Reply #15: Hate to sound like the grim reaper, but... [View All]

[warren pease]

I think this country has officially passed the point of no return concerning the relationship of government to the governed and the lofty goals of promoting "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

As the OP makes clear at least a dozen different ways, this country is no longer in the business of promoting life -- if it ever was -- for its own citizens or anybody else around the world, as Iraqi and Afghan women and children would be the first to tell you.

There's one study missing from the litany of US medical horrors; it's the one released in 2004 by a DC-based policy analysis organization called the Institute of Medicine. This study blames lack of medical insurance for about 18,000 deaths each year in the US.

I've seen a more recent study by the same organization that ups that number to 22,000, but I can't find it now so 18,000 will have to do. Either way, I somehow doubt that there's another "rich" industrialized country on the planet that owns such shameful statistics, or actively promotes a medical system that by its very nature will inevitably kill a small town's worth of humans every single year.


Nor is promoting "liberty" a function of government any more. Just the opposite. That's obvious in any number of examples of Bushean domestic repression and the series of incremental moves toward building and implementing a lock-down national security state. You'll have to either trust me on that one, reject the premise out of hand without checking, or read through this post that lists about 80 percent of the fascistic programs and regulations the Bushies have put in place -- and that's just the ones we know about -- to make damn sure that no independent progressive thought goes undetected or unpunished.

Here's an interesting take on the use by corporations of health benefits as social control mechanisms to increase employee insecurity and therefore keep them working in the kind of useless, soul-shriveling jobs that, if they lived in a country with a national health care program and other elements of a real social safety net, they'd quit before the sun set on another miserable day of frustration, boredom and hopelessness.

So much for the freedom to choose the life you want rather than the one the set of American restraints on real liberty -- with no access to health care at or near the top of most people's list -- chooses for you. Here's an excerpt from the above-linked article:

THE EFFECTS OF MARKET-DRIVEN CARE

The real effects of market-driven health care on people's lives suggest that the primary corporate motive for imposing this type of health care system is to allow employers to have more control over their labor force.

What are the results of market-driven health care? First, market-driven health care makes people feel insecure about their prospects for receiving health care when they need it. Second, it destroys the trust that patients once had in their doctors by making doctors "gatekeepers'' whose role is often to block access to care. Third, by making health care a commodity to be bought and sold like any other, it expands the growing economic inequality in the United States to include health inequality. Fourth, it pits health professionals against each other in competing physician groups and hospitals. These are four classic methods of social control: make people feel too insecure to challenge those in power, destroy people's trust in one another, make them more unequal, pit them against each other.

Even before the rise of market-driven health care, corporations relied on the insecurity of health care to control workers. For decades, large employers (and some regressive labor unions) have preferred to link health benefits to employment, knowing it gave them more control over their employees. According to a New York Times/CBS poll in 1991, 32 percent of workers did not quit jobs they disliked because they were afraid of losing their health benefits. In June, 1998 General Motors threatened to deny medical benefits to striking workers in Flint, Michigan in order to pressure them back to work. Raytheon actually did cancel health insurance for striking workers in Massachusetts in August 2000, to force them back to work.

Additionally, making health benefits depend on independent agreements between employer and employees in thousands of different companies gives employers the upper hand by preventing employees from acting as a single nation-wide block. This is why American corporations don't want the situation in Europe, where wages and benefits such as health care, vacation, and maternity benefits are negotiated on a country-wide basis between representatives of labor, the government and corporations.

In other words, a scared employee -- thrown to the wolves as an overwhelmed individual rather than as a member of a union or some other organized counter-weight to full corporate totalitarianism -- is the perfect wage/debt slave and will do whatever he/she is told to avoid increasing their already suffocating levels of uncertainty and insecurity.

Just one more way the American dream works to enrich the corporate piggies, control the (disappearing) middle class, exploit the working classes and continue to insulate the elites from their richly deserved day of reckoning with the people they've screwed to the wall, allowing them to keep on wallowing in their hard-earned dividend checks instead.


And then there's the really big lie: American government and its alleged role in encouraging "...the pursuit of happiness."

I know quite a few writers, artists, musicians and people with other "non-marketable" skills who are slowly withering and retreating inward under the stifling influence and sheer awfulness of forced daily subservience to corporate America. Because most of them bought into the debt slave trap, they couldn't cover their bills if they were to opt for a reduced standard of living that would get them out of the corporate death trap and let them refine their abilities and gifts so that, with a little luck and a lot of talent, they might become self-supporting artists in a few years.

They'll likely never make a ton of money, but they're not motivated by money anyway -- just by the lack of it. But this is heresy and runs completely contrary to accepted norms in a country where the national religion is capitalism and its most venerated icon is the dollar sign.

And because heretics are generally threatening to people invested in mainstream cultural values, it makes many corporate androids absolutely crazy that some of these insults to the system have gotten away with flipping off corporate America and have still managed to carve out a decent living in the arts or some other non-destructive pursuit.

To compound their sins, heretics' days don't involve life in a cube, buried in the middle of a cube farm, a small and unimportant member of a department in a building decorated by the department of architectural sterility, a disposable cog in the hostile machinery of a company that operates as a totalitarian fascist state and treats its people far worse than it treats its IT systems.

Unfortunately, people who take the non-corporate option in America might just die before they ever make enough money to afford private for-profit medical coverage on the open market. That's not enabling the pursuit of happiness by anyone's standards; that's wage slavery imposed by a system that places value solely on a person's ability to generate profits for a corporation.

Conversely, it accounts for the time spent on other "wasteful" activities -- things like creating art, music, literature or anything else that increases the value of humanity's collective assets but doesn't have some sort of bottom line corporate benefit -- as a net negative and an unproductive waste of time.

Well, fuck them twice over in every uncomfortable and/or painful orifice for their miserable capitalist world view and the debilitating effects it's having on life on earth. And fuck them again for inflicting this greed-driven failure of a medical system on 300 million people who really deserve better.

Even at political end times, that would still be heresy and highly offensive to all who spend their days grubbing for ever more money because they're so fucking clueless that they actually believe the bumper sticker that reads "He who dies with the most toys wins."

But if it won't fit on a bumper sticker, it probably won't fit between the ears of the average American corporate android. So I suppose these nitwits and modern America were made for each other. Too bad so many other decent, more rational and less co-opted people have to live alongside this oversupply of frauds and fools.


wp