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Al Gore’s Phony Support for Universal Healthcare


By Stephen Lendman
stephenlendman.org
7-21-17

 
Gore never was progressive and isn’t now, even as a private citizen.

The former House member, senator and vice president is part of the dirty system - supporting privilege exclusively, mindless of vital needs and rights of others.

Throughout his political life, he always put politics over responsible principles.

His record shows he’s pro-war, pro-business, anti-progressive. His environmental activism is phony. He’s no friend of the earth.

His 1992 book “Earth in the Balance” was more theater than advocacy. In Congress, he failed to introduce or support legislation to remediate air and water pollution, soil erosion, deforestation, overpopulation, ozone depletion and global warming.

He wrote about harmful auto emissions and need to phase out internal combustion engines - yet did nothing in Congress and as vice president to achieve these objectives.

He supported hugely anti-labor, anti-environment, anti-consumer, anti-democratic NAFTA. A decade after its enactment, about a million US jobs were lost. Since 1994, over five million US manufacturing jobs were offshored to low-wage countries.

Gore supported clear-cut logging in old-growth areas. He ignored an assessment revealing this practice risked extinction of hundreds of species.

He backed destructive salvage logging - opening millions of National Forest lands to predation, exempting sales of its harvest from environmental laws and judicial review for two years.

He and the Clintons let South Florida sugar barons devastate thousands of Everglades acres. They abandoned Delaney Clause protection to keep carcinogens out of our food supply.

They were friends of Big Oil, GMO producers, and other interests harmful to human health and welfare. They shilled for the nuclear industry, exacerbating, not alleviating, global warming.

Commercial reactors discharge huge amounts of greenhouse gases along with hundreds of thousands of curies of deadly radioactive gases and other radioactive elements.

Gore advocated for Pentagon and war-profiteer interests. He midwifed the MX missile, opposed defense spending cuts, backed the 1990s Balkan wars and rape of Yugoslavia.

He supported genocidal sanctions on Iraq, responsible for killing 5,000 children under age five monthly. He backed imperial wars on Afghanistan and Iraq.

He supported Big Tobacco, knowing its use risks contracting cancer and other serious illnesses. He supported destructive neoliberal harshness.

He won a Nobel Peace Prize for being pro-war, not against them. The real Al Gore is polar opposite his public posture pretense.

As congressman, senator and vice president, his notion of healthcare reform was serving interests of insurers, drug companies and large hospital chains at the expense of Medicare for all, a level playing field for everyone, no one left out.

Throughout his political career, he said one thing, supported another - acting duplicitously like most others in Washington.

He’s back saying “(t)he private sector has not shown any ability to provide good, affordable healthcare for all. I believe we ought to have single-payer healthcare” - what he failed to support in Congress and as vice president when it mattered.

His earlier rhetorical private life universal coverage support was phony lip service alone. He’s never been a true believer - always wedded to industry-serving dysfunctional care, prioritizing profits over people needs.

During his 2000 presidential campaign, he failed to endorse universal coverage. Rhetorically supporting it as a private citizen now is too little, too late hypocrisy.

Where was he on this issue when it mattered? He consistently backed harmful to human life and welfare issues - wars, corporate predation and environmental destruction, a record of shame, not pride.

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: stephenlendman.org (Home - Stephen Lendman). Contact at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
 
My newest book as editor and contributor is titled "Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III."

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

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