The Republican Party and Corporate America and the Military Industrial Mercenary Complex have learned to exploit this mass media process of trying to use repeated negative messages to convince us in the Democratic Party, (or Independents with Progressive tendancies) that we are so locked into a permanent "Economic System of Business" acting a certain way, that we just cannot change it.
This is wrong.
They are man made things, and therefore changeable.
It's the other Party that can't see the change. They can see the power in keeping the change from happening, but ... they can't see the change.
Remember, "economics" may be thought of in more than one way. It's alive. It was created out of the barter system, where people learned to trade and to save up edible things for winter once they understood the changes of the seasons happened over and over again. It's somewhat driven by insinct then, as one also sees certain wild things collecting and hoarding things... but remember, squirrels do lose a lot of those acorns burried in the yard. And then something comes along and eats the squirrel anyway. Then a tree sprouts from the forgotten acorn. The cycle of life... in a nutshell.
So now, today, Jerome posted his article about "Anglo Disease," and after reading it and some of the early comments, I thought it would be nice if I pulled up one of his pieces from a year ago, to explain to a few of the readers what he meant. Here's his first article, from June 2007, it's not too long and you should read it: http://www.eurotrib.com/...
The above reminds us that we have been in a 20 year bull market for bonds, as inflation threats slowly receded - in fact, it's been more than 25 years, a full generation, as it really started after Paul Volcker pushed Fed rates to 20% to kill inflation in the very early 80s).
Increasingly cheap money, underpinned by ever more optimistic prognoses about inflation and, more generally, future returns on financial assets, has fuelled the massive financial boom we've been in for most of our lives and which has so transformed our economic landscape. By making high returns possible, it has generalised the requirement for such returns in all economic activities, and thus the need for constant restructuring of businesses, for cost-cutting, offshoring and, often, for the wholesale dismantlement of whole sectors of activity that could not generate the required profitability.
In fact, I'd like to propose to call that the Anglo disease, as a mirror of the so-called 'Dutch disease' which was first identified in the 60s in the Netherlands as other industrial acitvities suffered from the discovery of natural gas in Groningue, which created a new industry with much higher returns which made investment in other sectors relatively unprofitable and eventually generated economic hardship for the country. Today, economic activity and growth in the UK and the US is similarly dominated to a large extent by the City and Wall Street, to the exclusion of many other sectors of activity, as is demonstrated by the skyrocketing deficit in the trade balance for goods in both countries, by various studies that suggest that 40% of company profits in the US come from financial firms:
and a bit more
Compared to the Dutch disease, the industry that causes activity-substitution (high finance) can appear to be able to grow ad infinitum, without any limitation to actual resources. Just borrow more money to do bigger deals and enjoy the very real income taken along the way. Find another lender to refinance or another buyer to re-purchase, and you're home and dry. Or just do deals where the actual burden to repay is pushed back into the future (and you won't be around anymore if and when they falter). Thus the City and Wall Street can generate more jobs than the industry it kills off destroys (especially when you are also making some of your money off industries in other parts of the world).
/snip
Bankers....
.....creating an apparently larger, but a lot more fleeting, prosperity increasingly based on our collective belief that it is actually doing so and not on underlying value added.
It was the last sentence that caught my attention, because this is what we have happening now in terms of our national dialogue on health care reform. People who are against it have the means to purchase good insurance, or are practically given it for free by our government, and they don't see the "value added" of our present system is actually more akin to a giant black money sucking wormhole in our collective universe.
We have people who, when asked their opinion on changing our financing of our health care delivery system, in defending the status quo, revert to the same old tired clichés they learned back in the era of Ronald Reagan in the early 1980's. See Jerome's first paragraph again. "Volcker pushing the Fed Rate to 20% to kill inflation in the '80's" ... been there, done that, as a young adult, got the tee shirt and it sucked.
History. Until President Franklin D. Roosevelt helped create Social Security for retirements and orphans and the disabled, and then President Lyndon Johnson helped create medical funding for the health needs of Senior Citizens, Medicare, THERE WASN'T ANY.
Today, if we had all our senior citizens heading into the senior years with no government subsidizing their medical care costs, but instead had mandatory, inexpensive, and wondrously working national health insurance for all children and all adults in this country, what in the world would the Resistant "Free Market" Republicans be saying about that situation?
paraphrased examples of what I read today on another blog, where the right wing nut trolls were in abundance bashing a certain demographic:
{Seniors} are a national drain on our economy, causing 10 hospitals to close in my state during the past year. Send them back to where they came from, we don't want them here.
{Seniors} come into my warm and sunny, lower cost of living state, to grow old, get sick, and die. They steal my benefits, and why should I have to pay for them to just lie around and get government subsidized food, shelter, and worst of all, expensive medical care? The government should round them up and put them on a bus to Canada.
{Seniors} are too lazy to work and pay taxes, I don't care what they did when they were healthier and younger, once they can't work a 50 hour week anymore, they should be forced to work or put in prison and work road crews, picking lettuce, or making license plates or something. And their children should be fined and put in jail for letting them roam around loose without identification.
{Seniors} don't deserve to live in this country.
While fictional paraphrases, you get the idea...
Why is it, instead, that our Seniors not only get nearly "free" government health care costs covered, but they defend it so strongly as a right and an entitlement that is intractable, and this is accepted by our general society ? Every age group you ask will say universally, Seniors deserve Medicare. What makes them so different ?
They get a government benefit and it works for them.
And we decided somewhere in our collective past that keeping the old folks around was a benefit for our society at large.
Now let's hear what they say when we propose letting the other age groups have access to the system.
We Don't Want No Socialized Medicine In This Country.
There will be long lines.
You'll have to wait forever for an appointment.
You'll have to wait for elective surgery.
We can't afford it because it will be too expensive
Let's see what the Seniors actually get:
Socialized medicine, in that society pays for it. √
What does everybody else get, IF they have medical insurance?
Long lines. ø
Appointment waits ø
Surgery waits. ø
High costs. ø
Wait a minute, what is this? what about the 1/6 of this nation that doesn't even have insurance, what do they get?
The Emergency Room of Last Resort. øø
Yes, if you are near death, then then our Society will suddenly decide to try to salvage your life. If you are dying, just in case God made a mistake trying to kill you off with an accident or a disease, the local Emergency Room will try to keep you alive so that society at large can then garnish what is left of your belongings, or your future wage earning potential, if you can't pay for it and end up surviving anyway.
You, the uninsured, suddenly have "value added." Either the hospital's billing will sell your soul to a collections agency, or the government will eventually kick in and pick up part of your tab.
But whatever you were doing before that admittance to the system, the Republican Revolution, which started in the early '80's with Ronald Reagan's crew, decided that before you became sick or injured, your lot in life didn't give you enough "value" to keep you healthy. Or alive, even.
Now let's go back to the idea of CHANGE again.
If you're really, really poor, you do qualify for Medicaid.
But Ronald Reagan Republicans HATE the working class, for whatever reason. They take care of the upper class very well. They take care of the poorest, sort of shoddily, but they do. The middle class fends for itself but is now struggling badly. But the working poor ? They got assigned the "not valueable to society" sticker.
The working poor, a lot of them went into the underground economy in the '80's, because they didn't have any choice. It was work and try to avoid taxes, or starve or go homeless. I saw this with some people I knew, and I stopped getting upset about "tax cheats" when I saw how people had to live when our economy passed them by. People have pride. They'd still rather work. But they don't have the resources to fight the system the way the rest of us do. They may not have a computer. They may not have the ability to type. Or the ability to be able to string thoughts together in a coherent way after being exhausted working a 12 hour day and 2 or 3 jobs a week. They may not have a social network. They may be modern nomads, forced from one rental to the next every few months.
But they do know that something is wrong. Every time they go to do a simple thing, it is now more complicated. Everything. They just don't know how to fix it. They don't know how to say it.
That's our job.
They get told over and over again by the media and the corporate business interests that change is impossible, and get beaten down by it.
Look at Jerome's last quote again,
Bankers.... creating an apparently larger, but a lot more fleeting, prosperity increasingly based on our collective belief that it is actually doing so and not on underlying value added.
That last paragraph illustrates what the Bush/Cheney administration is doing right now, trying to preserve the health insurance "denial of claims" industry which employs thousands of people to shuffle electronic paperwork around to slow down and deny access to the medical care their customers thought they were paying for, and furthermore employs thousands of doctors and hospital office personell to fight the the insurance company clerks fighting the claims and authorizations. None of which actually provide medical "care," but do drive costs up.
If we can get the American public to comprehend this fact, that this is not a value added system but it is being heavily subsidized by the government in order to get campaign donations, then we might get somewhere on reforms to the system.
Bush and Cheney are old, and are only doing what they know, because they can't imagine how otherwise they of their ilk would ever hold onto power if anything changed.
We have to break this thought pattern of supposed helplessness when looking at things we created. We can do this. They can't.
The next time some Boomer looks at you and says "but I don't want none of that socialized medicine crap" ask them why they want to keep paying the government to create less and less real medicine and more and more electronic paper shufflers that don't have any "value added."
If they don't know what you mean, tell them some old geezerette said that there used to be a time that you just called the doctor's office, didn't get put on hold, didn't get a receptionist that wanted Your Life Biography before demanding 10 number code sequences just to schedule an appointment 3 months from now, and that you didn't see a doctor for 4 minutes who had no idea what you were talking about. You then didn't have to reschedule your test 3 times waiting for an insurance authorization. You didn't then get your test results from someone who was a high school graduate and told you to reschedule an appointment again to have the doctor explain it. Your doctor didn't blow off your entire past medical history because he'd never see you again. Your doctor's office didn't have a whole slew of insurance fighting clerks to do battle with the insurance company clerks which are there to deny and slow down claims. The insurance companies didn't bait and switch and drive up prices repeatedly to drive up profits in a shrinking market share. Oh, and your prescription could be called in for a refill without having to jump thru ten hoops, and it didn't cost a week's take home pay.
Tell them none of this bureaucratic Repubican electronic paper shuffling routine , which is designed to wring out big campaign donations from the Drug and Medical Supply companies and some Doctors, to keep this stupid and wastefull system going, actually provides "value added" activities to our economy.
Tell them that GW Bush went to college, screwed around in his business classes, and the only thing he learned was that if you have a business you're supposed to make a profit, and that since he was his daddy's son the way you did that was to get the government to pay for it, as big a profit as possible, but that's all he remembers. He can't remember jack sh*t about what a profit is, and mistakenly thinks it's when his daddy's friends give him lots of spending money he earned by doing them favors. All he knows is that he has to do this, and then you run like hell outta there before somebody discovers what you stole for doing nothing. "Anglo Disease." Cheap Energy. Lots of Cash. Other things die off. Like human needs.
And then let's see what happens.
And if anybody has even better ways to say this, I'd like to hear about it, and I want you to start posting about it in nyceve's health care diaries.
It is clear that at least some of the Democratic candidates for President in 2008 understand the need for change, such as Edwards and Obama, but differed in how to approach and implement it, which is natural. Hence the tags. And this way of thinking can apply to many other different areas of of government.
et merci a Jerome.
