to radio, which then fell to television, which fell to cable, which fell to the internet….

    fracture, create, fracture, create.
    its how capitalism raises the bar to the next level.

    and each level fractures the ability to control the issue for a while, till a new level is reached. (the next will probably be mesh networking to get around internet blocking and control.

    the US has remained the most free (and we are about to lose all of that), because we have allowed rampant invention and improvement to create new levels in which control is harder to have, and easier to circumvent.

    when rules for radicals was written, the quote of everyone being famous for 15 minutes was not taken seriously, and someone like alinsky could not envision 200 cell phone cameras making and providing a rashoman effect an orders of magnitude greater.

    technology has empowered us to the point where communism may fail if we dont let it maneuver the right pieces into place while we are stupid and naive about it.

    question is will we as a people let it happen?

  2. “The term “siren song” refers to an appeal that is hard to resist but that, if heeded, will lead to a bad …”

  3. I guess after you read this, all this push for this stuff is going to make sense.

    that is, so many do not want to be on teh wrong side of what will happen before the end of the year.

    Report: Russia to allow pre-emptive nukes
    http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D9BAUJ680&show_article=1

    Moscow reserves the right to conduct pre-emptive nuclear strikes to safeguard the country against aggression on both a large and a local scale, according to a newspaper interview published Wednesday.

    and putin will be back in office in time to head that war room with the man who has been running things (gennady zyuganov).

    arent you glad that everyone else in the world is going to lay down their nuclear arms and let russia rule?

    Patrushev said a sweeping document on military policy including a passage on preventative nuclear force will be handed to President Dmitry Medvedev by the end of the year, according to Izvestia.

    Officials are examining “a variety of possibilities for using nuclear force, depending on the situation and the intentions of the possible opponent,” Patrushev was quoted as saying. “In situations critical to national security, options including a preventative nuclear strike on the aggressor are not excluded.”

    right about the time that a new world government treaty will be signed and americans as a people will go nutty when they realize that america WAS.

    At [the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in] Copenhagen, this December, weeks away, a treaty will be signed. Your president will sign it. Most of the third world countries will sign it, because they think they’re going to get money out of it. Most of the left-wing regimes from the European Union will rubber stamp it. Virtually nobody won’t sign it.
    I read that treaty. And what it says is this, that a world government is going to be created. The word “government” actually appears as the first of three purposes of the new entity. The second purpose is the transfer of wealth from the countries of the West to third world countries, in satisfaction of what is called, coyly, “climate debt” – because we’ve been burning CO2 and they haven’t. We’ve been screwing up the climate and they haven’t. And the third purpose of this new entity, this government, is enforcement.
    How many of you think that the word “election” or “democracy” or “vote” or “ballot” occurs anywhere in the 200 pages of that treaty? Quite right, it doesn’t appear once. So, at last, the communists who piled out of the Berlin Wall and into the environmental movement, who took over Greenpeace so that my friends who funded it left within a year, because [the communists] captured it – Now the apotheosis as at hand. They are about to impose a communist world government on the world.

    You have a president who has very strong sympathies with that point of view. He’s going to sign it. He’ll sign anything. He’s a Nobel Peace Prize [winner]; of course he’ll sign it.
    Lord Monckton…

    of course russia just told obama and the world that they are drawing up a new plan that includes using pre-emtive nuclear strikes against…

    So, thank you, America. You were the beacon of freedom to the world. It is a privilege merely to stand on this soil of freedom while it is still free. But, in the next few weeks, unless you stop it, your president will sign your freedom, your democracy, and your humanity away forever. And neither you nor any subsequent government you may elect will have any power whatsoever to take it back. That is how serious it is. I’ve read the treaty. I’ve seen this stuff about [world] government and climate debt and enforcement. They are going to do this to you whether you like it or not.
    But I think it is here, here in your great nation, which I so love and I so admire – it is here that perhaps, at this eleventh hour, at the fifty-ninth minute and fifty-ninth second, you will rise up and you will stop your president from signing that dreadful treaty, that purposeless treaty. For there is no problem with climate and, even if there were, an economic treaty does nothing to [help] it.

    it may be this or world war…

    and yet, i will bet the reasonable ones will say no way.

    russia is acting like it always has acted.
    it wants control of the whole world, and its willing to collude and manipualte to get it, and it got it cause of all the reasonable people who dont know that communism is the end result of socialism.

    it was good while it lasted.

    but after it CHANGES… they can exterminate any peoples they want, there will be no one left to protest. everyone will be on the same page.

    we have been disarmed of our ability to manufacture what we need to sustain any resistence.

    we have been disarmed of money which we would use to fund such resistance

    we have been dsarmed of our will to even put up resistance as a huge proportion love our new masters and think it will be utopia.

    there is a lot moer, but who wants to discuss the biggest picture when there are so many local things to get your nose into and not notice.

  4. Two-thirds lie about reading a book

    It is the dirty little literary secret of which most are guilty but few openly admit: pretending to have read highbrow books like War and Peace to make ourselves appear more intelligent and sexy than we actually are.

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/4938155/Two-thirds-lie-about-reading-a-book.html#

    is it any wonder that liberals, who dont know history tell everyone they understand marx? that they ahve read it. that they know where things are going.

    well, most completely do not want to read the ideas and policy papers of these peple.

    we have to first elect them to office to find out how radical their ideas are for us disposables (not elites).

    the worst part is, that if you HAVE read it, you would know that they ARE NOT being radical, but being VERY MAINSTREAM for people within that ideology going back to the late 1800s!!!!

    reichs statements are no more controversial than clarence gambles, margaret sanger, and a whole bunch of others from early last century.

    in fact they havent even changed the ideas, so at BEST people like this are plagerizers relying on the fact that the people who want to know are to darn lazy to even bother reading.

    i know that because i post a link, and they wont read anything that may actually explain stuff to them.

    and of course reading the same ends from 1880, then reading them from 1905, then 1910, then 1917… then 1928, then 1930, then 1947… then 1960s, then 1970s, then 80s.

    same message. same goals, same ideology, and if old, even the same people.

    but there is no patter, no explanation that comes from history writings and such…

    nope, this is all fresh and new..

    Under the cover of an anonymous questionnaire, two-thirds of people admitted to fibbing about having read a book.

    Surprisingly, given its brevity and pace, 1984 heads the top 10 list of books we falsely claim to have read.

    The rest of the list is largely predictable, stuffed full of weighty volumes most have seen dramatised on television but not read line by endless line.

    Besides War and Peace and Ulysses — which can both exceed 1,000 pages depending on edition — other unread works include the Bible, Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert and A Brief History of Time, by Professor Stephen Hawking.

    Many also bluffed about reading classics by the likes of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and the Bronté« sisters.

    In reality most people would rather pick up a JK Rowling, John Grisham or a Mills and Boon, the poll found.

    The results show the lengths to which people will go to appear intelligent and well-read, said Jonathan Douglas, director of the National Literacy Trust.

    so is it any wonder that things are as i said.

    intelligentsia are poseurs

    and the intelligent are railed and attacked by mostly them because they do not make up answers, pretend to read, write long tracts with references.

    they have not read the goals, all they have are the soundbites that help them FAKE IT. and be cargo cult.

    here is what they believe, and they dont even know where these beliefs come from.

    Under Communism all shall satisfy their material needs without stint or measure from the common storehouse, according to their desires. Everyone will be able to have what he or she desires in food, in clothing, books, music, education and travel facilities. The abundant production now possible, and which invention will constantly facilitate, will remove any need for rationing or limiting of consumption.

    but they dont look to examples.

    here is more
    There will be no class distinctions, since these arise from differences in material possessions, education and social status — all such distinctions will be swept away.
    There will be neither rich nor poor. Money will no longer exist, and none will desire to hoard commodities not in use, since a fresh supply may be obtained at will. There will be no selling, because there will be no buyers, since everyone will be able to obtain everything at will, without payment.
    The possession of private property, beyond that which is in actual personal use, will disappear.
    There will be neither masters nor servants, all being in a position of economic equality — no individual will be able to become the employer of another.
    All children will be educated up to adult age, and all adults will be able to make free, unstinted use of all educational facilities in their abundant leisure.
    Stealing, forgery, burglary, and all economic crimes will disappear, with all the objectionable apparatus for preventing, detecting and punishing them.
    Prostitution will become extinct; it is a commercial transaction, dependent upon the economic need of the prostitute and the customer’s power to pay.
    Sexual union will no longer be based upon material conditions, but will be freely contracted on the basis of affection and mutual attraction.
    The birth of children will cease to be prevented by reason of poverty.
    Material anxiety being removed, and the race for wealth eliminated, other objects and ambitions will take the place of the personal struggle for individual material existence; since all will benefit from the labour of all honour will be done, not to the wealthy, as at present, but to those who are skilful and zealous in the common service.
    Emulation in work will take the place of emulation in wealth.
    With the disappearance of the anxious struggle for existence, which saps the energy and cripples initiative, a new vigour, a new independence will develop. People will have more courage to desire freedom, greater determination to possess it. They will be more exacting in their demands upon life, more fastidious as to their choice of a vocation. They will wish to work at what they enjoy, to order their lives as they desire. Work will be generally enjoyed as never before in the history of mankind.
    The desire for freedom will be tempered by the sense of responsibility towards the commonweal, which will provide security for all.
    Public opinion provides a stronger, more general compulsion than any penal code, and public opinion will strongly disapprove idleness and waste.

    not bad for ideas from 1921
    Pankhurst’s communist vision – from her Workers’ Dreadnought newspaper of 1921

    i have listed out tons of stuff that would EXPLAIN whats going on and what the goals are. and some of that stuff was written by people connected to those in power now.

    and every one of these 100 year old things is a complet and shocking surprise to these reasonable fakirs posuers pretending.

    here is Anita Dunn,
    Anita Dunn, the White House communications chief who was the point-person for the administration’s war on Fox News, is caught on video expressing her admiration for one of history’s greatest mass murdering communists… Mao Tse Tung.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiBDpL2dExY&feature=player_embedded
    Her most admired philosopher is a communist who murdered at least 70,000,000 people.

    so take her, reich above, obama, ayers, wright, dohrn, pelosi, jennings, van johnson, cass sunstein, mark lloyd, john holdren, and about 75 more people..

    and its just an accident that their ideas are the same as that from what time?

  5. Books we pretend we have read:

    1. 1984, by George Orwell42% (read it more than once)

    2. War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy31% (read it when i was a child)

    3. Ulysses, by James Joyce25% (read it when i was a child)

    4. The Bible24% (have read several versions and you can throw in the koran, the mormon bible, and the vedas, lao tsu, kung fu tse, bhudda, etc)

    5. Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert16% (read it as a teen in high school)

    6. A Brief History of Time, by Stephen Hawking15% (Read it in a couple of days and was very disappointed in that it was grade school level (from the past))

    7. Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie14% (met the man, didnt like his attitude, didnt bother to read the book)

    8. In Remembrance of Things Past, by Marcel Proust 9% (started, never finished)

    9. Dreams from My Father, by Barack Obama6% (scanned fast, skimmed it. not a great read).

    10. The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins6% (read it, its awful. mostly because he has the same super intelligent luditism which somehow feels the limits of the world are the limits fo their mind and so nothing new will happen, the end is known, and of course a odd form of nihilism sets in. dawkins other book about religion, he relied on the fact that others would not have red the refutations to the points he was making. refutatios that were made by much much better thinkers than dawkins)

    here is a sampling of some reading of mine.
    if i give a name then i have read a lot by them.

    i have also read all 9 books of gramsci
    ihave read marx das capital, books by engels, books by chinese political philosophers, edmund burke, the founding fathers, the works of plato (including platos republic), all the works of shakespeare (more than once), gurdief, decartes, voltaire, rousseau, hobbs, aloisios, aquinas, ratsinger, castro, lenin, stalin, adorno, marcuse, skinner, freud, adler (was freinds with margot a relative that had her 15 mins), Maslow (love his book where he digresses chapter 11 and 12). fenimore coopers books, jack londons books, frank herbert..

    went to the canon and here are some i have read from there.
    Gilgamesh,
    Egyptian Book of the Dead (dad bought it in the 60s, so i read it when i was in juior high). Holy Bible (King James Version), The Apocrypha, Bhagavad-Gita, Confuscious, lao tsu. tsun tsu, koans, clausewitz, rommel. Iliad and the Odyssey.Prometheus Bound, Oedipus the King, Electra, ajax, Euripides (cyclops, heracles, hecuba, medea), Herodotus the histories. platos republic and platos dialogus, aristotle, ethics. of the greeks only aesop, and plutarch… lots of works and writings of cicero (he was roman). virgil, ovid… the koran (Al-Qur’an), The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, works of alexander dumas, Beowulf, Don quixote (and man of la mancha). dantes divine comedy. Michelangelo Buonarroti – Sonnets and Madrigals Niccolé² Machiavelli – The Prince / Leonardo da Vinci
    Notebooks.

    i can literally keep going on and on and on… and almsot all of them i read BEFORE going to college.

    this is why i dont get along with the left intelligentsia, they are poseurs, and when i talk to them and they refer, i know they are ignorant.

    and if you get into the authors from the US and england, the list blows out to literally hundreds of authors and books.

    i only sleep 4 hours a night…

    robert burns, robert frost, percy byse shelly, byron, william hazlit, jane austen, robert browning, elizabeth browning, dickens, tennyson.

    and modern works too. dune series, ur lord series, tanith lee, was stuck in an elevator with marion zimmer bradly, lord of the rings series, dark towers, elric series (and the others connected to it)

    very frustrating to try to make a point today, and all that and more is gone from those who are my contemporaries (which is why my friends ahve always been older).

    sigh

    We forget everything. What we remember is not what actually happened, not history, but merely that hackneyed dotted line they have chosen to drive into our memories by incessant hammering.
    Part I The Prison Industry, Ch. 8 The Law as a Child The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 (1973) by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  6. our communist in chief has decided to snubb the germans at the 20th anniversary of the taking down of the Berlin wall. i guess he doesnt like that symbol of his families most loved country.

  7. Occam beard said: “Imagine how much leftists must hate YouTube. Seriously.”

    There needs to be another repository of these things.

    I recall how that vid of Cat Stevens appeared for awhile in which he was saying he would burn Rushdie if he was in a muslim country. The vid was from some European show. Then the vid disappeared. Then Cat stevens played in the Al Gore climate concert…….

  8. Jon, check out Naked Emperor News. I sure hope that they have those clips stored safely.

  9. Robert Reich is one of my favorite liberals. He does occasionally tip the liberal hand – as in his speech at Berkeley. However, the second clip is Reich being the dutiful liberal, making the case in his most earnest fashion for what will eventually become the U. S. National Health Service. (USNHS)

    You have to be in the last season of your life to truly appreciate “September Song.” I always liked it and it evoked bittersweet feelings of a life nearing its end. Now that I’m in the September of life, it evokes feelings of love (for my wife, who spends these golden days with me) and appreciation for all that life has been.

    Sing it again, Walter!

  10. RR makes my skin crawl. He and his many brothers & sisters are such smoothly polished liars. It comes so easily, ever so easily to them. And the sheeple, the adult versions with their heads still filled with mush (Thanks, Rush), having been dumbed down their entire lives, just lap it up.

  11. Who were the ghouls who were applauding when he was talking about offing granny and crippling medical advancement? I suppose they think they will always be young and healthy.

    Such arrogance and sanctimony on open display. Who with two brain cells to rub together would trust this sleaze bag with their health care?

  12. There is a sizeable number of people who [falsely] believe that financing universal health care can be accomplished by taxing those evil rich people. If they need to see an example of what happens in that scenario they need only look at what has happened to the economies of California and New Jersey. High taxation has driven out business, creating lower tax collection than if tax rates had been left the same or lowered. It is an article of faith in liberal circles that the rich must be made to pay thier “fair share.” Trouble is, when that is put into practice it has the reverse effect. People still do not understand that Obamacare, in whatever form it will ultimately take, is going to tax people making less than 200K per year, and tax them heavily. In the spirit of schadenfreude, I can’t wait for my newly adult children, all of whom voted for Obama, to come crying to me about how much they are having to pay in tax once this whole thing is done. Boo hoo, I’ll say. You asked for it, you got it.

  13. Neo: I’ve bitten my tongue about this for a long time, but I’ve just got to say that Artfldgr’s posts are a real problem. They’re unreadable, unedited, often off-topic and even though there is plenty of intelligence and knowledge behind them, they often read like unhinged rants. And needless to say, they go on and on. I’m tired of scrolling and scrolling to get past them. As a longtime fan of this blog, I have to say that if I were new to it, Artfldgr’s posts would be the first thing to hit me, and they would put me off.

  14. The Berkeley students weren’t laughing because they are callous. I suspect they were laughing because an adult was speaking candidly to them and not blowing clouds of sanctimonious PC smoke at them. I have had the same experience in university settings: you tell them the ugly, unvarnished facts of life and everybody wants to crowd around and hear more.

    People laugh when something is surprising and makes sense. It is surprising when politicians say unpopular things. The Berkeley students are smart enough to know there is going to be pain for someone in universal health care. They probably believe the pain will be for someone else–people who aren’t like them in terms of age and class–and so they are callous. But I think the young are callous by nature.

    Reich’s second message was for a totally different audience: flyover working class people (in places like Ohio) who don’t know any better (that’s why they cling to their guns and religion). Reich probably figures that he can show contempt for their intelligence without much danger. Harvard professors know that the plebeians aren’t smart enough to see through them.

  15. Clarification: Reich’s previous appointments were at Harvard and Brandeis. His current appointment is at Berkeley.

    I always associate him with Harvard after sitting next to him at breakfast at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge. I either Mobutu or Kabila (I can’t remember which) was staying in the hotel at the same time, so it must have been late 90’s. Interesting people watching opportunities!

  16. mizpants:
    I respectfully disagree. I think Artfldgr’s comments add a great deal of value to this site, and as time goes on, his observations are becoming more and more important. The picture is starting to come into focus as to what the Obamunists have in store for us, and it is not pretty.

    You are perfectly free to scroll past any comment you don’t want to read. I myself don’t read every word of every comment posted here, and I’m not only talking about Artfldgr.

  17. mizpants:
    I just re-read your comment and saw that you said you were tired of scrolling. Are you familiar with the “page up” and “page down” buttons? I’m not being sarcastic or snarky. I’ve discovered that a lot of people are unaware of their function, and think they have to navigate by clicking and dragging on the vertical slider, or repeatedly hitting the arrow keys.

  18. rickl,
    Thanks for the tip. I am not techno-savvy, and appreciate it.
    I agree that Artfldgr has valuable things to say, but it drives me nuts that he won’t edit himself.
    Maybe I’ll address him directly: Artfldgr, I don’t mean to offend you, but please edit yourself! Your points are lost when you go on at such length. Readers get impatient. Anyone who can write can edit what he writes.
    I seem to be feeling cranky today.

  19. mizpants: actually, I often do shorten artfldgr’s comments, but I sometimes don’t get around to it if I’m busy (like yesterday). When I do, I always put a note at the end to let people know. But although his comments are indeed long and rambling, they are an always-fascinating glimpse into a unique perspective nad make many many points worth pondering. I don’t always agree with everything he says, of course (true of most of the commenters here) but I think his contribution is valuable.

    People can always scroll past. And if the length of them puts people off so much they’re tempted not to come back—well then, they probably won’t like my blog all that much anyway, since I tend to be verbose. I’m not including you in that group, but I suggest you just use the “page down” button.

  20. And while we’re at it, the “home” key takes you directly to the top of the page, and “end” takes you to the bottom. The “up” and “down” arrow keys move one line at a time, sort of like fine-tuning.

    That concludes today’s lesson. 🙂

  21. I think what we have here is a failure to miscommunicate.

    This often happens when someone tries to convey what he believes to be the truth and then, later on, in a political context, has to revisit the same topic.

    Reich told the unvarnished truth about Healthcare-with-a-capital-H back in 2007 speaking in an academic environment. Then, in 2009, to avoid everything he had said previously he addressed an issue, a national, rather than state-by-state insurance scheme, and omitted what he had said earlier.

    Daniel Patrick Moynihan had the same problem. As an intellectual he said that federal welfare policies were destroying the black family and creating a permanent underclass. As a senator he said said undoing some of these policies would destroy the same people he earlier said those policies were destroying.

  22. Not to be tiresome about it, but the disadvantage of using Pg Down or the space bar (which does work!) is that it usually lands me in the middle of a post and I have to scroll back up to read it from the beginning. And unless I’m careful, I’ll miss a tight and witty comment by Occam’s Beard or nolanimrod or rickl in the effort to get out of a twenty-four incher by Artfldgr.

  23. the effort to get out of a twenty-four incher by Artfldgr

    Unfortunate choice of words, but we get the idea…

    Artfldgr does occasionally do his cyber impression of a Castro speech, but he also turns up so much valuable stuff, makes so many critical insights, and highlights so many great references as to more than make up for that quirk, IMO.

  24. Artfldgr has a lot of loyal friends and supporters here. I think well enough of these people so that from now on I’ll make a good-faith effort to read his posts.

  25. i do castro when i am frustrated, or have said it before in short and passing and realize it didnt stick the first time. its like i have a big key ring, and i know if its said the right way, it will unlock realization. which key? sometimes i am dead on, other times i am literally trying keys and desperately trying to reveal HUGE amounts of information in a short space. information that they never even thought existed and tend to disbelieve sometimes just for that fact alone.

    sorry mizpants… i actually waited till the comment numbers were pretty high, then commented, i thought it had petered out and i would say my comment near the end. so far that recently has not been a good thing… the commentaries have gone over 75…

    i dont usually have time to edit… and so i just spit it out. (often i am at work, and so editing and researching more than i do is not possible, and being more careful is also not possible).

    neo does a great job keeping me from pounding the nail through the board. but others dont seem to integrate ‘new’, so the same old circles happen.

    sigh…

    look at it this way…

    do you think knowing so much, and being capable in so much stuff makes my life a happy one?

  26. And unless I’m careful, I’ll miss a tight and witty comment by Occam’s Beard or nolanimrod or rickl in the effort to get out of a twenty-four incher by Artfldgr.

    You should have seen what it was like when we had flame wars here that were uncontrolled and you couldn’t even scroll past them like on blogspot.

    I think well enough of these people so that from now on I’ll make a good-faith effort to read his posts.

    Pick the parts you are interested in and skip the parts that are not. That has never been a bad advice to follow, except for legal documents.

    Best control and speed is to click on the slider to the right, hold, and then move it down at a speed you know you can recognize the end of a post.

  27. “if your mere desire for something, anything, imposes a duty on other people to satisfy you, then they have no choice in their lives… your right to anything at others’ involuntary expense means that they become rightless.” Leonard Peikoff

    is this what your getting at yarmarskar?

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