Left I on the News

Yesterday I talked about Michael Moore's comments at a rally in Sacramento. Inside, he had even more to say, as listeners to Democracy Now! learned this morning. Here are just a couple excerpts:

Let me just pause for a second and say something on behalf of the health insurance corporations in America. Our laws state very clearly that they have a legal fiduciary responsibility to maximize profits for the shareholders. If they don't do that, they could be put in jail. They're required by law to turn as big a profit as they can. And the only way that can turn the big profit is to not pay out the money, is to not provide the care. So therefore, there is no way that this can work. There is no way that we can continue to have these health insurance companies making these decisions. Nor should we have private profit-making hospitals making decisions. The hospital that has to make a decision based on the bottom line as to whether or not to provide care, this is absolutely antithetical to human rights. And we're the only country in the western world that doesn't believe it is a human right to provide free universal health coverage for every one of its citizens.
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What is wrong with us? That’s not who we are, that’s not what we used to be about! This "every man for himself" attitude, "pull yourself up by your bootstraps." "You got your problems, I got mine." "Don't bother me." This "Me, me, me." That’s not how they exist in these other countries – in Canada, Britain, Ireland, France, these other places. They believe in "we, we." They believe we're all in the same boat and we sink or swim together. They believe that if too many people fall between the cracks, their society suffers as a result of it. What happened to us? I think we used to believe that somewhere along the line, somewhere way, way back.

Moore may have illusions about the reality of life in Canada etc., and about how life "used to be" in the United States, but he also gets the attention of a lot of people, and a lot of people hearing messages like the ones above is a good thing.

Not to mention that both he and I thought that the word "antithetical" was a perfect word to describe the situation. :-)