Doomsday Galts
by digby
As you all know, the Chamber of Commerce is spending many millions of dollars screwing over their members by opposing health care reform. Evidently, they are so ideologically blinded that they their membership companies want to be burdened by ever rising health care costs. How can we explain this?
I think the evidence is mounting that the American ruling elite has become faith based, whether it be through market fundamentalism, radical Randism or plain old white supremacy. Whatever their cult, they have lost sight of their own self-interest. In the case of HCR, unless they think the most promising market of the future is Soylent Green, these costs have to be contained and government has to be the instrument. Health care simply cannot function as a free market unless you are willing to have a great many people suffer and die. No other nation has been able to do it, and this Rube Goldberg contraption is about as market friendly as it's possible to get. For them to oppose it is just plain stupid.
Anyway, these deluded cultists are putting a lot of money into their own destruction and they are, as required by their scriptures, doing it dishonestly. The NY Times reports:
According to the Chamber’s polls, the legislators’ constituents are not nearly so divided. In all the districts, the polls found large majorities opposed to the current bill. And the findings come with an implicit threat: voters are more likely to support their representative if he or she votes against it.
That is about all The Agenda can say about the substance of the poll, however. As regular readers know, polls, especially those by interest groups, must meet stringent standards (pdf) before we can publish their results. These polls don’t. Instead of randomly selecting their respondents, the Chamber of Commerce sampled from voter lists, a practice The New York Times and many other media pollsters do not endorse because the lists are often outdated and are generally not representative — they do not include unlisted telephone numbers, for example. Moreover, the firm that conducted the surveys, Ayres, McHenry & Associates, identifies itself as a partisan (Republican-leaning) firm.
I think they just cook the books as a matter of course these days --- it's become part of American business culture. One can only assume they are so sure that they will always be bailed out that they no longer believe economics are even relevant to their cause. Customers, company, industry, country, planet be damned. They are now a doomsday cult, and a very dangerous one.
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