When will the brilliant technocrats learn?

• The data doesn't matter.
• The letter of the law doesn't matter
• The spirit of the law doesn't matter
• Unwritten understandings such as Senate rules on filibustering don't matter

The rules don't matter to the plutocracy. Kenneth Lay put it very well in his retort to David Freeman, Chairman of the California Power Authority who was responsible for regulating the business Lay's company Enron was involved in.

"In the final analysis, it doesn't matter what you crazy people in California do, because I got smart guys who can always figure out how to make money."

Enron blew up, and Kenneth Lay is dead, but the plutocracy in America is not only alive and well, but it is profiting more than it did during the Bush-Clinton-Reagan period. The plutocrats have gamed the system. They persuaded traditionalist democrats that the Senate rules requiring super majorities is a tradition that republicans will be constrained by in the future. For this reason, medicare for all (single payer) was legislatively out of reach even with the democrats in control of both Congress and the White House.

What a pathetic charade.

What is the most pathetic thing is that the dems allowed themselves to be gamed by the health care industry. In the arguments on Up we heard that the health care industry was different than others. Listen for the echo in what David Freeman warned about how businesses game the system:

"There is one fundamental lesson we must learn from this experience: electricity is really different from everything else. It cannot be stored, it cannot be seen, and we cannot do without it, which makes opportunities to take advantage of a deregulated market endless. It is a public good that must be protected from private abuse. If Murphy’s Law were written for a market approach to electricity, then the law would state 'any system that can be gamed, will be gamed, and at the worst possible time.'

Is it cynical to assume that Obamacare will not be gamed by the health care industry? Or is it naive to believe that powerful business interests will not use every means to pursue their economic interests, including the well used pattern of gaming the regulators?

What is so difficult to understand is why intelligent liberals do not understand that they are observing the simple raw exercise of power. Legal experts are shocked. Well, they have not intellectual basis for being shocked any longer.

For the republic to survive, the back of the plutocracy must be broken. Remove the tremendous financial motivation to subvert our institutions, and there will be far less intention to subvert the normal rules of behavior in governance.

I digress: Trayvon story will change history and put MITT in WH.

Obama made grievous error w comment, but a gun was put to his head.

Tragic. Not the event. But pols that will result.