With the health care reform vote looming, every news network and pundit is in hyper-drive, covering the "event" like sportscasters at the Super Bowl. Once again, truth and facts are taking a distant second place to exaggerated opinions, misinformation and bogus claims, as millions of dollars are being spent - mainly by opponents, of course - to kill the passage of health care reform.
Sometimes it's difficult to understand what really motivates opponents of health care reform. Recently, a Democratic lawmaker referred to Obama's plan as a "government take-over." When a Democrat co-opts the propaganda of the opposition, it's hard to know which end is up anymore.
So maybe Marco Rubio is right, after all: maybe this is a debate about our national identity. Maybe this is a debate about what kind of nation we want to be, what kind of society we want to become, what kind of government we want to have.
Naturally, Rubio and his ilk have twisted and distorted what ought to be an important discussion, by using scare tactics, propaganda, and promoting fear of "socialism," "tyranny," and damage to the Constitution - "forgetting" that they themselves did untold damage to the Constitution during the reign of George II.
The questions we ought to be asking are these: Do we want a society that strives for equality? Or do we want a society that accepts deep and persistent inequality as an unfortunate fact of life in a "free-enterprise" society?
The roots of modern inequality
In 1974, two men sat in a restaurant. One of them was an economist named Arthur Laffer, who had cooked up a new idea about tax cuts. The other man was a young staffer by the name of Richard Cheney. He took this interesting new idea back to his boss at the White House, one Donald Rumsfeld. In 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected president, running on a platform of tax cuts.
Donald Rumsfleld and Dick Cheney. We just can't get rid of them. Their influence on the nation has been profound and, on the whole, extremely negative.
As one writerhas elegantly put it:
Gerald R. Ford... took those famously amoral and criminally incompetent backroom operators, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, out of the lower quadrants of the twisted bowels of the Nixon White House and raised them to the highest levels of American government, where, in one form or another, overtly and covertly, they have inflicted their primitive ideology and violent psychodramas on the nation, and the world, for more than three decades.
What has happened in the U.S economy since the mid-1970's? The following item is from an article in 1995:
After years of little change, inequality exploded in America starting in the 1970s. Wolff said that three-quarters of the income gains during the 1980s and 100 percent of the increased wealth went to the top 20 percent of U.S. families.
"We are the most unequal industrialized country in terms of income and wealth, and we're growing more unequal faster than the other industrialized countries," the Times quoted Edward N. Wolff, an economics professor at New York University, as saying.
Is it any wonder that in 2002, when Cheney was faced with a shocked Treasury Secretary named Paul O'Neill, who adamantly opposed another round of Bush tax cuts because they would massively increase the deficit, Cheney famously responded: "We won the mid-terms. This is our due."
"This is our due"? Whose due?
Well, according the the Economic Policy Institute, it's pretty clear whose due. To quote their 2006 - 2007 report, "State of Working America:"
A recurring theme, which became more pronounced with this edition, is increasing inequality...
Inequality in the United States is on the rise, whether measured in terms of wages, family incomes, or wealth and is much higher than that of other advanced countries.
...wealth inequality has not only persisted, but also grown much larger over time. The richest 1% of wealth holders had 125 times the wealth of the typical household in 1962; by 2004 they had 190 times as much or $14.8 million in wealth for the upper 1% compared to just $82,000 for the household in the middle fifth of wealth.
There's that word again: inequality. Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld and their fellow conservaties seem to like it.
Cheney knew he had another chance to - in current political parlance - "ram down the throats of the American people," economic policies based on his fanatical devotion to the tax cutting/supply-side theory he had "discovered" three decades ago - and he wasn't going to pass it up. Fuck inequality. And fuck everybody else, why you're at it. "This is our due."
Cheney, Rumsfeld and their cronies were our "leaders" for eight long years. We all know where that got us.
Is that the kind of nation we want to be? A nation that promotes inequality out of sheer greed, and a misplaced and misguided devotion to a discredited economic theory?
The fight for health care reform = What can and should government do for its citizens?
Now Cheney's allies are screaming that we "can't afford" health care reform. Really?
With all that wealth sloshing around in the upper 1% of income-earners, we can't, as a nation, "afford" to change the way we deliver and pay for health care? Why is it that we can "afford" the Iraq War and we can't "afford" health care for our own citizens?
What sort of mental gymnastics does someone have to go through in order to justifying opposing legislation and policies that will, by every conceivable measure, very likely improve the lives of millions of people, while at the same time promoting economic and war policies that ruin, or end, hundreds of thousands of lives?
Let's not forget that George W. Bush was never actually elected president. He was appointed by the Supreme Court. That was an incredibly anti-democratic event. Bush, of course, subsequently hired his dad's old pals to lead his administration and inaugurated a new round of inequality, Executive branch abuses, war, corruption and all the rest.
We are becoming an undemocratic, militaristic society, with no patience, energy or "resources" to care for the well-being of our own citizens. We can't even have a civilized discussion about it.
Is that the nation we want to be?
It's striking how much of the discussion during the health care debate has surrounded taxes and deficits. Are we really that mean and that petty? There is a moral dimension to this debate that gets very little consideration.
Are we a nation that is really willing to abandon our fellow citizens when they need it the most? When they're sick or dying? Can we really "not afford" to help them, but we can afford to enact regressive tax policies that put billions of dollars into the hands of those without need?
These debates over taxes and deficits and Medicare cuts and all the rest go on endlessly, until we are all thoroughly disgusted. Meanwhile, in the "reality-based" world, real people suffer real consequences from the government's inaction, and the consequences are growing worse almost daily.
The recent New York Times profile on Senator Mitch McConnell was revealing and depressing. We all want our elected officials to fight for what they believe in. But clearly the only thing Senator McConnell believes in is the notion that Republicans ought to be in power, and if they're not then something is terribly wrong.
From the moment Obama was elected McConnell orchestrated a plan that has nothing to do with governance, or solutions to the nation's problems, or helping people in any way. His sole purpose was (and is) to damage Obama's presidency as much as possible.
What's more, after essentially bringing the government to a standstill, he has the nerve to proclaim that the "American people" are opposed to "big government."
He's wrong. They're opposed to no government. They're opposed to lousy government created by people like McConnell. They're opposed to government in which the opposition leader in the Senate spends literally all of this time persuading his fellow Republicans that it's not in their best interest to be bipartisan or to support the president in any way and then, at every opportunity, vilifies the president for not being bipartisan enough. Such utter hypocrisy.
That's the kind of government we have now. Is that the kind of government we really want? Maybe if we had a government that was better funded and better staffed, we might get better government. Might that not help people?
46 million people in this country, the majority of them working, do not have health insurance. The overall health statistics in this country put us on a par with countries like Zimbabwe.
Is that the kind of nation we want to be?
The gap between rich and poor is higher than at any time since the 1920's. Goldman Sachs executives and their brethren are giving themselves billions of dollars worth of bonuses as a reward for destroying the economy, while millions of "ordinary" citizens are forced from their homes.
Is that the kind of nation we want to be?
America's "greatness."
Recently, I heard a story on NPR about two Jewish sisters who "hid in plain sight" in Nazi Germany by posing as two Catholic girls from Poland. It was a harrowing time for them, as it was for so many. They worked in a hotel occupied by the Nazi brass, literally right under the noses if the Gestapo and the SS.
One of the sisters describes how things slowly fell apart for the Germans, until by one point everyone was living full-time in bomb shelters.
Then one day, someone came running in shouting, "It's over! It's over!" The people streamed out of the bomb shelters. They stared at the long, long line of approaching military vehicles. The sister said it reminded her of the seeing the Germany army as they marched into Poland. Only this time it was people she had never seen before, wearing unfamiliar uniforms: Americans.
They sat grinning atop their vehicles shouting, "Hilter kaput! Hitler kaput!" and throwing candy bars to the citizens.
She marveled at the good spirits of the soldiers, and she recounts the overwhelming feeling of gratitude she felt toward these brave young men who had sacrificed so much and fought so hard in order to save her and her sister and so many other people. It was incredibly moving. It literally brought me to tears.
I can picture those young men. I can picture the tanks and the vehicles and the grins. And I can feel in my bones that no other nation on Earth could have accomplished it. If it wasn't for America's optimistic spirit, industrial capacity and the leadership of Franklin Roosevelt, it's quite possible the world would be a very different, and a very nasty. place.
That is America's greatness.
Now, we are a shadow of our former selves. Our nation no longer aspires to greatness or leadership. In fact, these concepts have been utterly perverted by the same self-proclaimed "patriots" who gave the nation the Iraq War and the "unitary Executive" - tyranny by any other name.
Now, instead of aspiring to much of anything, or asking much of anything from the citizenry, we are mired in seemingly endless years of bickering over taxes and deficits, supply-side economics and abortion, health care reform, stimulus bills, text-book wars, culture wars. Now, devoting oneself exclusively to procedural obstruction is considered political courage.
We're fighting two wars and no one has been asked to sacrifice anything. Only those who lose a life or a limb or an eye, or who suffer permanent psychological damage - or lose a loved one. But they are mostly forgotten, except by a very dedicated few.
No one wants to discusses what's right. No one wants to discuss what's human - or humane. No one wants to exercises moral leadership, because to do so in our modern political climate would threaten one's prospects for reelection. No one, President Obama included, would dare to use the word "sacrifice." In our current political environment, that would be suicide. How incredibly sad.
The other day, I heard Obama ask, "What kind of nation do we want to be?" It came after a lot of other bullshit.
Maybe if he had been repeatedly asking that question from the day he took office, people might have payed attention. They might have wondered if perhaps there was something they could do to help restore some faith in our nation's institution. Perhaps they would have wondered if this man who inspired a nation in 2008 has the capacity for greatness, for true leadership, that this country so sorely needs. Maybe for a moment our citizens would have turned away from their big-screen TV's, their video games and Facebook, and asked each other:
What kind of nation do we want to be?
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