Elizabeth Kucinich and Fannie Lou Hamer Soul Sisters
Yesterday's Facebook Poll Shows Private Insurers Favored by 70%.
Democrats lack
marketing skills and political adeptness. The poll I took on Facebook this
morning referred to "government run" healthcare. It is no wonder 70%
of the respondents voted against it. The government loses wars, kills innocents
and mocks the Constitution.
The leftists should realize this is not an academic debate. The public doesn't
care about the civil right of health. They view the 47 millions of uninsured as
undeserving lay abouts. The unemployed should rise up and get a job.
This is a pocketbook issue. The Veterans Administration provides the lowest
cost and best health care in the USA. Private industry wastes 30% of
premiums on advertising, sales commissions, profits and big executive salaries.
A recent study rated the VA better than private industry throughout 278 rating
categories. Obviously, the right thinking legislators should base a universal
plan on the Veteran's Administration example.
I post this Elizabeth Kucinich video on how best to pitch single payer.
What Will We Do to Those Who Don't Vote for Single Payer?
Why do we urge our legislators to pass single payer? They have refused this for the last 60 years. The President speaks of public option as a compromise. He won't get that either.
May I suggest a new strategy? At least one committee should put a straight single payer on the floor. It could be an adaptation of the Veterans Administration program, the best we have. If we can't get reconciliation for that, anybody who failed to vote for it should be tried for murder of the 18,000 people who died last year without proper insurance.
As great as she is, Elizabeth Kucinich can not lift us to political respectability by herself. We need more Americans to stand up for what is right. I would choose Fannie Lou Hamer as a role model.
Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977), field secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was an outspoken advocate for civil rights for African Americans.
For more than half of Fannie Lou Hamer's life, she was a rural agricultural worker who saw no end to the cycle of poverty and humiliation that was the plight of most southern African Americans. Fannie Lou, born October 6, 1917, in Montgomery County, Mississippi, was the last of twenty children born to Jim and Ella Townsend. When she was two years old the family moved to Sunflower County, Mississippi, where Fannie resided for the rest of her life. At age six she joined the other family members working as a sharecropper picking cotton. By the time she was 13 she could pick between two and three hundred pounds of cotton a day.
In 1962, when she was in her mid-forties, Hamer's life changed drastically. She was invited to attend a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced "Snick") meeting at a church near her home. SNCC, an organization founded in 1960 by a group of young African Americans who used direct action such as sit-ins and other forms of civil disobedience as a means of ending segregation in the South, encouraged its workers to travel throughout the South to win grassroots support from African Americans. When Hamer heard the SNCC presentation she was convinced that the powerlessness of African Americans was based to a degree on their complacency and fear of white reprisals. She decided that no matter what the cost, she should try to register to vote. Though her first attempts to pass the voter registration test were unsuccessful they nevertheless resulted in the loss of her job and threats of violence against her and those who attempted to register with her for trying to alter the status quo.
In 1963 Hamer became a registered voter and a SNCC field secretary. She worked with voter registration drives in various locales and helped develop programs to assist economically deprived African American families. She was regularly threatened and faced beatings, a bombing, and ridicule. Nevertheless, she was a founding member of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), formed in April 1964 to challenge the all-white Mississippi delegation to the Democratic National Convention. The MFDP sent 68 representatives in August 1964 to the Democratic National Committee meeting in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Hamer was one of the representatives who testified before the party's Credentials Committee. In a televised presentation, Hamer talked about the formidable barriers that southern African Americans faced in their struggle for civil rights. She talked about the murders of civil rights activists such as Medgar Evers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner.
-Black Radical Congress News
"I am sick and tired of being sick and tired." -- Fannie Lou Hamer
"If the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America," she said. "Is this America? The land of the free and the home of the brave? Where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hook, because our lives be threatened daily." Hamer discussed the abuse she had suffered in retaliation for attending a civil rights meeting. "They beat me and they beat me with the long, flat black-jack. I screamed to God in pain...." As a compromise measure the Democratic Party leadership offered the MFDP delegation two seats, which they refused. Hamer said, "We didn't come for no two seats when all of us is tired." And no MFDP member was seated.
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