…the public — struggling with the worst economic downturn since the 1930s — is looking on with great anxiety and confusion. If the drug companies and the insurance industry are smiling, it can only mean that the public interest is being left behind.

Bob Herbert said it today, I’ve been saying it for a long time. When corporations are smiling, we the public lose. No if’s, no buts, we lose…Again.

The media coverage of the debate focuses on what is a deal breaker for the President. The questions are all directed towards the Democrats and what they would leave out to get a bill passed. When will anyone ask the hard questions of the Republican’s…Like…What is their idea of a reform the American people can live with? Do they think profits at any cost are really the answer?

The more this reform(?) works its way through the process…The more it shows us how much of the process itself has been hijacked. It is no longer a matter of the public interest in Washington,  but, it’s all about the private interest. The private interest of the drug corporations, the private interests of the hospital corporations, the private interests of the agriculture corporations…Even the corporate interests of the political corporations, because that’s what they are becoming.

Politicians and political parties have become just another corporate PR machine for the multinationals of the world. What this whole process is proving to the American voter is, that our one vote per person is worth less than dollars that come in in bushel baskets from the industry lobbyist, from the ex-politicians now selling influence, to the ex-staffers now working for the industries that are buying congressional votes with campaign contributions.

Sadly, the smoke screen of the “Death Panels” and the “government bureaucrats between you and your doctor” and “government can not run an efficient health system”…All lies. All pushed by the regular suspects. All played up by the Corporate Media that seems to have lost the ability to call a lie a lie. It is not a difference of opinion…It is a lie, a falsehood, a twisting of fact…Call it what it is, do not report it as a question…

via Bob Herbert – This Is Reform? – NYTimes.com.