Bill Moyers hosted an interesting conversation the other day among Robert Kuttner, Matt Taibbi, and himself about health care reform, the performance of the Administration to this point, and the relations of progressives with the President. The conversation focused in part on how Taibbi and Kuttner would vote on the Senate’s pending legislation, if it were up to them. Even though they both agreed very closely on the shortcomings of the Senate’s bill thus far, and also on how far from what’s needed this bill is, they disagreed about what should be done. Matt would vote against the bill, thinks that President Obama, would learn from the defeat, and believes that it ought to be killed; and Bob thinks that progressives ought to hold their noses and vote for it, because the political damage the Administration would suffer if it were defeated is so great, that the Democrats and the President would both be set up for defeat in the next elections, and any opportunity for the President to change direction, and for progressive legislation to succeed in the future, would be gone for many years. So, in short, Bob would support this legislation out of fear of the consequences for the larger political context in which progressive efforts to transform the political system are embedded.

Friday night Bill Moyers hosted a fascinating debate on the Senate’s health care bill between Matt Taibbi, contributing editor for Rolling Stone, and Robert Kuttner, co-editor of the American Prospect. (The video can be viewed here: Bill Moyers Journal). Taibbi and Kuttner both describe the just-passed health care bill as disastrous. They outline how it is a complete giveaway to the health insurance industry, how it will do nothing to lower costs, and how it will be extremely unpopular to the American public once it’s implemented…

Last week, President Barack Obama released key legislation designed to fight the banking industry’s too-big-to-fail problem. But Obama’s plan doesn’t actually address too-big-to-fail at all. It reinforces a broken system in which economically dangerous companies are bailed out whenever they drive themselves to the brink of failure.

Di and Dave on “The Edge” Talk Radio in Bozeman, Montana interview Matt Taibbi and asks him lots of questions with help from the listeners.

In his 2005 book, “Spanking the Donkey”, Matt Taibbi called Democrats “money junkies”. They keep asking us to trust them by giving them our votes and they promise they’ll fix stuff like health care. On our weekly radio show Saturday, October 31, Matt Taibbi will be our guest and we will ask him what we should do next.

I completely agree with Matt on all of this, even right down to his choice of Elizabeth Warren as the candidate of choice. Progressives can’t keep supporting candidates who are in the pocket of Wall Street and our most prosperous and powerful industries. Frankly, it is the historical role of Republicans to do that. The Democratic Party is supposed to be about the people. Right now, it is not. It always puts Wall Street first. We need to cleanse it somehow. We may need to defeat it in order to cleanse it, even if that means opening the way for Republicans again.

Matt knows about the risk of a challenge to Obama resulting in a Republican win, but he argues, and I agree, that we really have no choice. The Party as it is now is no good to progressives or the American people. Running a candidate like Elizabeth Warren will deliver a needed shock to which the Party will either adjust or open the way for a new Party to represent the people against the interests once again. Matt Taibbi talks about the possibility of waiting two or three election cycles until we can be successful at recapturing the party. I hope it doesn’t take that long. But whether it does or not we just can’t let the corporatists run the Democratic Party any more. If we do, our democracy will become a plutocracy. And the American dream will be gone.

The story that hasn’t been told enough is that the rising cost of private insurance is hurting corporate America. It’s been a terrible strategic mistake. Progressives could have a powerful ally in the fight against Big Insurance/PhRMA: Corporate America itself.

Consider that even Wal-Mart, which spends far less than its peers just to offer it’s employees a junk insurance package, spent an average of $3,500 a year per employee on health insurance in 2002. The way to beat UnitedHealth Care and Blue Blue Cross is by offering Wal-Mart a public plan that is cheaper, yet offers better benefits: Medicare for Anyone Who Wants It.

Allowing any person, business or local/state agency to buy into Medicare is not single-payer, because it allows private insurance to continue to operate. But unlike the other falsely-advertised “robust public options,” Medicare for Anyone Who Wants It will actually lead to a public plan that covers at least 164 million Americans and will control cost. It makes real the false rhetoric for the public option.

If you’ve had the growing suspicion that the so-called health care reform effort making its way through the well-$oiled machinations of Washington would end up working out very well for everyone BUT those who need it most..

We find ourselves like our founders at a turning point. Do we try to incrementally change our way of being governed even though the Court of St. James isn’t even listening to our pleas or do we put our necks out and try to change this country from the outside? Chris Hedges, Matt Taibbi, Physicians, Docs, and regular citizens may have the answers

Now that trillions of taxpayer dollars have been pumped through the financial system, Wall Street giants JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs are reporting record profits—and giving out record bonuses.