It's not the movies at the theater, the ghost stories you've heard from family and friends, or the little trick-o-treaters at the door. It's evil, and its presence in the world. It sends a reminder to me what we have is precious, and can't be taken for granted. There are all these stories in the world, about women suffering in Congo at the hands of army soldiers, people dying of hunger and without access to water, and little stories here at home in our county about families being driven out of their homes due to foreclosure and bankruptcy.
Evil just doesn't reside in the human heart, it also resides in what corporations decide to do with their resources based on their quarterly goals. It resides in the hands of an insurance company clerk that works with a team to find any "tell" that a patient policyholder isn't telling the truth so they can deny her or his claim, and drop that policyholder off their rolls. And that insurance company clerk and his team get bonuses as a result of denying access to medical care for that patient.
That's evil when insurance companies use their profits based off the premiums we pay them to lobby against what we want--a robust public option to compete with them. They want to stifle, choke, and smother the competition in the form of a robust public option, so they send their lobbyists to Capitol Hill to gladhand the politicians like Senator Lieberman, Senator Blanche Lincoln, Senator Snowe, who all know that their constituents want a robust public option but remain opposed to that public option.
Evil is when these politicians, who were elected into office by us, and we worked hard to earn a majority for these politicians, decide to stand by and do nothing in support of what their constituents want. For every week they delay real health care reform, Americans lose their insurance and go into bankruptcy. It's unconscionable when one of these politicians, Senator Lieberman, says he'll filibuster health care reform by joining with the Republicans against the cloture vote.
It's clear that Senator Lieberman, when he says that his constituents are ignorant about why they want a public option, that he's acting in the interest of these insurance companies that reside in his state. He'd rather stand for their profits over health care access for his constituents. Are these the actions of a good politician, who would move heaven and earth to make sure his constituents were fully represented? No, these are the actions of a self-interested man who would rather make friends with the devil. One may not call this malignant evil, but I call it a form of benign evil, where it rests in the body politic in the Senate, where these "moderate" Senators clearly don't care about their constituents and instead cite "bipartisanship" as a reason to hold up and weaken progressive legislation.
And all these lobbyists donations from PhRMA, AHIP, Aetna, BlueCross BlueShield, Humana, UnitedHealth, and WellPoint, clearly have shown that money influences our political discourse, and weighs in at our disadvantage on issues that we need our elected officials to fully support us on. When I think about the upcoming Supreme Court decision on campaign finance reform, that scares me because I know how badly unrestricted money in the form of donations from corporations will suddenly shift the debate from the barely left-of-center that we've worked to have through campaigning, canvassing, and donating, to the hard right.
That's scarier than the Dean Koontz book that I read tonight. And the vision of a long uphill fight for real campaign finance reform, and working to make sure that our elected officials don't get bought out by these corporations is a scary one, because after the past eight years of an executive branch from hell, I just don't know if we have the strength and the will as a populace to rise up against the onslaught of these corporate donations from these special interests and their lobbyists.
It's their dream, and it's my nightmare on this Halloween eve.