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Saturday, November 21, 2009

Sanders: Public Option Not Optional

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) issued the following statement on Nov. 21, 2009, after the Senate 60-39 vote to begin debate on a health care reform bill:
"I voted to proceed on health care reform because our current health care system is disintegrating and must be reformed. Forty-six million Americans are uninsured, and 45,000 die every year because they don't have access to a doctor. We have almost one million Americans going bankrupt because of medically-related diseases, health care costs are soaring and we end up spending almost twice as much per person on health care as any other nation. It is clear that we need real health care reform.

"While I voted to proceed to the health care legislation tonight, I have made it clear to the administration and Democratic leadership that my vote for the final bill is by no means guaranteed. In the weeks to come I intend to do everything I can to make this legislation stronger and more effective for working families and taxpayers in Vermont and America and something all Americans can be proud of."

Conservadems have attracted an enormous amount of attention and leverage through their threats to commit political suicide and destroy their party's majority and kill countless thousands of their fellow citizens by preserving the murderous for-profit healthcare system intact.

I leave to the side of my considerations, of course, the sizable, far worse, but hopelessly unreachable obstructionist block of outright anti-civilizational Movement Republicans who cannot be moved and who will reap the whirlwind in consequence if Democrats manage to install anything the least bit substantial in the way of more general welfare and good governance in spite of them.

Key now is that we not let a minority of corporate shills and vestigial feudalists among the Democrats dictate the terms of the next, even uglier stage of the struggle in the Senate. Now is the time for relentless pressure on Conservadems and also in support of those who are trying to do the right thing (comparatively speaking) in the face of incredibly loud, frantic, moneyed, incumbent interests.

Those who give up now, need to get out of the way, while the rest of us push, push, push from the left. Note that narcissistic declarations of "a plague on both your houses" at a time like this do not constitute pushes from the left, they constitute infantile demands for attention when nobody with sense has any time or attention to spare.

Majorities of Americans -- Republican lies to the contrary notwithstanding -- want real reform, and majorities in the Congress want to deliver it. Make sure that the attention and the leverage is on the side of the majorities -- who also happen to have the facts and human values on their side in this instance -- right where it belongs by making your voice heard with your calls, your signatures, your dollars, whatever you have.

Sanders, America's Senator, with the statement above, is announcing that the comparatively principled Democratic majority has a greater voice and greater sense and greater vision and greater righteousness and greater strength from which to bargain in this moment than the miniscule minority of greedheads and anti-choicers who are now grabbing the megaphone when they clearly need to be grabbing a copy of the Platform of the Party they benefit from membership in right about now, and we've got to have Sanders' back, we've got to have the back of the many more reform-oriented pro-Choice Democrats who are more in tune with our aspirations.

We need to get our foot in the door to shift the terrain on which the struggle for substantial reform in the direction of universal healthcare as a right to secure the scene of legitimate consent and the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.

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