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MERRY CHRISTMAS AMERICA
12/18/2009
If I had the time and a top rate research staff, and if I wasn’t already writing a book, I’d consider starting a book project analyzing what has happened to this country in the past sixty years.
Beginning with Eisenhower’s warning regarding the growing Congressional-Military-Industrial Complex, this country has gone further and further in the direction of corporatism and hand-outs to the wealthy, and further away from equality, prosperity, and security for the average citizen.
Consider where we are today, just one year after the election of a man some of us hoped would start turning things around, though that doesn’t appear to be happening.(Don't get me wrong, John McPalin would have been worse.)
Over 10% of adults who want to work cannot find a job. Why? Because our entire economy was changing even before the economic meltdown of 2008. Over twenty years ago, manufacturers began outsourcing jobs to third world countries where they could pay low wages to poor workers, avoid paying health insurance premiums, and thus make a bigger profit. Then large companies like Wal-Mart began swallowing up or destroying small companies, often impoverishing or devastating small towns. After putting local stores out of business, they employed large numbers of people at low wages, and then a few years later closed the store because they didn’t make as much money as they had anticipated. This left entire towns unemployed. In a bid for obscene profits, other large companies laid off workers who cost them too much in wages as well as health insurance premiums, and then simply demanded more productivity from their remaining employees. In fact, the high cost of health insurance is one reason many people have lost their jobs.
So we come to the second big problem in our country today. Not only are people unemployed, they are without health insurance. No, not all of them, but a significant number. In a country as large and supposedly as wealthy as ours, no one should be denied health security. No European country denies their citizens health insurance, yet we continue to call ourselves the greatest country in the world, even as we allow our citizens to die because they cannot afford medical care. And now, it appears another health reform bill will either go down to defeat because the Republicans and some Democrats are playing politics (and honestly don’t care how many Americans are sick and dying), or will be so watered down as to be meaningless.
That, of course, is a third problem: our political system. It is absurd that we continue to call ourselves a democracy – oh, excuse me you priggish Republicans, a republic – when we the people have absolutely no power in the end. It is the lobbyists for banks, health insurance companies, oil conglomerates, and other large businesses who actually determine what happens in this country, what laws get passed and what laws are defeated, all to protect their economic interests. A significant number of our politicians in Washington care nothing about the needs of the people. It doesn’t matter that a significant number of people have no access to health care. What matters is that insurance companies want to make more money. Politicians care about the wants of the big corporations, because those corporations pay their campaign expenses so they can be re-elected and continue to make bucks and feel important.
The bottom line in American today is that for far too many politicians, and in fact, for far too many voters, money is more important than people. I don’t care what happens to you, they say with their actions, as long as I get more money. I don’t care that you have no job, as long as I have a job. I don’t care that you have no health insurance, as long as my employer gives me mine. I don’t care that you live in an economically depressed area, or are discriminated against because you are black or Latino or female. I don’t care that you were abused during your childhood, or your husband beats you, or you have cancer or were in a horrific accident, pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
And so we come to the final two problems in America in 2009: Wall Street and war.
Wall Street banks nearly destroyed this country over the past few years, by gambling irresponsibly with investors’ money, creating new investment schemes that ultimately went bust, giving out loans that they knew people could not repay, and then taking out insurance on those loans so they would win either way. Then they screamed that the whole Frankenstein monster that they had created was going to destroy the country, and they walked away with taxpayer loans when every small investor like you and me lost at least one third of our retirement money. Now that they have taxpayer money they are investing in their old schemes, making money and giving huge bonuses to the very people who took down the economy in the first place. And still, Congress has enacted no new legislation to stop them from doing it.
And while Wall Street is doing its best to destroy the middle class, we continue to spend trillions of dollars on wars that are unnecessary, wars we will not “win” in any traditional sense, wars that were begun for dishonest reasons, wars to secure our oil supply. We have not even begun repaying the money we borrowed to fund those exercises in insanity, and we continue to do the bidding of the oil companies. We fight where the oil is, deny the reality of climate change caused by carbon emissions, and refuse to move to a green economy – all because big oil must have its profits.
We are not the country we once were, the country of Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt. Perhaps we never were. Maybe that country is a myth. After all, the country of Jefferson was a country where slavery was legal, and only male property owners had the right to vote. Maybe we have always been a country that existed to further the wealth of the elites. Maybe we are fools who were brainwashed in elementary school into believing in a country that never existed.
Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah, everybody. Even if you can’t spend what you did last year, even if you can’t afford to take your child to the doctor for an ear infection, or you have to stop your chemotherapy, even if you can’t find a job, I hope you have wonderful days with your families. For now, you still have that – I hope.
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