This was originally posted on May 10, 2011, before the Blogger site mysteriously went down and deleted all posts from May 10, 2011, to May 12, 2011.
Americans are bracing themselves for yet another media blitz of political information, misinformation, disinformation, and just plain propaganda. We expect that the attacks, and counterattacks to get more personal, more vitriolic, and mostly nonsensical, as we get closer to the next election.
Since the attention span of the average American is that of the common bonobo,
the idea behind a state-of-the-art media campaign is to use the shortest of sound bytes to inflict the most fear and smear, saturation and inundation, division and demolition against the opponent. If our last election is any indication of what is to come, the actual truth will continue to play a cameo role at best.
Yet it is not too early to start thinking (sorry, we got into this mess because we were too busy with our iStuff to actually think) about the many goals that every American shares and how best to achieve those goals. This is not quantum physics. This is simple stuff, really.
Jobs
Millions of Americans need jobs. How do they get them? The progressives say that we can create jobs if we impose sanctions on U. S. companies that send jobs overseas. Will that make big business bring the jobs back or will they simply pass on the costs of sanctions to the rest of us? The progressives also want to tax the wealthy and end subsidies for rich corporations/agribusiness. This will certainly redistribute wealth, but will it create jobs?
The Tea/GOP says that, if we continue to keep taxes low and subsidies high for big business, then big business will create jobs. We did that for the last ten years. Did it work? The Tea/GOP says that jobs will be created if we could just lift those darned regulations. We let up on the oil and banking industry. Did that allow for jobs or just disasters? The Tea/GOP wants to get rid of child-labor laws. Uh…what?
The President of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce sent out the word to all major businesses, instructing them to hoard capital instead of investing in jobs. He wants even lower taxes (like any of the Fortune 500 Companies actually PAY taxes), no regulations, and the Affordable Health Care Act to be repealed before he will instruct his minions to start hiring again. Huh!
Unions
This dovetails off of the jobs issue. If big business does decide to put some folks back to work, what kind of jobs will they create? Jobs with health care? Jobs with a pension? Safe jobs? Secure jobs? Jobs that will pay the bills without putting the whole family to work at McDonald’s? When we allowed unions to crumble, the good jobs disappeared. Can we get our jobs back from Mumbai, etc. without unions? Are those teachers and firefighters and cops really a bunch of indolent slackers, or has the private sector set the bar so low that a government job begins to look good by comparison?
Taxes
Despite the fact that almost 80% percent of Americans would agree to pay a little more in taxes (or to at least tax the wealthy at 1990 levels), why is the Tea/GOP insisting that taxes are “off the table?” Exxon Mobil made almost $12 billion in pure profit (just in the last quarter), and they paid zero ($0.00) in taxes last year. Huh! How much did you pay in taxes last year? Why should they pay no taxes, and get millions in subsidies (corporate welfare using our tax dollars), while we have to cut out school breakfast for poor kids?
Immigration
What will it take to fix the problem? What is the problem? Too costly? Last year, in Colorado alone, illegal immigrants put about $1 million more into the economy than they took out in costs.
Is it the problem instead that they are taking all of the dishwashingtoiletecleaningroofinglandscapingfarmworkingmeatcutting jobs away from citizens who would otherwise jump at the opportunity? Seriously?
Too much crime? How can we say this, when Speaker John Boehner’s home district in Ohio has more crime than the whole Arizona border?
Or are some just irked at the notion of living with all those brown people? Because I am not in the mood to address racism today; you’re on your own with this one.
Is it not the bottom line that we just want to know who is coming into our country, with the assurance that they want to become good citizens? Would we have so many illegal folks paying American citizens rent to hide out in modern day shtettles, hablando solamente en Español, if we put them on a path toward citizenship? Is it really more complicated than in the days of our parents and grandparents? Do the progressives really want them to be citizens just so they can vote Democratic and the Tea/GOP want them out just for the same reason?
Civil Liberties
How can we keep government out of our personal affairs? The progressives want government out…except when they don’t. The Tea/GOP wants government out…except when they don’t. Libertarians want government out of our personal affairs, but to them everything is a personal affair, including racially-separate water fountains, buses, and lunch counters. Isn’t the test whether the exercise of our own personal freedom tramples the freedom of another or is merely irritating? Can we at least agree on that basic tenet before we devolve the conversation into one about zygotes, and Commandments, and who is putting an appendage on/in what orifice of which gender? Is it possible for us to just stay the hell out of each other’s personal business?
War
War, huh! Good God, y’all! What is it good for?
Health Care
I saved this for last, because I cannot imagine any working person outside of an insurance actuary who believes that Americans should not have the right to decent affordable health care. Maybe I’m going out on a limb here, but why have we allowed health care to become a privilege? For hundreds of years, we have based our society on the social contract (look it up) but now it is “every man for himself”?
Have we really become that cold and heartless, or have we just been conditioned by the insurance/pharma folks to equate the idea of socialized medicine with some dark edict out of the Soviet Union? Can you say Canada? Spain? Portugal? South Korea? Germany? France? England? Denmark, Norway, Sweden, The Netherlands? Why should people have to move to Argentina to get decent health care? Do we really want to continue to have the infant mortality rate of a developing nation? Do we really want folks to have to choose between groceries and medicine?
Is giving seniors a voucher and sending them off to beg an insurance company to give them a policy part of the answer? Is forcing healthy people to buy private insurance part of the answer? Insurance companies make their money by not paying out claims. Should involving private insurance companies at all be part of the answer?
Is the insurance/pharma industry that powerful, that we can’t have decent affordable health care for all, with them out of the mix? I don’t know about you, but I have health insurance and I cannot imagine Medicare being any worse than what I have right now, and if we expand Medicare and it needs tweaking (it will), we can vote the bastards out of office unless they tweak it.
Should we really care if they call it Socialized Medicine or Communist Medicine or Osama Bin Laden Medicine? Did you know that France has the best medical care in the world and they did it by getting all twenty of their major political parties to agree on it? That‘s right, 20!
Can we get just two parties to work things out? Why do we continue to settle for anything less? Of what exactly are we afraid? Are we ready for some hopey-changey stuff?
J. Brandeis Sperandeo
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