What If There Were No Republicans?

Imagine if we woke up tomorrow and there were no Republicans. I am not suggesting that they be rounded up and eliminated or put on boats and sent back to Europe, where most of their ancestors came from. I mean that tomorrow the whole concept of conservatism and Republicanism just disappeared, just for the next few years, just for the remainder of Obama’s first term.
What would Democrats do? What would Obama do? My guess is that the first thing that would happen is we would withdraw from Afghanistan and stop trying to look tough in the eyes of conservatives who would not be around to condemn the Democrats for being soft on terrorism. I believe we are in Afghanistan because the Democrats felt shamed into being somewhere other than in Iraq in order to keep in check Republican and independent hawks who see the active demonstration of military strength as a litmus test for the presence of political testosterone or toughness.
The second thing that would happen is the tip-toeing through the minefield of private option preservation in health care insurance would stop, and an actual single-payer program would be developed that would serve to cut health care costs astronomically and boost economic recovery substantially in the long run. American companies would finally be able to compete with their foreign counterparts and would be encouraged to stay home and hire Americans rather than seek cheaper off-shore manufacturing sites.
The third thing to occur would be the re-establishment of anti-trust laws and the break- up of large “too big to fail” corporations and banks. No longer would the Democrats have to fear the loss of Wall Street support for their candidates. Caveats would be put on bonuses for bankers and CEOs that would tie any bonuses not only to actual value creation but to unemployment figures. Bonuses would not be granted until national unemployment dropped below say five percent. That way, investors would keep in mind that their investments had to create jobs or they would not be getting big bonuses.
The fourth thing that would happen in spite of some Democrats from coal-digging states is the country would shift from coal and oil as the primary energy sources to wind, sun and natural gas, assuming that the latter can be carefully extracted without harming water and air. No longer would the current oil and coal lobbies have enough power to control congress by playing one party against the other.
The fifth event would be the complete overhaul of American education. No longer would the Democrats have to bow to the will of teachers unions. They could embark on real educational reform including a longer school year, smaller schools, better teacher-student ratios, more rigorous standards, and more freedom to get it right.
The last benefit I will mention is the Democrats would have to take responsibility for balancing the budget starting now. They could no longer blame the past administration or the current obstructionists for preventing them from doing what is right for their grandchildren’s sake. After all, it is Republicans who often say about future generations: “They’ll figure it out. Meanwhile, let’s make some money, lower taxes, and cut programs” (that Republicans never benefit from or don’t need because they are rich). The bleeding heart liberals, of course, actually care about others and don’t want to leave a legacy of burdensome debt for their grandchildren to go “figure out.” Liberals by definition are other-directed, not “you’re on your own” rugged individualists. At the same time, they will be solely responsible for their programs and budgets, knowing they will be held solely accountable and that the Republicans would be available again in 2012 if the Democrats don’t follow through.
These are among the many benefits of not having any Republicans around for the next few years. I am not suggesting that they disappear permanently, as the Whig party did in the nineteenth century, although I am sorely tempted to conjure up a bumper sticker to that effect. In fact, I can see the bumper sticker now: REPUBLICAN: Gone with the WHIG!

It's Tough to Separate the Truth from the Horse Manure

It’s a tough life. Just think of it. Imagine having to convince yourself that what is best for the country is to continue compromising the long-term well-being of the planet. That’s what congress folks who support continued coal mining and oil drilling as the best means of solving our energy needs and for bringing about the recovery of our economy seem to have convinced themselves in spite of all the actual evidence to the contrary. They will stick their heads in the oil sands before they recognize the overwhelming evidence of global warming and the pending global disasters associated with it. It’s amazing how powerful faith in the status quo actually is for some coal-tunnel-vision folks who still manage to get elected in this 21st Century.
Of course the reason they keep faith in coal and oil is money and influence. Some of the most powerful lobbies in congress are coal and oil. What else would explain their indifference to or even denial of the actual scientific truth? They hold on to the myth that a shift to renewable energy or even natural gas as part of the transition to renewable energy would bring economic disaster.
I would like to think it is simply a matter of a lack of imagination or vision. Unfortunately, it isn’t. It’s about who funds their campaigns or whom they will fear if they switch allegiance to more sensible and beneficial energy sources. They are simply owned by the existing, powerful corporations that want to maintain their power and influence. There is no other credible explanation.
The same is true for health care reform. Most of the same obstructionists to combating global warming are the same folks who oppose real health care reform. They want to make certain that the existing insurance companies and health care providers remain as the primary players in and beneficiaries of any so-called reform. The preservation of the corporation comes first ahead of the public welfare. Somehow, in their belief, if the corporation is profitable, the benefits will trickle down to the public at large. That’s the theory that has had a long time to prove itself but has never fulfilled its promise. And yet the “true believers” hold on to those beliefs in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Health care and health insurance companies have had their very lengthy chance to prove their worthiness to the American people and they have failed miserably. Without government intervention in some major ways, they will continue to seek profits at the expense of the public good.
America is a country of believers. We like to believe that all people have access to the American Dream, to their choice of religious beliefs, to the notion that “all men are created equal.” However, when our faith is put in the corporation rather than in the original concept of free enterprise or the market economy, we have lost our way. The purpose of the corporation is to reduce competition in order to maximize profit. It is not to compete for the benefit of the consumer. From the time the corporation was deemed a “person” legally, we started down the slippery slope toward the destruction of the American Dream for actual everyday people. Once the corporation became a person, “all men are created equal” lost all validity. As long as the current crop of obstructionists in the House and the Senate continue to pretend to believe that the large corporation is the answer to America’s needs and a sizeable portion of the American populace sees government as the enemy and the corporation as the symbol of free enterprise, then we are stuck in swamp of overweening corporate power and influence, and the American Dream will continue to sink into the bog.
No matter what Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh tries to tell you, question authority: theirs, your elected officials’, and the corporation’s. Question the authenticity of the ads you see on television. Question whether or not the truth you perceive actually holds up in the face of real evidence. Don’t let your theories get in the way of the truth. Belief is a powerful tool that can be used against you more easily than it can rise to your benefit.
Finally, imagine those folks who were nay-saying the petroleum advocates at the turn of the 20th Century. Those naysayers were “haysayers” or hay-burning advocates. Imagine how life would be today if they had continued to rule their day. Imagine the piles of horse manure. If you feel you have to watch your step now, just imagine if “haysayers” had won. Yes, there have been unintended consequences of our oil-burning, but we now can see our way clear to make changes that can reverse the damage in the long run. Don’t let the 21st Century equivalent of the “haysayers” stop what needs to happen now. Change may be unnerving, but failure to change will be disastrous. That’s a certainty you can count on.

Is Bill Cosby a Conservative?

A recent column entry by Matt Lewis in Politics Daily calls Bill Cosby a conservative because he has joined forces with the IWF, a forum organized by so-called conservative women. Their mission is as follows:
"Rebuild civil society by advancing economic liberty, personal responsibility, and political freedom." The site goes on to state that "IWF builds support for a greater respect for limited government, equality under the law, property rights, free markets, strong families, and a powerful and effective national defense and foreign policy."
As a flaming liberal, I have little issue with any of these values. In fact, I embrace them wholeheartedly.
I would love to have limited government if only the corporate giants would dismantle into human-scale entities so that we could afford limited government. As it is, the only voices congress seems to listen to are the voices of Big Business such as oil and coal, instead of the still small voices of natural gas, a much cleaner, earth-friendly, plentiful transition fuel that will bridge us into the age of renewable energy. If only the little guys and the Big Bullies had equality under the law.
If by property rights they mean surface owners as opposed to the Big Bullies who own subsurface rights that currently and historically have trumped the little surface owners, I am for property rights.
If by free markets they actually mean the preservation of real competition and the protection against the monopoly and oligarchy of Big Business, I am all for real free markets.
If by strong families they mean the kind of families my two sons are raising and committed to that foster good manners, rigorous education, respect for nature, and high achievement, then I am certainly in support of strong families.
And if by strong national defense and foreign policy they don’t mean a go-it-alone strategy without first asking the rest of the world to join us in positive endeavors, as The Little Red Hen did, as opposed to the Bush administration, then I support a strong national defense and foreign policy based on cooperation rather than isolation.
So, if Bill Cosby is about getting parents to take responsibility for their children, I am all for it. No government program will do it for them. However, access to good schools can help, and good government can provide incentives that will help good schools flourish in underserved areas.
And sometimes it is a matter of saving the kids FROM the parents.

Principle andPrejudice

“The real American day hasn’t begun yet. Or at least, not yet sunrise. So far it has been the false dawn. That is, in the progressive American consciousness, there has been the one dominant desire, to do away with the old thing. Do away with masters, exalt the will of the people. The will of the people being nothing but a figment, the exalting doesn’t count for much. So, in the name of the people, get rid of masters. When you have got rid of masters, you are left with this mere phrase of the will of the people. Then you pause and bethink yourself, and try to recover your wholeness.” From “The Spirit of Place” by D. H. Lawrence (1923).
How true Lawrence speaks to the state of America in the first decade of the 21st Century even though he wrote his “Studies in Classic American Literature” in the second decade of the 20th Century. We are still throwing off old masters, even those whom we have elected only recently. The more our current leader looks like a master, the more some of us want to overthrow him.
What sticks in the craw of the fearful whites who hold “tea parties” and protests is that the current master, duly elected by the majority, has exercised power, and that power, no matter how it is derived or on what knowledge it is based, is black. Furthermore, no matter what the topic (health care, economy, Wall Street regulation, or missile defense) the issue is the power held by a master who is black, and that very fact subconsciously or overtly, threatens any white who fears the coming extinction of white privilege disguised as “the will of the people” – my people. They see a black man in power and fear either deep-seated ancestral-guilt-based reprisal is in store or at the very least the “traditional” racial hierarchy has been deeply eroded. For some extremists, the “natural” racial hierarchy has been irrevocably compromised.
What may start out as principle-based disagreement devolves into personal attack. When race or religion is available as a distinction, it becomes the currency for personal attack, particularly when the principle perceived to be under attack evokes indefensible privilege, indefensible selfishness, or irrationality under close scrutiny. It becomes more convenient and emotionally satisfying to demonize race or religion, thereby declaring the person in question a lesser being, a lower order. Seeing him as an equal leaves his principles and argument on the same field of play, thus giving it equal value in principle. Therefore, the best way to avoid facing the opponent’s arguments head on, point to point, is to render them inferior categorically by labeling the person whose views you disagree with a socialist, a fascist, a communist, or racially inferior.
The astounding fact is that the proponents of private enterprise and free markets would rather demonize a black president than look at the inherent contradiction in their support of both corporations and free markets, when it is the mission of corporations to assure themselves a lion’s share of any market they enter. They don’t want competition; they want monopoly or as close to it as they can get. These ‘tea partiers” would rather continue suffering at the hands of private monopolies or domestic cartels than trust their elected government to provide a mechanism for keeping corporations honest. Big Government is bad; Big Business is good. Keep it simple. Keep it about good guys and bad guys. Keep it like…well, like football: Broncos good; Raiders bad.
D. H. Lawrence was right then (1923) and right now (2009). Populist demagogues hiding behind their perception of “the will of THEIR people” would rather bring down a master who is trying to make things better for the greater good than allow him to succeed. His success would prove them wrong, and then they would have to face the error of their beliefs, both principled and personal, and that would be worse than muddling along with the unsustainable status quo.

Regulatory Arbitrage Is an Outrage

The idea that congress could streamline anything is as likely as an ice age coming to your neighborhood soon. Once in power, politicians are all about holding on to power or even increasing it, not sacrificing it for the common good. That’s why Blumberg and Davidson of NPR on a recent “Morning Edition” discussion are pessimistic about any effective changes in how congress might better regulate the markets. Trying to merge the SEC and the CFTC would be more difficult than trying to cross an elephant with a donkey: it just won’t happen. There is too much influence and money at stake among congressmen who supposedly supervise these overlapping agencies to risk merging the two. Lobby largesse would go missing from the coffers of congressional election campaigns.
Both Barney Frank (D) and former Representative Mike Oxley (R), the current and past chairs of the House Financial Services Committee respectively, agree that trying to merge the SEC and CFTC, both of whom supposedly oversee financial services, would be impossible now and in the future. Somebody would have to give up some power, and that simply doesn’t happen in congress when campaign contributions are at stake. It appears that you can add regulation more easily than you can make it more efficient. And adding regulation is like adding cooks to the kitchen: nothing gets cooked because each cook thinks another will do the cooking.
It’s all a great dodge. America is Dodge City, the perpetuation of the Wild West where anything goes and laissez-faire capitalism still rules, thanks to congress’s approach to regulation. Simply write enough laws and create enough overseeing agencies, and real responsibility will fall through the cracks, over and over again while the lobby money keeps rolling in.
There is an ad currently appearing on television that shows what justice would be like if loggers ruled the world. They are portrayed as even-handed in doling out justice by sawing everything in half including houses and cars but stopping short of King Solomon in sawing a couple’s pet in half, implying that joint custody will serve in limited instances. There is something appealing about that simple justice in the face of the dithering lip-service congress pays to justice in matters such as securities regulation and health care where the stakes for the country are so high. And yet their self-interest apparently transcends any thought of common goodness or justice.
Is it democracy itself that brings out the worst in our politicians, or is it our cultural narcissism that grew and flourished amidst previously unheard of materialistic wealth during the last fifty years mutating into a malignant form of hubris incapable of either humility or humanity? Where is public service when we truly need it? Did it die with Ted Kennedy who, despite his shortcomings, appears to be the last of the great public servants in congress?
If the only safeguard or producer of goodness left to us is competition, what a commentary on our sad state of affairs. Maybe Coolidge was right: “The business of America is business.” And it is business as usual in all facets of our culture in spite of the serious flaws we all have witnessed in the last year. If congress won’t do anything to make things better, who will? The President can’t do it alone.
Meanwhile, the very banks that brought the world economy to its knees have been temporarily saved by federal transfusions of cash but little of that cash has trickled down to the economy of Main Street. The banks apparently are living off the transfusion while they organize the next campaign to dupe investors with glossy financial products that have no more relation to the actual manufacture of goods than the most recent bungle of derivatives. But they are the largest source of lobby money (your tax dollars), so don’t count on your congressman to do anything to threaten that pipeline.
We keep hearing about the “green shoots” as if just around the corner is the actual economic recovery. With unemployment projected to crest above 10 percent before the year is out, there aren’t many “green shoots” to comfort the unemployed. In Bhutan, where the culture measures itself by GNH (Gross National Happiness) rather than GDP, there are real green shoots growing, thanks to the intervention of the government that recognized a growing deforestation problem. Bhutanese like to honor their dead by placing prayer flags on poles, which were being harvested from the country’s existing forests. The government decided to act and began planting fast-growing bamboo to provide its inhabitants with adequate poles without continuing to compromise the existing forests. It was a simple solution to a simple problem. And they don’t need loggers to harvest it for them. Ah, if only we could do the same.
I fear our economic system is so convoluted and complex that it has become a monster we no longer can control. Even before we elect our politicians they are “purchased” by corporate lobbies and owned by corporations for the duration of their careers. Even self-proclaimed “mavericks” are owned and manipulated by corporate wealth. There is no power to govern these monsters, and so we are defenseless against their best laid plans.
Maybe we could save our own forests by electing loggers to congress. They would appreciate the pay and would probably not tolerate a lot of dithering among their colleagues. And perhaps they would put an end to derivatives on Wall Street by chain-sawing through the red tape and complexity that Wall Street hides behind. They also might just cut a few opening to allow the bailout money to flow to Main Street. Yes, I can see the bumper sticker now: “Break the log-jamb in congress: Elect a logger as your congressman”!

The Truth Ain’t Nothin’ but a Big Mac

America hates the truth about itself as much as any other country, but the truth it hates to admit the most is the truth about free speech: free speech and real truth seldom find each other because the angry mob never wants to hear the truth, especially about itself. The angry mob shouts of freedom, the freedom to lynch somebody rather than have to face the truth.
This past weekend the angry mob gathered in Washington, D.C. to vent its anger at the “injustice” of the imagined tax burden they would shoulder under the leadership of” that black man” Obama. Never mind what he said in a gloriously intelligent speech last Wednesday about “not one dime.” No, the angry mob knows he lies. Just ask Joe Wilson, probably not the last of the great baton twirlers for the old Confederacy. If you’re angry enough, you must be right. That’s how truth is forged: with the heat of burning belief. Don’t let the facts interfere. “Creationism” is alive and well because ignoring facts is practically a religion in America.
Free speech is never free. If it is free, it falls on deaf ears. If it has any power, it has money behind it. It is not the freedom but the money that gives speech value. If there is enough money, the so-called “free speech” gets delivered over and over until it becomes “truth.” In other words, in America you have the freedom to finance your “free speech” to such an extent that the sheer volume of its presence in the culture makes it the truth. Just look at the effect of advertizing on the American public and you can see how Big Food, Big Drugs, and Big Health Insurance all work symbiotically to trap the American public in their vicious cycle of obesity, poor health, poor virility, and prescription drug use. Watch a football game or the evening news and you’ll see the cycle in action about 30-to 40 percent of the time you watch.
Thanks to the law that makes the corporation a “person” in America, the Supreme Court is about to improve the free speech rights of that so-called “person” by no longer limiting the amount of money a corporation can throw at the character-assassination of politicians they want to destroy or the image-building of politicians they want to promote. We may technically still have one-person-one-vote democracy in America, but the notion of free speech is a joke. Effective speech is not free and is, in fact, becoming more expensive all the time. It is becoming so expensive that only large corporations have enough money to manufacture the “truth” as they want us to see it.
The corporate dupes like Joe Wilson and many other Republicans whose elections depend on generous corporate sponsorship and “true believers” in the unchallengeable freedom of corporations to brainwash us continue to protect the status quo at the expense of the health and well-being of the nation. They may not be aware of this fact, but they continue to be a major part of the problem out of adherence to a belief in the principle of free enterprise without being able to see that the state of free enterprise in America is about as free as speech is. Existing corporations do everything they can to make certain that actual free enterprise does not exist. They view competition the same way John D. Rockefeller did: “a sin.”
I fear Big Corporations more than I fear Big Government and with good reason. Until Big Government restores real free enterprise through effective law to protect and promote real competition, we will continue to need Big Government as the last defense against complete corporate take-over of this country. Perhaps it is already too late, given the evidence of the brainwashing corporate America has exercised over the waddling masses yearning for more Big Macs and Viagra. If Big Government is somehow successful in dismantling the stranglehold Big Business has on the American psyche and culture, then it can shrink back to a human scale as well. But let’s downsize the corporation before we downsize the only defense the people have against the continued ravages and waste the corporate Gorgons perpetrate.

The Blue Coats Keep Coming!

It’s time to put Wall Street in its place. They just don’t get it. After all the deriving, bundling, and Madoffing, they are up to another scheme: this time they hope to profit from your death, or so Peter Cohan, a Babson professor and author of You Can’t Order Change reports. It’s time for another “tea party” and the chanting of a revised slogan: “No securitization without representation!” Actually, it would be better if we held out for “No securitization” at all.
Here is how it works according to Cohan:
Wall Street's idea is that the thousands of securities in these bundles -- which will consist of life settlements from people with a diversity of diseases -- such as breast cancer, Alzheimer's, Leukemia, and heart disease -- will reward investors by paying them the difference between the amount that the policyholders get paid while they're alive and the size of their death benefit.
In simple terms, Wall Street will be setting up a casino so pension funds and other institutional investors can place a bet on your date of death. Wall Street will extract fees for running the casino -- just as it did with mortgage-backed securities (MBS).
And investors will rely on a new class of ratings agencies -- such as DBRS, co-founded by a nuclear engineering PhD -- which will measure the risk of these life settlement-backed securities (LSBS). And the risks are considerable. First among them is fraud -- unless a very ethical person takes the time to examine the medical records of each policyholder, there is enormous potential to simply make up fake policies -- just like the liar loans that brought down the MBS market.
Then there are the risks of people living longer than the actuarial tables predict -- which could cause LSBS investors to end up making very little money or even losing it. Or -- heaven forbid -- scientists discover a cure for the disease that threatens some of the policyholders and instead of dying an early and profitable death, those policyholders get healthy and live a long life.
Back in Boston around the time of the original revolution, bundling occurred when young couples, often teenagers, would be “bundled” in bed with each other, sometimes separated by a bundling board to keep them from having intercourse. The intention was to let them be intimate without the parents worrying about consequences of ultimate intimacy. Given the number of out-of- wedlock pregnancies that resulted during the colonial period, neither bundling nor bundling boards worked very well.
Today the same can be said for the bundling of loans into a trust and selling the product as a derivative. I doubt a bundling board would be any more effective than the original piece of timber. Therefore, securitization with representation would be about as futile. An all out ban on securitization is probably a better solution.
I discovered this summer that there are many different forms of the classic board game Monopoly. I learned this when I purchased the Deep Sea Fishing edition for a fishing-frenzied friend whose house I was occupying on Martha’s Vineyard for a couple of weeks. Art may imitate life, but when the cherished board game of our childhood imitates Wall Street in spinning off theme derivatives the way Ben and Jerry develops ice cream flavors, they don’t feel as right or good as say, Brahms’ Variations on a Theme by Haydn. It seems one can “monopolize” anything and what Wall Street is now proposing is just another monopoly game paid with not only your real money but your life. Let’s call them DDT’s (Disease-Death-Trades) before Wall Street comes up with a more euphemistic label.
I wonder if a board game can be made of this new Wall Street ploy. Perhaps a theme board game will lend legitimacy to the deal and assuage the fears of another, even more insidious bubble and bust already churning in the pit of my stomach.

The Fast-Food-Health Care-Insurance Complex

Eisenhower waited until the end of his presidency to give the famous military-industrial complex speech and look what good it did: America went on to immerse itself in Vietnam, Iraq, and now Afghanistan. The fast-food-health-care-health insurance complex is just as real, more threatening to American lives, and even more complex. It's one of the best examples of the trees obscuring the forest except when I start to ponder the derivation of derivatives. No one, not even Obama, can make a speech that can effectively explain the nuances of this insidious complex in a way that will convince the American people that they have been had, hoodwinked, and huddled by another deceptive complex.
However, the difference between a conspiracy and a complex is that a conspiracy is intentionally designed by conspirators while a complex grows organically. A complex becomes so pervasive you can't trace its evolution to a single starting point. Much the way an ecosystem evolves, a complex develops by companies or even whole industries finding niches in the complex and protecting those niches even at the expense of the whole. Of course a complex has an insatiable appetite that is ultimately unsustainable. In contrast ecosystems, if left on their own, sustain themselves.
The fast-food-health-care-insurance complex has brought America to its knees. It started about the time Eisenhower gave his last speech (1960). Its casualties are so pervasive we can barely see them. They are the overweight, artery-clogged, American children and adults who have bought their fool’s gold piece of the American Dream piecemeal in the form of Big Macs, KFC chicken, Whoppers, Baconators, and fries. They have been “educated” by TV commercials to satisfy their voracious appetites and shrinking wallets with the greatest life-threatening diet known to western civilization, thanks to the dollar menu and the drive thru.
Meanwhile, health care and insurance companies have been able to cherry-pick their clients and eventually exclude the high risk ones, all of whom pay increasingly higher insurance rates over time. The excluded are often dropped when their employers switch health insurers, a neat trick to lower the risk to insurance companies. The retained find themselves paying higher and higher premiums each year because of the exorbitant interventions practiced by the health care providers in order to compete for investment dollars from shareholders by showing greater profits. Thanks to the premiums insurers are able to charge and the deductibles they are able to set, insurers make a fine profit whether you need an intervention or not. The rates and deductibles always favor the insurance company stockholders at the expense of the insured.
America has always been about freedom. The most dubious freedom we have acquired, over the years, is the freedom to be simple-minded. That characteristic requires that life remain simple and that politicians explain things in simple terms. No complex answers to complex problems, thank you. Just make things right or better without changing anything. Change is scary, especially coming from a black man who happens to be President. America is also about faith. Just have faith in free markets, God, or your talk show host, and things will turn out for the best. Just don’t listen to anyone talking real change. That’s too scary. And keep that black man from talking to my kids at school.
We need to address America’s health before we address its health care, or at least make it a large part of what we do first. If the government would stop subsidizing the beef industry, for example, the price of burger would go up, the dollar menu would disappear, and folks would be forced to eat more vegetables, thus making people healthier. However, this would hurt the beef industry, the health care industry, and the insurance companies just as failing to go to war would hurt our arms-producing strategic industries such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, etc. The artery-clogged, obese bodies would disappear, thus creating less demand for expensive interventions, and thereby reducing the profits of stockholders in health care and health insurance companies.
Putting all of that in simple terms will require an oratorical skill far beyond anything any president has ever demonstrated. Eisenhower offered his vision but too late to do anything about it himself. When Obama offers his own health care plan, he will have time to act. I wish Obama the best of luck spelling out in plain English the nature of the problem so that his solution makes sense. However, this health complex is a multi-headed dragon that needs a multi-nuanced strategy to overcome it. But the right wing fear mongers have labeled Obama a socialist “dragon” and that dragon is easier to focus on and believe exists than one with many heads.
How anyone can have absolute faith in a free market system today in the wake of the most recent debacle is truly astounding. The market system needs a referee with teeth. Government is the only logical choice in that regard. But let’s start with subsidizing spinach, tomatoes, and peppers instead of beef and corn. That move alone would do more for America’s health than all the fixes we can make to health care and insurance. The agri-business lobby as it exists today does more to harm American health than any other single factor.
A way government can help educate America about its role in their lives and what it is trying to accomplish is to offer health and civics classes taught by AmeriCorps teachers to retiring citizens much the way driver’s education classes help reduce auto insurance premiums. If you want to get a bonus benefit from Social Security or Medicare, take a class and you’ll receive a one- time small bonus. That way, people will be able to have access to facts rather than be manipulated by pure irrational fear. If nothing else, they’ll realize that Medicare and Social Security are both “socialized” programs.