It's a big week for the Empire up on Capital Hill. Using a poker analogy, the Democrats are all in to get a health care reform bill passed, but it's not at all clear they have the votes. The original proposal has been watered down beyond all recognition, it appears that soaring health costs will not be affected much, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi isn't quite sure what's in the bill.
Nevertheless, if the House does pass a cosmetic & expensive health care reform package, that action would mar Congress's unblemished record of total inaction on the important issues of the day. Actually, the time to pass a comprehensive health care bill was 20 years ago, but who's counting?
On a related note, a CBS/New York Times poll last month found that 70% of Americans are angry or dissatisfied with Washington—
The majority of Americans —- 70 percent -— are dissatisfied or angry with the way elected officials in Washington handle the business of the people...
Among those surveyed, 80 percent said that members of Congress are more interested in pandering to special interest groups than in serving the needs of people who elected them. Only 13 percent believe that Congress represents the interests of the people...
By a lopsided margin and a final rebuke, the CBS News/New York Times polls shows that 81 percent of Americans believe members of Congress don't deserve re-election...
These results are encouraging, and likely represent the best we can hope for, given the very high probability that the 29% of those polled who were "satisfied" or "enthusiastic" about Washington are feeding at the government trough. (See my annotation in the lower left part of the graph.) The 80% who said members of Congress are more
interested in pandering to special interest groups than in serving the
needs of people who elected them demonstrates that fully 10% of those sucking on the government tit joined the 70% who were merely "dissatisfied or angry" in conceding that special interests run Congress. But of course, they're the ones who should know!
In the long shadow of the health care "reform" push, Christopher Dodd (D, Ct) is trying for the umpteenth to get an agreement on financial "reform" in the Senate. Dodd, who has labored long & hard for the Finance industry in his long, illustrious career, is nearing retirement and running out of time to get something passed. In Dodd Takes Another Crack at Financial Reform But ... Does Anyone Care? Tech Ticker's Henry Blodget and Aaron Task explain why nobody seems to give a shit about changing the rules of the game in Finance. (Watch the video below.)
For Goldman Sachs or J.P. Morgan Chase or Citigroup, if you bribe enough Congressmen, and they stall, delay, filibuster, procrastinate, hold-up or tie-up legislation, and otherwise hinder progress in any way they can, eventually you will get a satisfying result—18 months after the financial meltdown, which was decades in the making, nobody cares anymore.
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