change we shouldn't have believed in

Glenn Greenwald sums up the state of health care reform:

One finds [the corporatist trend] in far more than just economic policy, and it's about more than just letting corporations do what they want.  It's about affirmatively harnessing government power in order to benefit and strengthen those corporate interests and even merging government and the private sector.  In the intelligence and surveillance realms, for instance, the line between government agencies and private corporations barely exists.  Military policy is carried out almost as much by private contractors as by our state's armed forces.  Corporate executives and lobbyists can shuffle between the public and private sectors so seamlessly because the divisions have been so eroded.  Our laws are written not by elected representatives but, literally, by the largest and richest corporations.  At the level of the most concentrated power, large corporate interests and government actions are basically inseparable.

As well as the civil liberties situation:

So, to recap: we have indefinite detention, military commissions, Blackwater assassination squads, escalation in Afghanistan, extreme secrecy to shield executive lawbreaking from judicial review, renditions, and denials of habeas corpus. These are not policies Obama has failed yet to uproot; they are policies he has explicitly advocated and affirmatively embraced as his own.

He quotes Time magazine:

Beginning in the first two weeks of May, Obama took harder lines on government secrecy, on the fate of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and on the prosecution of terrorists worldwide. The President was moving away from some promises he had made during the campaign and toward more moderate positions, some favored by George W. Bush. At the same time, he quietly shifted responsibility for the legal framework for counterterrorism from Craig to political advisers overseen by Emanuel, who was more inclined to strike a balance between left and right.

And I have to agree---it is a crazy world we live in when extraordinary rendition, indefinite detention, and trial by military commission are considered moderate positions. It's the absolute nadir of the two-sides-to-every-story way of doing journalism, combined with the premise that the two available poles are What The Republicans Say and What The Democrats Say.

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I got home to find this month's copy of Harper's, which begins with an essay (subscriber-only, I think) on regulatory capture. Here's how the state of the legislature is described:

The polite word for regulatory capture in Washington is 'moderation'. Normally we understand moderation to be a process whereby we balance the conservative-right-red preference for "free markets" with the liberal-left-blue preference for "big government." Determining the correct level of market intervention means splitting the difference. ... The contemporary form of moderation, however, simply assumes government growth (i.e., intervention), which occurs under both parties, and instead concerns itself with balancing the regulatory interests of various campaign contributors. The interests of the insurance companies are moderated by the interests of the drug manufacturers, which in turn are moderated by the interests of the trial lawyers and perhaps even by the interests of organized labor, and in this way the locus of competition is transported from the marketplace to the legislature.

The results:

... Mediocre trusts secure the blessing of government sanction even as they avoid any obligation to serve the public good. Prices stay high, producers fail to innovate, and social inequities remain in place.

Because the competition doesn't happen at the market, the current Republican rhetoric (pro-market, anti-socialism) is just a non sequitur---consumers can't exert any pressure on corporations to produce better products, and the emphasis on free choice is a red herring. And the Democrats, well, they've been captured. And apparently the whole business about a public option, the expansion of Medicare? Total sham. Obama and co. never wanted to do any of that---they just wanted to force people to buy from the insurance industry, with subsidy, i.e. funnel tax money to the very corporations whose inefficiency and protection from the market have made reform urgent.

From the start, assuaging the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries was a central preoccupation of the White House -- hence the deal negotiated in strict secrecy with Pharma to ban bulk price negotiations and drug reimportation, a blatant violation of both Obama's campaign positions on those issues and his promise to conduct all negotiations out in the open (on C-SPAN).  Indeed, Democrats led the way yesterday in killing drug re-importation, which they endlessly claimed to support back when they couldn't pass it.  The administration wants not only to prevent industry money from funding an anti-health-care-reform campaign, but also wants to ensure that the Democratic Party -- rather than the GOP -- will continue to be the prime recipient of industry largesse.

Reminds you of the bank bailout, doesn't it?