Buddy, can you spare me a lek?

By Joe Bageant
Ajijic, Jalisco, Mexico

[Note from *C* ~ As I'm sure some of you have noticed, I am a huge fan of Joe Bageant . . . I don't understand how anyone who reads him wouldn't be!)

People often comment on the intelligence and insight, the humor and sincerity, of the letters Ken and I receive on joebageant.com. And they say that the readers write as if we have known each other all our lives. I respond that yes, we have, but just did not know each other's names. And that many of us have been pretty much invisible and voiceless except to each other. And that, yes, my friends out there are indeed intelligent and clear eyed citizens. The American populace is often underestimated.

The fact is that America's finest minds and souls have no voice in this chilling new corporate state that has evolved. And if we are not allowed a voice, if our monolithic system ignores us, pretends we do not exist, then for all practical purposes we do not exist. Therefore it does not have to offer us political candidates representing our views or change laws to reflect them. Nevertheless, we are out there -- millions of us.

One of my biggest regrets regarding this site is that the success of Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War increased the volume of email to the point where I cannot answer it all like I used to do. I do however, read every one, and answer as many as is feasible these days.

This morning's mailbox was the usual wonderful variety of letters, mostly responding to the current post, "Shoot the fat guys, hang the smokers." Many offered heartfelt smoking cessation advice, all of it from personal experience, honest and eminently more sensible than anything I've read elsewhere.

As to the strange new politicizing of behaviors such as smoking and overeating, some brilliant insights came in, along with the prescient observation from Spain that "the fat gays will be the first to go." We should all watch out for that particular canary in the coal mine in which we all toil.

A couple of emails objected, though not meanly or with excessive vehemence, to my calling the Democratic leadership a bunch of fickle, sleazy, traitorous "cunts." I'm not gonna defend such language. Heavens no! It's downright loathsome and detestable. This is why I use it. Then too, I have called the Democratic leadership dicks and dickheads and pussies scores of times, and there were few options left. In passing I will add that I do not believe that any words or terms whatsoever should be beyond the reach of a writer or anyone else for reasons of political correctness. The masses are controlled through controlling their language, which in turn controls the concepts they are capable of grasping.

I try to remember that it was during the most brutally repressive period of communist China that the Communist Party came up with the concept of "political correctness of language." I have always been amazed that Americans could bring themselves to even use the term "politically correct," given the murdering bastards who coined it and perfected its implementation as a social control tool. As we have seen here in America with the exclusion or purposeful demonization of words such as liberalism, socialism, welfare state, controlled economy, once words are demonized or made off limits something is lost, no matter what the word. And once the people are sufficiently indoctrinated to ideology, they will police the language among themselves in the name of political correctness. If the language used by writers such as Mark Twain or Hunter S. Thompson were stripped of politically correct words such as nigger, faggot, etc. -- their chronicles of their times would not convey the full mood and ambiance of the world they saw around them. But enough of that.

Documenting the empire's decline has its funny moments. In the "Iron Cheer of Empire" essay, I opined that the American dollar's value seems to be "thrashing around down there with the Bangladeshi taka." Whereupon a Bangladeshi reader politely informed me that the Bangladeshi taka is strong and doing quite well, thank you. There ya go. Proof that I am as guilty of chauvinism as the Americans I complain about.

Another email depicting the dollar's decline came in yesterday, from a world traveler named Arnie, who was shopping in Rome last September. Arnie has always carried American dollars as fallback currency. But in Rome he was informed by a pretty dark haired clerk that, "I'm sorry, but we do not accept the American dollar anymore."

"She told me," writes Arnie, "about the types of coin they would accept, including the Albanian lek. Now I now know that the axis of the world has shifted. Not having any leks in my wallet, I paid her in euros. I wonder how much sausage gravy you can buy with 20 leks?"

Among the most rewarding are the letters from readers with a similar white underclass background to mine. They too spent a good part of their lives ashamed of their working poor backgrounds -- until they eventually came to realize that the white underclass is the largest demographic group in this country, and decided to own their personal histories. "It's like coming out," wrote one reader. "As long as the true condition of white underclass is kept hidden, and as long as they are kept ignorant and politically manipulated, and as long as they are scorned by liberals, real liberalism doesn't stand a chance."

Amen brother.

We get fascinating (and dismaying) reports from around the world. Reports from Australia that the Aussies have embraced credit card debt and ridiculous mortgages that have driven house prices into the stratosphere as everyone expects to get rich "flipping" their house at a higher price. We get reports of the German and Scandinavian citizenry clamoring for American style privatization of public services and facilities. Residents there tell me it's mostly the result of boredom with decades of safety and security. That plus boredom with their elections, which are nowhere as entertaining and brutally fought as in America. For god sake doesn't anybody ever learn anything at all? Must everyone learn the hard way? Let them have John McCain and Sarah Palin for a while. Inside of a year Switzerland would be attacking Japan.

Scores of emails come in asking for advice, particularly about immigrating to another country. Or how to deal with the depression that has engulfed so many once hopeful folks of principle and good will.

I really don't know much about immigration, or becoming an expat, other than it is a different situation for every person. And more complex that one might think. My personal choice was Belize, which many quite decent Americans find a little too rough and primitive for their tastes (such as not flushing your toilet paper, torrential seasonal rains or an unheard of number of things that crawl, fly, bite, sting or just burrow into your hide and lay eggs -- the bot fly comes to mind). My wife is one of those Americans.

So now I find myself rather comfortably dividing my time between Jalisco, Mexico, Belize and America (because to write books about America you gotta be there on the ground). Right now I am in Ajijic, Mexico and will return to Belize for a stay after Christmas.

This is one ole hillbilly boy who could never have imagined he would reside on two such fine parts of the world, one among the Garifuna by the Caribbean, and one in the arid hills in an ancient town by a lake once fished by the Aztecs. And on very small bucks too. My point being that it's just something you gotta go ahead and do and see what happens. Would-be expats can never really plan how their expatriation will play out (unless you're well heeled old blue hairs or retired car dealers who buy a condo in one of those gated communities that look the same the world over, and your idea of a foreign experience is bossing a maid named Rosa). And besides, a rigid super planned life is what we're trying to escape, right? Why bring the disease with us?

Then there's the mail regarding that black despair permeating American society, the one nobody really talks about. Not the mainstream media. Not even the lefty sites. However, readers do write about it here. And others read and say, "Thank god! I am not alone, I am not weird, and I am not going crazy." I cannot tell you how many thousands, yes thousands, of letters we've received over the years expressing exactly that feeling of relief. Even conservatives write of that national low level depression hovering over our country. It plays no favorites. We also get many letters from people of both camps who've come to the conclusion that the American political process has become so corrupted as to be hopeless, and have given up on trying to fix things.

In a masterpiece of clarity brevity, one reader this week said: "Joe, every day this country makes me want to puke. Any advice?"

Hell, I dunno. Clear liquids?

But the most soul wrenching for me are those that ask: "When I look at what my country has become, I get so depressed that I could cry. Joe, do you think it's hopeless?"

Most days I do. But one thing I know is that while America may be a hopeless cause, the world is not. I am sustained every day by its joy and mystery. The Mexican school kids run by my house at 3 PM, their laughter crashing giddily down these ancient cobbled streets. Iron horseshoes clatter outside my casita window at dusk as "horsemen pass by" on their homeward journey back up into the desert mountain chaparral. In Belize it is raining and in Virginia tonight my wife lights the fireplace, and with our elderly dog at the foot of the bed, will sleep the sleep of the innocent. Any time now snow will fall there, and next morning yet again will appear the miracle of cardinals and chickadees, like dancing peppercorns in the snow.

I just cannot give up on this world.

Shoot The Fat Guys, Hang The Smokers

By Joe Bageant

(This is a long letter, with an even longer reply, but this reader has several excellent points, including the politicization of smoking and over-eating. -- Joe Bageant.)

Dear Joe,

I smoke cigarettes. This is my 49th or 50th year -- don't know which.

When this war on smokers really heated up, in the late 90's, I wrote to a friend in San Francisco, and asked her what was going on. "Is this some kind of grassroots movement?," I asked, in caps. She said she didn't know what it was, exactly, but that it couldn't be a grassroots deal, because they were very, very rich, and very powerful, and they had the full support of governments, corporations, and all of the media, without exception. They were getting lots of tax money, she said -- hundreds of millions -- and there were rumors that the big pharmaceutical companies were involved in funding and planning operations. "After all," she added: "They want to sell nicotine patches, nicotine gum, and a shitload of tranquilizers to the masses who quit as they get the piss pounded out of them." She said that a mutual friend had remarked that it was sure to become the largest social engineering project in the history of the world, and that, though he didn't smoke -- he found it frightening.

I avoided studying the whole thing, because all of the TV infomercials seemed to be telling me that there was an enormous amount of new evidence about the horrors of smoking -- for smokers, themselves, and for everyone they come into contact with. I just didn't want to think about it. But I, too, felt frightened about the social engineering. Still do.

Then, one day, three or four years ago, I had to do a bunch of outdoor work. The following morning, I sat down to try to catch the weather report on the local 6:00 news. I turned on the TV, and they went immediately to some huge anti-smoking rally in Seattle. It was a big, sumptuous event in a banquet room of a ritzy hotel. The governor of Washington State was there, as were the mayors of Seattle, Tacoma, and Everett, one US Senator, a couple congressmen, and a bunch of local city and county politicians. The place was crawling with media. The politicians were falling all over each other to genuflect before the local anti-smoker uber-thugs, and smoking was declared infinitely worse than nuclear war or even a possible collision between earth and a massive rogue meteor.

I thought, "Well, I guess I should look into all this. It just keeps getting more frightening."

That was dozens of books and hundreds of essays and articles and a pretty serious number of epidemiological studies ago. I had planned to write an essay for the Left, but now I've got a dozen rough draft essays, and so much information bookmarked, on Word documents in folders all over the computer, and scattered all around the garage in books and print stuff, that I don't know where I am, half the time. I'm so fucking lost and overwhelmed, that I'm not sure what to do. If you have any advice -- any at all -- about how to keep all this stuff straight, I'd sure like to hear it.

But, beyond the "ME" in all this, we smokers are being "Denormalized." That's the official term. Unofficially, it means that we're characterized as being, in many ways, subhuman -- unworthy of any consideration whatsoever, under any circumstances, like a disease or a repeatedly offending child molester. And, of course, they're taking more and more of our money, and sending it on up the line to the well-to-do professionals who promise to protect society from us drooling psychopaths down here at the bottom. And, in the employment section of the want ads, more and more businesses and government agencies declare that "users" of tobacco, in any form, need not apply: "Urine and blood samples will be taken when we accept your application."

Generally, this war is described as a battle against big tobacco, but, of course, it's actually a war on working people, their habits, their little idiot joys, their little mechanisms of coping.

In any case, the point of this letter is that, throughout the last few years, I've been expecting ("Oh, any day now!," I'd tell myself) some of the big guns on the Left to write some essay condemning all this shit -- but, of course, it has never come. Alexander Cockburn, George Monbiot, and a host of hotshots have even written in favor of what's happening, and Amy Goodman spoke out about what a good idea it is to support a Republican Senator's plan to force smokers -- primarily working and poor folks -- to pay for health insurance for the country's neediest kids. Presumably, the Left would rather not foot the bill itself, so it's handed the burden off to the poor.

I don't understand how this is a Left issue. I don't understand how they're letting all this go on, unchallenged, without even a critical comment.

Then, this morning, I awoke to read a piece by Alexander Cockburn on Counterpunch which literally spends a couple dozen paragraphs attacking fat folks (never had that problem, but the wife is pretty chubby, and I know some very bright, very Left, very serious, very, very fine fat folks).

He actually calls them names, and trashes and demeans them from a number of perspectives. It's a savage, creepy piece.

And, I don't understand how being fat is a Left issue, either. What the fuck is all this shit?

I've always thought of myself as a Lefty -- a "Left Anarchist," that is -- to differentiate myself from Libertarians, with whom, I'll admit, I have some things in common, but their belief in "The Free Market," and the joys of big business, just makes me puke. I thought of myself as a Lefty because I just couldn't stop hearing all the calls for help, from all round me -- all the poverty, all the misery, all the injustice, all the racism, all the sexism, all the violence, all the loneliness, all the situations and people you've so excellently described in your book. I wanted to help, in whatever small ways I could, those folks who were suffering and consistently ignored. And, of course, I wanted to understand what was happening -- how something this terrible could have come to be and could continue to be.

I don't see how punishing smokers, many of whom have been dedicated and effective "members" of the Left, throughout their lives, is responding to cries of help from those who most desperately need it. I don't see how punishing fat people fits into this framework, either. The essential structure that is attacking smokers is working toward various denormalization programs for fat folks -- with, again, Big Pharma generally leading the way. Lots of stuff for drinkers, too, on the horizon.

Even in a "perfect world," a world after the revolution, this shit would not make sense to me, but in a world in which virtually everything is sick and twisted, anti-human and often anti-life, spending tens of billions of dollars to make smokers and drinkers and fat folks the equivalent of Jews in 1930's Germany (this is not hyperbole), it seems to me absolutely inconceivable.

The second-hand smoke deal, as confirmed by 149 epidemiological spousal studies, workplace studies, and childhood studies, is nothing more than "perception management." Smokers are accused of being murderers.

I decided, after trying to make sense of Cockburn's essay, to write a letter to Joe Bageant and ask him to give me his take on all this madness. I've written 50+ letters to various people and newspapers and magazines and TV stations and various governmental agencies and NO ONE has ever replied. There's a dark, very disturbing religious quality to this whole thing, as if someone like me is writing letters asking priests if they mind if I have sex with the nuns.

What do you think, Joe?

Thanks for listening to this torrent of babble. Oh yes, and thanks for being Joe Bageant.

Joe

------

Dear Other Joe,

I scarcely know where to begin on this topic. As a smoker for 40 years, I think I've experienced every emotion and held just about every opinion possible on the subject. I've enjoyed the hell out of smoking most of the time (before it helped ruin my health), hated myself for being addicted, loathed the fact that despite having both kinds of COPD, I cannot seem to quit. I've quit for up to a year at a time, only to go back. Right now I am taking Welbutrin, which helps more than anything I've ever seen, but I still lapse in and out of the addiction.

As you can see, I'm not prone to defend smoking at this late age when I suffer from so many of its long term effects. Long term suddenly got short on me.

However, I do observe the same things as you regarding the anti-smoking movement. It is extremely classist.

Our society never asks why most of America's underclass people smoke. America is a society at the edge of a cliff. Many people fall over the cliff but instead of building a fence, America sends middle class professionals down in a basket to pick the pockets of the dead and dying victims, either through the "recovery industry" or expensive end of life care and funerary services. In the case of smoking, however, middle class Americans, left or right, seem intent on beating up the victims for sheer enjoyment or, as you point out, to fulfill some unfathomable political agenda. The prevailing philosophy seems to be "Why exercise an ounce of mercy when you can expend a pound of cruelty?"

Smoking and drinking are indeed among the few miserable pleasures available to working class and working underclass folks. They were and are always there for me when little else is, so long as I am willing to pass my money up the class ladder. They make money for the middle and upper classes two ways, first through corporate sales profits, then later through medical treatment for the diseases incurred (or in the case of insured middle class people hooked on nicotine, patches and pharmaceuticals).

Smoking unarguably costs America billions upon billions in medical expenses. But you gotta ask just who the billions are paid out to. They are paid out to the "healthcare industry," which is just that -- an industry -- to support the millions of doctors and others in the professional classes. Which means cigarettes will always be with us. Somebody's gotta pay for their hot tubs and vacations in Provence.

As far as I am concerned the government could ban the goddamned things and we'd all be better off, black market or no black market. That would certainly solve my problem, and I suspect solve the problem for millions of others like me, who wouldn't smoke if cigs were not available at all. I know that probably makes a libertarian like yourself blanch. But I'm only speaking from my own selfish perspective. I wouldn't knock off a liquor store to buy a pack of smokes on the black market, nor would most smokers I know.

Put simply, I'd do anything to kick my nicotine addiction, which as Ray Charles said, "is worse than heroin." I believe him. While I was back in the States this summer working on the new book, my webmaster, Ken Smith, said to me, "You're a vet. Why not use your VA benefits?'" I avoid anything related to the US government for the same reasons one avoids any other criminal cartel. But considering the way my health has seriously gone to hell (COPD, hypertension and type two diabetes) and that I couldn't breathe, couldn't fuck, couldn't sleep, and had arthritic pain 24/7, I decided to go, and as long as I was going, to give smoking cessation a shot. I must say here that the VA hospital treatment turned out to be excellent. Beyond excellent.

I found myself in the smoking cessation program with the kind of people I've known all my life, hard looking people by the commercially indoctrinated middle class standard. There was a tough Lynndie England type who was an Iraq War vet, a black diabetic guy with no feet, a retired construction foreman who was trying for something like the tenth time.

As I looked around and listened to each of these rough looking brothers and sisters speak, I realized that not a goddamned one of them was going to be able to quit smoking. Not because they are weak (hell, half of them have been shot at and shot back) but because of the very real fact of addiction, plus the nerve wracking insecurity of daily American life. No employment security at all, no health insurance for their spouses, no viable future for their kids, not enough real education to comprehend the greater world and the larger forces that govern our lives (which in this country means working against us to make a buck). Eventually any one of these or other hazards will slow-walk them down and fuck up their nerves -– again -– and they're gonna be right back on the fags. Ultimately, some will go down to emphysema or a heart attack.

And I thought: "There's no damned reason to believe I'm special or any different than anybody else around this table. After all, I'm here ain't I?"

I also thought about how so many of the people who read my books and essays, so many of my friends on the left, would view these people if they encountered them on the street. There would be the instant assessment of their coarse manners, poor diction and working man's bluntness that is so often mistaken for surliness, and their obvious lack of education. "Trashy and dumb," would be the verdict.

There are a million ways to be smug and the American left holds the copyright on three quarters of them. Down inside most lefties feel superior to the majority of Americans for the simple reason that they are indeed superior. Morally superior (at least in the justice sense), intellectually and politically superior too, if you exclude every member of the Democratic Party. However, the American left is void of compassion, the thing that is at the very heart of the true left the world round. And by true left I mean the people dying for the cause in places we never heard of and never will.

Given the afore named virtues and qualities possessed by most lefties, they are convinced they know everything about the people around them and what is best for everyone else. People should not own guns, or eat meat, wear fur or shop at WalMart. They should be able to obtain abortion on demand and pot should be legal. Maybe so, but those who do not agree will never be convinced of that by people they will never meet, but who insist upon calling them "sheeple" and "'Merkins" on the Internet and in other public venues.

All of which is not the worst thing in the world. In a nation that proclaims every citizen to be an individual, precious and special in his or her own right, merely for being born, well, a lot of folks are bound to take such bullshit a mite too seriously. As in, "I'm special, and you might be too, but the rest of them are just sheeple." I've done that myself, so I'm throwing stones from a glass house. It took a lifetime to recognize the lack of compassion in American society. Hell, I was raised there too. And it took the raw obscenity of George Bush for me to realize that ideology had taken over the political and civic arenas, the only venues where a society can exercise compassion collectively and by force of legislation and law demonstrate its humanity and evolution.

It was the snuffing out of what compassion remained in the Democratic Party that ceded the political stage to hard rightist forces. The Democratic leadership, fickle spineless cunts that they are, let the rightists reduce everything to ideological warfare, handing the rightists the field of play.

It no longer matters if Democrats are the majority. We don't see our warfare abroad decreasing. It's expanding. And following an ideological war over healthcare reform, we "won." We got reform. Reform which forces 40 million of America's poorest and hardest working folks into bed with insurance corporations, sucking an additional 70 billion dollars a year in public funds from the citizens' pockets into insurance industry coffers. We don't need the insurance companies at all. Never did. Never will. But they are still leeching us because "we won." We the supposed proponents of universal healthcare, we who believe in the right of all children and old folks, the right of all people to freedom from pain and misery, we won.

After the ceding of issues and principles to ideology, the only exposure to politics the people got was to ideological warfare. And the only way they got to vote was based on ideology. The left was entirely sucked into this game. Now it's the only game in town and will remain so. You cannot backtrack on pure meanness once it is unleashed, because if you quit playing the game, soften up and exhibit compassion, the opposition eats you alive next election. Calls you the kumbaya crowd and mocks you mercilessly through its extensive network of media puppets, a la Beck, Limbaugh. The crowd loves mockery. Meanwhile the nation continues to rot under a soulless ideological sun. Perishing for want of a drink from compassion's cup.

I think many Americans voted for Obama because in their minds he represented the promise of a more compassionate America. They forgot, or chose to forget, that the promise was a political promise. Which is to say it was all either just smoke, or unfulfillable by even the best intended mortal in such a heavily armed high stakes whorehouse. Some of the best among us have thrown in the towel, lost all faith in the political process. Frankly, in my 63 years as an American I've never seen more hearts broken nor more bitter people created by a single event. And that includes the Vietnam War.

Those who remain politically involved have internalized politics as ideological warfare. Which means no thing nor person is now safe from the toothy maw of ideology. As the Red Brigades in China showed us, ideology is the big grinder, baby.

For the common people, ideological adherence can only be demonstrated by zeal. And in their zeal, which is really unarticulated frustration at their powerlessness, the people start to cannibalize one another according to the social themes and agendas issued to them by institutions and corporations through the state sanctioned media. What themes are not about conformity are about denormalization of individuals and behaviors. First the smokers (in a country established as a tobacco colony), then the fat guys (in a nation whose government force feeds its people corn syrup through corn subsidies). To see smoking, physical attractiveness and other human attributes and frailties politicized is chilling. To see the left (which apparently does not own a single mirror between them) so whole-heartedly taking part in such cannibalism bodes even grimmer. Among other things, it means that the worst people among us have managed to turn the left once again against their brothers and sisters on this earth, against the very people who most need what liberalism and the left has to offer humanity. Things like justice, genuine equality, environmental healing, freedom from hating and being hated -- all of us bound together by our commonalities as human beings. By acknowledging our equal weaknesses, we become equally strong.

Which means we are fucked. As long as Americans remain convinced we are each so damned individual, unique, special and different from our neighbor, better than our neighbor, we're sunk. As long as we are kept divided, the murderous assholes will keep on owning the game, keep on looting destroying and extorting the people's wealth and health.

Yes, I think the anti-smoking movement is becoming a mass social control program. But not in the ways I sense you see things. I don't believe any grand wizard or corporate cabal cooked it up behind the curtain (although they certainly capitalize on it). Not directly anyway. I believe it just came down the pike wearing opportunity's hat. In America one man's misery has always been another's opportunity to make a buck. We are not good at "the common good." And besides, nobody wants to miss their big chance at that buck, which they are assured will surely come along here in the land of opportunity.

At heart, it's a predatory society. So damned mean we no longer even notice its inherent cruelty. A strongman's democracy in which bodily appearance has become political, and the only allowable vice is self-righteousness.

You're right.

It's creepy.

In art and labor,

Joe

Kucinich: Why I Voted NO

By Dennis Kucinich

Washington D.C. (November 7, 2009) – After voting against H.R. 3962 - Affordable Health Care for America Act, Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) today made the following statement:

“We have been led to believe that we must make our health care choices only within the current structure of a predatory, for-profit insurance system which makes money not providing health care. We cannot fault the insurance companies for being what they are. But we can fault legislation in which the government incentivizes the perpetuation, indeed the strengthening, of the for-profit health insurance industry, the very source of the problem. When health insurance companies deny care or raise premiums, co-pays and deductibles they are simply trying to make a profit. That is our system.

“Clearly, the insurance companies are the problem, not the solution. They are driving up the cost of health care. Because their massive bureaucracy avoids paying bills so effectively, they force hospitals and doctors to hire their own bureaucracy to fight the insurance companies to avoid getting stuck with an unfair share of the bills. The result is that since 1970, the number of physicians has increased by less than 200% while the number of administrators has increased by 3000%. It is no wonder that 31 cents of every health care dollar goes to administrative costs, not toward providing care. Even those with insurance are at risk. The single biggest cause of bankruptcies in the U.S. is health insurance policies that do not cover you when you get sick.

“But instead of working toward the elimination of for-profit insurance, H.R. 3962 would put the government in the role of accelerating the privatization of health care. In H.R. 3962, the government is requiring at least 21 million Americans to buy private health insurance from the very industry that causes costs to be so high, which will result in at least $70 billion in new annual revenue, much of which is coming from taxpayers. This inevitably will lead to even more costs, more subsidies, and higher profits for insurance companies — a bailout under a blue cross.

“By incurring only a new requirement to cover pre-existing conditions, a weakened public option, and a few other important but limited concessions, the health insurance companies are getting quite a deal. The Center for American Progress' blog, Think Progress, states “since the President signaled that he is backing away from the public option, health insurance stocks have been on the rise.” Similarly, healthcare stocks rallied when Senator Max Baucus introduced a bill without a public option. Bloomberg reports that Curtis Lane, a prominent health industry investor, predicted a few weeks ago that “money will start flowing in again” to health insurance stocks after passage of the legislation. Investors.com last month reported that pharmacy benefit managers share prices are hitting all-time highs, with the only industry worry that the Administration would reverse its decision not to negotiate Medicare Part D drug prices, leaving in place a Bush Administration policy.

“During the debate, when the interests of insurance companies would have been effectively challenged, that challenge was turned back. The “robust public option” which would have offered a modicum of competition to a monopolistic industry was whittled down from an initial potential enrollment of 129 million Americans to 6 million. An amendment which would have protected the rights of states to pursue single-payer health care was stripped from the bill at the request of the Administration. Looking ahead, we cringe at the prospect of even greater favors for insurance companies.

“Recent rises in unemployment indicate a widening separation between the finance economy and the real economy. The finance economy considers the health of Wall Street, rising corporate profits, and banks' hoarding of cash, much of it from taxpayers, as sign of an economic recovery. However in the real economy -- in which most Americans live -- the recession is not over. Rising unemployment, business failures, bankruptcies and foreclosures are still hammering Main Street.

“This health care bill continues the redistribution of wealth to Wall Street at the expense of America's manufacturing and service economies which suffer from costs other countries do not have to bear, especially the cost of health care. America continues to stand out among all industrialized nations for its privatized health care system. As a result, we are less competitive in steel, automotive, aerospace and shipping while other countries subsidize their exports in these areas through socializing the cost of health care.

“Notwithstanding the fate of H.R. 3962, America will someday come to recognize the broad social and economic benefits of a not-for-profit, single-payer health care system, which is good for the American people and good for America's businesses, with of course the notable exceptions being insurance and pharmaceuticals.”

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Author's Bio: Dennis Kucinich is a congressman from Ohio and a 2008 presidential primary candidate. http://kucinich.us/ The best way to reach congressman Kucinich is through the information on his congressional website