If you get your information from traditional sources – pick any, "liberal" or "conservative", it doesn't matter – it's very easy to get distracted from the critically important big picture issues. And not only are people arguing over the wrong issues, but even in the context of these issues they are often arguing against their own best interests! It would be hilarious if it wasn't so important.
Health care is one good example of this phenomenon. The country is caught up in a debate about how to fix the system, without any real discussion of some fundamental issues of the status quo. These elements are implicitly assumed to be essential to our way of life, which is "not negotiable", even though they may have become quite distorted:
0) Do citizens of the USA have a basic right to health care (or food or shelter)?
CURRENT: The implicit answer is "no", because in our capitalistic system you get only what you pay for.
CORRECT: Yes. In fact, after WWII, the USA agreed with much of the rest of the world that, indeed, this is a basic right, which the UN documented in Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights...
1a) What is the real purpose of the health care system in the USA? Is the goal to provide some minimally adequate health care for US citizens in a cost effective manner? Or is the goal to provide some reasonable rate of return to investors in the health care industry?
CURRENT: The implicit answer, consistent with capitalism, is that health care is just one more vehicle for generating profits for owners and investors.
CORRECT: The primary purpose of health care must be to keep people healthy! Private "Health Care Insurance" is, at best, an inefficient and superfluous billing system. More typically, it is a financial racket, skimming profits off the top of health care transactions, without adding any value...
1b) Is cost effective health care compatible with unbounded capitalism?
CURRENT: Implicitly, everything of any value is compatible with capitalism.
CORRECT: No. Of course it may operate within (or coexist with) the bounded capitalistic framework of our society, but it can not be perverted to the point of becoming ineffective or worse. The basic human right level of service should be available to everyone as part of our basic social system; yes, this is socialized medicine! This would not preclude a thriving market for special/elective medical treatments which the rich could also pay for...
2) How can we pay for coherent, effective universal health care?
CURRENT: We can't, which is why we shouldn't even consider it! Besides, this is socialism, which is communism, which is bad.
CORRECT: The government must fund the basic level of service from tax revenue. We can't afford to finance it through more foolish deficit spending! The funding should come from existing revenue (an oversimplification, ignoring redirecting current private health care cash flows or implementing more taxes, but valid for the purpose of this discussion). We need to set priorities and live within our means. An obscenely large proportion of federal revenue currently goes to military and defense-related spending; it would be prudent to redirect some of these funds to universal health care.
3) How long can this nation survive on its current course? There are many warning signals - financial, economic, social, political – flashing bright red. If we can not do the right thing with health care will we have a sustainable socio-political system?
CURRENT: Don’t worry! (We should be able to keep this game going as long as we can keep you folks engaged in the contentious and entertaining distractions that we’ve substituted for mature discourse/debate and rational policy-making. Besides, there's a little more loose change still rattling around the system, which we'd like to collect.)
CORRECT: The warning signs are real, and the danger can not be overstated. If we don't wake up, grow up, and make some painful and necessary changes, our individual and collective future may be exceedingly unpleasant! The potential consequences of continuing on this course are really quite grim – think angry and insolvent failed state with nuclear weapons. No one, at home or abroad, will be safe.
It's essential to understand the bigger picture. The current system is designed to benefit the real owners – a small plutocratic minority. (No, we're not really a democracy, never have been.) From this perspective there's little distinction between "Right" and "Left", Republican and Democratic. The partisan friction and "issues" are used to keep most of us distracted, so we don't notice just how far we've strayed from our clearly documented (though never actually achieved) founding principles, nor how much we've been ripped off by the plutocrats. And clearly, we wouldn't want to rock the boat with issues like peak oil, oppressive military empire, fascist police state, non-productive economy, etc.
Just to be clear, I do not think there is one, single, overarching, nefarious conspiracy being explicitly perpetrated on some innocent victims. I think the complex system is just "working" the way that one might expect given the architecture, the profit goal and the present conditions (inputs, processes). If you can "privatize profit and socialize loss", especially legally, on a grand scale, unencumbered -- actually aided and abetted -- by the very elements meant to control this behavior, why wouldn't you? Exactly! And if you can channel most of the malevolent social energy generated by this insanely imbalanced scheme away from the real cause, while actually making a profit on that, too...?
Our mean-spirited, profit-driven zeitgeist discounts or dismisses such quaint notions as human rights – quite tragically, I think. Tragedy “is a form of art based on human suffering that offers its audience pleasure”, and that’s what we’re seeing on a grand scale, not just with the faux health care “debate”, but with all of the Left-Right us-them political theater-cum-mob fodder. When much of the audience wakes up and realizes they have been playing the rather doltish expendable extras in an even more sinister tragicomic production, it will be too late.
The situation is clear to anyone willing to honestly assess the data: this whole, amazing system we call the USA, and possibly even the entire modern global system, is faltering and starting to collapse. Now, in the endgame, the plutocracy has morphed into a kleptocracy, desperately sucking the last vestiges of (fantasy) wealth from the dying carcass of this once great nation. Some of these elite cliques manifest as:
- the famous, and very real, military-industrial complex is right near the top;
- the whole corrupt financial system, from the Fed (or BIS) on down, including the financial racket some incorrectly call "health care";
- the grossly perverted criminal justice system, hijacked by the prison-industrial complex by way of the War on Drugs;
- the entire legislative-lobbying quid pro quo system, complete with revolving door;
- the ubiquitous, pernicious propaganda organ comprising infotainment media & entertainment, etc;
- and the Federal government itself, e.g., ripping off the Social Security trust fund through that nifty trick call the Unified Budget...
This just scratches the surface of the monster, and ignores many interesting details - including collapse itself as the last big bubble - topics of future discussion. To conclude this brief essay, and tie it to any earlier note, in recognition of the substantial changes we've already witnessed, I propose we rename the USA to the Fascist American Kleptocratic Empire. For those who appreciate recursive acronyms, there's also the Fake American Kleptocratic Empire. The same FAKE initials can then suffice for the remains after the disintegration (Former).
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