The VA and Government

We always have known.  Of course we have.

Jon Stewart, a comedian and political satirist,  has attacked several administrations for their pathetic progress in reforming the Veterans Administration health care mess.

I still remember the movie "Born on the Fourth of July", showing a  VA Hospital, ill serving Vietnam veterans, in a cesspool of poor care and despair.

It wasn't bad enough that the young men who pulled the short straw and got sent to Vietnam were accused of losing an unjust war, when they were wounded the care was too often  inadequate and  pitiful.

And today, we learn they are still getting the short end  of the stick, enduring months of wait time to see a physician if they make the mistake of using the VA health care.

Of course, Vietnam Vets now also have Medicare and Medical in many cases, so its isn't like they don't have choices.

But, the promises were still made, that the VA was there to serve them.

I can remember when I was in the service, they always  talked  about Veterans benefits; to a 23 years old that sounded like something from Back to the Future, years even decades away.  Right now it is here and embarrassing.

But even then, there always was a pinch of sarcasm to the promise, since the VA Hospitals were rumored to be very poor.   Guys would say, "Yeah, you get VA benefits...ha ha".

Look.... we promise too much and are willing to pay for too little.  We created wars, the last two we even "charged" by starting conflicts and amazingly cutting taxes at the same time.

What cynicism!   To start two wars and cut taxes is a crime.

Bush successfully got away with it, being re-elected in 2004, while stiffing us all with promises of any easy victory an no cost.  Finally Iraq was stabilized with a "surge" that of course created more cost, and created many  more veterans.

Afghanistan has ground on to become America's longest war, churning out more wounded warriors, that combined with a flood of Vietnam veterans has swamped the VA.

And what has the VA done?  Well like any bureaucracy that is getting neglected, they have survived  by cooking the books.  Nobody has looked for years, so self-serving avarice has taken over, leaving a mess of under served Veterans amidst bureaucrats getting pay raises.

And this is not Obama's fault!    Republicans currently are making hay of the recent scandal, while cutting funding to the VA several times in the past, starting wars on a credit card, and mostly ignoring veterans as their needs have not been met.

It is the ultimate con:  be patriotic and pro-military, but cut funding and create  an underfunded and understaffed VA.

All of this of course serves to once again destroy what little credibility the Government has with those who served us best.

And it plays right into the  hands of fascists who have taken over the Republican Party; who work full time to destroy democratic institutions.

Look, we fought two wars in the past twenty years; fairly good sized ones at that.  We need to pay for them with higher taxes, both to pay for the current military efforts and pay for the crippled and maimed veterans.

We ignore this at our peril.

No government can long endure half slave and half free.  No government can long endure with no credibility.

What about the rest of us?

What about the rest of us in the Hobby Case currently in front of the Supreme Court?  

What is disguised as a 'religious liberty' case, is actually yet another in a seemingly endless line of efforts to discredit the Affordable Care Act.

A minority (Evangelical Christians are a minority in the United States), is seeking to foist its values on the rest of us.  I am a progressive Christian and I deep resent other Christians shoving their "values" down my throat.

One person's religious liberty is another's tyranny. What about the employee rights to equal protection under the 14th Amendment?

And what about the fact that providing abortive conception drugs in a person's insurance does not force them to use them?

The next step in this con is obvious, a conscientious objection to state mandated health insurance.

This is not a cute issue that is simply going to weaken and destroy the ACA.

It carries with it echoes of the past; of a Jim Crowe segregation and the great kill off of thousands of Native Americans in the name of God.


Southern Baptists, who for decades proclaimed religious freedom as the reason for segregation, were the vanguard of segregationists'  dubious use of the 1st Amendment Establishment Clause to support injustice.

The Bible, they claimed, sanctioned bans on interracial marriage, exactly like the Bible supposed bans gay marriage today.

The result?  A huge injustice and a way around the 14th Amendment.  The result?  A hundred years of one of the most brutal forms of injustice in human history.

The Bible also says Thou Shall Not Kill, and I was forced by the draft years ago to enlist in the Army.

Without my religious freedom being abrogated, which is most definitely NOT absolute, we lose WW I, WWII ,etc.  It is true there were ways to become a conscientious objector, but those were limited to individuals, not to companies!

There are no doubt lawsuits just waiting for the Supremes to rule in the affirmative and we will see employers claiming that state mandated health insurance is against their religious beliefs.  The conservative right (led by greedy health lobbies) will have their victory.

Recently Arizona's state legislature tried to take the 1st Amendment and twist it around to support bigotry.  "Christians" tried to use the establishment clause to claim that gay marriage could not be condoned, anywhere, because the Bible forbids it.

The Bible forbids a lot of things, including crucifixion, stoning to death; etc., that are long since past.  The Bible has been stretched into painful interpretations that have justified mass murder.

Religious liberty does not imply religious excess.  The 14th Amendment was passed exactly to curb the trick of using the 1st Amendment to condone injustice.

If anyone doubts that, read about Jim Crowe.

We stand again in front of a deeply conservative and reactionary Supreme Court, who doesn't seem to get it, and sides with the regressive gene in our national conscience.

God help us!

Each to His Own,

To each their own.  This saying is the backbone of conservatism in the United States.

What it means is:   me, I'm first, what I want is most important.

It is the backbone of liberty for most.  If I want to drive to Canada, and I can afford it, I can do it.  If I want to buy a RV, that gets 5 miles to the gallon, and drive to Canada, while the nation is starving for oil, so be it:  to each his own.

To most Americans this is the core to freedom.  Doing what I want to do is liberty.

Is it?  When all Americans subscribe to this credo, what about scarce resources?  What happens when the oil runs low?  What happens in a drought?  What happens with a scarcity of food, or health care for example.

At this point, the chorus from the right is "to each his own".  If you teach a person to fish...etc.

Now, narcissism is at an all time high in America.  Profit at all costs.  I am first.  Screw over the poor, they are lazy; all of these and more, are indicative of many America's attitudes.

But is this liberty?  Is it liberty when narcissism is so prevalent that millions do not have health care insurance for example.  The reaction to many to this injustice, is:  Let them go to emergency rooms.  The Republican Party to date has voted over 50 times in the House of Representatives to repeal the ACA.

Individual horror stories are trooped out, decrying rising premium rates, or cancellations in insurance.  Meanwhile millions upon  millions are for the first time in their lives getting affordable health insurance  and health care.

But this is tyranny according to "to each his own".  Libertarians rail against the ACA as socialism, tyranny; etc.  It is nothing of the sort.

The tyranny lies in the narcissism.  The tyranny lies in the widening gap between the haves and the have nots.

Look, there is economic liberty and their is political liberty.   The Constitution of the United States deals mostly with political liberty.  Liberty, according to political scientists, is voting, democracy, representative government, and the lack of a dictator or tyrant.

Liberty is NOT the right to squander resources, selfishness, and narcissism.

And this is the most divisive issue of our times.  Both on the left and on the right, narcissism is becoming a large part of political behavior.  People are increasingly voting their selfish self-interest.

This will increase as the inevitable decline in available natural resources occurs.  Global warming and peak oil are going to lead to less for all of us.  The narcissistic reaction will only makes things worse, widen the gap between the rich and the poor and lead to conflict and probably war.

To each his own will lead us to ruin.

Self Interest?

The concept of voting in your best self interest is not a new one.  It reeks of ME first, but it is what most voters do; they vote in what they think and hope will most help them in their lives.

In Northern California, and rural California the exact opposite has been the norm  now for many years.

With the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, working class whites, not just in the south, felt betrayed by the Democratic Party.  In the south and rural north, the party of Roosevelt,  moved  in mass over to the Republican Party.  The motivation was at first racism, no question.

A second motivator was the Vietnam War.  Working class young men bore the brunt of that war.  They were sent to the wrong war at the wrong time, became extraordinarily cynical and came home to rejection by their more affluent friends.

Liberal anti-war college students, protected from the war by an unfair draft, were able to sit out the war in great numbers.  The working class, loyal young man who did their duty,  felt betrayed and abandoned  by his country and by the Democratic Party.

Then along came Reagan and his Hollywood populism.  Reagan was able to collect even more working class people into a Republican party,  based on a working class populism, that mixed racism with revulsion against non-"family values".  Reagan had been elected govenor of California by a backlash to anti-war protestors and "hippies".  Once Reagan was elected he turned this anger on "welfare queens" and taxes, shifting the tax burden from the rich to the middle class.  Trickle down economics was sold as being in the best interest of the middle class.  The concentration of wealh in the top 1% of the past forty years is proof that this cutting taxes to stimulate the economy and aid everyone is simply a LIE.

What really was going on, was a carefully orchestrated campaign, led by special interests, to manipulate the market to their permanent advantage.

The United States was the top dog after World War II.  It remained alone in the world with a non-damaged infrastructure.  This advantage began to wane in the 1970s, with the oil embargo and the ending of the Vietnam setting off high inflation that hurt the middle class.  And who did the conservatives blame for this?  The Democrats of course.

In anger, and as a result of unprecedented propaganda led by radio conservatives, the middle class swung right, abandoning the lessons that the New Deal had taught them.   Those lessons by the way, that wealth had to be re-distributed to a limited degree, or a middle class could not exist, have never changed in their veracity.  Keynesian economics still work, even in the global economy.

The New Deal had saved the middle class in America.  But, when Democratic Party  swung into supporting  civil rights, the white middle class had enough.  It reacted negatively to the Democratic Party, joining Nixon's Southern Strategy and Reagan's "Shining Beacon on the Hill", and started voting Republican.

Meanwhile, the rich benefactors of this political shift, cynically began changing the game in America, accumulating more riches and cutting opportunities for the American Dream.

And the middle class fell into a trap of voting contrary to their self interests.  And the middle class committed suicide.

Fox News was a  direct reaction to this "victory" of the wealthy over former New Deal Democrats.  It continued and perfected the propaganda of right wing commentators, with devastating effect.   Reagan even changed the Federal rules for mass communication, enabling a huge advantage for conservative propaganda.  And white middle class Americans began watching Fox News all day long.

Remarkably, even though their votes brought them NOTHING, middle class whites continued to vote directly against their self interests, electing more and more conservative pro-rich, pro-special interest legislators.

Northern California is a perfect illustration of this.  The logging industry imploded in the 1980s.  The working class in Northern California bought the lie that environmentalists caused the closing of mills.  The logging industry, that cynically outsourced work, closed plants that had simply ran out of public  land lumber.  Clearcutting had simply cut down all the timber.  What was left were private lands, the last of the old growth forests, that had to be preserved.  The sad fact is it takes over 100 years for a forest to regrow.

And the Democratic Party has been perpetually blamed for this .   And the voters in the North State continue to vote for the interests of the wealthy class at stark variance to their own because they see environmentalists as the enemy.

Meanwhile, thanks to an incredibly foolish adherence to an anti-immigration position, the statewide Republican Party has shrunk in size and power.  Currently Republicans do not even have 1/3 of the legislature, do not have one state officer position, and are even losing more influence with the demographic changes in the state.

And in Northern California a nonsensical separation of the state movement grows with absolutely no chance of success.  Conservative groups push for secession, knowing full well there is no chance it will succeed.

And rural people buy it.  Blinded by propaganda, they vote again and again directly opposite of their self interest.

As a result, northern California gets poorer and poorer, "patriots" tilt at the windmills of secession, and the poor get poorer.

People seem to enjoy getting fooled.

And the interesting thing is, in many other areas of their lives, they are getting more progressive.  Families are including gay brothers and sisters, inter racial marriage is commonplace, even in the most conservative of families.  But their churches, who invariably are Christian Conservative, continue to work to blind them to what is in their self interest.  The conservative press doesn't let up.

Of course  they buy it!   Millions are being spent EVERY day to keep the middle class silent.

They continue to waste their votes, sending people like Doug LaMalfa to Congress, who are there for one reason only, line their pockets and vote for their agribusiness profits.

The easy fix for the alienation and lack of representation at the state and federal level, is to elect Democrats.  It is that simple.

And they won't do it!

Free Capitalism From Itself

This is a response to yet another con apologist article by David Brooks, who tries so hard to me a moderate, but can't help himself by being wrong all the time!


Brooks is amazing...we have to search for ways to make capitalism work better.  Meanwhile, Republicans refuse to pass a minimum wage increase, refuse to pass any jobs bill, refuse to drop their austerity nonsense.

We finally watched "12 Years a Slave" last night.  Everyone in this nation needs to watch it, some twice.

Here a  few inconvenient truths:   1.  Slavery grew the American economy rapidly, assisting industrialization with cheap textile products, created by slave labor.  2.  Genocide grew the American economy by killing the legal owners of vast areas of land, allowing immigrants to begin their economic lives on land they got for free.  This was an enormous advantage in competing with Europe for economic hegemony.  3.  The Gilded Age, culminating in the Great Depression, proved forever that a free market economy, unregulated, would eventually implode, creating misery everywhere, and eventually resulting in mass warfare and fascism; witness WWII.

Look, slavery was never nice.  Capitalism has an ugly face, that destroys often as much as it builds.  Left alone in a total free market, it will implode!  At its worse, it is very negative.

Brooks is an apologist for this negativity.  He can't bring himself to support even one progressive idea, like simply raising the minimum wage, when history shows redistributing wealth, when it gets greatly out of wack, not only is good economics, but good historical survival.

As we watch other nations deteriorate into perpetual warfare, we could be next.  FDR, in 1932 realized that, and instituted policies that Republicans hate to this day and saved the free enterprise system.  And he is vilified to this day for it.

Brooks talks about the American Enterprise Institute as a "Think Tank".  So is the Hoover Institute.  Neither one of them produce any real breakthroughs, because their ideology is so flawed, so opposed to common sense fixes, and yes sometime complicated fixes,  to the free enterprise system, that they literally cannot think.

Finally, try this one on:  The ACA is yet another idea to begin SAVING the health care system in this country.  Raising the minimum wage is another idea to save the capitalist system.  Passing immigration reform is yet another.  And believe it or not, treating everyone fairly with equal civil rights also saves the capitalist system.  If Arizona foolishly approves their horrible discrimination toward Gays based on "religious freedom to discriminate", they will doom their capitalist system.  Companies will relocate, segregation is the enemy of free markets!

In the 1960s LBJ got that.  As a Southerner, he saw the damage that was produced by maintaining a segregated social and economic system.  Since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, that southern conservatives hate so much they actually changed parties because of it, the south has turned into an economic success; still not fair, but way better than before.

Raise the minimum wage.  Ensure Civil Rights for all citizens.  Regulate the free market system when necessary for its own good.  And stop voting Republican until they wise up...

Arizona Again

Once again Arizona is proving its engrained facism.  

This time the Constitution of the United States is the target.

In segregated times, southerners used religious freedom as one of the reasons numerous bigots tried to use religious freedom to justify discrimination against African Americans.  

The idea was to use scripture out of a context to justify institutionalized racism.   

It goes like this:  It is against my religion to serve Blacks, allow them to intermarry, get jobs; etc.

Now, in Arizona they are trying the same trick, voiding the Civil Rights Act, the 14th Amendment, etc.

There is nothing in current law thats forces anybody to do anything against their religion in a dealing with gays.   Nothing.   

But good old Arizona voted and sent on to the governor a bill that allows open discrimination against gays, including negating their civil rights even more than before.

All in the name of religion.

Not so long ago, in Germany and Italy, religion was used to justify the murder of over six million Jews.  The justification was that Jews killed Christ.

Nevermind that none of the Jews were even alive when Christ was crucified.  Fascism does not care about law or logic.  It is all about power.   

If we allow abomination to continue, we will be tolerating the same fascism that existed in Germany and Italy.   

This isn't just about Gay rights, it's about fascism and its evil getting a foothold in our country.

We need to resist this and demand Arizona be punished for their fascist behavior. 

Get off ACA's Back

This is the part of the ACA that is most positive.  One, the "portability" of insurance, that allows people to go to the exchange and get their own insurance.  Small businesses, that cannot afford to cover their employees, self employed entrepreneurs, now can get affordable insurance.  And those in their 50s and 60s, are not yet at Medicare age, now can get insurance at a time in their lives when they need medical insurance.

Look, we are the ONLY economy on earth, who ties health care to whether we are employed or not.  So, to lose a job, means disaster if you get sick.  This has been a huge drag on our economy, puts us at a competitive disadvantage in the global economy, and ruins careers.  I am an example of that damage.

I have a son in law, who has a bad back, and is dragging his feet to get insured.  There may be some red tape issues, but there is simply no excuse to not get insurance today....none.  My son in law is self employed and right now cannot work, has not obtained insurance yet, so he sits home, untreated.

I was one of the unlucky ones, who watched his wife die slowly of breast cancer.  The ONLY thing that saved us financially was that we had medical insurance.

But, in those days if you changed jobs, you fell victim to pre-existing conditions.

I needed to change work places for political reasons: I clashed with my boss.  But, I could not, even though I was in education and got "group insurance", move from one work place to another within the same town.  Moreover, the job was the same one I was doing (Human Resources), in public education.  And I practically was promised the other position.

But to move meant no insurance for my wife, who was dying of breast cancer.  The Human Resources Director, who was retiring, called me and said I could not apply for the job since I would not be able to get insurance for my wife.

So, I stayed in a job situation that ultimately became toxic.  Because I could not change jobs, my situation at work got so bad I had to resign, and was able to relocate after my wife passed away.  By that time, even though I was a Superintendent, my time to build a career was over, so I ultimately took an early retirement.

Today, I could have moved.  I could have gone to the exchange to get insurance, or more likely, pre-existing conditions now are covered, so a job move is now very possible.

For me it meant a dead end to my career.  For me, my career was harmed, in addition to losing my best friend.

But, what the heck right?  According to my conservative friends, the ACA is awful, socialism, terrible; etc.  We all are sucking off the government's teat...eating the candy; etc.

Ask some of the people  quoted in the article below.  Ask your kids.

Get off ACA's back!  And as for you cons...may you rot!