Amerca's House of Lords

The public health care option appears to be losing ground, thanks to effective strategies of health insurance companies and other lobbyists that, through fear-mongering advertisements, have convinced enough of the American public that health care security is not desirable. It’s another coup pulled off under the direction of America’s House of Lords.
Huh? You say. America has no House of Lords. We have two chambers: the Senate and the House of Representatives. By all means, according to the Constitution, that’s all we have. But de facto, we actually have a House of Lords in the form of large corporations who, depending on the issue at hand, send their lobbyists to Congress and their marketing gurus to Madison Avenue to make sure their corporate interests are protected and preserved. Their sheer wealth and influence make Lords of old England pale in comparison. The latest efforts by the big four health insurance companies (UnitedHealth, WellPoint, Aetna, and Cigna) have sent the Obama administration into retreat from a so-called public option to less threatening and less secure health cooperatives.
It appears that we can have Homeland Security and armed forces run by the government, because they do not compete with industry. In fact, they sustain and even give rise to industrial might, thanks to the contracts they dole out to security and military-based corporations respectively. But let government compete with industry for the benefit of American citizens, and there is all out war to re-capture the hearts and minds of the American public and instill fear in them that their health, their incomes, their right to live will be compromised by government involvement. How stupid can America be? Pretty stupid, I guess.
America’s House of Lords, like England’s of old, is not elected. It has no term limits. It is accountable only to other Lords who control shares in their companies. Like the landed nobility and clergy of old who composed the traditional English House of Lords, American corporations and their chief stockholders have control of the majority of America’s wealth. Instead of being based in land, the American corporate gentry’s wealth is more portable and useful, is able to be placed in coffers that generate decisions and influence people, namely Congress and Madison Avenue.
America’s clergy in the form of televangelists and local fundamentalist bible-thumpers are an unwitting tool of America’s House of Lords. They teach people how to fall in line behind the existence of increasingly incredible discrepancies in wealth by promising their flocks heaven if they only believe and do what they are told. The clergy, then, perpetuate the notion that the kingdom of heaven is worth the wait even if their brothers in freedom reap huge profits from their docile submission to the status quo. They may also hate government for bailing out the banks and American automotive industry, because they remember government took God out of the public schools but ignore the fact that American agriculture has been bailed out with substantial subsidies since 1933, and those subsidies produce the cheap, harmful food that makes them fat and sick.
Unlike the old English House of Lords, the American version does not actually meet as a body. In fact, the only time they come to Washington is to be investigated or interrogated or to look for a bailout. They generally stay out of the limelight and use their minions (lobbyists and marketers) to make their influence felt.
If only the American public knew how it is being manipulated, not only by so-called health care insurance companies, but by the American House of Lords as a whole. The cars we drive, the food we eat, the obesity levels we have attained, the products we have purchased that we really don’t need, all are the product of corporate power. Caveat Emptor (Let the buyer beware) has been the governing laissez-faire principle of our economy since its inception. You’re on your own so that corporations can exploit your weaknesses, for that is how they view the average citizen: a host of weaknesses, appetites, and exploitable manipulations.
For example, the American has been taught to need a full-sized pick-up or SUV as a symbol of the full expression of his masculinity on four wheels. He eventually “needs” the large vehicle to hold his increasingly obese family that has been taught to eat huge burgers and fries and drink beer whose label tells you it is properly cold, as if you couldn’t actually feel the temperature of the bottle. The health care companies want to have control over your health care dollars so that they can take your premiums and then exclude you from service when you don’t measure up to the image of the models romping in the beer and fast-food adds. The Lords’ health care scheme is all part of a larger plan, however diverse but pervasive, to get you to waste or spend unwisely your net income, all the while getting you to focus on how your tax dollar is misspent.
Another example is drug companies, who don’t want you to actually get well by eating right or living a better lifestyle; they just want you to solve your cholesterol problem with one of their drugs. Keep eating the burgers and fries: just take some Lipitor and you’ll be all right. Or if you are upset and anxious about life, just take a mood-altering or sleep-inducing drug such as Zoloft or Ambien. Whatever you do, don’t take a hard look at the source of your condition.
Wake up, America, and see yourselves for what you are: the greatest dupes since Adam took the apple. Of course Caveat Emptor was apparently in full swing even then. Furthermore, take a look at corporate America and recognize it for what it really is: a profit-making manipulator that has more power over your lives than any government can ever dream of having.