Vapors

Madamest Maximus Supremus:

Forgive my poor Latin. :)

The questions your discussion group asked are exactly the ones we need to ask ourselves—in many months and perhaps years of forging consensus.  Twice now we have attempted—understandably feeling an urgency because it is eating the country—to move forward without first airing all and achieving effective consensus (full consensus is probably not realistic).  And twice the effort has been sabotaged or diluted, diverted, or corrupted (although the 2700 page law does contain some beneficial and needed things that improve on the present situation, it also contains more than a fair amount of, shall we say, excessive benefit for major players in the sickness industry; our readers can decide for themselves whether that means the law is fatally flawed compared to the present situation.  Of course, maybe the Supremes will decide part or all of it for them).

Yes, some food/healthcare/education issues of children lay largely at the doorstep of ignorant, uncaring, obstinate, or selfish parents.  Yet sometimes those parents have limited and/or poor options.  Poverty and/or long hours at poor paying jobs are cycle-repetitive and daunting enough, but then sometimes parents do not even have access to good and healthy foods (it is more common in some areas to live near multiple terrible fast food places than it is to be near even a basic grocery store, let alone one with healthier foods).  And even when good foods can be found, they may not be affordable.  And where the magical combo of availability and affordability exists, the parent(s) has to find the preparation time while coordinating multiple schedules—a product of not only our overscheduled and frantic society, but also the fact that the society is a hyper-individualistic one, meaning that the nuclear family is largely on its own continually to do everything from child care to transportation to basic daily/weekly tasks the family requires to function.

Yet you are correct that we have transformed the country far too much into one centered on cars, fast food, and sedentary entertainment.  You don’t solve a whole lot if you swim upstream against that.  And if much of our food is either nutritionally near-bankrupt, or actually even makes us less intelligent and/or less able to reason, we are slaves, serfs, or cattle in far more ways than we might realize.

No one has ever advanced a convincing argument to me about why Congressional members are NOT required to be part of whatever laws, systems, etc. they pass.  There’s another Constitutional amendment sorely needed, but that would be one of the trickiest of all to get.

You (and Hedges) have brought up many good points about corporations.  We so desperately need a radically different set of rules and relationships about them, so that, if they go on existing in something like their present forms, they serve the society instead of us serving them.

The myths we put forward to exalt ourselves and divert us from our true internal adversaries trumpet an America that in many respects no longer exists—and yet, we in our illusory culture—either do not recognize or do not acknowledge, or if we do, we blame each other rather than the puppeteers.

Which loose thread to pull first and how much do we want to unravel?  I have no hesitancies in tossing answers into the ring, but am more interested in hearing Madame’s ideas first! :)

Addressing your second post (my Mem Day post put me behind, as you know), I do indeed hear those Don Henley lyrics. :)

The press/media is vaporizing as a check on power or a source for the people to keep their creatures—governments and corporations—under control and doing their bidding, rather than the other way around.  We in political science like to blather about the separation of powers—between the executive, legislative, and judicial at the national level, and further subdivided between the national and state and local governments (the transformation of all that is a can of worms discussion for perhaps another time).  Yet, as you say, we give short shrift to the Framer’s additional check—a vigorous and probing press.  With corporations and plutocrats increasingly controlling in some fashion all three national branches and much of the state and local governments, the steady evaporation of investigative media is yet another undermine to the foundations of the republic.

Hedges brings up one example of what not having a free and investigative press/media does (or does not) when discussing how much of what we spend on “health-care” really goes to administrative “costs” that hide the reams of money that corporations make: “(T)he reality of the health-care system is never discussed because corporations, which fund the main political parties, do not want it discussed.” (157)

An info-tainment media isn’t going to give us what we so very much need: “(I)n a sound-bite society, reality no longer matters.  NAFTA was great if you were a corporation.  It was a disaster if you were a worker.” (158)

While I have some disagreement with some of Hedges’ assertions about welfare reform, I do not doubt that society reached for a solution without thinking it through (we are infamous for doing that, repeatedly).  We swelled the already burgeoning prisons, for this and other reasons: “We have 2.3 million of our citizens behind bars, most of them for nonviolent drug offenses.  The United States, with less than 5 percent of the global population, has almost 25 percent of the world’s prisoners.” (158)  We blithely accept such a statistic, instead of looking at ourselves about how sick a society we must be, and also, who is profiting from all those people behind bars (there is a good book by Cornell West and Tavis Smiley that touches on this heavily)?

Democrats were no strangers to gutting financial regulation and speeding up the Wall Street casino, and many of those are in charge or in positions of influence today.  This, Hedges shows, demonstrates how we in reality have a corporate-state with 2 factions.   Yet we embrace illusion, thinking we will somehow make it when legions fall down the economic ladder around us, becoming in complete denial that you can’t have your American dream, as Robert N. Bellah says, if you live in a society that isn’t worth living in.

“The cost of our empire of illusion is not being paid by the corporate titans.  It is being paid on the streets of our inner cities, in former manufacturing towns, and in depressed rural enclaves.  The growing class divide is not understood, despite the glibness of many in the media, by complicated  sets of statistics….or on the absurd utopian faith in unregulated globalization and complicated trade deals.  It is understood in the eyes of a man or woman who is no longer making enough money to live with dignity and hope.” (158-159)  Swelling legions, Hedges says, that are impoverishing whole classes of people, but without us wanting to believe it, and with many having nowhere to go and nothing to realistic hope for.  There is always money—our taxpayer money or borrowed money—to bail out the criminals who run (ruin) things the way they want to make their obscene extortionist profits, but there is little to nothing "available" to help the man and woman of Main Street.

Worry not Madame.  30 pages of the book left, and I have much to comment on!  Shocked, I know! :)