Barbara Christian [1] called our attention to the unknown Black women thinkers and doers whose desk were a kitchen table and whose podiums were a kitchen chair. Black women, young and old, daughters, mothers, aunts, and grandmothers, earned their credentials at these tables. Then, the flow of challenges was confronted with intense debate and focused movement. Today, the less credentialed control the dialogue. Just go with the flow we heard in the late 1980s and during the 1990s. What can you do? Go with the flow!

No one offered an explanation or description about where we were headed if we joined the flow.

Join the flow of things�

My grandmother, who died in 1987, presided at one of these kitchen tables, earning the right to sit at her podium. While it had taken her several years after Dr. Martin Luther King�s death for her to catch up with him, and while she eventually referred to Negroes as Black people, I know she knew the government.

The government doesn�t tell you everything.

The government lies.

Lies flow from one regime to the next, easily. The current Head of State, thought by many on the Right to be a not-so-discreet socialist and by many on the Left to be a closet progressive, certainly moved with that flow back in the 80s. Kitchen table thinkers and activists see the direction of this movement. Activist for Medicare for All, Dr. Margaret Flowers, commenting on the passing of the health bill, said it succinctly: �The Democratic Party has now moved so far to the right that they have just passed a republican health bill.�

But that�s not what the Head of State articulated when the House voted in favor of this health bill:

Over 70% of the people want Single Payer or Medicare for all. Government took Single Payer, the public option off the table where debaters didn�t include Single Payer supporters. If my grandmother were alive, she would have been rejected and told to stay at her kitchen table, among the woman kind!

Government didn�t rise above the weight of politics: government played politics to feed taxpayers� money to insurance companies.

We proved that this government - a government of the people and by the People - still works for the people?

Kitchen tables have been replaced by the desk at the Oval Office and the artificially credentialed lobbyists speak as one voice: go with the upward flow of capital.

According to Dr. Flowers, 23 million of the American uninsured will remain uninsured 9 years from now! Major tenets of the health care bill will not kick in until 2014, and, in the meantime, 180, 000 people will die because of a lack of insurance or adequate insurance. Currently, 800 Americans die weekly because they can�t afford health care insurance. Will the fate of those 23 million Americans be that of the 800 who die weekly from government indifference?

Wendell Potter, former CIGNA vice president, declares �Obamacare will move millions of uninsured to underinsured, making them vulnerable to serious illness costs, the main cause of personal bankruptcies.� No Obamacare provision, Potter argues, will protect these citizens from losing their homes (qtd. in Stephen Lendman�s �The Insurance Giant Wellpoint Wrote Obama�s Health Care Bill�).

Obama, funded by AIG, didn�t listen to the people. He never came to the kitchen table where the people sit, debate, worry, strategize survival, and where they know, as they stare at bills, the government doesn�t care about them. And that�s those with kitchen tables! Others sleeping in cardboard boxes with the ground for a table know, too, that this government doesn�t care about them.

Most importantly, today�s vote answers the prayers of every American who has hoped deeply for something to be done about a health care system that works for insurance companies, but not for ordinary people�

If �ordinary people� now means, and in a State moving with the flow toward fascism, it may well mean corporate persons, then the insurance companies� prayers were answered. The insurance companies had their turn to cash in on the Obama giveaways to wealthy elite.

It�s a victory for corporate minded Americans. They are not all on the Right nor are they all wealthy elites or all white.

As a collective of money-conscious people, status-climbers, power-hungry people, moving-with-the-flow people, this country has yet to witness a �victory for common sense� that truly benefits all of the people. Ranks of the poor and poor working class are growing while Forbes lists new millionaires to the ranks of the wealthy elite - in a democracy!

Obama is no doubt grinning from ear to ear right now, and he has, for the time being, solidified his strength as a can-do president. He can engage in two wars at the same time and still get the Nobel Peace Prize. And he can sell an insurance policy to an unwilling populace, writes Paul Barrow (�The Health Care Bill and Fascism�).

�Black� guy can�t lie! �Black� guy isn�t government!

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, keynote speaker at the Left Forum, rightly condemned the State of the powerful against the people but urged that the attendees stick to the Democratic Party. Certainly the Democrats have nothing whatsoever to do with trashing the concerns of the poor and working class people! The Democrats aren�t giving the wealth and the resources of this and every U.S. colony state to the wealthy 1%. Flow with the Democrats, the Black leaders say!

Others on the Left hailed Rep. Dennis Kucinich as a true dissenter, above, shall we use Obama�s words, the weight of politics. For months, Kucinich said no to the health care bill that, to use journalist Stephen Lendman�s words forces coverage on consumers, assesses penalties for noncompliance, empowers the IRS to collect them, protects corporate profits, rations care, and dumps millions of Americans (insured and millions left uninsured) in the scrap heap to fend for themselves.

But Obama calls Kucinich for a conference, and the latter can�t speak on leaving that table. The next day, he has the voice of the Party: Defend Obama! Defend the health care bill!

Forward with the flow of things! Save the Party! Save the politics of a government for military and corporate ventures! Save the State and the people will follow!

Government lies when it needs to and it needs to all the time. And why not when they can count on Progressive and Left friends to cover up the scam for them? �As Obama likes to say,� writes Tariq Ali, ��We are all God�s children,� and �This is God�s vision.� If sonorous banality and armour-plated hypocrisy are the hallmarks of this Presidential style, that does not make it less functional for the task of servicing and repairing the imperial institutions over which Obama and Clinton preside� (�The President of Can�t,� New Left Review 61, January-February 2010).

What is this �God�s vision�: a government flowing in the blood of the dying and murdered?

Article 25 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), Stephen Lendman writes, applies to U.S. citizens too. According to UDHR, Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care...

He continues: Article 12 of the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social & Cultural Rights (ICESCR) states:

People don�t sit at Obama�s table! When the people look at the window where Obama presides at the table, they see a blurring of humans and pigs. Remember George Orwell�s Animal Farm? No offense to actual pigs - but pigs sit at his table!

We aren�t pigs willing to go with the flow!

We should pledge and take action with Physicians for a National Health Program (Margaret Flowers) to continue the work �for the only equitable, financially responsible and humane remedy for our health care mess: single-payer national health insurance, an expanded and improved Medicare for All.�

Seventeen thousand doctors at Physicians for a National Health Program support single-payer national health insurance. Get back to the kitchen table! A human rights violation was pushed forward last week and signed by the inhuman entity (corporate greed) that believes in just going with the flow! Visit www.pnhp.org/stateactions or call (312) 782-6006.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has been a writer for over thirty years of commentary, resistance criticism and cultural theory, and short stories with a Marxist sensibility to the impact of cultural narrative violence and its antithesis, resistance narratives. With entrenched dedication to justice and equality, she has served as a coordinator of student and community resistance projects that encourage the Black Feminist idea of an equalitarian community and facilitator of student-teacher communities behind the walls of academia for the last twenty years. Dr. Daniels holds a PhD in Modern American Literatures, with a specialty in Cultural Theory (race, gender, class narratives) from Loyola University, Chicago. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.