Think about all the struggles over the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and all the “repeal and replace” negation and obscurantism. Think about Obama’s hopeless attempts to compromise with a racist Congress. Think about the many years during which all the Congress could do was to implement their racist policies of saying NO to anything the Black President proposed, even initiatives based on programs the Republicans themselves had earlier advocated. Think about the stark contrast between the U.S. healthcare system and the systems of almost every other industrial nation in the world, where costs are far lower and health outcomes are much better than for Americans. Think about the fine healthcare coverage that every member of Congress gets free.
Follow the Money!
The incompetent excesses of the Trumpist Congress in its efforts to trash limited healthcare insurance for Americans matches its self-serving intent to pave the way for a massive tax cut for the rich, especially for the giant corporations that regularly bribe its members. They would give away the nation’s commonwealth to the rich by using “savings” from reducing federal expenditures on anything they can, except military spending. For them, the government has only one function: to defend by force the oligarchic privileges of corporations and the wealthy.
The proposed GOP budget, now pushing its way through the Congress in a big rush with no debate and the same secrecy as the attempts to “repeal and replace” the ACA. It has precisely the same function. Cut federal expenditures on anything that serves the public interest, so Congress can pass a massive tax cut for the corporate rich with minimal increase of the budget deficit, thereby minimizing objection to the inevitable increases to the national debt. Keep in mind that despite glowing proclamations regarding “creating jobs,” “helping small business,” and “tax cuts for the middle class,” such talk is pure propaganda directly contradicting the facts of the legislation they hope you will not read. The vast majority of the tax cuts accrue to the corporations, at the expense of the shrinking middle class.
The Oligarchs’ New Class Warfare
It would all be unnecessary if insurance industry interests and the Wall Street financial elite did not dominate national politics. However, the goals of the corporate elite rule Congress and feed its growing CLASS WARFARE against ordinary Americans. Agents of wealth and power in the institutions of the federal government, instigate increasingly open class warfare, veiled by pseudo-patriotic rhetoric. The neo-fascists in patriotic clothing who dominate the Congress and the White House today have one goal: reduce the role of government in protecting the people, land, and resources of the nation to minimize costs and maximize profits of corporations. In effect, increase the growing control corporations have over government. The ‘general welfare’ of the American people just does not fit into that equation.
Hunter-gatherer societies did not have healthcare insurance of any kind. They didn’t have a budget either. Their focus was survival. They had subsistence, leisure, and relatively short lifespans. Remarkably, the lifespans of Americans have begun to decline as overall health and wellbeing weaken. At various stages in history, people in differing environments had various levels of comfort, disease and struggle; they were subject to occasional plagues and other health and subsistence challenges. Medieval towns and cities in Europe, for example, suffered great waves of sickness unto death for the majority of their populations stricken by the Black Plague. They could do little about these onslaughts to health, since they had no scientific understanding of the sources of their suffering. Sometimes the aristocracy confiscated so much from the peasantry to fight its wars that starvation resulted for some or many.
Pre-industrial folk were not totally dependent on a complex multinational industrial system for their survival as we are. No, that is an entirely modern phenomenon. Our livelihoods, our health, and our lives have depended for a long time on the increasingly complex industrial system that has allowed human populations grow beyond the carrying capacity of the planet. The corporate state increasingly finds the population and the environment inconvenient obstacles.
Politicians avoid facing that dilemma and the complex requirements for overcoming our “post-industrial” problem of finding ways to transform human society to harmonize with the ecosystems upon which we all depend. Instead, our “political leaders” would forge ahead toward their utopian dreams of fully installing the power of the corporate state in direct conflict with the needs of the people. These days, we have a lot to think about.
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 