As I watch the situation about healthcare reform unfold, I am thinking that in a way it was a pity that Obama won the election. We really needed one more term of Republican rule to drive the point home.
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All these folks yammering the talking points of Beck, O'Reilly, Limbaugh (not to mention AHIP) have not suffered enough. Most of the folks sitting on the sidelines and whimpering about taxes have not suffered enough.
If McCain had gotten elected, the whole economic implosion engendered by the unholy alliance of Big Oil and Goldman-Sachs under the Bush regime would have not been handled by a disciplined team working to stabilize the situation. Instead, the McCain team would have flitted impotently from one trivial measure to another and allowed the "free market" to totally immolate itself, and the wealth and employment of the middle and upper-middle classes along with it. It would have been the Great Depression all over again, just as many warned.
Unfortunately, I think this is inevitable, and Obama has merely forestalled the GotterDammerung that we will ultimately face. He is like the enabler who props up the alcoholic so the alcoholic can continue to (barely) function. For this he merely gets more abuse heaped upon him.
Instead, like the alcoholic who must hit bottom in order to even acknowledge there might be a problem, America will only seek economic democracy and progressive social change when things have gotten so bad that these poor, misguided racists and reactionaries -- not to mention the apathetic middle -- have the blinders ripped from their eyes and realize they have been brutally punked by their media priesthood and their political divinities, and corporations like a plague of locusts have stripped the land bare and left it barren.
When America is forced to realize that corporations are like cancer and that the single-minded pursuit of profit is demonic, then and only then will the opportunity exist for us to remake our society as one based on a renewed social compact, where economic activity is a means to satisfy needs not an end in itself. Whether we take that opportunity remains to be seen. Many people will never reach that point, they will die clinging to their illusions. The United States may fragment as a political entity. In some ways, that could be the best thing for Americans and for the world.
Flame away.