The Rise and Fall of "Obvious Truths" Part Three

Culture War, Part Seven: The Rise and Fall of "Obvious Truths," Part 3

Reprise - "Obvious Truths" Parts One and Two

This is the third and final part in this series delineating the history of the American Republican' incredibly disciplined, relentlessly persistent, and amazingly cohesive...seemingly coordinated...nearly fifty-year campaign to gain advantage and wealth for their benefactor corporations and the “Filthy Rich” through totally concocted untruths.

All in the Family

We are seeing here revealed the fifty-year invisible family and community that surrounded all Americans and affected every aspect of their lives, including, and intentionally, the basic components of one's personality, and the erosion of reason, Soul, and independent thought or action.

Awakening. I am showing how only because of increasingly cocky and greedy acts and extreme over-reaching "in broad daylight," before the entire world, did this malevolent surround become visible. These brutish and thievish over-reaches displayed an incredible disregard for, disrespect of, indeed, an actual literal inability of the "Filthy Rich" and their Republican puppets to SEE American People, who were the recipients of these attacks. Together these reveals, displayed unintentionally however blatantly and unknowingly by the Republicans and the "Filthy Rich"... and before the entire world...disclosed to the masses of Americans some "cracks," "stains," or textures in the "dome" of unreality they'd existed in, which had made them blind to Reality itself, and had kept them in a near zombie-like dream reality.

"They're so cute when they jump for their treat." As this awakening continued, some began remembering events, the memories of which had been "bleached" out of awareness until just then, and then with remembering they realized how they'd been trained like animals their entire lives for the uses, whatever they'd be, of the "Filthy Rich," and been trained then to forget that.

"From here, they look just like ants." It is clear that the "filthy rich" had an absolute certainty of their success because of their unmitigated power. What is also evident is the absolute inability of the "Filthy Rich"...which was the shocking thing they'd carelessly let out and therefore displayed to the World…absolute inability of the Republicans and the "Filthy Rich" to actually notice, let alone view or act towards, Americans as any thing even living or having sentient ability, let alone as humans, people, or individuals.

All we have to do is dream. And as for the term "fellow Americans" often employed by Rich-publican politicos, if that thought even crossed your mind for a second as being anything but a device, you are not fully appreciating just how literally I mean for my words to be taken. You may very well, in fact, be deeply dreaming and have missed the crack in the dream state that had shone the light in the eyes of a sufficiently large segment of the world population as to cause them to come out of trance and begin to untie their formerly invisible bonds, so that they could try looking around, which led to the realization of the reality that had been blocked from view, and the beginnings of investigations into the real truths of their existence, and to this series of expositions, which delineates the actual, formerly invisible profile of the actual actors in American's lives, and the processes of control, and the things in their lives that were determined for them by the "Filthies," though ordinary folks thought they had been making decisions for themselves.

What They Would Have of Us

And the last aspects of this series delineates the real factors in your life and the outlines of the real intentions for our lives these puppet masters have had, and have even now in mind.

Making ready the field. In Part One, I talked about the fifty-year Republican campaign to convince the media and the American people of certain truisms that had nothing to do with the truth, in fact were almost one-hundred percent of the time, the opposite of the truth. It is a pretty amazing story of a campaign involving such things as getting people poorer and poorer, requiring them to work longer hours and so on so that they would have less time to think about things. It included other elements such as the way in which people’s minds were either stressed or made busy, and also the way they wore down the American people’s resolve to fight back against injustice.

Part Two elaborated on these parts of the campaign, which together resulted in an erosion of reason among Americans. I discussed how this erosion of reason resulted in an erosion of action as well and why this would be desirable by the societal puppet-masters. Next, I discussed the means of the manipulation--the media, the puppet strings employed by the masters.

The great hustle (Cool Hand Gipper). After that I talked about the way our lives were focused away from human concerns and reduced to the level of a game, contrived by the elite and which was geared toward their ends, suited to their abilities, and in which they dominated. This game was most of the time camouflaged in positive, civic sounding phrases and terminology that made it seem that it was an endeavor for the betterment of all, but I explained how it actually was played and what the motives and ends really were.

$$$ 666 The Great Religion

Last, I bring out how even this ruse of societal welfare was ever more let go of, as the puppet-kings gained in strength and in success in converting mass minds to a belief in the dogma of the game that they controlled.

Dogma keeping out pesky saviors. They channeled people's inclinations away from their own priorities and from human concerns to be in alignment with the overseer's non-humanistic, alien ones. Human concerns such as life, easing of suffering and the like were seen as silly and laughable.

As they gathered power, they became more blatant and reckless in their machinations. The game was successfully installed as the focus and preeminent value of life itself; but in this headiness of accomplishment they became complacent about their subterfuge. Reckless in their maneuvers and ever more careless in concealing it, they risked being exposed.

Nightmare apparent. Aspects of their self-benefiting game play and the cockiness with which they pursued them are further disclosed here in Part Three. We see how this creates a condition of such extreme suffering in the populace that stimulates them into awakening from the dream. The matrix is glimpsed. How the masses awaken and behold in horror the shackles and blinders upon them is described beginning here and in subsequent parts of Culture War.

Parts One and Two are intended to be read before this one, but if you haven't done so this review will gave you a platform from which to view what follows.

"Brother, I do not know thee." Part Three continues from the end of Part Two where I was describing how the brouhaha around Rich Santelli's callous comment revealed a wholesale and disturbing change in American's sensitivities toward each other and in particular a callousness about each other's suffering. Part Three starts after the audio player and links following this.

The Rise and Fall of "Obvious Truths," Part Three -

an Audio Reading by SillyMickel Adzema

The Rise and Fall of "Obvious Truths,' Part Three

Here is an audio of the author's impassioned reading of this part. Though it is of the first, unedited and unpolished version, and it does not contain all the detail of its current form below, it does capture the flavor of it all. I offer it here for your listening pleasure. For the reading of this part, "The Rise and Fall of 'Obvious Truths,' Part Three," click on the link to the audio site above or click the audio player here.

(Link) View more Presidential Race 2008 Sound Clips and American Presidents Sound Clips

The Great American About Face -

Foolin' the People About History



Obvious "Truths":

• Reagan "saved" America.
• Reagan saved Americans from an oppressive tax burden.
• Reagan brought down the Iron Curtain, the Soviets, Berlin Wall.
  
  
• In America we were far better off than the Soviets were because...
  
  
  • wealthier.
  • don't have to work as hard.
  • can take better care of our children.
  
  
  
• We are the richest country in the world.
• In America we only get better.

So these days you have the attitude, “A dollar laid is a dollar played”; people's suffering is irrelevant to the game.



Reagan's Great Ruse



We have seen a lot of change over the last five decades. And many new thoughts have become truisms that are actually not true. In the real world they’re nonsensical.



The Eighties changed everything...The great swindle. Unfortunately they abound because of the cultural change initiated by Reagan that lowered the standard of living for everyone except for the rich who were the beneficiaries of that switch. It was the greatest shift of money upward, to the higher classes, in history, at that time. Bush in the last decade outdid him though.

The Republicans pulled off this transfer of wealth under the banner of capitalism. The huge tax cuts for the seriously rich, which was how this relocation of money was accomplished, began with Reagan. When it was proposed during the 1980 presidential race Bush the Elder called it “voodoo economics.” This was before he was invited on the ticket with Reagan.

Voodoo economics gradually brought the highest marginal rate of taxes down to thirty-something percent from the sixty-some percent it had been when Reagan took office. This should be compared with the ninety-some percent it had reached in the Forties, the eighty-some it was during Eisenhower's presidency in the Fifties and the sixty-some during Kennedy's time. Reaganomics took corporate tax rates down to forty percent from the fifty percent that it had been previous to that beginning in the Forties.

Keep in mind that these were times--Forties through Sixties--when America's economy boomed, turning the US into the wealthiest country in the world. Remember also that the last time, previous to Reagan, that marginal tax rates were below forty percent was in the Twenties, prior to the Great Depression. Not coincidentally at that same time, preceding the Depression, corporate tax rates were also at their lowest and were down in the teens. History records how well those low corporate and private marginal rates worked out. This did not stop the Reaganites from opting to repeat the previous debacle.

The Face of the Enemy, Ours







Overall, this bonanza for the rich--along with union-busting and other anti-worker practices by Reagan--had the effect of gradually lowering the standard of living for the vast majority of Americans. The result could not have been more ironic. These pro-capitalist, fervid anti-communist Republicans like Reagan and his supporters began the process that would make us mirror images of Soviet Russia in several hugely important ways.



At one time, "Women don't have to work"; at another, "Women are free to work." Reaganomics brought in the two-salary family. This had been one of those major propaganda points for the anti-communists in the Fifties: We were horrified finding out that behind the Iron Curtain both parents had to have jobs to support their family. It was thrown out as one of the ways we were superior in our capitalist way of life--American wives and mothers did not have to work and were able to spend their time instead raising the children.



The anti-communist Reaganites also brought in institutional child care, for now this was needed because both parents were working. Someone had to take care of the children, and they would begin that at earlier and earlier ages.



At one time, "Strangers take care of their kids"; at another, "Child care teaches social skills and enhances multicultural awareness."Again, extramural child care was one of those elements of Soviet life that in the Fifties was pointed out to us disdainfully and which we were grateful not to be subject to. It would be thought inhuman, if not barbaric, for children to be cared for by strangers, while the mother was working. There was something dangerous, if not lascivious, insinuated to us by propagandists, about pre-school children not being with their mothers, not receiving her protection and love during that vulnerable and needy time, but being instead “in the hands of strangers”…(god forbid!)



But after Reagan this dreaded feature of Soviet culture became the norm in American culture as well.



So Reagan’s economic policies pushed Americans into a lower standard of living—fooling them in all kinds of ways that this was not the case—which was evident in major changes in American culture which mirrored that of the Soviets such as the virtual requirement of two-salary families and along with that the necessity of child care outside the family at earlier and earlier years. But these Soviet-like changes did not also bring with them Communist benefits of job security, free child and medical care, guaranteed lifelong support, and so on.

Better Off Than Fifty Years Ago?

Foolin' the People About America

Obvious "Truths":

• Americans are innovators and problem-solvers.
• There's nothing Americans can't do, no problem we can't solve, once we put our minds to it.
• Things just keep getting better in America
• Republicans are for small business.

So unfortunately for many people, with prices on health care and pharmaceuticals going through the roof along with the sudden unexpected increases of other necessities of life, you had that lowered standard of living. You had a population that was poorer, in relative terms, and got increasingly poorer.



Over time, over the course of my lifetime, though we might ostensibly have appeared to prosper we did not. The apparent rise in standard of living was a result of the glut of new consumer items produced in an increasingly technological and complex culture. You might be able to afford plenty of cheap trinkets and toys, but for things that pertained to your well-being and quality of life, such as health and medical care, good schools, wholesome food, higher educational opportunities, a clean environment, recreational opportunities, fuel and energy, leisure, family, and quality time, and so on we were ever more wanting.



Peaking in the Sixties



In retrospect I can see we prospered in the Fifties and Sixties. The records show that Americans achieved a peak of affluence in the Sixties and that since then, and rapidly accelerating since the Eighties, we have been on a downward slide.



Poor mothers could afford to stay home and take care of the kids. I can see the ways we, living in the Fifties and Sixties, were as a culture fairly well off, though personally my circumstances were anything but that. My father made only fifty dollars a week for a time. But my mother never had to go to work. She actually did get a part-time job much later in life for the enjoyment of it. Can anyone today imagine that?







What's health insurance? My family didn’t have any health insurance, had never even heard of it. We were not well off, but we like most people could afford to go to the doctor. And similar to others we could even normally pay hospital bills, for maternity and so on. If anything very serious developed that required more money no one ever imagined that they would be turned away at a hospital. The Mercy Hospital in my city, run by a religious order of Catholic nuns and funded by contributions, was a place one could always go regardless of one’s means. Sounds unbelievably quaint, doesn’t it? I know. I myself can hardly fathom the discrepancy with now.



Starving for Prosperity



"Have some more, there's plenty!" And we never starved. The dinner refrain was “Have some more, there’s plenty.” Though we were fairly poor by the standards of that time, I never, ever, ever imagined there being a lack of or limitation on food. There were big restrictions on sweet treats and goodies, but not on wholesome food. So it shocks me to see how much more concerned parents are today about how much their children will eat, as well as how precisely they mete out their gustatory offerings when entertaining.



"You're not leaving this table till you've eaten all your...ketchup." When not long ago I worked in a group home for troubled boys I was shocked and distressed to see the controversies over the food portions given and the restrictions on when they could eat. This was a government-funded group home and had to abide by all kinds of minimal standards in nutrition. Still, ever since Reagan determined that ketchup qualified as a vegetable serving, I have noticed this public stinginess about food.



Where I worked, sugared-water drinks qualified as juice, and peanut butter consumption was limited to a thin layer like that of butter that’s spread on bread. Cheap sugar this and thats and nutrient-low, colon-clogging baked goods, noodle dishes, and pizza were the at-hand substitutes for wholesome, more substantial offerings. The resulting blood-sugar swings and erratic, aggressive behavior were handled with drugs and listed within their case histories.



"Please, sir, some more?" There was much more like this but suffice it to say that I could hardly believe the happenings in this Oliver Twist world. My heart went out to those young boys who in this once wealthy land and still surrounded by plenty in this post-millennial, rich suburban California stood near the kitchen with plate in hand, their eyes pleading if they might “please have some more.”







This miserliness about food seems a prevalent thing throughout the culture as it is evident in school lunch programs also. Whereas at the grammar and secondary schools I attended while growing up I enjoyed complete wholesome meals on a par with and sometimes surpassing the enjoyable repasts at home and even seconds were allowed, what is considered a decent school lunch today is shocking. Corporations have taken over as suppliers. Can you believe we had a Joe the Cook in grade school who concocted home-style offerings, which was ladled out by those of our mothers, including my own, who had volunteered?



The beloved school cook--Pepsico. Today the school meals are akin to that in fast food restaurants and just as monotonous…pizza, chicken nuggets, spaghetti, greasy burgers, hot dogs, fries. They are not “cooked.” From what I understand, they are taken from freezers, popped in microwaves, and dealt out to pupils like one would cards. The epidemics of obesity and diabetes in our country attest to how much worse is the nutrition for young folks today.



Your payment or your life. What else is different now? Well, there’s people who can’t pay for health care… can’t get health care? …. Now that’s something new for me too. Can’t get health care. Wow. You mean you’re sick, you’re gonna die, but you can’t get help in the medical system? Unbelievable. That used to be unheard of.







So what happened to our country? We were supposed to be a country that valued human life, for example, but is now valuing contract law over that. So the word has become more important than the person, and better that people sleep in the gutters or lie out in the park than to lend them a hand. And god forbid when you have children, that one of them get sick, someone have an accident, or someone get killed….









The Compassion Gap



Goddamn it. Y’know, here you’ve got Rick Santelli saying, well they must have put in a kitchen or else they wouldn’t have gotten foreclosed on. Where does he get that? That’s not a fact. That’s a made up thing, just to get people angry.



And that’s the game. A game that’s not founded on any facts, only played to be won, and it’s won by making the best argument to arouse the most passions, the most negative passions in people, and to find scapegoats.



Stop war? Don't be silly. And this is the kind of thing that was brought up year after year over the decades to the point where it became that the things that I heard being valued growing up were laughable: compassion, if you were caring about people, or not wanting people to die.



Say, there was a war or something and there was agony over the loss of life. And all these people would gather together out of their concern. I’m sure you’ve heard about it. People anguished and horrified by other people’s sufferings…reaching out to help them, help each other, comfort each other, pray together…hope…weep.







Oh my Lord, kumbaya. Yea, a great big kumbaya moment! Wow. And I’m sure that’s what you heard, too. So I get it. Ok, so you shouldn’t have any feelings toward your fellow suffering brother or sister. Is it, what, silly? Uncool? Weak? Wussy? Sappy? What?



What is it you’re trying to prove to others with that?



What is it you’re hiding about yourself?



… What would Jesus have said to that…



It seems more than the standard of living was lowered since those days. And I’m sure they are in many ways connected…. I’ll get into that later.



Health Not-care



Getting back to the change in the physical standard of living that Reagan wrought, though, let’s take for example the increase in health care costs. This is one of the necessities of life, and it’s been climbing out of reach, putting a burden on people, ok?  … …



Humbug for the poor. As I explained in Part Two, Nixon addressed that problem in the Seventies. He was supposedly  helping out the people, the poor…. Uh. But, no, he would never say that. He would never say he wanted to help the poor! Previous to him, in Johnson’s time…The Great Society and all that, yes. That was surely a time when you would hear talk like that. But by the time of Nixon…. So, I guess that’s when it started happening.







You couldn’t say you were actually going to help out the poor anymore. Because the truism, which I’m sure you all agree with, whether you admit it to yourself or not,  is that the poor people deserve to be punished because obviously they’re lazy. Think about that, isn’t that the same stuff they were saying about blacks?  …



Democratizing the hate. So isn’t it kind of like that racism has become classism. It’s kind of like a hatred that’s not been eliminated because they’re still saying that  about blacks, but it’s been expanded. It includes more people–whites and blacks…and all other kinds of colors. All the poor, they’re all now lazy, deserving what they get.



The middle class--the last bastion of who you can give a damn about. So instead what you hear today is like the “middle class”! Well, supposedly the middle class are ok people. They’re not deadbeats; they didn’t put in that kitchen they can’t afford… Actually they’re the ones who are owning homes so some of them actually are the ones getting those new kitchens.







Nixon cared about health...healthy profits. So Nixon’s answer to health care, to help the middle class, he started the move toward HMOs. And remember how it came about. There were actual White House tapes, an actual taped phone conversation of it. You hear Nixon talking to Ehrlichmann. And they are discussing the matter, health care. Nixon is told that Kaiser, and this is the guy who started Kaiser Permanente, one of the top HMOs. He is told that Edgar Kaiser is proposing a “for profit” system of health care. Now here we have people who can’t afford health care and now you want to have a system that’s going to add to the costs of it. How’s that you say?







Some people just wanting to get sick again and again! You say HMOs lower health care costs by reducing overhead? Maybe, but to all necessary costs that are already there, HMOs add the cost of profits to go to the owners of that health care system. Ok? Also, Kaiser pointed out it would discourage “overuse” of medical treatment. Wow! So, here we go again.



So now we see that people who need medical treatment are just like those deadbeats, they’re like poor people, they’re overusing medical care. My god! They’re getting sick too much. And if you had a for-profit system, well, they could deny people coverage. And they could deny people medical treatment, no doubt, because they would naturally want to increase their profits.







GOP-think. GOP, think! GOP...think? So guess what? So, Nixon replied, “Well, now that I like.” This is a true story. So this is a look into how Republicans think.



Well not long afterwards, maybe a few days, or a few weeks, Nixon gives a speech to present his sweeping new health care proposal. What does he say?



Remember, there is this obvious disdain for certain groups of people who might be getting too much health care. On the other hand, Nixon is wanting to see that certain other groups of people will make out big time from profits that will be involved.

But his speech doesn’t go like that. Nixon is recorded giving a speech, proposing a big solution, purportedly to answer the problem of the rising health care costs that are beginning to be felt at that time. He will emphasize that his proposal would be a great benefit to the middle class.



Make it to the middle base and you score. Keep in mind as I was saying in Part Two, there was a time in which influential groups would consider they “had a home run” when they could make a case that their proposal was going to benefit the American people. But by this point, because of the culture war and mean-spiritedness being stirred up in the country by Republicans, it had become necessary to single out the middle class as the only ones receiving the benefit, because, y’know, poor people…they’re not Americans.







Thanks for the health care savings, Dick. So Nixon says he is going to lower health care costs. Well, you can see how right he was about that. Just look at Michael Moore’s movie on American’s health care system if you can handle knowing how bad it got. The documentary, “Sicko,” lays out in brutal detail how devastating it was to inject the profit motive into health care.



"I was a hit-person for the HMO." There is one especially disturbing example of this. A former employee of a huge HMO testified before Congress. Crying and tearful she related how she received a million dollar bonus for having denied health care to someone who had insurance with her company. This person was a member of their health care system, but she denied the costly medical care that would have saved this person’s life. Simply put, it would have cost the HMO a chunk of money to save this life.







So this female employee denied the procedures, saved the HMO money, and that person died. So she killed somebody and got like a million dollars for it. She’s kind of like a hit person, y’know?



[ML: Saving money on costly care means there would be more help for others.]







Pay us now. We'll think about covering you later. No. That’s not the rationale. That’s another part of it. They can deny health care on any basis. They can deny it on any basis but they went out and they found more ways to make even greater profits. If you were going to cost them a lot of money, if what you needed to live was medical treatment that they might consider too expensive, well what they would sometimes do is hire people to look into you. These people would be paid to research your background, to see if they could find something that could be used as an excuse to deny your costly procedures to you.







Michael Moore records in his documentary at least one such researcher who explains, with remorse, what he had been paid to do and how he would go about it. He, and people like him, would pore over your records to look for something, even slight, that they could hang a denial of coverage on. They would in particular look into your childhood for any care that they could say indicated the presence of a medical condition for you at that time.  When they found something, they would be able to say that you had a pre-existing condition and so they were not liable for your care now. They would claim that you lied on your application in not listing such an ongoing ailment so that they could can drop you from coverage and let you die. So people were being left to die, killed in this manner.



Did you, at any point in the past, pre-exist this application? Buuut it’s contract law! …dollar laid, dollar played, y’know. And it’s contract law that is stretched to benefit the people with the most money and who have the better lawyers and who can, y’know, twist things better in their favor. Here you have a situation, where, let’s say, somebody is dying and they’re dying of emphysema. I don’t know enough about medicine to know if that would be the kind of thing that could entail very costly care, but let’s just say it did. So this person very ill with emphysema might be informed that it had been discovered, let’s say, that they had a bronchial condition as a child…maybe to them, they were prone to get colds. But they would make the determination that your frequent colds shows a preexisting condition for you. Now you tell me how a person who is dying is going to be able to fight that.



Over your dead body getting paid. We’ve all heard Obama’s story about his mother and what she had to go through prior to her death.  She spent the last months of her life arguing with the medical insurers over the bills. She was being told they didn’t have to cover her.



One-stop larceny. Getting back to Nixon, at the time of his health care proposal he said huge managed care systems, which he touted as being one-stop medical systems, were going to lower health care costs. This was so, he claimed, because cost sharing and lower overhead would rein in the price of providing medical care. He said these lower expenses would benefit the whole system.







Apparently he forgot to mention the for-profit part, which ended up funneling all those benefits, those lower expenses, into the pockets of the owners and shareholders. That is what happens when you put profit-hungry businessmen in charge of care. Gradually, America’s medical needs were primarily the purview of business, big business.







You mean you care...and you're not paid to?? (oh, kumbaya.) Previous to that much of what was involved in caring for the sick had been attended to by religious and charitable organizations. These concerned social institutions might be dedicated to idealistic or religious principles, for example, which included compassion and caring for the sick as one of their values or one of their religious ideals. So, much of health care had been in the hands of charitable entities and people dedicated to the idea of service, caring for the sick, getting them well, caring for your fellow person, your fellow man or woman, and so on; naturally the type of care you received was infused with such ideals.



With Nixon all that changed. And Nixon loved it.



The Monopoly game again. So then also, these businessmen with their HMOs are having near monopolies; they’re the only HMO providing health care in many areas. The only alternative is privately paid physicians. And these medical providers have costs that have have gone up because of their reduced client base, their patients having been siphoned off by the HMO.







"Buy one appendectomy, get a second one for a dollar!" So private care physicians have the same overhead, and now they’ve got less clientele. In addition to that, now with their making less money and having higher costs, they also have extra costs, of competition, advertising for the first time.



"I need to take two aspirin...I'll call you in the morning." But that’s only one of the many costs that occur in a situation where you have a small market, with the same number of providers. You have a scrambling with other private small medical practitioners over a smaller pile, which increases not only the competitive costs involved in having to put oneself out there to win clients from competitors and thus further increases the cost of private care, it also increased pressures and tensions on private physicians who now are required to have two jobs. They have to be medical provider and business person. They have to work longer hours because of this too.



Of course you can imagine what a boon this was for medical care in our country. Now you not only have to pay more for private care but also compared to not so long ago it is being increasingly performed by angry, stressed,  tense, overworked, underslept professionals. Well what happens when you’ve got those kind of people providing you medical care on the private side?



So, on the one side--the mega-care side, you have them denying you medical care even if you’ve paid. You’ve got them denying you coverage if you have anything wrong, or if you’ve ever had anything in your life and you admit it. You either don’t get covered at all, or you may have paid premiums for years but when you get sick you don’t get treated so you die.



"Take two aspirin and call me after tax time." On the other hand, you can pay the higher costs for private care out of your pocket. And these people are overworked, spending much of their time trying to drum up business and trying to take care of all the increasing paperwork of a competitive business enterprise and that of an ever increasing number of payers. So they’re making more mistakes. And more mistakes equal what? More mistakes in medicine means more people dying, by mistake, or having the wrong procedure done, or having the wrong limb removed. The extra stress will push some physicians to "operate under the influence" of alcohol or the readily available prescription mood drugs glutting the market.



You get the idea that things may have been getting worse over the years in a lot of areas?



So with all the extra pressure on medical practitioners, we begin to hear more and more about malpractice. So, another cost is introduced. And medical malpractice insurance for physicians  has ever increasing premiums. This adds even more to the price of private care.



The kind of care that increases suffering. So you can see that the suffering of the masses, in both health care systems, is going up. As for the doctors themselves, well now they’re either out of business because they made a mistake or they're keeping up with the competition and trying to make a living. But now they have these huge malpractice insurance payments. This is a cost HMOs can easily absorb, but for private physicians, it adds even more to their costs of business, their need to increase their fees, their loss of patients, their financial stress. So what happens? They’re forced out of their professions. Or, they're minds are filled up with financial considerations and they are burdened with concerns...and now they're gonna treat you!



Making It So You Need a Car to Do Anything



Well, I’ve been around long enough, I saw this before. It’s a pattern you keep seeing over and over again in America. And it’s changed America.







Back in the time of neighborhoods. There was a time when there were no supermarkets in America. I remember that time. You used to be able to walk up to the corner, walk down the street, and you’d see bakeries, drug stores. There were penny candy stores, there were meat markets…. There was a wonderful ambiance of community about it…it was a garden of delights…people smiling and everything.
Drive to the store, get a loaf of bread.  And now they have these huge mega supermarkets. And I saw the way it slowly changed; it didn’t happen overnight.
On the side of the mom-and-pop Safeway.  Those supermarkets--run by hourly wage workers--could beat mom-and-pop prices. Gradually over the years we don’t have meat markets, bakery stores….
And Republicans say they are for the small businesses, the backbone of the middle class. Well, this is an example of just what a lie that is because, no, supermarkets are not small businesses. It’s all those meat markets, bakery stores and all that--those are the small businesses, they are the mom and pop, those are the average Americans trying to be self employed. Self-employment is not huge corporations.

Money Madness -

Foolin' the People About Money

Obvious "Truths":

• Tax the wealthy, you're taxing me.
• Democrats tax and spend, they bust the budget, balloon the National Debt.
• Republicans are fiscally responsible, fiscally conservative; they balance budgets and are careful about the National Debt.
• Rich people create the jobs.
• The wealthy are society's creative sector.
• That "class warfare" stuff "just doesn't work."

Obvious "Truth" - Tax the Wealthy, You're Taxing Me  But when you hear the same things again and again, even black-and-white facts can be put up for dispute. For example, during the 2008 presidential race and prior to Obama's first budget the Democrats' tax proposal was explained as a tax cut for the middle class and no increase on any Americans making less than two hundred thousand a year. This was a black-and-white fact, part of the public record, not in dispute. But how did the Republicans explain it?

That's a small business?  I certainly heard it, over and over again; I bet you did too. Republicans were saying the tax proposal was going to affect small businesses. So we have small businesses that are making over two hundred thousand a year in pure profit? And that’s a small business? That’s a small business? I think if you’re making, after all your deductions and everything and you’re still making two hundred grand, I think that you’re not a small business, I think you can afford extra taxes, but that’s what we are told.
We're all rich. Somehow I missed that memo.  So apparently we got a group of people who think that people are really rich. The assumption is that most Americans are rolling in dough so that any tax increase on the wealthy is an attack on all Americans.
So, you can’t tax that sliver of the very, very wealthy a little bit more so that the majority of Americans might benefit. Benefiting the majority of Americans used to be how you got to "home base." But now, it's like, “No, you can’t tax Americans; we are Taxed Enough Already!"
The Democrats' want to take your money.  The way this "obvious truth" is phrased now...no way to get around it, it's a flat out lie...goes, “You can’t tax the very rich, cause that’s…” and they’ll just say it right out, “that’s gonna affect all Americans, that’s taxing everybody.”
Well how did it get to that conclusion when actually it’s going to lower taxes. And they were saying it over and over again, “No, we don’t even need to know what the plan is; we just know he’s a Democrat and that he’s going to raise taxes," they would say of Obama...or for that matter of any Democrat at any time in recent history.
Now, how did that become true? Well because…he’s a Democrat and well haven’t you ever heard the term tax and spend Democrats? And there we go again.

Obvious "Truth" - Fiscally Responsible Republicans

Pointing some fingers already.  Alright, let’s go back. Pre-Roosevelt turn of the century initiatives so common and familiar now, such as the Food and Drug Administration, are the kinds of things Democrats brought in that added to government. Yet, Republicans spout misinformation; they get people angry about "evils" of such "big government."
Misplaced credit. The Democrats are the ones who brought in the FDA, worker's rights, workman's compensation. They’re the ones who put in Medicare. They’re the ones who put in Social Security.
Misplaced blame.  And we remember the Republicans are the ones who created the Great Depression, created poverty for everybody at that time. They're the ones who did it again with Bush, who tripled and nearly quadrupled the National Debt under the twelve years of Reagan-Bush, then more than doubled it under George W. That’s a lot of goddamn money.
That's a lot of money.  And then the Republicans were giving away seven hundred billion dollars to rich people who afterward were giddy in their ingratitude. This giveaway, keep in mind, came at the end of Bush’s terms. And you would hear CEOs bragging how they’re not going to spend any of that on people; they're not going to use any of that money to loaning any of it out, which was supposed to be the purpose.
And even afterward, all Congressmen were agreeing that’s a huge amount of money, which at the time was the biggest amount of money being spent at one time, in such a short period of time on anything. And how could we forget that they just took the money and did whatever they wanted with it? They paid off debts to other rich friends; they went overseas and invested in other countries.
Chase didn't use the money for what it was intended for.  Goldman Sachs used sixteen billion of what it received to pay off an outstanding debt to a German bank. The head of Chase bank is known to have said he wasn’t going to use the money to increase credit. In fact, he said he was going to keep that money and he was basically going to feather his nest with it and keep Chase solvent so that when other banks went under he  could buy them up with it. That’s the money of the taxpayers he's playing "Monopoly" with, mind you.
Obvious "Truths" - Tax and Spend Democrats 
But stacked up against the facts we have this idea of tax and spend Democrats. It's been repeated, going back many decades. It basically goes back to Roosevelt who ended the Depression and benefited virtually all Americans. And now that’s somehow a bad thing, brought up to get you mad about the tax and spend Democrat. And they’ve got all Americans convinced that if you vote for a Democrat, they’re going to take your money, they’re going to tax it, and they’re going to spend it on somebody else. Well, that has nothing to do with the truth.

Social Security, Medicare, and surpluses, oh my!  It has nothing to do with the truth. Certainly Roosevelt benefited all Americans with Social Security and so on; certainly Medicare, brought in under Lyndon Johnson benefited the vast majority of Americans. All these things the Democrats did. And Clinton raised taxes on the very rich a few percentage points and balanced the budget. Clinton created jobs and prosperity, balanced the budget, reduced the National Debt, and created a surplus that could have gone into creating a better America for all Americans. But, no, that was considered bad, because they said it hurt all Americans when the extremely wealthy had to give a little more in taxes.

The fun times anticipating the surplus.  Never mind the facts, never mind that fact that we had a surplus that we were talking gleefully about how we were going to spend it. If you can remember, we were discussing investing in better roads and infrastructure that would have benefited even the businesses.

Stealing home.  But no, it wasn’t about the truth anymore, it was about how you made it to home base, how you got money for yourself. And it didn’t matter anymore if you just skipped all the bases, and you started at home and went to home...if you just took the money. I mean, after a while the Republicans could just do that; tax breaks for the wealthy just because they were wealthy. Because, after a while, after all those years of repeating it: They could get away with, If you tax the wealthy you’re taxing all Americans. Wow.

Obvious "Truth" - Rich People Create the Jobs. 

The wealthy are the job creators; they're society's creative sector.  Yes, I have actually heard it said this way; a good chance you have too. Here’s how it works: Raising taxes on the wealthiest is gonna hurt all Americans because by taxing that sliver of the upper two percent of Americans, you are inhibiting the creative sector's ability to create jobs. Rich folks are society's wealth creators. The wealthy are the creative people in our country.
They're creative all right.  They’re the creative people, huh? Yea, they’re creative in stealing from us. They're creative in fattening their wallets at our expense. They’re creative in getting people elected who are liars and things like that.
That’s not the kind of creativity I’d like to have. As far as creating jobs. Who creates jobs?
Excess wealth given to the rich created high art prices, not high employment.  Here’s the facts. You know all that money that was given to the rich people? All those tax incentives given to the rich people by Reagan? Well, It didn’t create jobs so much as it created a lot of excess wealth that went into, well, people were buying yachts, and they were investing in art objects that were being bid through the roof.
The wealthy were scrambling; they had so much money they were fighting over art objects. And the art objects—paintings and so on, famous paintings--were making headlines in being sold for so much. During the Eighties under Reagan it was common to hear of a hundred million dollars for such and such...two hundred million, three hundred million. And because what? Because they had so much freakin money. Now you tell me how many jobs money tied up in art objects created?
The rich will squander or sit on extra money. I mean it isn’t rocket science. It’s very simple… simple psychology. This has to do with facts: You give money to rich people who don’t need it, they’re the ones who are going to squander it; they’re the ones who are going to spend it frivolously, or not going to spend it just let it sit. They’re not going to benefit society with it; they’re not going to multiply it; they’re not going to invest.
The poor will sweat over and multiply money, what they can.  You give a fraction of that to a poor person, a tiny amount of that to a poor or moderate income person and what will they do? You have any idea how somebody who is poor will make a little bit of money go a long long way?
I saw my father do it. He is the same person making the meager fifty dollars a week at one point. And he wasn’t making much more, but he eventually got a truck driving contract. He was able to own several trucks and to hire several workers.
So, why did he do that? Because he didn’t have a lot of money. And by taking those chances and becoming a businessperson, taking that little bit of money he had, he created jobs for a few other people. Because he was motivated, he was desperate. And for him it was all about a chance to raise himself out of being poor. He spent his life scanning for such opportunities till he finally came across one.
Billionaires are not highly motivated to become millionaires.  So you have people who would take any money coming their way to better their situation in life, the real American way. They would really love to be millionaires; they would risk their very lives for that. They would work their asses off. But those folks aren’t the people who are already billionaires.
But nobody will point it out.  So you’ve got these inanities thrown out there. They’re being said over and over again..."Rich people create the jobs; they're society's creative sector." These obvious untruths are not being countered by journalists and pundits. There is really no one pointing out that anything is a lie, there’s nobody saying out loud that these self-serving pronouncements are untrue, or that what is being said is vastly different from the facts.

 

Foolish People -
Foolin' the People About "Us" (the rich)

Obvious "Truths":

• Things you hear a lot are true.
• Simple "truths" are real truths.
• Democrats think they're better than everybody; they're snobs, elitists.
• Unlike Republicans who are regular people just like me, folks I could sit and have a beer with...they'd understand me.
• A rising (economic) tide lifts all boats.
• The "Me Generation" is those young folks from the Sixties. 

Continue with

Culture War, Part Seven: The Rise and Fall of "Obvious Truths" Part 3