The Republicans Had 6+ Years to Legislate Changes to America's Health Care Problems
12.21.09
Commentary By Reid Holloway
Whether or not Americans want it or the country can afford it, the Democrats are going to make history with their healthcare bill because "they know what's best for America."
The liberals are essentially right when it comes to the GOP having had 6+ years to make changes to the American healthcare system, and for better or worse (and they don’t care which) that they are about to make history. This is also true for developing nuclear power, restraining spending (instead of throwing it at 9-11 and Katrina, etc.) and many, many other issues. Indeed, the liberals are doing the GOP a great favor in pointing this out because it illustrates so well how failing to “know thyself” and failing “to thine own self be true” are exactly what ails conservatives; particularly the Grand Old Party and why Bush did not use the veto pen. Now we rightists are all ticked off about what the wayward "leftness" of the Republican Party has wrought.
Don’t be surprised then that Orrin Hatch is Senator Al Franken’s big buddy; he was Teddy’s before that. He seems to have more time to write Hanukkah songs than to care what’s happening to us. He is a moth in the seductive light of today’s Washington-Hollywood play land. This is precisely what the Republican quest to out-liberal a liberal has led to; it is no less childish than when we were kids and succumbed to peer group pressure to be friends with the crowd when we were handed our first lit joint.
Do we continue to be childish, or do we put childish things away and grow the heck up as the Bible implores? This is the true legacy of the Bush years that embarrasses, humiliates and defeats us all; and we deserve it and can’t whine and squirm our way out of it pointing fingers at anybody but ourselves. We earned it because we tolerated it and we did it.
So now the True Blues vent the collective acidic Dostoevskyan spleen of the alienated man. This is understandable, but we can’t be dishonest about the fact that if in some ways the two major parties have become indistinguishable, a kind of oligarchy when it comes to the little guy, it’s our fault for not having pressed our concerns enough with the Republicans, the party that’s supposed to represent us. I am not trying to make enemies among Republicans; in fact, I’m trying hard to make friends in those quarters. But I do feel a deep sense of sadness that conservatives waited since the days of Eisenhower—and that even Ronald Reagan told us he didn’t have a congress on his side and we needed to have that. Well, we finally got that under GWB, but we didn’t do much with that, did we? We could have pre-empted the health-care legislation now looming over us by addressing competition restrictions on insurance companies in the states. We could have incented domestic energy development. We could have held the line on spending. We could have done so much. But we did very little. We have to own up to this in order to deal with the grave present and future now upon us or we will continue to fail.
What does an alienated man do with his alienation to accomplish something positive? What is the acid of a Dostoevskyan spleen good for? It’s good for killing the germs our years of treason toward our true colors and our quest for “modernization” and “social acceptability” that have been a hospitality suite for multiplying the microbes and filth of our own breakdown. We are feverish and bilious in a disease of our own creation and embarrassed by our own faults and tolerance pointed out to us by the “Left Coast” and liberal progressives of the world who can now legitimately laugh in our collective face at Christmas parties for having done nothing about health care and so why should we now object to their legislation. We can only blame ourselves because we enabled them, and not just on this issue.
I say pour the acid of alienated spleens on those germs and start anew, while confessing our sins. Can’t think of a better time than Christmas to begin the process, but it will take a lot of determined honesty, humiliation and other uncomfortable things that have always been the building blocks of self-inspection, truth, learning, betterment, reform, revolution and hope. Even drunks and heroin addicts can learn this; those who recover often exemplify the virtues of the process and become models to look up to.
Have we got the guts? That’s the only real question. There is no easy way out because that only perpetuates the poisonous dishonesty and appeasement we have all been guilty of for too long.
* Cues up Michael Jackson’s Man in the Mirror *
Curriculum Vitae:
Reid Holloway is an independent practitioner in corporate finance, specializing in strategic, market-identification and operating strategies for the telecommunications and technology industries. He is a licensed Realtor, associated with The Cohen Agency of Torrington, Connecticut, and a member of the Litchfield County Board of Realtors, the Connecticut Association of Realtors and the National Association of Realtors (NAR).
Mr. Holloway began his career as an editor with Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publications in 1976. In 1978 he joined Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., Inc. (now a unit of Alliance Capital), an investment research and management firm now handling $498 billion in client assets, where he instituted and managed the company’s communications department. In 1980 he joined specialty-chemicals giant W.R. Grace & Co., and, for seven years, as senior corporate writer and deputy director of public affairs, handled as many as 100 speaking engagements per year for then chairman Peter Grace.
He served on the presidentially appointed Grace Commission on government waste, which Mr. Grace headed at Ronald Reagan’s request, and which developed many of the cost savings adopted in every federal budget since the completion of its findings in 1985.
In 1987 Mr. Holloway joined Edward S. Gordon Company, Inc. (now C.B. Richard Ellis), then the world’s largest independent commercial Realtor, and directed the firm’s marketing and communications activities related to large leasing and investment transactions, such as the sale of 2.5-million-square-foot One New York Plaza to Chase Manhattan Bank. ESG became a Holloway client after his consulting practice was formed, and he was responsible for writing the firm’s quarterly Gordon Office Market Report, distributed to clients and the news media, tracking the entire 400-million-squarefoot office leasing market comprising Midtown and Downtown Manhattan.
From 1992 through 1996 Mr. Holloway served as managing director of SGC Advisory Services Inc., a corporate-finance and money-management firm specializing in telecommunications and technology, which he co-founded. Since 1988 Mr. Holloway has operated an independent consulting practice concentrating in corporate and financial marketing and communications. His client roster has included Young & Rubicam, Inc., Philip Morris Management Corp., Philip Morris U.S.A., Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, Browning-Ferris Industries and The Trump Organization.
Mr. Holloway was graduated from Colgate University in 1975, where he earned distinctions as a George Cobb Fellow, and as editor of The Colgate Maroon, America’s oldest college weekly. He pursued additional studies in finance and accounting at New York University’s Graduate Business Administration Program in 1980.
In 1994 the Commissioner of the Department for the Aging and the Mayor of the City of New York nominated Mr. Holloway to serve on the Board of Directors of the Fund for Aging Services, Inc., a private foundation which finances much of the City’s aging services activities, and the largest fund of its kind. He served for four years as a director.
Mr. Holloway is also a published commentator on political and financial affairs, widely quoted in the news media and an intermittent guest on a variety of talk shows. He is a contributor to the Waterbury (Connecticut) Republican-American. Holloway is one of a select group of “professors” from the financial community whose articles are regularly published on Minyanville.com, which logs some 25,000 visitors daily. Reid has been published by the Christian Science Monitor and The New York Times and is also a regular guest on four ClearChannel radio stations based in Monterey, California.
Using his quantitative and other techniques developed professionally, Mr. Holloway published studies in 1996, 2000, 2004 and 2008 forecasting the outcome of the Electoral College and popular vote totals. His 2004 model accurately forecasted not only the Electoral College outcome for that election, but also the popular vote totals for each of the candidates in all 50 states and D.C. During the two-week period leading up to the 2004 election, he was a nightly guest on the nationally broadcast ABC Radio Network discussing his findings with John Batchelor. In 2008, the Holloway forecast was remarkably close some four months ahead of the actual election. He called the turnout within fewer than 4 million votes (out of more than 121 million total votes cast). His forecast for Obama's vote count was off by about a million votes. Looked at on the basis of percentage measures, the Holloway call was, in both candidates' cases, wide of the mark by a scant 0.72 percentage points. The technologies Holloway applies to his Electoral College forecasts are based on The RLH Volatility Model, a proprietary mathematical model he has developed over the past 15 years, which is designed to assess and manage equity portfolio risk.
Reid is friends with Distressed Patriots founder Chris Janelli who heads an exploratory committee to evaluate forming a Holloway for Torrington campaign in the 2010 election against Democrat Michelle Cook (65th House District). For more information about Reid, see his Curriculum Vitae at the end of his commentary, and visit his Web Site: stocksthatwiggle.com
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