On Friday, I blogged
that my day started a little differently — veering toward a place of peace. I tried
to stay away from politics until late in the day. Then, a thread on Facebook
became active. I thought the comment I posted to the thread
was more peaceful and neutral than an advocacy position I would normally hold.
Then, a former employee of the Amarillo Globe-News chimed in
and did exactly what I said was unproductive. He claimed I was strategizing on
how to hurt Americans and blame it on the Republicans. You can read the comment
at the end of the thread.
My main point yesterday was this, “This government shutdown is a battle for the hearts and minds of
Americans. It is a crude attempt to get at this question: What should be the
role of the federal government in American lives?”
The rise of the Tea Party since 2008 has triggered this
crude battle in our country. It seems the Tea Party activists and libertarians
want government’s role to be so minimal as to almost destroy government itself.
The role of the government would reflect in the starkest possible terms the
invisible hand of an amoral free market, even if the very structure of a market
segment doesn’t accommodate the free market-capitalist paradigm. If one looks
carefully at the right wing conservative positions on what should and shouldn’t
be part of the federal government’s role, the positions amount to two major
directions: Remove government from regulating large corporate interests; and,
continue to feed the military-industrial complex, which would flow money back through
the corporate ruling structure.
Even in his latest essay, the esteemed Bill Moyers in his Friday
musings,
missed somewhat the overarching role of the corporatist takeover of the United States government.
Moyers didn’t totally miss the point. He recognized that one of the goals of
the Koch-inspired (if not led and financed) Tea Party is to destroy the Environmental
Protection Agency. It’s no wonder that the right-winger conservatives, who perseverate
the inability to think critically, overlook that their populist view of the Tea
Party movement is sadly misplaced. How ironic.
And the evidence to buttress my position about the lack of
critical thinking and intellectual dishonesty, the trigger for the Republican-led
shutdown is the futile attempt to kill off the Affordable Care Act (who can
honestly dispute that as the proximate cause of the shutdown?). While much of
the resistance to the act is based on disinformation (or should I say outright
lies?), the final version of the law has something for every big-money corporate
health care interest. The pharmaceutical industry won price protection. The
medical equipment industry (and the hospitals and hospital administrators with edifice
complexes) on a national level continue spend capital dollars even if the new
toys and buildings are not needed. And the biggest winner, the insurance lobby,
gets to be the conduit for coverage even when the more efficient Medicare
system could be the more efficient system for insuring Americans.
I can’t gainsay what another Facebook poster noted, although
he seems to have pulled his posts since making the statement that both parties
are complicit. And so are the voters. I’ve long and often said we get the government
we deserve.
Still, what is more important to me at this point is seeing the
big picture. Being mentally anchored in the Texas Panhandle gives a skewed view
of that picture. The view of the role of government in this reddest and more religiously
conservative part of red-state America
is far different than other parts of our vast nation. I won’t condemn people
for having and adhering to their beliefs, but I will condemn them for not
recognizing others have different beliefs. And more, I condemn the Republican-Tea
Party politicians for their slanted view leading to this shutdown.
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