[lbo-talk] Obama transcends change

Shane Mage shmage at pipeline.com
Sun Jan 6 15:02:29 PST 2008


On Jan 6, 2008, at 4:58 PM, Shane Taylor wrote:
> "I don't think in ideological terms"...Obama said, continuing on the
> healthcare theme. "Everybody who supports single-payer healthcare
> says, 'Look at all this money we would be saving from
> insurance and paperwork.' That represents 1 million, 2
> million, 3 million jobs of people who are working at
> Blue Cross Blue Shield or Kaiser or other places. What
> are we doing with them? Where are we employing them?"

I little while ago I discussed the absurdity of treating unproductive labor as though it was a contribution to real GDP--the society's annual output of consumable and investible goods and services. Now comes Mr. Obama preaching that the unproductivity of paper-shufflers is an "ideological" concept and that the millions of them in the health- insurance swindle (not incidentally, disproportionately young black women) must be kept at their wasteful jobs because otherwise "what will we do with them?" Likewise,I'm sure, with the millions of (black male) prison inmates and (white male) guards, etc. "What will we do with them?" And so forth and so on. So the candidate of "Change" underlines that even in the most wasteful and destructive parts of the US capitalist system no change should be thought about because "what will we do with them?".

Who was it here who was denying that US capitalism is in a long-term crisis of stagnation, disguised by "schachermacher accounting" of the National Account Books and financial looting masquerading as "profitability?"

Shane Mage

"Thunderbolt steers all things...it consents and does not consent to be called Zeus."

Herakleitos of Ephesos



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