The Daschles: Feeding at the Beltway Trough
by Glenn Greenwald
by
Glenn Greenwald
 When
Barack Obama announced in early December that he had selected Tom
Daschle to be his Secretary of Health and Human Services as well
as his "health care policy czar," Rolling Stone's Matt
Taibbi – who had spent several months studying the inner workings
of the 2006 Congress in order to profile
its limitless corruption – wrote the
following reaction on his blog:
I know several
reporters who are either officially or unofficially on "Whore
Factor" duty, watching the rapidly kaleidoscoping transition
picture and keeping track of the number of known whores and ghouls
who for some reason have been invited to befoul the atmosphere
of the next administration.
Obviously
there has been some dire news on that front already. When Obama
picked Tom Daschle to be the HHS Secretary, I nearly shit my pants.
In Washington there are whores and there are whores, and then
there is Tom Daschle. Tom Daschle would suck off a corpse
for a cheeseburger. True, he is probably only the second-biggest
whore for the health care industry in American politics –
the biggest being doctor/cat-torturer Bill Frist, whose visit
to South Dakota on behalf of John Thune in 2004 was one of the
factors in ending Daschle's tenure in the Senate.
But in picking
Daschle – who as an adviser to the K Street law firm
Alston and Bird has spent the last four years burning up the sheets
with the nation's fattest insurance and pharmaceutical interests
– Obama is essentially announcing that he has no intention
of seriously reforming the health care industry. . . .
Regarding
Daschle, remember, we're talking about a guy who not only was
a consultant for one of the top health-care law firms in the country,
but a board member of the Mayo Clinic (a major recipient of NIH
grants) and the husband of one of America's biggest defense lobbyists
– wife Linda Hall lobbies for Lockheed-Martin and Boeing.
Does anyone really think that this person is going to come up
with a health care proposal that in any way cuts into the profits
of the major health care companies?
How serious
Obama is about health care reform remains to be seen. Obama supporters
argue that Obama needs someone like Daschle, with credibility within
the health care industry, in order to achieve real reform. That's
the standard explanation for most of what Obama does (he's only
courting the establishment in order to change it), and though
highly skeptical, I'm personally willing to withhold judgment until
the actual evidence is available regarding what Obama actually does.
Read
the rest of the article
|
