Pantages

From the Barfly, originally uploaded by lucienphoto.

I have listened politely to the detractors of Health Care Reform. I have heard the arguments that it will bankrupt this country; that it will mean that illegal aliens get free health care; it will mean that the quality of care that we have come to know will diminish. I am tired of the government bashing; the lack of respect for civil servants and the slavish devotion to a market economy gone beserk.

Here is my take on what has happened in the grande ol' USA. We let the pundits and financial wizards convince us that they could spin gold from straw. We bought it all. Profits beyond your imagination. Those profits came at the expense of the working people, the safety of our economy, and very physical environment in which we live. Easier to make huge profits and pay pennance to a government agency for fines than to take a look at the big picture.

We all allowed our greed to blur our vision. We eagerly trod upon those lower than us on so many scales - education, SES, racial, gender, work hierarchy. We were thoughtless and callous because the never-going-to-end profit orgy was too good to pass up.

While we were gluttonously stuffing our bank accounts and putting profit before service or profit before resources we forgot that you can't fool nature. Like us she is bound by the laws - physics, gravity, economics. We manipulated those laws but that was only a small detour on the road back to reality. You can't devour your capital and still hope to profit.

Human capital. Human resources. Human productivity. We keep wanting to take the humanity out of our reality. Examples abound in the real world. My wife works for a Big Ten university whose president is determined to make it a world class institution. The football coach makes $3,000,000 a year. She is in HR and specializes in compensation. Many of the employees are now looking at furloughs. Days without pay. Days when they will not work but will still be responsible for the end product. Has anyone asked that coach to give back anything? No, she said.

Corporations invest in art so that they have an air of prestige while denying health care for children, the elderly and the disadvantaged. This is the face of someone who might be denied health care because she can't afford it



The corporations and the Christian Right (what does that really mean anyway?) are stuffing their pockets with your dollars and building temples. What is in those temples? The riches of our labor. Will that protect them from aging? - No!

Walmart keeps lowering prices. Ironically, even the Walmart employees don't really make enough to shop there, but where do you go if Walmart is too expensive. At what price have we saved a penny? My money is going to the local seller, if I am able to do so. That local seller may have a relationship with a supplier who has a family to feed. What happens when all the manufacturers in the USA have been put out of business by cheaper (both definitions) suppliers in other places? What happens when there are no jobs here at all that pay a living wage because the corporations have uprooted themselves and moved on to cheaper labor somewhere else? Think it could not happen?

Ask yourself how the USA has changed since this



Is it better? Do immigrants (all of us nearly) make this a better place? Did your family have opportunity? What kind of social programs really exist here? Does education count? Maybe we should all just pay for the services we get benefit from! Or better still, just the services we approve of and really need.

Children do not need music in their lives.



We can eliminate art, too, because it is a frivolous endeavor. No life was ever enriched by art education.

Education should serve a purpose. That purpose should be determined by the market. Market needs slave labor. No need for education. There are enough managers for now and they can tell us when we need more bodies, more middle management, engineers, and...

See what I mean.