Perverse, Savage, and Lunatic

Of course we have budget problems!
Better than half of all discretionary spending is for military purposes.
Our health care costs are the highest in the world,
although the extent of our care is not. Too many have no care.
We insist that insurance companies should skim from health care dollars,
when we ought to have a single-payer, non-profit system.

Social Security more than pays its own way. It always has.
We steal Social Security money for general budget use.

We are just now climbing out of a huge recession
brought on by chicanery and greed and lawlessness.

Now our income is less than our expenditures.

Forget, for the moment, that in a time like this we ought
to go into debt to put the country back on its feet. If we don't,
the recession will drag on for decades. Cutting back
on public spending right now will only make everything worse.

So what do our politicians do?

They refuse to admit our militarism. For years, under Bush,
they didn't even include military spending in their budget figures.
That was pure charlatinism! Pretend it isn't there!

They refuse to really fix our health care delivery system,
but arrange things so insurance companies, who don't give
a diddly-damn about health care, get paid to administer and limit it.

So what do our politicians do?

They refuse to talk about raising taxes on the people
who really have the money: those at the top. In fact,
they cut taxes on the wealthiest every chance they get,
and thus make the budgetary problem even worse!

To save money, they propose to cut Social Security,
cut health care for the poor and disabled, to cut back
on education (which is our economic lifeline), and
sell the black walnut trees in the city park.

They make things even better for the wealthiest,
and even worse for the people at the bottom.

That is perverse! It is savagery! It is lunacy!

Comments

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. Even when all they wanted to do w

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer. We do have an answer. We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there

SmokeSound

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