[from The Note - will someone ask Andy Stern what he hopes to gain by associating with this gang?]
Pressure to move, on healthcare: "Four leading advocacy groups representing business, labor and retirees are starting a campaign today to press Barack Obama to enact comprehensive healthcare reform, upping the pressure on the president-elect to tackle the issue quickly after he takes office," Noam M. Levey reports in the Los Angeles Times. "In a letter to Obama, the Business Roundtable, the National Federation of Independent Businesses, AARP and the Service Employees International Union urge that a healthcare overhaul be a priority in the administration's first 100 days. The groups plan to spend nearly $1 million to publicize their cause in newspaper and television advertising in coming weeks."
.........
Unless I miss my guess, here's the group's website:
<http://www.aarp.org/issues/dividedwefail/>
Note the 'post partisan' (and, we can infer, post political) logo which mates the elephant with the ass to create a new, apolitical, hybrid creature.
This seems perfectly suited to the Obama era: the message is attractive -- let's solve our problems together without partisan bickering! But the goal is to preserve the existing class architecture.
The fantasy of politics without politics, without conflict, is fascinating. If the US nurtured a functioning technocratic elite --instead of a dysfunctional command strata which tends towards wild swings between unbounded enthusiasm and baggy eyed depression -- she might be able to sustain this fantasy.
For a little awhile.
The idea that our trouble is argument itself, instead of the genuinely conflicting goals of competing class interests (for example, the medical industry's desire to squeeze ever more protection money from me while providing ever less service vs. my need for decent health care) will, I predict, achieve its apogee during President Obama's time in office.
.d.