by Zach Carter, Media Consortium blogger

Congress returns from its April recess this week with financial reform at the top of its to-do list. With millions of Americans still bearing the brunt of the worst recession in 80 years, Congress needs to start protecting our economy from Wall Street excess, and repair the shredded social safety net that has allowed the Great Recession to exact a devastating human cost.

Big banks are an economic parasite

Senator Baucus during his May 8, 2009 Senate Hearing on Health Care Reform calls for “More Police” as single payer advocates are escorted out of the room, yet soon after his crony-CEOs of the health care industry get the mike and plenty of air time. Please watch:

http://therealnews.com/t/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=3665&updaterx=2009-05-07+12%3A35%3A22

The health care reform discussions have never honored the true meaning of “round table” in considering the sanest, most humane and affordable, health care reform proposals. The Single Payer Medicare-for-All Plan is a structure with boundaries from the get-go. This structure is clear and simple and, again, a structure, so it can’t by eroded by corporate-political cronyism and semantic gymnastics (i.e., what happens to words such as “robust” or even “the public plan” itself, “the” … as if there is or was ever a stable version).

Matt Taibbi’s take on the health care FIASCO is so worth a read. “Sick and Wrong”. With black but never hyperbolic humor he takes us on a hellish tour of the surreal political quagmire that our health care future now struggles within.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/29988909/sick_and_wrong

He explains how in the REAL (as opposed to the Washington beltway) world, a “single payer system” would far and away make the most sense. Nearly a third of all health care costs are attributed to wasteful administration.

Fully $350 billion a year could be saved on paperwork alone if the U.S. went to a single-payer system — more than enough to pay for the whole goddamned thing, if anyone had the balls to stand up and say so.

Matt Taibbi: Obama’s Top Economic Adviser Is Greedy and Highly Compromised

Matt Taibbi responds to a whining Wall Street executive who didn’t get his bonus.

Taibbi Does Friedman