Recently, a Facebook friend posted that many Americans are not being served well by their government. After I apologize to the Canadians and Mexicans, who are also Americans, I want to comment on the fact that many citizens of the USA are, in my opinion, very poorly served by our government.
I speak as one of those few Americans who have ventured overseas to live for a few years. I have lived in Slovakia and in the Czech Republic, a total of six years, during which time I taught English as a second language, to adults, mostly. Because of my teaching, which included a lot of informal chatting with my students, I learned a great deal about their lives, both recently, and in the past, under communist rule. There were a lot of comparisons between their country and mine, the USA. These discussions were very eye-opening. I even married one of my students, and though this only lasted a year, unfortunately, before our divorce, this was another source of insight, as I got to know her parents, who had vivid memories of the communist times.
While I always understood that none of them would willingly go back to the old days of communism, there were many benefits, many good aspects of their lives under the Soviet system. You may laugh at this, but while I do admit that there were many horrible aspects of living under what was called communism, in the U.S.S.R., it’s true that there were some good things, things that amazed me when I heard it.
For instance, free education, equally available to any citizen, and, as long as they were capable of keeping up their grades, they could go on to advanced education. Anyone with the intelligence and diligence could go on to receive the equivalent of our master’s degree, or even a PHD. And, importantly, one’s education was normally matched with a ready-made job as soon as you graduated. I was surprised to find that the population was more educated than that of the USA. Many of the socialist-styled policies were continued after their liberation from the USSR, you see, and until recently education was still free to all in the Czech Republic. I think that they have begun to demand some fees from students now. But, compared to our system, these fees seem negligible. Actually, I think I am safe in saying that education is less expensive in ALL advanced countries, than it is in the USA, if one takes into account government subsidies (in other countries).
In researching out the cause of the skyrocketing price of education in America, I found that it is mostly due to the fact that American colleges and universities used to receive a good deal of funding from the state and federal government here. This all began to change, as Republican-style budget cutting slashed this funding dramatically, during the past twenty years or so.
After one achieved his education, under Soviet communism, when you got married, you were GIVEN an apartment (or before you graduated, if married). OK, it was just a flat, in a hi-rise ‘commie-condo’, one of those massive, pre-fabricated concrete things that were all identically ugly, but, never mind; I’ve spent time inside of these, and they’re not so bad. My Czech wife and I were in the process of finding one of these old flats, to buy, when things began to get ‘shaky’ between us, and we called it off. Anyway, a Soviet citizen was given an education, and housing. All one had to do was to perform the normal duties of a citizen, and to stay out of trouble. Unfortunately, staying out of trouble meant being a good member of the Communist Party, and not criticizing the government in public, being denied freedom of speech, and other freedoms, to some extent. Then, you were GUARANTEED employment, for life, and then, furnished with a pension. Also we may include here FREE UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE, as another benefit of being born in a communist country, don’t forget. And, as I said, most of these socialist policies were continued after the fall of the Soviet Union. When I was there, before 2010, they were only beginning to charge fees for medical visits and procedures for the first time ever. But, compared with American rates, these fees were miniscule. Still, the population was so USED TO having absolutely free medical care, that some people were angry about the change.
By the way, the Czech Republic is not a particularly rich country, not at all. They are less affluent than Britain, or France. But even Slovakia, which is a patently poor country, had this same kind of free medical care for their citizens, even though I did notice some problems there, such as finding no toilet paper in the hospital toilet. One big difference in these countries and the USA, is this: they don’t spend half of their national budget on the military, like we do. In fact, NO country spends so much, even as a percentage of their budget, as does the USA. The only possible exception might be North Korea. Americans do not know this, by-and-large, speaking of the general population. This is a fact that cries out for our need to inform our citizenry, something that the media evidently has not done.
All of this money that is spent on our military, and our offensive take-overs of other countries, along with our secret endeavors around the globe, and our massive ‘intelligence’ budgets, might be one reason there is so little left over for investment in the education of our population, don’t you think? In fact, it is the main reason that there is so little money left for anything else, the reason that our population receives so little from our government, when compared with the citizens of all other developed nations. Even Mexico has nationalized health care. Canadians don’t want to come to the USA, unless they have supplemental health insurance policies to cover them, should they land in a hospital while in the States. They look at it as a risk, as part of coming here. Poor Cuba’s people have good health care, absolutely free.
But here in the USA, we have a strong ethic of “everybody paying their own way”. Health care is not thought to be a right, but a privilege. It is only for those who can pay for it, or can pay for insurance. Even with insurance, one can lose their life savings, and even their home, as a result of a catastrophic illness. There are supposed to be some improvements in this situation as a result of the Affordable Care Act. But people in most other developed countries do not have to worry about such things. We are a marvel, to these foreigners, as they look at us, the richest nation on earth, and see Americans struggling, wandering the streets, homeless, and with bad teeth, poor nutrition, dying for lack of medical care. As one who has spoken to hundreds of foreigners, in Europe and in Russia, I can tell you, the world looks at us, aghast. We are a mystery to them. They say, “How can it be that Americans don’t demand more of their government?
And what is the answer to that question? Well, in most countries, the government is there for the benefit of the people of that nation. Our government, here in the USA, is here for the benefit of the wealthy, for the corporations, in other words. Big corporations care little for the USA, let alone for the populace of the country. And now, due to the recent decisions of the Supreme Court, it’s even written into law; we will have a government that is bought and sold to the richest, to the exclusion of everyone else. If it’s been bad for the masses in recent years, now that the floodgates of black money are open, things will deteriorate even faster. That is, unless there is some kind of popular revolt, something strong enough to effect profound changes.
As I said, we are a country with this ethic of ‘paying your own way’ and ‘picking yourself up by your own bootstraps’. We begrudge all assistance to the poor. We rail at them, as if all of our problems, as a nation, are due to the tiny percentage of our budget that goes to social programs. If you want to argue about how much we spend on aid to the poor, it’s no mystery, there are pie-charts, freely available to the public. You won’t see any accurate charts on Fox News, though. You will see only commentators, saying “We keep hearing these stories, don’t we, about people on public assistance, who live lives of luxury.” Yes, we keep hearing them, unfortunately, from hateful assholes like you. [Not you, dear reader. You’re a liberal revolutionary, a man/woman after my own heart, I’m sure.]
Yes, we believe in self-sufficiency. So much so, that it is actually illegal to fail, in our society. In any town, you can go to jail for ‘loitering’, which means, being broke, out of money, homeless, whatever. Our cities have purposely made thing more and more inhospitable to the down-and-out. Public drinking fountains have become a thing of the past. Park benches are constructed to make it difficult or impossible to sleep on. It’s even illegal to sleep in your car, now, in some places. And as the homeless population grows, our response is to outlaw homelessness, vagrancy, public misfortune, one might call it, in more and more draconian ways.
Well, alright then, if we must demand that every person have the means to support themselves, then aren’t we responsible, as a society, to supply every person with what they need in order to do that? And what would that be? What is needed, for an individual to ‘make it’ in life? I think we can all agree on a little list.
1. As a child, health care. Some form of health insurance for the parents, at least. Many Americans have been lacking in this.
2. An education. If this is left to chance, or left to be attained only by the affluent, shouldn’t we EXPECT to have many homeless people?
3. For those who are able-bodied, a job. And consideration must be made for those who lacked health care, causing them to be unable to work. There is so little attention given to making sure that Americans have employment. It’s up to the individual. And what if one is mentally ill? What if one has no marketable skills, no experience, no education? With our leaking, dysfunctional so-called ‘safety net’, failure can mean that one has poor alternatives. You can beg, mooch off of friends or relatives, or just lie down and die. For many, nobody will give a fu*k. Such dire situations can come upon a person as easily as losing your job, or breaking up with your partner, and having to move out. So employment is important, so that one can have
4. A home. If is against the law to be homeless, then it becomes necessary to provide some place for these people to live. Otherwise, they end up going in and out of jail, perhaps for vagrancy, or for petty theft, or shoplifting, crimes committed due to hunger, maybe. And now, most are unaware of it, but county and city municipalities are charging fees for jail time, and for public defenders. Unfortunates caught in such a trap can’t pay these fees and fines, and end up going back to jail for ‘failure to pay’, thusly incurring even more fines. I guess the USA is the worst nation to be in, if one is in dire straits. At least in Bangladesh, one would find sympathy and understanding among the many other unfortunates there.
But we Americans of the United States, if we have less-than-middle-class parents, we have almost no chance of getting an education past high school. And so, we end up applying to become a ‘temp’, a temporary worker in some laborer position, or in the service industry, fast-food, whatever, we’re just happy to find whatever will keep us off of the street. I am appalled to see the way so many people must live nowadays. So many, without an education, just going from one crappy job to the next, from rented apartment to relative’s couch, getting together with some person, having children when they’re too young and too poor to be parents. And what hope do such children have? And if anyone needs a doctor, tough luck. Wait ‘till it becomes an emergency, then go to an E.R. at the hospital.
And let’s face it; for many, many Americans, the present price of buying a home, and the difficulty of obtaining credit make it nearly impossible to buy a home now. Oh yes, homes are being bought and sold, but I’m speaking of millions of people who are now in what I would call the lower class. This is a far greater demographic than we want to admit to. People don’t talk about being in a lower-class. But what do you call it, when you’re one missed pay-day away from homelessness?
My point, in all of this, is that since we have made a system in which failure is criminalized, then we are obligated, as a society, to provide the means for being at least nominally successful. At the very least, to provide a system in which a person who follows the rules, puts forth the effort, will be alright, will not have to worry. In other words, can we just set a goal to make life as good here as it was for those who lived under communism, in the Soviet Union? Or in the old Czechoslovakia, (now nonexistent since their separation in the nineties), or in Hungary, Bulgaria, or Ukraine, for that matter. And as the collector of taxes, the responsibility for the welfare of the citizenry should be firmly on the shoulders of the elected government, our United States Government.
Incidentally, while I was living abroad, for most of that time, I was an undocumented alien, or, technically, an illegal alien, as were many of my fellow ex-pats. But we were all treated quite nicely, though the authorities knew many of us were staying illegally or in some shade of grey legality. It was not by our choice. We went to the authorities, and applied for a residency permit. There was a many-layered bureaucracy, and a complicated process, which took many months, and cooperation from one’s employer. In the mean while, while waiting for this process to play out, we would simply leave the country every 30 days (there is a 30 day limit to visit legally), and immediately return, beginning our thirty day stay over from number one. But many didn’t bother to even do this. But the authorities didn’t hassle us.
My efforts to become legal in Slovakia were all in vain. By the time I got all of my ‘papers’ together, the first papers were over 90 days old, and so, were out of date, unusable. I gave up, and left Slovakia in a few months anyway. Being an ‘illegal immigrant’ was not a big deal, there, in those days. Since 2008, they have ‘tightened’ their rules somewhat, and Americans have to get themselves legal somehow now, within a limited time. There are ways to do this. But I had fallen in love with a Czech woman, and we were married. So I became a European family member, which gave me health care and everything, just like a citizen. In most countries, there ARE ways provided whereby an immigrant can attain legal status, other than by marriage. This used to be true in the USA as well. If it hadn’t been, there wouldn’t be so many of us with ancestry that has no native genes.
But this nation of immigrants can’t even call these children entering our southern border refugees. No, they’re illegal invaders, and criminals. It’s a border crisis, not a crisis of people trying to escape a country like Honduras, where the murder rate is worse than in Iraq or Afghanistan, and the government there is controlled by the Mafia. We forget, if we were ever aware, that our Republican administration backed a coup there, some time ago, overthrowing a democratically elected government. This was done at the behest of corporations, of course.
Those who are protesting the arrival of these children are vulgar, hateful morons. They have bought the idea that there is so little money, that this is going to ruin our city budget, or whatever. There are budget problems, yes. But they aren’t caused by immigrants, nor by the poor. Our budget deficits are due to corporate give-aways, and Republican-style tax-cuts for the wealthy. Funds are there, and plentifully available; it’s just a matter of rectifying the tax code, to simply return to the tax rates of the sixties, when, by the way, the country was more prosperous.
But with the constant string of road-blocks, thrown up by the right-wing conservatives in our present government, there is little hope for reform, for improvement in the plight of so many hapless citizens of our country, the richest, most powerful nation on earth.
I should add, at this point, that the African-American population suffers far more than the rest of us, and other minorities are also discriminated against, not to forget mentioning discrimination against women, and the LGBT community. Equality even among the middle and lower classes is still a distant dream. White male domination is perpetuated by the media, where the bigots try to turn us against one another, when we should be looking instead at corporations, which are sitting on trillions of dollars, while we bicker amongst ourselves.
In this present world of massive inequality, the middle and lower classes, the 99%, are all in the same boat, more or less. If anyone is black, we are all blacks now. We are slaves to the banks. Our youth are enslaved by student debt to the tune on a trillion dollars. The oil companies are our masters. We must sell our soul to pay for expensive drugs, and for medical care, without which many would die. Our politicians must sell-out to corporate interests, ignoring the will of their constituents, the citizenry, who are the true owners of this country. Only those with millions of dollars can influence government policy. This tendency will snowball, in short order now. Things will get worse, fast, if the rich gain complete dominance over us. They are on the verge of doing it now.
However, IF we should ever discover who our enemies really are, speaking in terms of economic domination, and if we can ever unite against the powers that be, I have some suggestions, some food for thought. I’m not an economist, nor a highly educated individual; I only wish to throw out some ideas, which can be bandied about, back and forth, just to widen the discussion a bit.
The most profitable and prosperous companies are the oil companies. They create a tremendous amount of wealth for their shareholders. But, as citizens of this country, can we not rightfully say that they make this money by pumping stuff out of the ground on OUR territory? If they are to become so very rich, as a result of their activities in this country and on our shores, should the people of this nation not benefit from this financially? The general population of this country should benefit financially, and directly, from this resource which is, after all, a finite resource.
But only the elite benefit, while we all watch them pollute our land and our shores. Our air is polluted, and the consensus among oil company executives, at this time, that nothing will be done to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, not any time soon, because “it would be too expensive”. So we are dooming our grandchildren to the effects of global warming, to profit these elite shareholders and owners of oil corporations. And pumping out more and more will not make it cheaper for us to drive. Oil self-sufficiency is a fraud, since plans are under way to export massive amounts of oil and gas overseas. It sells at the world price, regardless.
Our military is used to stir up trouble around the globe, insuring that the USA is hated everywhere we invade. I think a more proper use of our military would be the forcible takeover, the nationalization of at least the largest oil companies. Then, the oil could be sold much cheaper, lowering the cost of every commodity that requires shipping. Also, the profits could be divided between every adult citizen in our country. This would yield quite a payout to each person. It would be a step toward solving the problem of inequality.
The nationalization of industry is not a new idea. The populace of some countries in South America and Central America are benefiting from such programs as I write. Other such targets, for government take-over, would be the other most profitable industries, particularly the ones that are price-gouging the people of this country in such egregious ways. The drug companies, the pharmaceutical companies come to mind. Perhaps only one large company could be nationalized, which would provide a non-profit competitor to the private companies that are left. Prices for medical care would plummet immediately.
To ease the burden of such actions, perhaps the present shareholders of these corporations could even be compensated with a fair market value. This payment, taken from government coffers, would soon be replaced by profits from the companies, even if they lowered prices to consumers.
I can’t understand how that there was no talk of nationalizing the banks and financial institutions, after the government spent quite enough to buy them outright (they should have sold cheap, being on the verge of failure). If only we, as a government represented by its citizenry, had taken over at least one or two of these institutions, the whole population would have benefitted from the recovery that HAS taken place among the upper 1%. Another fact that is unknown among the general public is the fact that Wall Street and the affluent among us are richer now than they were before the depression that we are ever so slowly beginning to come out of, as average people. Could it be that some important information is being under-reported for political reasons?
There are other things that could be done. For instance, to reform the taxation structure, with the goal being the redistribution of wealth. Not only that, but to try to capture some of this wealth, which is being gained by abusing the less wealthy of our society, by plundering our resources, gaining wealth that is being socked away in foreign countries, secret accounts, accounts of foreign ‘partners’, foreign ‘divisions’ of American or international firms. This flight of capital runs into the trillions. These excessive profits, held out of circulation by the wealthy, could be used successfully to end poverty in America. Unemployment could be turned into a thing of the past. The national debt could be erased. It’s time we began to speak openly about these things. All it would take, theoretically, is for a number of people who hold such wealth to get out their checkbooks, and do it.
It’s time we questioned the morality of such a situation, in view of the suffering of so many, not just nationally, but worldwide, in which funds are actually available that could alleviate so many problems, but instead, fat pigs of capitalism are sitting on it, reinvesting it in low-risk investments that benefit no one, except their progeny, whom they hope will dominate the earth, when the wealth is concentrated into the hands of a miniscule few, who live completely without barriers to their greed. This while the suffering masses watch their quality of life continually diminish, until, what? Until starved bodies are piling up, waiting to be hauled off to the dump?
There ARE solutions to our problems. The status-quo has not come about by accident. The present situation is as it is by DESIGN. It is a result of government policies that have been so influenced by the elite, the wealthy, that there is NO WAY they can lose, and no way that the average man can win.
The first priority should be to educate people who have been brain-washed by these damnable so-called ‘think-tanks’ such as A.L.E.C., and the Heritage Foundation, the fraudulent Americans For Prosperity, these spawn of the super-rich, these deceivers, such as the Koch brothers, Pete Petersen, Mr. Pope, in North Carolina, and so on. It’s basically the Republican/Tea Party mindset. It boils down to creating dysfunctional government, locked in gridlock of partisanship, concentrating on distractions, on religious matters and so forth, while the sons-of -bitches loot the treasury of the United States, and lock us all into permanent struggle. We are so tired, that we can’t even raise our heads up from the cotton-bolls we are picking, let alone try to influence the tax structure.
The public must be made aware of who it is that is robbing us, and we must be directed as to how to resist, to defeat those who are, let’s just say it, evil greedy bastards. Just as importantly, we must become aware of who the good-guys are. There are some out there, influential, honest, good people, who are working, writing, reporting, and betting their money to help us as a people to rise up and reclaim what belongs to us, as citizens of a proud nation.
There are corporations that deserve to be boycotted. There are others who deserve to be blessed by a grateful populace. We must name and shame the bad, and bless the good. And for our own sake, we must unite, those of us who have a brain, and eyes to see reality. We must forget about trying to obtain perfection in our ranks, and be almost completely inclusive. We are all sisters and brothers, working against the bourgeoisie, those who look down on us commoners.
The union of workers must be revitalized. The slaves must revolt (peacefully). We can mine the words of those who have gone on before, like Martin Luther King, Jr., Howard Zimmerman, Ghandi, and so many others, and the enlightened economists among us like Paul Krugman, and Richard Wolff. We mustn’t let cynicism and depression rule us. If it really is almost impossible for any man alive to make a change in our government, then that’s all the more reason to work desperately to make change happen somehow.
From Tracy Chapman’s song:
Don’t ya know, talkin’ bout a revolution (sounds like a whisper)
Poor people gonna rise up, and get their share.
Poor people gonna rise up, and take what’s theirs.