Signed, sealed, delivered

Remember the Sarah Palin turkey moment? She had gone to "pardon" one bird ahead of Thanksgiving, and then, cluelessly or not, gave an on-camera interview while a slaughterhouse employee fed less fortunate beasts into a machine. Their heads were stuck into a funnel, their throats cut, and their blood drained.

The world is more complex than ever. Economic, social, geopolitical and military situations are full of nuance, contradiction and layers of gray. Still, I don't about you, but I am feeling more and more like one of those turkeys. Most of our necks are in that funnel, and the blood being drained out is the wealth of a whole society.

Where is it going? To ever-higher profit margins demanded by Wall Street. Profit margins that translate into greater wealth for an elite that makes its living off investments rather than wages. To the gamed market that is the world of politically powerful, highly concentrated industries, especially finance. And to tax cuts, the opiate of the duhs and ignos, that have become so deeply ingrained in our local, state and national polities that our society as we knew it is starting to collapse. Who, for example, would have thought 30 years ago that we would reach the point where we couldn't afford to keep Interstate rest areas open? Never mind that "we can't afford" the rail network found in other advanced nations, etc.

Our situation is made clear by the so-called debate over so-called healthcare reform. Foremost in the actions of most members of Congress is the preservation of the revenues and profit margins of the insurance companies, the big hospital chains and the pharmaceutical industry. It's almost as if Congress, and sadly the Obama administration, see an entirely different crisis from most Americans.

If polls are to be believed, most Americans realize the current system has failed and is unsustainable. Many are without insurance of any kind; many more are way underinsured -- one illness away from bankruptcy. From painful experience, they know America does not have the best healthcare system in the world. The more curious know we spend much more than any other industrialized nation and get worse outcomes. They know Medicare doesn't get between a patient and her doctor, and has a fraction of the administration costs of private health insurers. Many know Canada has a fine system -- one that its conservatives only pledge to maintain.

In Washington, however, the political elite seems to think the crisis is to protect, at all costs, the ever growing profits of their corporate puppetmasters. This is easy for Republicans, the Party That Wrecked America, now the rump Southern party of "no." But most Democrats seem just as eager to please the corporate rulers. Thus universal healthcare, which is used in every other advanced nation, was never even considered. Now "the progressives" -- said with a sniff -- are trying to save a "public option," whatever the hell that means.

The result will be a massive taxpayer subsidy for the private insurance companies -- and Americans still won't have the healthcare security that is a given elsewhere in the advanced world. The insurance industry has seen how Wall Street and the big banks played the taxpayers for fools -- and they don't intend to be left out, whatever the longterm fiscal costs to the nation. That's the funny thing about deficits. If they're run to pay for productive, forward-leaning infrastructure and enhance human capital, they will reap huge gains for the Treasury. If, however, they merely go to enhance the privileges of the few -- who already know every tax dodge ever invented -- the result is national bankruptcy.

Conservatives have been screaming about the specter of income redistribution all my life. And it's happened. We now have the most unequal distribution between rich and everybody else than at any time since the eve of the Great Depression, if not the Gilded Age. The greatest middle class in history has been eroded -- and the deterioration has just begun. The greatest manufacturing base in history has been obliterated -- try to find something in a store not made in China. Cities and towns across America have lost their corporate citizens, absorbed into a blob of giant corporations, or crashed to earth trying to maintain "growth." Jobs must be sent offshore to save money, we're told. Jobs and benefits must be cut to save money.

And where does all this money go, exactly? Where did the profit from all the swindles of the great bubbles go -- and then the bailout trillions? Less and less to build productive businesses and an advanced civilization. Less and less to people who must work for a living without the benefit of massive intergenerational wealth or having attended elite colleges. Where? Why are the rich just getting richer while the ladders up enjoyed by our parents and grandparents are being pulled up. Solemn obligations to pay pensions to employees whose decades of hard work made companies successful are now seen as "liabilities"; unfunded ones at that. But the golden parachutes are more abundant than ever. But, but, but...prices are low at Wal-Mart! Or so say the disciples of the gamed market.

This is the new American reality. Drip, drip, drip. There's more blood to be had. More treasure that it took generations to build to be dismantled and sold off. It's just business, we're told. The great god of the market will save us. Meanwhile, as with the turkeys meeting their fate in Alaska, there's always some fool on camera yammering nonsense as the national bleeding continues.

Comments

[soleri]

It is amazing. The failure of market fundamentalism was so stunning that it seemed unlikely even the rubes in talk-radio land could ignore it. But they not only did, they swallowed with nary a pause the right's alternative theory why things went bad (Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Freddie & Fannie, mortgage mandates for minorities, etc). One reason why health care reform is failing is simply that the demonological paradigm of public investment still holds. Everything government does is bad. Everything. Plus, if you win the lottery, the government will take it all for taxes!

We have a deeply ignorant citizenry, an entirely feckless media culture, and a passion gap still favoring the right. What good does it do us to complain? We know we're going to lose this latest battle.

Yet on another level, we are winning. The media and political leaders on the right are, with virtually no exception, horrifyingly grotesque. It's probably not a surprise that anyone with some measure of human warmth and humility is not a firebreathing greedhead and know nothing. People may believe stupid things through the magic of incessant propaganda but they can still judge the character of the shills themselves. That said, power and wealth are the great persuaders so even obvious shills can make a case if the stars align.

It looks like that's going to happen. Arizona's parochial example will fail but explained away. For most Americans, the magical invocations of "Reagan", "tax cuts", "free enterprise", etc will fill the void where skepticism should reside. We're not going to win this war for America's soul because the nihilists have already sold it to their corporate bidders.

[Emil Pulsifer]

Even the Peanuts comic strip recognizes that the existing healthcare system has broken down (see the sample strip for July 9):

http://www.unitedfeatures.com/?title=Bio:Peanuts%20Tall%20Dailies

Increased sales and payroll taxes, even as income taxes were cut (especially at the high end), have gone a long way toward increasing the burden on the working and middle class. Nobody seems to remember that Reagan presided over a huge increase in payroll taxes, which he called "pre-funding" benefits, which produced a cash surplus that was only used to offset deficit spending.

[Emil Pulsifer]

The matter of blood is certainly curious. I wish I had a pocketful of shiny answers, but I'm scarcely more than a mummy myself, and have only a few vague impressions: unlike answers, these have the potential to deceive and discourage as well as to enlighten and hearten. Impressionistically, one turns to artists: in my own case and due to my own tendencies, to poets and musicians.

T.S. Eliot is somewhat depressing, but in the spirit, perhaps, of the Rogue Columnist. Shall I, like the protagonist of the Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock, compare myself to Lazarus, "come from the dead, come back to tell you all", having bitten off the matter with a smile, and squeezed the universe into a ball, to roll it toward some overwhelming question"?

http://www.poetry-archive.com/e/love_song_of_j_alfred_prufrock.html

But the question, never mind the answer, remains unspoken, suggesting perhaps that it is, after all, illusory.

Or shall I compare myself to the protagonist of Ash Wednesday, mourning the vanished power of the usual reign? (If I should ever meet an aged shark, I should punch it most vigorously on the snout and jab my thumbs in its eyes.)

http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/748/

Or perhaps one of The Hollow Men? After all, "This is the dead land / This is the cactus land":

http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/784/

Or perhaps one of the Pale Saints (pale from exsanguination?) Throwing Back the Apple (silly video but interesting music):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8L4s00Fa2Hg&fmt=18

No, I suspect that for those who endure even unto the end, we shall find, like Robert Frost, that blood will out because it cannot be contained, and that the "power of blood itself releases blood / It goes by might of being such a flood / Held high at so unnatural a level"...

http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/robert_frost/poems/718

Or, if I'm really feeling optimistic, I might recall the words of "The Ink Spots" in Glenn Miller's "Juke Box Saturday Night":

If I didn't know why the roses grow
Then I wouldn't know why the roses grow...
Now listen, honey child, honey lamb,
If I didn't know all them little things I'm supposed to know
Then I sure would be a SAD man...

[Mark Manoil]

Well played, sir! Until our heads are literally cut off, would you say we are more likely to rebound from current circumstances with a new progressive era (as was the response to the wealth concentration and abuse of the Guilded Age, arguably reaching its apogee with The Great Society programs to fight poverty), or because of the concentration of main stream media in service to hyper-corporate/wealth interests, are things more likely to just get worse? Is a replay of the French Revolution, literal "class warfare," the more likely outcome of our broadening social disparities?

[Donna]

What's so maddening is that the true elites, who are a fraction of a percent of the population, cannot do it without the complicity of millions of dupes - from politicians to pundits to the modestly affluent, and especially of legions of dingbats like Samuel Wurzelbacher (AKA Joe the Plumber). As Emil points out, the working class has NOT benefited from tax cuts.

[eclecticdog]

The kooks don't get it. They would rather sacrifice themselves on their new alter of free enterprise than save themselves. As long as they have their guns they will keep the faith as they swirl down the drain. The kooks really make me wish I had emigrated when I was young.

[LaRinda Saylor]

Your article on Obama's Waterloo is so right on. As a disappointed Obama supporter I can't understand why he won't play hard ball with the
Republicans,bipartisanship is overrated. They didn't give the Democrats the time of day when they were in power and Obama should do the same. Sure do miss your writing in the AZ Republic but now have discovered your website and great articles. The Dayton article was so true also. I lived there for 6 years myself and it is sad to see a great city on the decline.