Some day (maybe) we'll get real.
Then we'll realize what has always been obvious: the BEST way to reduce healthcare costs is to TOTALLY eliminate the profit motive from the system.
That means ALL reputable (and certified) doctors in the US would work for state-certified community-based health care centers and nonprofit hospitals.
Drug development is ALREADY primarily directed by the federal government swishing finances through elite nonprofit research institutions (MIT etc). Drug marketing and distribution could also be handled by regulated nonprofits.
Etc. Etc. Etc.
“Socialized medicine” need not be run by “da Fedrul Gubmint”. It can be a widely distributed, multilevel system VERY accessible to oversight, checks and balances, and COMPETITION!!!
It takes a village to raise a child. It takes a generation to cultivate a vineyard or a forest. It will take a long time to get this right, and Medicare for All is not necessarily a false step any more than ObamaCare is (was?)
It would take a LOT LESS time if we would only stop deceiving ourselves with nonsensical neoliberal capitalist malarkey!
Yes, democrats are (for now) having the wrong type of debate. But this is the world we live in.
Right now we're allowing our healthcare delivery system to be overseen by an internationalized, profit ravenous, corporatized insurance industry. That's not unlike permitting a coven of vampires to run our emergency blood supply.
That's not to attribute malevolence to for-profit corporations any more than I would attribute malevolence to a pack of wolves dismembering a bleating Bambi, a scorpion stunning and then devouring a slug, or a silent owl swooping down to rip away from its cozy nest a screeching baby bunny rabbit.
We just have to get our minds and the incentives right.
Joe Panzica (Author of Democracy STRUGGLES! and Saint Gredible and Her Fat Dad's Mass. He is currently working on his second novel I Wanna Be Evil.
Yes, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are taking big risks.
It’s always dangerous taking on the rich and the powerful to support the ordinary, the struggling, the trodden upon, and the bewildered. One reason it’s so risky is that the people, whom true heroes fight to protect and to uplift, may be easily turned against them when they aren’t simply persuaded to stop their ears and walk away.
Yes, they are taking a big chance.
And so are we if we support them.
There is NO solid evidence that any true democracy has EVER worked, or that the majority of any population has what it takes to manage our own self-government in ways that don’t catastrophically lead to even more predation by the few upon the many.
Right now we have a “leader” with a genius for whipping our worst instincts toward predation, domination, and self-destruction. Elizabeth and Bernie believe we can do better - and THAT is a very risky course to take.
They are called dreamers. Fantasists!
But WHAT nightmares of emptiness do their detractors “believe” in?
Joe Panzica (Author of Democracy STRUGGLES! and Saint Gredible and Her Fat Dad's Mass. He is currently working on his second novel I Wanna Be Evil.
Democracy has ALWAYS been the enemy and EVER will be to the tiny oligarchies which have held sway in every civilization so far.
Democracy is even radically toxic to itself. Thus the treacherous, long, and uncertain STRUGGLE of democracy to control ITSELF through arduous processes of building internal checks & balances while ever scrambling to belatedly forge counterweights against emerging new forms of concentrated wealth.
In the Post WWII attack against social democracy and liberal institutions, the “neoliberal” enemies of democracy pretended market forces would inevitably make democracy superfluous by some combination of meeting all our needs AND by making all organized resistance totally futile. But the oligarchic enemies of democracies do not put their trust in contrived or abstract historical forces. They use their vast resources to employ “the best & the brightest” to rig every game for their own narrow idiotic benefit. This goes back to well before Plato, but for recent examples, serious democrats would do well to peruse two well written and well researched popular articles in The Atlantic and The Institute for New Economic Thinking.
“Meet the Economist Behind the One Percent’s Stealth Takeover of America” is by Lynn Parramore. Her article in Inteconomics.org is a review of historian Nancy MacLean’s “Democracy in Chains”. It describes the work and influence of James McGill Buchanan, a lynchpin and major architect of the right-wing libertarian “brain trust” most associated today with the “gravy rich” Koch brothers but also thickly supported by “Shell Oil, Exxon, Ford, IBM, Chase Manhattan Bank, and General Motors”. According to Parramore, Buchanan:
“was incensed at what he saw as a move toward socialism and deeply suspicious of any form of state action that channels resources to the public. Why should the increasingly powerful federal government be able to force the wealthy to pay for goods and programs that served ordinary citizens and the poor?”
Sound familiar?
Buchanan was instrumental in developing the theory of “public choice” as another weapon against democratic efforts to use the power of government as a check against wealthy corporations and individuals. His books, including “The Limits of Liberty” and “Property as a Guarantor of Liberty” elaborated on his view of a society where a tiny band of Galtish “makers” are besieged by insatiable legions of “takers”, “parasites” and “predators”.
What can these heroes do - except use every tool they possess (including the Republican Party) to engage in:
“Suppressing voting, changing legislative processes so that a normal majority could no longer prevail, sowing public distrust of government institutions— all these were tactics toward the goal. But the Holy Grail was the Constitution: alter it and you could increase and secure the power of the wealthy in a way that no politician could ever challenge.”?
Make no mistake this is the revolutionary agenda that Shell Oil, Exxon, Ford, IBM, Chase Manhattan Bank, General Motors and other corporations CAN be forced to disavow, but which they will pursue to its deadly limit if permitted. Make no mistake, the attack on democracy is serious, concerted, dangerous, and extremely effective. Popular faith in democracy and its liberal forms is declining all across the western world.
Corporations were a medieval European institutional development designed to conduct monumental projects (like cathedrals) which required immense resources and multiple generations to complete. They were also employed to codify and protect the rights of free citizens to govern themselves in towns and cities with some insulation from the power of feudal lords and monarchs. Later they were used by sovereigns to bestow monopolistic privileges and other protections for risky capital intensive commercial endeavors. These included building local toll bridges, canals, and highways but also massive imperialistic enterprises involving varying combinations of commerce and conquest. Think of the British and Dutch East India Tea Companies, but also remember how many of the original 13 American English colonies were organized under corporate charters. If you live on the East Coast, it’s quite likely you’re sitting in territory once claimed by the Virginia or Massachusetts Bay Companies.
Adam Winkler in 'Corporations Are People' Is Built on an Incredible 19th-Century Lie details how, in the years following the Civil War, a small number of sharpies were able to subvert the 14th amendment, written to protect the rights of newly emancipated blacks, and transform it into a legal tool still being used to attack democracy and the Constitution itself.
Advocates for democracy need to focus their attention on how the corporate form has been subverted to become a potent weapon for idiocy and oligarchy. Corporations need to be held accountable via multiple legal and institutional mechanisms to workers, consumers, and levels of community (from local to international). Concentrations of wealth and power need to be justified by their service to the public good as defined in multiple contending forums. And WE need to raise ourselves to arduous challenges which extend far beyond harnessing and domesticating these power centers. WE need to cultivate in ourselves the abilities to keep all manner of institutions functioning in ways that do not ever again give unlicensed power to an irresponsible few. That means education for the knowledge and habits of mind required for democracy to govern itself as well as for multitudes of other more specialized skills.
The price of liberty, as one slaveholding founding father was right to point out, is “eternal vigilance”. But the rich and powerful have the time and money to not only wait for us to become cloudy and drowsy, but they also have the resources to lull us into self-deceptive versions of “moderation” or to incite us into self-defeating spasms of “extremism”. They can always hire more interchangeable “brains”. They can afford to wait and make mistakes.
Joe Panzica (Author of Democracy STRUGGLES! and Saint Gredible and Her Fat Dad's Mass for which he is seeking an agent . . .)
It is infinitely true that we should never countenance efforts to minimize ghastly crimes against Gypsies, Jews, Communists, and others demonized as deviant by fascist Nazis in Germany and in their occupied European realms. This is why some people threaten to turn the debate about what is happening to migrants and their children on the southern US border in 2019 into a kerfuffle about the term “Concentration Camps”. They are right in that The Holocaust deserves a special place in our sense of history. Somehow, we must keep its memory alive to give its victims some measure of honor and dignity which they were unjustly denied in the circumstances of how they were murdered, tortured, exploited, and confined.
Most importantly we should preserve the history of Nazi crimes against humanity to work towards the day when such atrocities are not likely to happen again.
Anywhere.
Even the US.
“Never”, unfortunately, can be part of a very self-deceiving and self-defeating formulation about history and human nature. We must be ever so careful about what sense of history we have and are supporting in the public mind. In 2019 should we compare our concentration camps for border crossing migrants with the work camps and death camps run by Nazis during WWII and feel GOOD about ourselves?
Another comparison, perhaps more apt, is between those in Germany who were not active Nazis (and who maybe had uneasy qualms about Hitler) but who said, “Well what else can we do? I wish there were a better way to deal with the problems certain people are causing US who, after all, only want to be left in peace. And anyway, the Russians have their own brutal ways of . . .”
It is strangely provocative to say that Nazis and Fascists are people too. But it is imperative to never forget this essential truth. It’s absolutely crucial to remember this NOT to normalize or excuse torture, neglect, and the demonizing ill-treatment of helpless people, BUT to keep in mind how EASY it is to ignore it, passively support it, and even endorse it without ever getting OUR hands dirty.
The ones whose hands are dirty are, just remember, “only following orders”. And are administrators of our concentration camps to blame if we don’t provide them with enough blankets and diapers ?.... What can they DO?? What can ANYBODY do? Oh well . . . Anyway, the Iranians and Chinese are out to get us.)
There is a common connotation to the word “demonize” which involves depicting certain (often helpless) people in dehumanizing ways. But if you want to create real live actual human demons, just abuse, neglect, and despise them while they are helpless children. A few of them will survive into adolescence and adulthood in ways that will make us feel additionally afraid, superior, and even more crimped in our understanding of human nature.
Meanwhile, the world is watching the US and judging us.
And the vast condescension of history will have its savage say.
Joe Panzica (Author of Democracy STRUGGLES! and Saint Gredible and Her Fat Dad's Mass for which he is seeking an agent . . .)
