Professor J,
I'm not really sure my ranting is something you want to encourage. ;)
Yesterday
I had coffee with a group of friends, and the subject of healthcare
came up. In our small group of well informed women, it got a little
heated as can sometimes happen when people are discussing things they
are passionate about and speaking from a place of deep conviction. The
questions in our little microcosm of opinion that were most difficult to
answer were ones about finding common ground that have been in the
media spotlight of late.
What do we want to provide?
Who is going to control it? How are we going to pay for it? Aren't we
already paying for it in other ways? Wouldn't the new plan save
millions? How are we going to prevent fraud? Isn't it just going to be
another wasteful bureaucracy? How are we going to give everyone what
they want without violating anyone else's conscience? Can we get any
meaningful change without doing something about lobbyists, the revolving
door between the public and private sector, and campaign donations by
corporations? And of course, my personal fave and one of the toughest
things to deal with (and that you alluded to last time)--How are we going
to fund healthcare for a nation of obese, sickly, self poisoning
consumers? The flip side of which is do we want the government telling
us what to eat? And if alcohol and tobacco are any indication then the
carrot/stick method doesn't work as well as we would hope.
You
can't discuss food and healthcare without discussing parenting. And
education. If the seven, ten, or fourteen year old is obese, whose fault
is that? There is a parent supplying them with bad food and allowing
them to sit around in the house far too much. I can assure you that that
parent is setting a bad example as well. You only have to look around
at families at a park or grocery store to see that these things are
household problems. Who is going to regulate parenting? We have built a
country around cars, fast food, and sedentary entertainment. We have
designed cities for cars not people. We allowed advertisers to sell us
(happily, I might add) food that keeps us sick and (according to new research at UCLA) stupid.
One of the things that we agreed on at our noisy table
was that if Congress had to participate in the system they create, it
would be vastly improved. That idea seems to be popular as a solution
for quite a few things.
In this last chapter Hedges moves
quickly from the military industrial complex, to healthcare, breezes
past NAFTA, welfare reform, and the disappearing middle class. His
underlying focus is on the powerful corporations and how much power they
wield in the new social and political landscape:
"There
are few aspects of life left that have not been taken over by
corporations from mail delivery to public utilities to our for-profit
health-care system. These corporations have no loyalty to the country or
workers. Our impoverishment feeds their profits. And profits, for corporations, are all that count."
(162)
"A corporation that attempts to engage in social responsibility, that tries to pay workers a decent wage with benefit, that protects workers' rights, that invests its profits to limit pollution, that gives consumers better deals, can actually be sued by shareholders." (163)
"Power lies with the corporations. These corporations, not we, pick who runs for president, Congress, judgeships, and most state legislatures. You cannot, in most instances, be a viable candidate without their blessing and money." (167)
On p. 68 he returns to the illusion concept: "We are fed illusions. We are given comforting myths--the core of popular culture--that exalt our nation and ourselves, even though ours is a time of collapse, and moral and political squalor."
The problems are (as we have repeated numerous times, now) knitted tightly together. The question is which loose thread to pull on first and how much do we want to unravel?
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