The intellectual history of the thugarchy driving the fight against the public option may actually flow from the middle ages where chivalry was the protection of the aristocracy. That moneyed aristocracy has always existed in this country and their values have been grafted onto our political system via a corporatism, the warnings of which go back to Andrew Jackson and even further. Today the corporate elite can make money from anything without the burden of actually having to produce a product and that money is being bundled into ever larger spheres of control. The danger in this is a centralizing power (i.e., money) that is clearly what Andrew Jackson had in mind when he warned of allowing the monopolistic control of capital to manipulate the real sources of wealth in this country. He said we would be giving up our freedom to the corporation. So the fair and equitable distribution of anything that such a monopoly as the health insurance industry has taken away would be a restoration of freedom and a move away from the existing fascism.
The Obsession of the Right with Fascism?
Posted by ishtarmuz
The back story on this post is that it started in response to a post on another site that began, “The left is obsessed with the public option…” I am not sure any more if this is exactly what it said since it appears the right wing rant was removed by the writer, but it served its inspirational purpose. I would have liked to have it remain as counterpoint to my piece, but, alas, I suspect he was slinking away with his marbles.
The defeat of the public option is an obsession of the right even though it is clearly needed to ensure that everyone gets health insurance coverage and that skyrocketing costs are brought down to manageable levels.
The hegemony of the corporation has left free market competition as no more than a propaganda slogan existing only in the mouths of right wing lobby machines. The right insists on the public option defeat by any means and at all costs, even the furtherance of our economic decline, loss of any of our remaining freedoms and the smashing of our moral compass. They see the left as encroaching on their Godly profit motive, seeing the public option as a Trojan horse to all sorts of left-wing socialist agendas, something they see the left as being in love with, and a real threat to their profit-without-product.
The right says that the pubic option is the road to Barack Obama forming a one world government that they have already achieved via the transnational corporations. The right thinks that once a public option is in place, then there will be a domino effect of reinstating government regulations they worked so hard to dismantle , and that their New World Order (NWO) idea reserved for business interests will be usurped by the left. Though there is no leftist plan for a NWO, the public option will allow the government to undercut the private insurance industry’s monopolistic price gouging and will ultimately move on to other business cartels. They will actually regulate the private insurance, making it possible to force them to charge fair market based premiums that produce only just profits in real competition with the public option. The private insurance monopoly will be forced to do business with the government instead of the reverse. How this might be socialism I am not sure, but that is what the health insurance industry would have you believe.
I do see the current state of affairs as akin the fascism, however. The public option could indeed morph into single payer universal health care, but only if the health insurance industry refuses to comply with these more just policies. I cannot see health insurance industry actually complying. So one can only hope that when the private insurance industry refuses to comply that the government will have the sense to see this and rescue our democracy and our economy before we go completely bankrupt; economically, politically and morally. If not, single payer universal health care will become just one more moral imperative ignored by America and our country will slip into an even more openly fascist state and our private insurance industry will continue ration health care to feed their out-of-control profits, with the elderly and disabled being those who are most left out in the cold. How do I know that the right would allow this? Because they already do. Unfortunately, I am having less and less trust in the left as well, thinking that the smoke and mirrors in this debate is all about maintaining corporate control with the best public face.
I begin to look forward to the rise of a new Progressive party.