Syndicate and Hague

I wanted to open this by saying that there are so many things I don’t understand about the people crying “socialism” in regards to having public health care, but that isn’t entirely true. I intellectually understand a lot of the factors leading them to that reaction. Some of it is simply that they have good insurance through their employers and don’t want to possibly wait another day to get seen by a doctor so that we can all be covered. It’s a naive way to think in this economy when a person could lose his/her job and be without insurance or with insurance at staggering COBRA premiums.

I could go into the racial undertones of the anti-health care reform language (directed both at Obama, and at the “others” who may take away “our” health insurance/doctors), but what I want to focus on is why public health care is good for entrepreneurs - and, by extension, for capitalism.

If our leaders are really concerned with the needs of small businesses and individual start-ups of new businesses as they say they are, their resistance to publicly run health care is puzzling. Needing to maintain a relationship with a specific employer in order to have health insurance actually deters people from striking out on their own and becoming innovators.

I could write up some scenarios for you, but you should already know them. Someone with a child with chronic health conditions cannot stop working at a job with great benefits just because they “have a great idea for a business” because no individual plan would provide the level of care the group employee plan does (nor would the individual plan probably cover the child, what with the child’s pre-existing conditions and all).

You could have Crone’s, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, cancer, severe mental illness, whatever - and you are either lucky enough to be trapped with an employer who offers benefits that keep your illness from driving you into bankruptcy, or you get sick. And sickness can be disastrous.

So what are you going to do? Forget yourself, even - if you have people relying on you who absolutely need good medical care are you going to strike out on your own with that new business idea or are you going to stay at your job (hoping benefits don’t get cut more, hoping you don’t get laid off)? In my experience, people with great ideas stay at their jobs because when faced with the kinds of medical bills they would be paying without it, they simply can’t do anything else.

If you’re a capitalist who thinks big business is the only way to go, then this is a pretty good set up. However, no politician likes to go on about how much they looove big business. They’re always talking about “the little guy.” American ingenuity and exceptionalism blah blah blah. But they don’t really mean it. Our fates are tied to the whims of behemoths. Social programs support us so that we have a safety net. As anyone who has ever gone from a dangerous situation to a safe one knows, safety brings freedom. When you’re not in reactive mode, you can plan and dream and innovate.

It’s hard for me to untangle this argument from morality though. At its root, I think it’s immoral for us as a society to not leverage our power as a community to support and buffer each other so that we can all do better.

(A side note to the “SOCIALIST/COMMUNIST” screamers: please read Marx. It is so embarrassing when you use the term “socialist/communist” in place of “i don’t even want to hear what you say” because, due to the context in which you are using it, it is plain that you don’t actually have full knowledge of the tenets of that philosophy.)

School started up again yesterday. This is usually a very exciting time for me because excessive brain exercise=happy. However, I’m suffering from what I’m going to call “recession malaise.” I think a lot of us have this right now - it’s the knowledge that the people in power are screwing us combined with the knowledge that everything could be much worse, so count your blessings.

It’s hard to quell the discontent, though.

As I’ve said before, people in general like to say that we become more conservative with age. It was Winston Churchill who said “Show me a young Conservative and I’ll show you someone with no heart. Show me an old Liberal and I’ll show you someone with no brains.” Personally, I see that as both a cop out and as arrogantly self-interested. (As it’s Churchill, I shouldn’t be surprised by the latter).

The older I get, the less patience I have with how business (non-profit, government, education, private industry, whoever) operates. The “tough decisions” rarely affect the bottom lines of the top administration’s remunerations/benefits or those of the people in their peer group. The “tough decisions” always, always, always result in stripped away benefits from low-/middle-wage workers, with a disproportionate burden of layoffs falling upon low-wage workers.

I understand the basic human nature behind these decisions. You want to protect yourself, you want to protect your friends, you want to ensure that - when it’s your colleague’s turn to make a “tough decision” that they spare you. People don’t want to give up the trappings of power or power itself.

It’s still wrong, though. It’s still unethical and immoral. And I know that many people think ethics and morals have nothing to do with business, and I thank them for allowing the financial sector to become what it is today - you know, the financial sector that almost singlehandedly set up the environment that would most easily facilitate an economic collapse. But hey, you can’t even live like a pauper in NYC on a salary of less than a million, right?

The thought process embedded in our organizations by this kind of lunacy - that executives should make obscene amounts more than their underlings - has infiltrated pretty much every aspect of our society, and this is a problem. It means that when terrible times come and a terrible governor makes the worst possible decisions about a great state’s welfare…well, sacrifice becomes the keyword of all state organizations. It’s not proportionate sacrifice, of course, because we operate with an oligarchy and: in good times salaries are justified by the good times and in bad times salaries are justified by how hard it is to retain such valuable employees in bad times.

The entrenchment of power never ends.

And so…malaise…

Way back during the Clinton impeachment hearings (over his blow job), my (dearly missed) grandmother and I were talking about the state of politics in this country. She said “If politics when your grandfather was alive was like politics now, I never would have allowed him to run for anything.”

What she meant, of course, was that character assassination was steadily growing as the focus of political battles. It didn’t matter how much damage it did to his family at the time, but if all the Republicans could distract us with about Clinton was that he got a blow job, then that was going to take precedence over policy and legislation.

I can’t imagine what her impression of the politics of today would be.

Here is the situation we’re in: a small minority of very loud Americans will do or say anything to bring down our president. I’d say that they get media play because the media gets a lot of airtime out of the Battle of Left Vs. Right, but I don’t know about that. Back in 2003, when the global Iraq war protest was staged, somewhere between 100,000-400,000 people flooded the streets of New York (the figure depends on the source), and between 6-10 million people protested that day in February in different cities all over the world. We weren’t covered with nearly the same seriousness as the town hall screamers are.

The anti-health care reform people; the birthers; the right wingers in general get a few dozen people at a rally - maybe even a hundred or two at a protest - and this is a movement? Yes, they’re loud and very good at parroting Fox’s talking points, but their numbers are hardly representative of massive public sentiment.

The problem is that every time their screaming town halls are reported on, it lends them credibility. Just like every time the media even asks questions like “should the president’s message to schoolkids be allowed in the classroom?” gives that insanity credibility.

(A sidebar on that: are you people fucking kidding me?????!!! He’s the president. George Bush made me want to gouge my ear drums out every time I heard him talk, but if he wanted to get on TV and tell the kids to study hard and have a good school year, I wouldn’t have batted an eye. And neither did my parents back when Reagan and HW broadcast messages to schoolkids. Way to raise your kids to have respect for this country.)

I just don’t understand why the media is legitimizing the ideas that are coming out of the right wing machine. It’s not like having “two sides” of an issue=critical analysis of an issue. There are things called facts, and when one of the two sides has an argument that consists of “socialism,” “death panels,” and “Hitler,” they are not a “side” of an argument, they do not have an argument.

To be clear, I have no problem engaging in a debate with someone who wants engage in an actual discussion of the pros/cons of various types of health care reform. However, I have found that many right wing-identified people begin an argument with me by calling me a socialist. That’s not an argument, that’s invective and hyperbole and has no place in a debate/discussion.

In fact, I want to extend Godwin’s law to the “Socialist” moniker. If you have to say “Socialist!” or “Socialism!” in order to win an argument, you automatically lose. It’s like sinking the 8 ball. You say “socialist” to win an argument, you fail.

Man, I really miss talking current events with my grandma, but part of me is glad she didn’t live to see this insanity.