Enjoy Your Health Care Shit Sandwich

My loyal readers of Black Sun Gazette are none too surprised that I am adamantly opposed to the health care bill which was recently passed by Congress. There’s a lot of confusion surrounding the bill, not the least bit due to a massive campaign of disinformation and lies coming from The White House and its toadies in the corporate media. I’m sort of amazed at how otherwise rational people are joining in the Democratic Party circle jerk that is accompany yet another massive transfer of wealth from working class people to corporate elites in this country.

The health care “reform” bill isn’t anything that deserves the name reform. The very word “reform” at least tacitly implies amelioration of social ills. For those who haven’t seen it, the fact sheet from Fire Dog Lake–a “progressive,” pro-Democratic Party blog–explains a lot about what is wrong with the bill. It doesn’t protect or aid the people it purports to and requires you to pay a large part of your income to, not a tax pool, but private companies. The bill puts pressure on insurance companies to provide fewer services of lower quality with higher co-pays which means that many people at the bottom levels of society will be paying for services that they can’t even use. The elevator pitch version? Insurance companies basically wrote this bill, Joe Lieberman pushed it and insurance company stocks are skyrocketing. If you need to know more than that, I’ve got a dollar I can loan you to buy a clue.

How the bill will actually work in reality is outlined succinctly in another article from Fire Dog Lake which uses the historically imprecise but emotionally evocative term neo-feudalism to describe this bill. To the best of my knowledge this is the first time in American history when citizens will be required by law to tithe a pre-determined portion of their income to private companies, none of which seem to have a waning rapacity for superprofits. Indeed, the health care bill can quite possibly be seen as an attempt to totally privatize and ration health care in the United States, what with its massive attacks on Medicare and Social Security–cynically called attacks on “waste” by the President and those foolish enough to believe him.

What those who have been taken for a ride by the Democratic Party (once again) on the matter of health care fail to realize is that everything good about this country, from the abolition of slavery to the Civil Rights Act, was the product of a hard fought struggle by millions of people. The rights and privileges that we enjoy in the United States were not handed down by benevolent rulers trying to “do good” by their people. Rather, things like Social Security were wrested from a terrified ruling class who would give up any scrap from their table to maintain their social power. In the words of Martin Luther King, “Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” Those who subscribe to any variation of the notion that the people who run this country are going to give up anything without a fight desperately need a lesson in history and basic reality. From the very beginning, the health care bill has been an attempt at ramming a reorganization of the industry down the throats of the American people by cynically using the language of “reform.”

The health care debacle, coming on the heels of a recent Supreme Court decision allowing corporations to finance political campaigns wholesale, is a troubling sign of where the United States is headed. It also lays bare the bankruptcy of placing any faith in the Democratic Party. Rather than being a “lesser evil,” Democrats are the preferred party of the ruling capitalist elite during times of economic strife from the 1930s to today. Since winning The White House at a time when Democrats held both houses of Congress, they have failed to do anything to help working class and poor people who are struggling in America. Rather, they have spearheaded new attacks on the living standards of working class Americans through methods such as massive wealth transfers to bankers, deep cuts in social programs, attacks on teachers and the wholesale destruction of large sectors of the economy. Those who continue to rely on the Democrats are either parasitic privileged social layers, those who soon hope to be, willfully ignorant or hopelessly confused. Even the great stalwart of the “progressive wing,” erstwhile anti-choice bigot Dennis Kucinich quickly fell in line.

The politics of pressuring capitalist politicians to throw you a few crumbs leads nowhere but where we find ourselves today. Those who wish to keep begging for less severe beatings and slightly larger scraps from the master’s table are welcome to do so. These people doubtless possess a continued touching faith in the ability of capitalist politicians to be pressured to do the right thing. However, battle lines are more quickly and firmly being drawn in the sand. We all exist during what the Chinese curse calls “interesting times.” A time will come when stock will be taken and those who lined up to defend the system will be separated from those who saw a diseased and decaying system careening over a cliff and rather than try and save it, leaned in with all their weight to push it to its death. However, more important than the judgment of peers or history on this matter is the judgment of one’s own conscience. As social conditions continue to deteriorate, I sincerely wonder how those who currently act as left lawyers for the Democratic Party’s assault on American living standards (to say nothing of illegal and borderline genocidal assaults abroad) will look back on their misspent youth as liberal apologists.