No System of Justice Can Rise Above the Ethics of Those Who Administer It.

(Wickersham Commission 1929)

Fits in rather nicely with the current thought that if we can't get healthcare done now, with all of the majority advantages, we have to ask ourselves, who is administering our laws? Are our elected officials bought and paid for by special interest groups?

If so, then we know who is administering our system of justice and we shouldn't be surprised when the product reflects the ethics of single-minded devotion to the pursuit of a buck.

Congress was happy to pass bankruptcy reform which turns the Federal Courts into collection agencies for creditors, bailouts and bonuses, tax cuts for the wealthy, off-shoring labor, off-shoring profits, a prescription drug bill that showered millions more on big pharma, media consolidation, deregulation of everything...

It's easy to see that Big Business has no problem getting Congressional or Presidential doors to open for it's army of lobbyists and then getting exactly the type of justice it wants administered.

Singlepayer. Off the table from the get go. A total non-starter. Why? Because it would have put medical insurers out of business over night. No more gaming the system with safe bets on healthy people or "Vulture of the Year" awards for denying claims. Never mind the fact that medicare/medicaid rates higher in "customer" satisfaction than the insurance companies. Ignore the imbecile who decried perceived attempts by the government to regulate his Medicaid.

The VA is another government run healthcare plan that achieves high marks for standard of care and patient satisfaction. True that reputation has been tarnished due to it's inabilityto handle rapid, wholesale changes in it's patients needs, due itself in large part to underfunding and underplanning by the Bush administration when it decided to begin generating a lot more veterans. With time, funding and planning, there is no reason to believe it won't reclaim its prior excellence.

Fact: big business killed single payer to protect a valuable income stream earned off of a captive audience in need of healthcare and they were able to kill it because they own too much of congress to be denied.

With single payer a non-starter for our elected officials, can we get a public option? The fear is this will slowly phase out medical insurers unless they can actually deliver something of greater value than a government plan devoid of their mark-ups, committed to insuring all comers at a reasonable cost and supplemented if necessary by public tax dollars. My guess and theirs is they can't. Either way they will fight it.

If public option is truly killed it is hard to come to any other conclusion than the world we live in does reflect the ethics of those who administer our system and they are the ethics of the corporation.

So thoroughly does our system of justice reflect the values and ethics of the corporation that the Supreme Court has asked for more briefs to be filed in assisting them in answering whether or not a longstanding limit on corporate donations to candidates running for office should be overturned. Does anyone doubt how the STAR (scalia/thomas/alito/roberts) Chamber bloc wants to vote? Heaven forbid Wal-Mart is prevented from purchasing favors from candidates.

On an up note, it does appear as if large numbers of people are paying attention. There's been a sea change in support for Democratic ideals vs. Republican ideals. After 8 years of Bush proving daily that the Republican party existed to serve big business and themselves, and not necessarily in that order, they were turned out. Hopefully, the democrats can take the hint that the people are demanding representation and expect something more than the corporate ethic.

The trick is to demand it.