Ryan? Is this some sort of joke?

Oh, I had to come back for THIS.

Paul Ryan is Romney's running mate? You've gotta be kidding me. Really, this must be a joke. 

This whole election is about concentration of wealth. It's about how the "one percent" (really the zero-point-zero-zero-one percent, but who's counting) are screwing over the rest of America, if not the rest of the world. It's about how the middle class, working class, and lumpenproletariat are finally starting to wake up to the reality that they've been screwed over for going on thirty years now. It's not even just Occupy: that's what the Tea Party was really about, even if the poor bastards were completely co-opted by the handmaidens of wealth.  Everybody's already pissed, and they're getting more pissed by the day.

With Romney as the Republican nominee, that's the only way it COULD have gone. That's why the Republicans were so desperate to nominate somebody else: Romney's the worst possible choice for a candidate in a situation where Americans are already starting to light the torches and sharpen the pitchforks. Obama's people don't need to be political experts to realize how to take advantage of the situation, and Romney's played into it quite nicely with the tax issue.

So why the fuck would you pick Ryan as the running mate?

Literally the only thing that he has to sell himself is his budget plan. There's nothing else to the guy. Sure, you could sell him as a wonk and a thinker, but Romney doesn't NEED one of those. They aren't going to appeal to Republicans and independents in the first place.  He's a good looking youngish guy, but he's not going to match Obama on that, and he's not going to carry states.

No, it's all about the budget proposal. And that budget is the worst possible thing for Romney to be running on. Not only is it utterly dishonest bullshit—Paul Krugman must be licking his chops at the prospect of carving Ryan up on a weekly basis—but it's a direct attack on both medicare and the middle class on behalf of the wealthy minority that Romney and Ryan both represent. That budget isn't going to defuse Romney's negatives. It'll MAXIMIZE them.

The only thing Ryan has going for him is the whole "DEFICIT! DEBT! DEFICIT! DEBT!" hysteria. That hasn't been the defining issue in American politics since 2010, not since all that supposed hyperinflation failed to materialize. There are bigger issues now. The effect that global warming is going to have on food prices are going to be more important than that.

Seniors will hate this choice.  The middle class will hate this choice. Minorities will hate this choice. Women will hate this choice. Independents will hate this choice. The only people who will endorse this choice are the exact same wealthy white men that Romney already has in his pocket.

Sure, he might still win. If he does, though, he'll do it in SPITE of Ryan. Ryan's a loser. What a ridiculous choice.

Upward Jobs Tick

Apologies for the lack of updates. Been occupied (heh) of late.

Not quite sure if I buy that the latest upward tick in the jobs numbers is a good thing or not. Certainly it's a good thing for the newly employed. No-one would deny that. But any sort of improvement is going to be seen as a reason to lay off on low interest rate policies, to deny any further need of stimulus, and even to avoid changing anything at all about US economic policy.

That's not a good thing. America still has the same problems. It still has manufacturing jobs moving to other countries, especially China: not because of low wages, but because of the ease of access to suppliers and appropriate human capital. That's why Apple's there, that's why everybody else is there, and that is NOT something that Indiana is going to solve by nuking public-sector unions.  It requires a sophisticated understanding of the role of public investment. Those Chinese factories didn't spring up out of nowhere. Read the story: the Chinese government had a hand in it. As long as America is still led by people who think that government is the enemy of success, America won't have success.

America also still has the problem of financialization, and the fallout from that sector's dominance. Matt Taibbi's right that it's good that the foreclosure scandal hasn't been completely buried...but considering it was one of the biggest and more prevalent scams in U.S. history, the fact that it came as close as it DID is a problem.  Smart people are still moving out of the real world and into Wall Street chasing the big financial dollars, or simply trying to find a decent job as other sectors empty out. That's not right. That's not sustainable. And it's nothing to build an economy on.

But, mostly, America is STILL behind on one of the most important trends in the 21st century: renewable energy. Look at this story on India: the price of solar panels is absolutely crashing there. That story in the New Scientist quoted analysts as saying that solar could as cheap as grid energy across half of the globe by 2015. That's three years from now. This will absolutely revolutionize how the world looks at energy...and what is the United States doing? FRACKING! Jamming toxic chemicals into the earth to extract more hydrocarbons, possibly causing honest-to-goodness earthquakes, while the increasingly-inaccurately-named "developing world" says "heck with it" and just builds cheap solar panels! Panels that they may soon produce without any sort of American help whatsoever!

So, yes, this is good news. But it doesn't address the underlying problems.

This is How Bad It's Gotten

Watch this video. Right now.

This is what America has sunk to.

No, let me amend that. America has always treated its minorities this way when they get "out of line". The police have been defending their own privilege using overly violent means for years.

This is something different. This was a cold, calculating, pointless assault on these protesters. There was no move to arrest or detain, and certainly none of the violent resistance that pepper spray is supposed to be used to deter. This doesn't fit any sane rules of engagement for police, and yet the officer didn't even do this furtively, afraid of being caught. He calmly walked up and used a burning, blinding chemical weapon on these kids' faces.

What's worse is that they aren't even defending their own privilege. Cops aren't wealthy. They aren't powerful...not really. They sure as hell aren't part of the 1% of wealthy Americans that are at the center of this, nor will any of them ever be part of that group.  Their own pensions are being raided to pay for the bailouts; their own children are facing a lifetime of un- and underemployment. Their own family members are out of work, and may never find work again.  They're defending the privilege of a tiny mob that they will never, ever belong to: a mob that created the intolerable future that America now faces.

Yet here we are, with a police officer betraying everything his badge and his country stands for, in order to protect people who neither acknowledge nor appreciate it. People who are, frankly, being utter douchebags about the whole thing.

Edit: One of the protester chants sums it up pretty well. They shout, repeatedly: "Who do you serve? Who do you protect?"

Good question. In fact, it's the only question that matters.

Super-Committee

So the Republicans have made their picks, and not surprisingly, they're all nutbar right-wingers:

For the House, it's Jeb Hensarling, Dave Camp, and Fred Upton. For the Senate, it's Jon Kyl, Rob Portman, and Pat Toomey.

So how nutty are they? Well, Toomey wants to privatize social security, Henserling called Social Security "a cruel ponzi scheme", Camp wants higher taxes on the poor, and Portman wants to get rid of the Department of Education.

Yep. Jon Kyl is the "not intended to be a factual statement" guy, too.

Meanwhile, Reid's sent in John Kerry, Patty Murray, and Max "DINO" Baucus. All of whom are more than willing to carve up "entitlements" that they have no personal need for or familiarity with.

So, yeah, America's fucked. I just wish it had a President. That'd be nice, wouldn't it?

The American Worker's Depression

Here's a chart from Talking Points Memo. It shows the American worker's share of national income.

The rebound in workers' income share after the early 2000s recession simply never materialized. As a result, this figure is now at by far its lowest level since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began keeping track of it in 1947.

There isn't much to add, is there? This is probably why Obama Admin people think that there's a recovery while regular joes think that America's going into a depression. For them, it has.

Krugman and the Rentiers

Sometimes, it's just better to quote.

The latest economic data have dashed any hope of a quick end to America’s job drought, which has already gone on so long that the average unemployed American has been out of work for almost 40 weeks. Yet there is no political will to do anything about the situation. Far from being ready to spend more on job creation, both parties agree that it’s time to slash spending — destroying jobs in the process — with the only difference being one of degree.

Nor is the Federal Reserve riding to the rescue. On Tuesday, Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman, acknowledged the grimness of the economic picture but indicated that he will do nothing about it.

And debt relief for homeowners — which could have done a lot to promote overall economic recovery — has simply dropped off the agenda. The existing program for mortgage relief has been a bust, spending only a tiny fraction of the funds allocated, but there seems to be no interest in revamping and restarting the effort.

The situation is similar in Europe, but arguably even worse. In particular, the European Central Bank’s hard-money, anti-debt-relief rhetoric makes Mr. Bernanke sound like William Jennings Bryan.

What lies behind this trans-Atlantic policy paralysis? I’m increasingly convinced that it’s a response to interest-group pressure. Consciously or not, policy makers are catering almost exclusively to the interests of rentiers — those who derive lots of income from assets, who lent large sums of money in the past, often unwisely, but are now being protected from loss at everyone else’s expense.

Of course, that’s not the way what I call the Pain Caucus makes its case. Instead, the argument against helping the unemployed is framed in terms of economic risks: Do anything to create jobs and interest rates will soar, runaway inflation will break out, and so on. But these risks keep not materializing. Interest rates remain near historic lows, while inflation outside the price of oil — which is determined by world markets and events, not U.S. policy — remains low.

And against these hypothetical risks one must set the reality of an economy that remains deeply depressed, at great cost both to today’s workers and to our nation’s future. After all, how can we expect to prosper two decades from now when millions of young graduates are, in effect, being denied the chance to get started on their careers?

Ask for a coherent theory behind the abandonment of the unemployed and you won’t get an answer. Instead, members of the Pain Caucus seem to be making it up as they go along, inventing ever-changing rationales for their never-changing policy prescriptions.

While the ostensible reasons for inflicting pain keep changing, however, the policy prescriptions of the Pain Caucus all have one thing in common: They protect the interests of creditors, no matter the cost. Deficit spending could put the unemployed to work — but it might hurt the interests of existing bondholders. More aggressive action by the Fed could help boost us out of this slump — in fact, even Republican economists have argued that a bit of inflation might be exactly what the doctor ordered — but deflation, not inflation, serves the interests of creditors. And, of course, there’s fierce opposition to anything smacking of debt relief.

Who are these creditors I’m talking about? Not hard-working, thrifty small business owners and workers, although it serves the interests of the big players to pretend that it’s all about protecting little guys who play by the rules. The reality is that both small businesses and workers are hurt far more by the weak economy than they would be by, say, modest inflation that helps promote recovery.

No, the only real beneficiaries of Pain Caucus policies (aside from the Chinese government) are the rentiers: bankers and wealthy individuals with lots of bonds in their portfolios.

And that explains why creditor interests bulk so large in policy; not only is this the class that makes big campaign contributions, it’s the class that has personal access to policy makers — many of whom go to work for these people when they exit government through the revolving door. The process of influence doesn’t have to involve raw corruption (although that happens, too). All it requires is the tendency to assume that what’s good for the people you hang out with, the people who seem so impressive in meetings — hey, they’re rich, they’re smart, and they have great tailors — must be good for the economy as a whole.

But the reality is just the opposite: creditor-friendly policies are crippling the economy. This is a negative-sum game, in which the attempt to protect the rentiers from any losses is inflicting much larger losses on everyone else. And the only way to get a real recovery is to stop playing that game.

All I can add to this at the moment is to remind people that when Republicans and their lot talk about "job creators" and "spurring investment" and the like, they're really talking about policies that benefit these Rentiers. The problem, as Krugman exhaustively showed, is that these people DON'T necessarily create jobs. They can plow money into investments that create jobs, yes, but they can also plow it into arcane financial instruments, real estate bubbles, and (now) food and commodities. That doesn't benefit anybody except them; and to the extent that it hurts the economy, it doesn't even benefit them, not really.

The other stunning thing about this article is that it shows just how radicalized basically-moderate economists like Prof. Krugman have become. He's not the only example of a scientist driven to radicalism in the face of the state's capture by its most short-sighted and least competent members—climatologists are becoming more radical by the day as well—but it's rather shocking when you compare it to his old "dismal science" articles. He's all but admitting that the old lines about economic self interest are falling apart in the face of classism and cronyism.

That doesn't invalidate him. Far from it. A bit of radicalism is the only sane response in these mad times. It shows, instead, just how far his compatriots have fallen. If they're going along with these apocalyptically stupid and destructive policies, what does it say about them

Edit: He also points to the solution: if you want to get sorted out, follow Iceland's lead and default, instead of following Ireland's lead of austerity.

Could Saying Nice Things About WikiLeaks Get You Arrested?

Hot on the heels of that last post, I find this: WikiLeaks should be designated a 'foreign terrorist organization,' Rep. Pete King fumes.

Rep. Pete King (R-L.I.) urged U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to designate WikiLeaks a "foreign terrorist organization," saying it "posed a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States," and to prosecute founder Julian Assange for espionage.

Again: Not an American.

But aside from that, this is deeply disturbing. As NPR points out, the laws against supporting supposed foreign terrorist organizations are incredibly extensive. It's not just material support: even talking to them could get you arrested and indicted, if not shipped off to one of the foreign covert prisons that we're not supposed to know about.

So is that how this is going to play out? Are Americans supposed to pretend that the site doesn't exist, for fear of getting arrested? Or are Americans only allowed to pretend it exists if they engage in the sort of kabuki dance of overt condemnation that you normally only see in salacious sixties films about the dangers of drugs and promiscuity? It won't keep any of this information out of American hands, since the Internet is global. The best that the Government could do is redirect DNS requests, as they've tried to do with BitTorrent sites. But that didn't work, and wouldn't work. It's not worth it.

As Susan Delacourt says, this is really just another revolt against "elites". America clearly no longer trusts the people that are supposed to be running it. Either they're spitting angry against a government that doesn't care that they're out of work, or simply distrustful of a state that seems to be governed BY Wall St. bond traders, FOR Wall St. bond traders.

In a country where Matt Taibbi seems to uncover fresh horrors on a daily basis, where security theatre has TSA goons laughing at your genitals when they aren't smacking them with the backs of their hands, and when Congress collectively decides that protecting mortgage fraudsters is more important than ensuring that people don't die of starvation during the Christmas season...why the hell should anybody care about whether some diplomats get some egg on their faces?

I don't know about you, but I'm drawing a blank.

"US embassy cables leak sparks global diplomatic crisis"

Well, how could it not? Pretty much everything marked "noforn" is going to be utterly embarrassing for all involved. That's kind of the point.

The best part about the WikiLeaks controversy, so far, are all the right-wingers asking "why aren't they being prosecuted"? No matter how many times somebody says "you can't prosecute them, they aren't Americans", it never gets through. You can't even pass a law against it, either, or else every other nation in the world would be breaking U.S. law for engaging in their own espionage.  And the U.S. would be breaking theirs.

(The U.S. probably shouldn't bring that sort of thing up, anyway, considering they have been trying to collect passwords, encryption keys, and biometric data from U.N. diplomats. Whoops.)

Edit: I think the right-wingers know that prosecution is impossible. Their protestations aside, what they really want is for Obama to kill Julian Assange. Obama wouldn't do it because it's stupid, it would bring down universal condemnation, and wouldn't help stem the flow, since WikiLeaks is bigger than Assange.

But, hey, if the American right had realized that "beheading" attacks do not work in situations like this, they wouldn't have botched Afghanistan and Iraq so badly, would they?

America Says "Cut DOD, Not Social Security"

Every so often, I'm pleasantly surprised. Not often, but occasionally. This is one of these times, as a focus group of Americans choose a path to deficit reduction that Washington's big deficit hawks weren't expecting:

President Obama’s deficit commission is moving forward with Social Security and Medicare explicitly in their sights. They got a dry run for how this effort is likely to sell with the public on Saturday as the Peter Peterson funded group America Speaks sponsored a series of 19 "21st Century Town Meetings." It seems that events didn’t quite go as planned.

The exercise was intended to convince people that there were no options other than large cuts to Social Security and Medicare to hit their deficit targets. To ensure this result, the America Speaks crew put together a booklet that exaggerated future budget problems (the exercise was for the year 2025) by assuming a worse budget path than the country is currently facing.

America Speaks also excluded the possibility that the Fed would buy and hold more debt, in effect continuing its current course. This would substantially reduce the interest burden facing the country in 2025. While in normal times this could cause inflation, that is unlikely to be a problem in the foreseeable future. In comparable circumstances, Japan’s central bank has bought an amount of debt nearly equal to the country’s GDP (the equivalent of $14 trillion for the U.S.) and its economy is still facing deflation. There is no reason that the Fed could not follow the same path, unless the goal is to force cuts in Social Security and Medicare.

The America Speaks folks also denied participants the option of reducing public sector health care costs by reforming the U.S. health care system. As they say at America Speaks, everything is on the table, except reforms that would hurt powerful industry lobbies. The America Speaks crew also neglected to mention the Social Security trust fund and that it would have enough assets to pay all benefits through the year 2043, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Given this stacked deck the participants rose up in revolt. They demanded the option to vote on a single-payer type health care system. The idea being to reduce costs by making health care more efficient rather than just cutting services in Medicare and other public sector programs. They also voted overwhelmingly for defense cuts and for every progressive tax option in the book, even though many had been seriously mischaracterized. For example, they listed the potential revenue from a financial speculation tax in 2025 as $30 billion a year even though there is good reason, based on the experience of other countries, to believe that we could raise close to ten times this amount.

I would not have expected this, considering how public opinion and the "acceptable options" are portrayed in the media. Nevertheless, here we are, with ordinary Americans saying "keep the 'entitlements', enact REAL health care reform, and ditch the wars".

It does raise a question, though. Considering these results, how on earth is it that the Dems aren't doing better? Is it because the people are being misled as to the options? Or is it because the Democrats don't understand what Americans actually wants?

Debt: How America's Class Differences Are Seen in Stark Contrast

In 2010, if you're a billionaire banker and you end up in debt problems, the government will bail you out.

In 2010, if you're a regular person who ends up underwater, they toss your ass in jail with all the other criminal scum until you cough up the dough.

As a sheriff's deputy dumped the contents of Joy Uhlmeyer's purse into a sealed bag, she begged to know why she had just been arrested while driving home to Richfield after an Easter visit with her elderly mother.

No one had an answer. Uhlmeyer spent a sleepless night in a frigid Anoka County holding cell, her hands tucked under her armpits for warmth. Then, handcuffed in a squad car, she was taken to downtown Minneapolis for booking. Finally, after 16 hours in limbo, jail officials fingerprinted Uhlmeyer and explained her offense -- missing a court hearing over an unpaid debt. "They have no right to do this to me," said the 57-year-old patient care advocate, her voice as soft as a whisper. "Not for a stupid credit card."

She isn't the only one.

It's not a crime to owe money, and debtors' prisons were abolished in the United States in the 19th century. But people are routinely being thrown in jail for failing to pay debts. In Minnesota, which has some of the most creditor-friendly laws in the country, the use of arrest warrants against debtors has jumped 60 percent over the past four years, with 845 cases in 2009, a Star Tribune analysis of state court data has found.
Not every warrant results in an arrest, but in Minnesota many debtors spend up to 48 hours in cells with criminals. Consumer attorneys say such arrests are increasing in many states, including Arkansas, Arizona and Washington, driven by a bad economy, high consumer debt and a growing industry that buys bad debts and employs every means available to collect.
Whether a debtor is locked up depends largely on where the person lives, because enforcement is inconsistent from state to state, and even county to county.

In Illinois and southwest Indiana, some judges jail debtors for missing court-ordered debt payments. In extreme cases, people stay in jail until they raise a minimum payment. In January, a judge sentenced a Kenney, Ill., man "to indefinite incarceration" until he came up with $300 toward a lumber yard debt...

...In Minnesota, judges have issued arrest warrants for people who owe as little as $85 -- less than half the cost of housing an inmate overnight. Debtors targeted for arrest owed a median of $3,512 in 2009, up from $2,201 five years ago.

Those jailed for debts may be the least able to pay.

"It's just one more blow for people who are already struggling," said Beverly Yang, a Land of Lincoln Legal Assistance Foundation staff attorney who has represented three Illinois debtors arrested in the past two months. "They don't like being in court. They don't have cars. And if they had money to pay these collectors, they would."

This is how it works. It isn't technically illegal to owe money and be unable to repay. It can't be, or the guys with the friends in the right places and the connections to make it go away might end up in a spot of trouble.
But if you aren't the guy with the friends, if you aren't the guy with the connections, then the collection corps will exploit the law to make sure that they get that money.  And they'll keep it quiet.

No national statistics are kept, and the practice is largely unnoticed outside legal circles. "My suspicion is the debt collection industry does not want the world to know these arrests are happening, because the practice would be widely condemned," said Robert Hobbs, deputy director of the National Consumer Law Center in Boston.

So if you're going into hock, go into hock big-time. If it's big enough, the President (Democratic or Republican) will bail you out; but if it's too small, you'll have to deal with a bail of entirely a different kind. Might as well go big.


How disgusting. How predictable.

(h/t to John Robb.)

Illegal American Experimentation on Prisoners

Digby on a report from Physicians for Human Rights:

2010:

In the most comprehensive investigation to date of health professionals’ involvement in the CIA’s “enhanced” interrogation program (EIP), Physicians For Human Rights has uncovered evidence that indicates the Bush administration apparently conducted illegal and unethical human experimentation and research on detainees in CIA custody. The apparent experimentation and research appear to have been performed to provide legal cover for torture, as well as to help justify and shape future procedures and policies governing the use of the “enhanced” interrogation techniques. The PHR report, Experiments in Torture: Human Subject Research and Evidence of Experimentation in the ‘Enhanced’ Interrogation Program, is the first to provide evidence that CIA medical personnel engaged in the crime of illegal experimentation after 9/11, in addition to the previously disclosed crime of torture.

To those of us who have been following the torture story from the beginning it has long been obvious that there were those in the government who used the "enhanced interrogation" regime as an opportunity to experiment. We had evidence that they were documenting the efficacy of various techniques from the OLC memos. But this was more systematic than previously suspected.

Some of the sick details are here:

The PHR report indicates that there is evidence that health professionals engaged in research on detainees that violates the Geneva Conventions, The Common Rule, the Nuremberg Code and other international and domestic prohibitions against illegal human subject research and experimentation. Declassified government documents indicate that:

• Research and medical experimentation on detainees was used to measure the effects of large- volume waterboarding and adjust the procedure according to the results. After medical monitoring and advice, the CIA experimentally added saline, in an attempt to prevent putting detainees in a coma or killing them through over-ingestion of large amounts of plain water. The report observes: “‘Waterboarding 2.0’ was the product of the CIA’s developing and field-testing an intentionally harmful practice, using systematic medical monitoring and the application of subsequent generalizable knowledge.”

• Health professionals monitored sleep deprivation on more than a dozen detainees in 48-, 96- and 180-hour increments. This research was apparently used to monitor and assess the effects of varying levels of sleep deprivation to support legal definitions of torture and to plan future sleep deprivation techniques.

• Health professionals appear to have analyzed data, based on their observations of 25 detainees who were subjected to individual and combined applications of “enhanced” interrogation techniques, to determine whether one type of application over another would increase the subject’s “susceptibility to severe pain.” The alleged research appears to have been undertaken only to assess the legality of the “enhanced” interrogation tactics and to guide future application of the techniques.

Of course they used detainees as guinea pigs and of course they documented it. The question is, are they still doing it?

PHR’s report, Experiments in Torture, is relevant to present-day national security interrogations, as well as Bush-era detainee treatment policies. As recently as February, 2010, President Obama’s then director of national intelligence, Admiral Dennis Blair, disclosed that the US had established an elite interrogation unit that will conduct “scientific research” to improve the questioning of suspected terrorists. Admiral Blair declined to provide important details about this effort.

That doesn't sound good, does it?

No, it doesn't. It's terrible. It's unsurprising, but it's terrible. For all that I've been focusing on Israeli security and political issues lately, the fact remains that the United States really did go completely off the rails after 9/11, and the U.S. government has been responsible for reprehensible acts in the name of the "War on Terror".
(Which was won, by the by, by deciding not to use that phrase anymore. Which suggests it never really existed in the first place.)

The problem in Israel and America is fairly similar, though. It's about a lack of empathy. The Israelis have problems empathizing with their Palestinian counterparts as sentient, individual human beings. It's the same with many Americans attitudes the "terrists" with different countries of origin and cultural backgrounds to their own. And, critically, it's the same with the people that caused 9/11 in the first place. It's an issue with thinking of "America" or "Israel" or "the Jews" or "the Muslims" or anybody else...

...(China, anybody?)...

...as some amorphous entity filled with nameless, lifeless, inhuman "cells", not a collection of thinking individuals.

It's that attitude that blew up the World Trade Center.

It's that attitude that caused all the events that preceded that attack.

It's that attitude that is losing Iraq and Afghanistan.

And it's that attitude that allowed Americans to build their own little Unit 731.

Bernie Sez "No"? Also: The Assault on Rep By Pop

I'll believe it when I see it, but as of right now, Bernie Sanders is apparently not going to support the Senate "Health Execs Will Need To Build Bigger Parking Lots For All Their New Stretch Limos" Act of 2009 :



It'll be difficult to whip Sanders, as he's an independent from a very progressive state. But I'm sure Rahm et al will try. It's not going to look good, though, when America sees them whip one recalcitrant Independent but let the other get everything he asks for.

That reminds me of something else about this nonsense that bothers me. There is a Bill with a public option out there. It passed in the House, remember? 50.5% and all that? Yet it's being completely ignored in favor of the Senate's POS legislation.

Never mind all the crap about cloture and whatnot. Think about what this says about you. By only paying attention to the Senate and ignoring or subduing the House, as the White House has been doing since they first got the keys to the place, they are saying "we don't give a rat's ass about the representatives of the people. We only care about the representatives of the state".

"But Senators are elected!" you cry. Yes, they are. But they aren't really democratic: the number of Senators has nothing to do with Americans per se, just the fifty states that make up the union. That's what they represent. There's a reason they weren't even elected by the public back during the early years of the Republic; the Senate was never intended to represent the wishes of the people.

And how could it? A few Senators from a few low-population states can dictate things to the rest of the the country. As more and more people move to fewer and fewer states, that's only going to get worse, and it was never great to begin with. That's fine if all you care about is having each State have its representation. But it doesn't help most Americans much.

No, your representative is your Representative. That's what the House of Representatives is for, just like the House of Commons in a parliamentary system. It ensures that each and every American has an equal voice in at least one body of their government. It's the foundation of American democracy, in fact; if the Revolution were just about protecting the interests of nobility, then America could have just reconfirmed the Magna Carta and been done with it. They fought a revolution for Rep by Pop.

(That's also why bodies like the Canadian Senate and the British House of Lords aren't elected at all: because like the American Senate, that's not what they're for.)

So, when the media and the White House ignore the House, what's really going on is that they're saying "representation by population is a completely crock." It's almost a Confederate view of America, since it privileges the interests of states as unique bodies, instead of the interests of Americans AS Americans. And as individuals. It's "state's rights" by another name.

The House has their bill. Their bill has a public option, and is (bluntly) a far more tolerable bill than its Senatorial counterpart. Giving it up to get Senatorial votes might have been acceptable if Obama et al had shown the House that they respect the body, its members, and its consensuses; but since no respect has ever been shown, House progressives should (politely) tell them to go piss up a rope.

Sure, Sanders is important. I hope he sticks to it. But as Americans, you cannot forget that the Senate does not truly represent you, and never will.

Edit: Just to make it clear what the American PEOPLE want: A Washington Post/ABC poll asked people what they thought about extending Medicare to people 55+. By a THIRTY-point lead, they agreed with with it.

America has said what it wants. Its representatives have acknowledged that. But the Senate, and the White House, doesn't appear to care.