Saturday, October 10, 2009

What Do You Call a Revolving Zombie?

I can't con myself that it is a pain-free (or risk-free) program to continue to attempt to monitor the ongoing health care reform proceedings. Despite the fact that ridiculous absurdities and over-the-top hysterics from opponents are quite frequent and do bear a distinct resemblance to some of the most outrageous behavior exhibited by the McSlime campaign (only a year ago - ohmigosh), this is different. For one thing, the show has a cast of hundreds instead of scores. For another, the corporate interests and lobbyists do not seem to be bothering to divide their money, time, and slime evenly between the true opposition positions, e.g., killing reform and say, a proper first-world country single-payer system (or at least a program with a truly robust 50-states public option).

But background briefings from those with a broader perspective and more context than I have can be helpful. For one thing, they can reinforce the need for strong and consistent speaking out and pushback by those who believe in reform. I.e., apparently a healthy majority of Americans.

Here's Moyers and Winship:

On Tuesday, Oct. 13, the Senate Finance Committee finally is scheduled to vote on its version of healthcare insurance reform. And therein lies yet another story in the endless saga of money and politics.

In most polls, the majority of Americans favor a nonprofit alternative -- like Medicare -- that would give the private health industry some competition. So if so many of us, including President Obama himself, want that public option, how come we're not getting one?

Because the medicine that could cure our healthcare nightmare has been poisoned from Day One -- fatally adulterated, thanks to the infamous, Washington revolving door. Movers and shakers rotate between government and the private sector at a speed so dizzying they forget for whom they're supposed to be working.

If you've been watching the Senate Finance Committee's markup sessions, maybe you've noticed a woman sitting behind Committee Chairman Max Baucus. Her name is Liz Fowler.

Fowler used to work for WellPoint, the largest health insurer in the country. She was its vice-president of public policy. Baucus' office failed to mention this in the press release announcing her appointment as senior counsel in February 2008, even though it went on at length about her expertise in "healthcare policy."

Now she's working for the very committee with the most power to give her old company and the entire industry exactly what they want -- higher profits -- and no competition from alternative nonprofit coverage that could lower costs and premiums.

A veteran of the revolving door, Fowler had a previous stint working for Sen. Baucus -- before her time at WellPoint. But wait, there's more. The person who was Baucus' top health advisor before he brought back Liz Fowler? Her name is Michelle Easton. And why did she leave the staff of the committee? To go to work -- surprise -- at a firm representing the same company for which Liz Fowler worked -- WellPoint. As a lobbyist.

You can't tell the players without a scorecard in the old Washington shell game. Lobbyist out, lobbyist in. It's why they always win. They've been plowing this ground for years, but with the broad legislative agenda of the Obama White House -- healthcare, energy, financial reform, the Employee Free Choice Act and more -- the soil has never been so fertile.

The healthcare industry alone has six lobbyists for every member of Congress and more than 500 of them are former congressional staff members, according to the Public Accountability Initiative's LittleSis database.

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And, on a related note, Sirota draws our attention to the proliferating plethora of un-dead critters sprouting up in the entertainment field as well as on Wall Street:

What's with all the zombies lately?

That could be a question about one of the hippest retro fads that pop culture has going these days. Inspired by horror genres of past, zombies have lurched back to preeminence in books like "World War Z," video games like "Left 4 Dead" and blockbuster films like "Zombieland." Even the highbrow producers at National Public Radio recently devoted a segment to a University of Ottawa study titled "Mathematical Modeling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection." Indeed, the undead have become so popular, they've spurred "zombie walks" in cities and spawned Weird Al-ish parodies through Jane Austen knockoffs like "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" and bands such as the Zombeatles (with their hit "Hard Day's Night of the Living Dead").

Frighteningly enough, though, that question about zombies could also be asked of America's political culture.

It was only a year ago that "zombie" first entered the colloquial economic lexicon during the collapse of the financial institutions that were cannibalizing the economy. From a balance-sheet perspective, many of these firms were dead. But they were quickly reanimated as zombie banks with trillions of taxpayer dollars.

Like a typical zombie outbreak, the initial plague spread.

On Wall Street, we have zombie executives -- those who destroyed the economy but nonetheless kept their same jobs and now continue paying themselves huge bonuses. At the White House, President Obama hired zombie advisors whose zombie economic ideologies and records manufacturing recession conditions should have killed their careers, but who now sit in high government office letting out moans in support of the zombie banks.

On Capitol Hill, the scene this Halloween season looks like Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video. Decrepit zombie politicians with the funk of 40,000 years stalk Congress with the very zombie lobbyists that the election was said to disempower. Lately, they are working in tandem to construct zombie health insurance companies -- for-profit corporations eternalized by public subsidies, customer mandates and almost no regulation or competition. At the same time, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that should have already concluded keep plodding on with an unchanging zombie strategy -- all while media zombies push zombie myths about death panels and birth certificates, effectively feasting on the last functioning lobes of the American brain.

Call me a zombie pundit, but I agree with "World War Z" author Max Brooks' suggestion that the concurrent rise of zombie pop and political cultures is no coincidence.

"Zombies are an apocalyptic threat, we are living in times of apocalyptic anxiety (and) we need a vessel in which to coalesce those anxieties," he says.

In fact, I'll go out on a severed limb and take it further: If zombies specifically represent the apocalyptic downsides of immortalized mindlessness, then today’s zombie zeitgeist is not merely a result of scary quandaries created by stupidity. It is a reaction to both those problems and the sense that they can never be thwarted.

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I don't know what I have in the way of a punch-line. An Everlasting Dizzy?