Life is not a game show. The realities of electing the moronic, semi-troglodytic President’s son as President…or having the Supreme-Court-justice son of a rumored Fascist appoint him…should have proved that. From $5 trillion in debt and a balanced budget to a $14 trillion in debt and a commission trying to figure out how to keep the country from bankruptcy. (Hint: It ain’t complicated. Raise taxes on everybody.)
The ultimate reality, however, is not sitting by the fireplace in the library at the University Club discussing the future of the country. The ultimate reality is trying to figure out where your next meal will come from after your 99 weeks of unemployment have run out. Reality is trying to survive after the savings you used up to make up the difference between your living costs and unemployment benefits have run out. Reality is hanging on to your house, just barely staying out of foreclosure or eviction. Reality is facing that moment that many have been forced into…deciding where you are going to live when the bank takes over your house.
That is reality these days. Not housewives from Jersey or Beverly Hills. And you can thank, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Dick Cheney, Bush II (the stooge, the prodigal son), and more specific people like Chris Cox and Grover Norquist. You can thank…and we all wish you would begin to show just how grateful you are…in an organized way…Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch. You can thank the Koch Family.
“What this country needs…” is an organized effort to tell all these people in person how you feel about what they have done for you, or for your relatives, friends or neighbors. They need to hear it in a way that is unmistakable, in a way that smacks them right in the face, knocks them down and stomps on them. Only that kind of message will get through…a forceful message…one that gets their attention.
We need large groups, organized groups to get together to offer our extreme gratitude. We need to track these people down in their homes to say “Thank you,” for the economy and how well it has treated those 30 million Americans who are out of work or only able to find work at McDonald’s or Burger King part time. And “Thank you” for trying to defeat health care reforms so we can get health care that we can afford for our kids when we inevitably become one of the unemployed whose jobs go to India or China.
Let’s thank these people in person, not just one or two or three or five, but hundreds of thousands to let them know the degree to which the people of this country are grateful for what they have done.
Let’s let the health insurance industry CEOs and the Republican Congressmen and Senators and the handful of Democrats like Bayh and Nelson and Lincoln who voted against health care reform know how much we appreciate them. How much we appreciate their trying to prevent the government from allowing us to keep our children on our health insurance until age 26. How we appreciate their shutting down the public option that would have enabled us to lower health insurance costs.
Let’s let them know, and the Tea Party people…Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks. And Dick Armey…let’s track him down…he shouldn’t be hard to find…just look for a television camera. Let’s tell them how much we appreciated their making sure we would never be able to keep the health insurance industry from dropping the insured when they get sick.
You ignorantly thought that this was the point of health insurance, didn’t you? You thought that health insurance was for when you get sick. You didn’t realize that it was not for all those years paying tens of thousands of dollars in premiums. The health insurance companies are all…all…corporations. They know that the goal of a corporation is to maximize profits for their stockholders. That is goal number one. If you don’t you are replaced.
Health insurance, you see, is for paying premiums and making profits for the health care industry so that they can buy politicians to give them the green light to cut service and increase premiums to make more profits….and so on.
That is why the health insurance corporations gave millions, (along with the Koch Family, who want fewer taxes and regulations,) to the Tea Parties to disrupt the health care reform proposals. They will all…yes…all go out of business as profit-making entities. There is no other advanced country in the world…and we are way, way down on the list of OECD countries with the best health care…that has a for-profit system but us. It doesn’t work. That is why other countries don’t do it. We do it because the health care industry gave $400 million dollars to Republican politicians to create havoc and prevent us from having a true universal health care system.
We used to have nuns and volunteers taking care of people because it was a non-profit, a non-money-making proposition to take care of the sick and dying. People realized that the better you make the business, that is the better you take care of patients, the more it may cost. So it has to be run as a non-profit, to spread the costs around, not a for-profit to make money by refusing service.
Now, thanks to that brilliant scholar and B-movie actor from Eureka College, Ronald Reagan, we have a for-profit system that has driven costs up to more than double anywhere else in the world and has left 35 million people behind.
Somehow it escapes most people that the object of health care is to take care of people when they get sick. The better the care, the more it costs. So it is not a good for-profit business unless you make the service…health care…as minimal as possible.
The idea of real health care is to have very good service at the least possible cost because you want to spend money on care for patients, not on profits for multi-millionaire investors. Health care should not be a for-profit system. Here’s the real answer: Shut down our private, for-profit system and put in a European model for better health care and half the cost….or less.
Ronald Reagan, the great conservative, looked at the health care at GE, probably a spectacular system at that time, and said, yes, this is good for everyone. Well, he probably asked Milton Friedman, whose idea of a health care system was some kind of high-priced plan priced for the wealthy and leaving the rest of society “Free to Choose” illness and death.
Milton Friedman’s boom-and-bust system of free-range economics only allowed for people to work hard and competitively and when an industry breaks down…go on the dole until…something happens. He never figured out what to do with all the displaced people that would result from totally unregulated industry. We have an example of what happened, the Depression of 1893 which lasted for years and during which there were no government social systems at all.
This is what we have come to and what Liberals and Progressives have been shouting about for years, trying to be heard over the corporate-paid, huge, daily-televised or radio broadcast megaphones of the Right Wing propagandists. YOU ARE BEING LIED TO BY THE REPUBLICANS! They want to destroy health care reform…for profit. They want to keep taxes low on millionaires…to let them keep more profits.
And why do they want that? Because they are the kinds of people who do not mind doing whatever is necessary, selling their souls, to get rich themselves. They have used their media organizations to spread lies into every corner of America. Certain millionaires and billionaires do not want a Middle Class. They do not want unions. They do not want minimal wages. They don’t even want American workers. Just their consumption by going into debt. This is what the industrial billionaires really want.
They use their lackeys to lie to the elderly, telling them that they will lose their Medicare under a health reform bill, when in fact Medicare will be strengthened. Lies that tell people with private health care plans that their premiums will go up because of health care reform. They will. Until health care reform is fully enacted…because they still control all health care pricing.
When health care is fully enacted they will have to bid on the open market with all other potential health insurance providers…no monopolies as they have now. Then prices will drop like a stone. Does it ever occur to any rational citizen that a health care CEO who makes $20 million a year by creating huge profits by denying you care…that this guy does not want to see health care reform come about? It will kill all his big paydays.
And the Neocon Republicans want to keep wars and a gigantic military going…both for their military industrial complex friends like Bechtel and Halliburton…but also because they want the military on their side. Don’t think for a minute that we are on the other side of the world from a military coup.
What do people do when their government or the national parties have so confused the citizens that they support a dictatorship? A dictatorship cannot be voted out. We are coming close to that as a result of the enormous sums spent by corporations thanks to the Supreme Court’s Citizens’ United decision.
People react the only way they can against a dictatorship. They revolt. No one is going to live with starvation, illness, lack of educational opportunities, food, clothing and housing only from charity. And what do governments do then? They call in the military to “restore order.”
We are nearing plutocracy and control of the military by the Republicans. Most military officers are Republican. They want a larger military, whether we need one or not. A large standing Army means more generals and more opportunities in the military-industrial complex after service. Because they are in the military makes some of them no less greedy. Others simply go along in an organization built on blaming someone at a higher level of authority.
Republicans want control as in a military setting. They want to dictate your morality. They want to dictate your sexuality. They want cheap labor. If they didn’t they would have shut down the borders long ago and started putting employers in jail. There are strong laws that say you cannot employ illegal aliens.
They want to control government at all levels on behalf of the rich and powerful. They captured 30 governorships in this election. Those 30 governors control 30 National Guard units, 30 militias, if you will. And have these governors or the federal government cracked down on private armies, ruled them illegal? No”? Do they crack down on private armies? No. Why not?
Is this reality? Would they do such a thing…use national guard troops against the people? And what would the guard do? Most of them come from middle class or lower backgrounds. Would they try to control their own families or would they see themselves as the fortunate few and collaborate for favors? Latin American countries positioned one group against another, troops against the people…yet some were willing to do it…die if necessary…for not very much in return.
These people are not the majority of Americans. But the majority of Americans are sitting on the sidelines in a fight in which the Republicans, the Totalitarians, the Neocons have all hands on deck. They are in this for the political power which they see as an easy way to get rich. Basically, steal from other citizens. Give the money to the rich and in return the rich give them jobs, give them opportunities to become rich or install them in seemingly secure political jobs.
How does a clerk at a health insurance company who has children herself, turn down the request of a woman whose child is very sick or dying on the order of a superior who is working on a bonus for preventing claims? The first woman needs a job. The second person is either greedy, or totally uncaring or has no other opportunity to find a job paying this well. It is a matter of ethics. An ethical test in which they fail miserably.
So, they support the rich so that the rich will support them…literally. They see what happens when the Right Wing propagandists like Limbaugh play the rich man’s game. In his life before becoming the tout for the rich,
Limbaugh was a fool and an odd-job failure. Now he makes tens of millions of dollars a year as a mouthpiece lulling the ignorant into a slumber until the rich can pollute their acres or poison their eggs, or keep their child from health care or drop the value of their home…their biggest asset…by half.
And at the same time, he persuades them that the problem is really the “Liberals.” He is good at propaganda. The hicks eat it up…forgetting that the Liberals were causing their problems, the Liberals, the middle class, would be doing it to themselves at the same time.
Limbaugh is worth $400 million now. Hannity worth $200 million. And Beck earns $30 million a year spouting his idiotic anti-American drivel to a couple of million hicks a night. And they believe him. That is the problem. We are so “dumbed-down” as a nation that people as far away as Finland can see it and shake their heads that such a wealthy, fortunate society cannot figure out that we are selling ourselves down the river. But the hicks in Alabama and Texas and southern Ohio and Nebraska can’t get through the transparent lies.
They do not have the capacity to understand how illogical it is, for example, that a Republican would cry for fiscal sanity and then be adamant that billionaires should have a trillion more in tax cuts that we would have to borrow from China to give them while cutting Social Security! This is how stupid we have become.
We all remember the man who was on a Glenn Beck mission to kill people in the non-profit educational group, the Tides Foundation. Another man, spurred on by the words “baby killer” on television by former and current gossip columnist, Bill O’Reilly, shot and killed a doctor who performed abortions.
It did not matter that the type of abortion procedure the doctor performed was not only legal but approved by more than half of the people in the country in survey after survey. The threats of violence among certain segments of society are becoming too frequent to ignore. “We” decide that this is a law we don’t like. So we go out and kill people. Is this what we have become as a society?
It is. We know because the local representatives we recently sent to Congress are those who have, for some unfathomable reason, chosen to support the Republicans, the very rich, the lobbyists, like the health care lobby, and the military industrial complex. They voted for a majority of Representatives who have said that they will try to repeal health care reform for the people, give more tax cuts to the rich, keep a large military even though we only have small bands of enemies and cut entitlements and wages.
It is time for organization. It is time that certain groups began to organize…large groups…ex-military and police and firemen and labor unions and participants in team sports, people who really understand how organizations work.
There are many abroad in the land. We can no longer turn the other cheek when a radio talk show host promotes violence. We must react in a way that he will understand and not repeat this kind of thing. We must rally around our political parties, Democratic and Green Parties. Independents must join if only to be part of an organized group.
It is time that the violence started going the other way. We need to make violent war on the ideas of a group who would steal everything that represents the American Middle Class, the greatest and most affluent society in the history of the world. We cannot let Neocons steal our jobs and send them overseas, steal our tax money to give it to the rich, and steal our very health and well-being and that of our children…in order to profit the rich and powerful friends of the Republican Party.
We voted for a President and a political party to change the order of things. While the legal processes are being rigged and tricked and bullied by a group of old white millionaires, the people suffer. It is time to make the people who cause the problems begin to suffer.
