A better health care plan — what else?

The current, largely Republican-inspired brouhaha over the Affordable Care Act makes the best possible case for universal care, but few if any are connecting the dots — at least not out loud. Each time Republicans vow to overturn the ACA, Democrats charge that the GOP doesn’t have a better plan, and Republicans are silent. Why? It’s not because they don’t think there’s a better plan — it’s because the better plan would be an anathema to them.

The better plan, of course, is universal health insurance, single payer, expanded Medicare, whatever you want to call it. The better plan covers everyone for everything at an affordable price determined by a sliding scale, with rates for families calculated in the same way. The better plan would issue every American the same card, which would give every American the same access to the same benefits regardless of social status. The better plan would be non-profit and leave insurance companies out of the picture altogether. The better plan would encourage the establishment of more clinics modeled after the Mayo, Cleveland, and even the VA. The better plan would allow vets to find health care wherever they chose — including VA medical centers if they wished. The better plan would cover the well and the sick, and provide the kind of peace of mind never before experienced in this country.

The industrialized world has had one form or another of a better plan for decades. Only the United States holds out. In most of the world’s democracies, health care is a right. In the US, it’s seen as a privilege. You can be healthy if you’re well off. If not, well too bad. You can be financially secure if you’re well off. If not, well you can go bankrupt.

As long as insurance companies have so much power over our elected officials, we will never enjoy a better plan in the US — and as long as both sides continue to take big money from corporations, we can’t pin the blame on just one party.

The (ahem) tea party

When I first heard the term “tea party” in a contemporary political context, I thought to myself WTF . . . I have always thought of a tea party as one of three things: the historic event during the American struggle for independence, a once-popular children’s pretend game, and a never-ending mad social event hosted by the Hatter in Alice in Wonderland.

Of the three, the modern Republican tea party comes closest to the Hatter’s insane tea party. There is no mistaking it for an historic American event, and it lacks the innocence of a children’s game. In fact, it’s one of the most destructive forces ever to threaten American democracy.

Logically the recent debacle we barely survived will be the beginning of the end of the tea party, but I wouldn’t count on it. For too many Americans, growing up is a challenge so daunting that many don’t bother. People who vote for tea party candidates are probably the same people who drowned kittens in a burlap sack when they were kids. Who knows — maybe they still do.

The decline of North Carolina

Before moving to NC in 1976, I was told by friends who lived in Charlotte that it was pretty progressive as far as southern states went. They were right. While there was no doubt latent antebellum sentiment in some circles, moderation prevailed. Schools were improving, libraries were stocked and staffed, and the arts were revered. Tolerance was the rule rather than the exception, and democratic institutions were respected. Even the first two Republican governors in the years since I arrived were fairly moderate by southern standards.

All that changed in the elections of 2010, when tea party candidates came out from under their rocks to take control of the state legislature, and with Republican Pat McCrory winning the governorship in 2012, the takeover was complete. Since then, the right-wing state government’s actions have been a systematic dismantling of democracy — from usurping local control of utilities to stripping women of reproductive rights to putting up voting roadblocks for students, the elderly, and minorities.

In that time, the governor’s popularity has dropped to 39 percent, and the legislature’s has plunged even further — to an abysmal 24 percent. But the right-wing’s assault on democracy is relentless as they no doubt believe institutionalized voter suppression, coupled with gerrymandering, will solidify their hold on the state. North Carolina, along with a handful of other states, will be an ugly example of minority rule in the United States, whose future as a shining example of democracy is in doubt.

For years I was proud of my adopted state, but not now. I have to hope people of good conscience will rise to the occasion and put up with whatever they have to put up with to restore the state to a progressive path in 2014. I want — need — to see it happen in the time I have left.

The radicalization of the NRA

While guns are part of the American tradition, gun mania isn’t. It wasn’t until the NRA radicalized its original mission that people became rabid about their guns. Today’s gun hysteria is the result of a wildly successful public relations/marketing campaign to destroy American common sense for the sole purpose of enriching gun manufacturers.

The National Rifle Association was founded in 1871 by William Conant Church and General George Wood Wingate, with Civil War General Ambrose Burnside as its first president. Burnside had decried the pitiful marksmanship of American troops during the Civil War, and Wingate, recognizing that a pool of men who could shoot straight was probably in the national interest, made training a goal of the NRA and wrote a marksmanship manual.

Following passage of the National Firearms Act in 1934, the NRA formed a legislative affairs division. Interestingly, the Association supported the Act, as it did the Gun Control Act of 1968. Together, the acts created a system that licensed gun dealers and established taxes on private ownership of machine guns. In 1975, the NRA created the Institute for Legislative Action to lobby for Second Amendment rights to support hunting, conservation, and marksmanship. Meanwhile, the NRA became the umbrella organization for gun safety programs and shooting sports.

It was at its annual convention in 1977 that the NRA went off the rails, at what became known as the “Cincinnati Revolution.” Until then, the Association had focused mainly on sportsmen and had avoided issues of gun control, but there was now a bloc of activists whose primary concern was Second Amendment rights. This group ousted the incumbents at the convention and elected Harlon Carter as executive director. Carter went on to become America’s most rabid opponent of gun controls.

It was downhill from there for the once-proud organization. What started out as an association to advance gun training, marksmanship, safety, sports, conservation, and gun sanity, became an instrument of death, the criminal’s best friend, the enemy of law and order.

Why I fear fascism

When I was growing up, I was an innocent floundering in a sea of bigotry — even in supposedly liberal New York, where I was born and spent the first half of my life. My father, a German immigrant, openly admired Hitler’s achievements — the autobahn, the trains — despite having become a citizen and serving in North Africa and India during the war. About the Holocaust he said little, except perhaps to suggest it couldn’t have happened. But it always made him subdued. My mother was silent on the entire issue. Her family came to the US before the Depression took firm hold in Germany, so she probably couldn’t relate to Hitler’s promises. My father came years later, in its depths, when a loaf of bread cost millions of marks and fascists and communists were already clashing in the streets.

Around me, all minorities were insulted. My father and his soccer club buddies used every ethnic slur I’d ever heard, which often struck me as odd because they were supposedly friends with so many Irish, Italians, Poles, and Jews (but not African-Americans). I didn’t get it. My neighborhood friends were Irish, Cuban, and Czech, some of my good school friends were Jewish, and my best friend overall was Italian. If I had no black friends, it was because there were very few in my school (because my school was in a predominantly white neighborhood) and we just didn’t move in the same circles. There was a black kid in my sophomore English class, but I only thought of him as the football team’s captain and quarterback. Yes — he was the team captain. In my school, the few black students were not shunned and didn’t feel the need to isolate themselves. Hooray for us!

So I had these positive experiences going for me to help offset the influences of all my elders — except my maternal grandmother’s, who was also a German immigrant. But she was a Quaker, and if at a very young age I ever channeled my father and used the N-word, she’d give it to me with a wooden spoon and say, “Ach, Robert — dey are colored people. Never say dat.” In those days, it was okay to say Negroes, but she wouldn’t tolerate even that, much less the N-word.

As the years went by and my knowledge of German history after WWI deepened, I came to despise my heritage and perhaps felt the same shame as the generations of Germans born during and after WWII. How could some people be so inhumane to others, and how could so many people turn their backs on this inhumanity? I was sickened even by the anti-Jewish rhetoric as the fascists rose to power and the brutality in the streets, and how the people bought into it. The end result of it all, the Holocaust, continues to make me weep.

Which is why I’m ultra-sensitive to the right-wing scapegoating that continues in the US today. Granted it’s no longer Jews who are the targets, but in my lifetime it’s been blacks, Hispanics, gays, welfare queens, liberals, anyone different, who are blamed for the nation’s ills. No, today’s right probably will never resort to a new holocaust — none among them are that crazy. But some lessons have been learned. When times are tough, even the best of us will buy into the blame game played by those who will do anything to gain power.

It is naïve to suggest that there’s no comparison between today’s American right wing and the German fascists of the 1930s. It shows up in campaign rhetoric, in opposition to safety net programs, anti-unionism, and in laws to suppress voters. This last is a page from the fascists’ tactics in the 1930s as they manipulated elections to achieve victory. The logical end to this was the abolishment of elections altogether. After all, who needed them? There was only one party.

After WWII, our hatred of fascism faded as conservatives infected the American psyche with their irrational fear of communism. This of course was absurd. Communism is unlikely to ever gain a foothold in a society that has known prosperity and freedom — but fascism is, if people fear that prosperity and freedom are threatened. If communism has an appeal anywhere, it’s in third-world countries  that have never known prosperity, much less freedom.

It is not paranoiac to fear the rise of fascism in the US. But it’s troubling that so few sense that it’s happening. Perhaps it’s because of how we’ve been conditioned to fear communism since it was born, perhaps it’s because very few people still living really understand what fascism is — and that’s not surprising, since historians, economists, and political scientists can’t even agree. But in my mind, two things in particular characterizes fascism. One, of course, is the scapegoating that persists on the right. The other is the unholy alliance between government and corporations. And if you don’t think we’re not in the process of succumbing to corporate rule, you haven’t been paying attention.

The cost of doing nothing

It is impossible to calculate what climate change has already cost in terms of lives and property. At what point would a dramatic change in behavior have begun to make a difference? In the 1970s, in response to the OPEC oil embargo? As the consensus about climate change formed in the 1980s? To counter the jokes about Los Angeles smog in the 1950s, perhaps?

Regardless, it was always foolish not to make the development of alternate forms of energy part of our national policy, as if we’d never run out of anything. Never mind that the Greenhouse Effect, a natural phenomenon, was first identified in the 19th century, and never mind that concerns about increasing atmospheric carbon began to emerge in the 1950s and ’60s.

On Sunday, June 30, 2013, 19 firefighters battling a wildfire that threatened a small Arizona town north of Phoenix became the most recent casualties in the onslaught of a changing climate as record heat grips the West. In places already known for being hot, temperature records are being shattered, and at last report the world record of 134 held by Death Valley was in danger of being surpassed — by Death Valley.

“Who cares about Death Valley?” you might ask. Well, we all should. Las Vegas tied its hottest-ever record at 117, and the system bringing this heat isn’t just affecting isolated spots in the desert. And it’s not just the heat and the wildfires. It’s the increasingly devastating storm surges, droughts, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes — the weather extremes climate change scientists warned us about.

We’ll never know how much of what we’re experiencing could have been avoided had we begun preparing for the future in the past. But even now there are policy makers in Washington who at best drag their heels about taking action and at worst deny we have a problem. True the United States isn’t the boss of the world — in addressing global warming or anything else — but we like to think of ourselves as a world leader, so goddamnit we ought to start leading.

Justice delayed

Today’s Supreme Court rulings on DOMA and Prop 8 do not resolve the issue of marriage equality in the US. It was entirely within the Court’s purview to declare once and for all that bans on gay marriage are a violation of the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment, and it sidestepped the chance to finally make things right. Invalidating DOMA wasn’t enough — all that does is protect the rights of gays legally married in their states at the Federal level. It does nothing to compel other states to allow gays to marry, or even to honor their marriages if they cross a border. Refusing to rule on Prop 8, meanwhile, will benefit gays in California only — at least for now, although many are optimistic that this will provide momentum for other states to legalize gay marriage.

What I find particularly stunning, though, is that it’s taken this long for the 14th Amendment to have a prominent role in deciding the issue. I’ve argued that the Equal Protection clause applied before — in 2006, for example — and it would have applied at any time since it was ratified if anyone had ever challenged marriage laws in court. If the Court minority didn’t see it this way, it’s because they’re stupid bigots.

Today the Court didn’t bring the debate to an end — it merely postponed the inevitable and made sure more agonizing lawsuits will be required to achieve justice for all. There will still be gays and lesbians in 37 states who would like to have the same rights as every American while they’re still alive.

Incidentally, to the Bachmanns and Huelskamps of the world, if you find gay marriage disgusting, that’s your choice. But some of us find you disgusting, and maybe someday there’ll be an amendment banning you.

Sarah what’s-her-name

In Twitter I refer to Sarah Palin as Sarah what’s-her-name, because she doesn’t deserve to be remembered. But she is, and we have the media to thank. It seems as if her every inane utterance is repeated ad nauseum via video on every cable news show — which, to me, erodes the credibility of a news organization. After all, editors are supposed to be able to discern news, and Sarah what’s-her-name isn’t news.

What she is is a national embarrassment. People used to want to come to the US because they thought the streets were paved with gold. Now, thanks to Sarah, people want to come here because they think any dimwit can get rich and become famous.

We have John McCain to thank, or perhaps his campaign people. She was Ms. Nobody when she was tapped for the GOP VP slot in the 2008 campaign for president, and the public quickly divided into two camps around her: those who thought she was a heroine, and those who thought she was an idiot.

She is an idiot, of course, which makes it scary that so many people idolize her. She feeds off the media attention, even if it ridicules her, because as the saying goes, no PR is bad PR. If Sarah is rich and famous, we have the press to thank. Does she deserve it more than you and I? Dumb question.

Sarah what’s-her-name is like the monster to McCain’s Frankenstein — almost indestructible — and the best way to get rid of her is to ignore her. This is a word of wise advice to a media that thinks it can exploit her stupidity, when in reality it’s only making her rich. You ridicule Sarah, and she laughs all the way to the bank.

Forget about insurance reform

Obamacare is being clobbered in the polls, which is interesting because it’ll be a few months yet before Obamacare is fully in force. It shouldn’t come as a surprise though, because conservatives have poured a lot of money into a smear campaign to persuade people they don’t like it.

If Obamacare fails, it will be because conservatives of both parties controlled the process to design the plan — and progressives let them get away with it. The end result was a plan doomed to self-destruct before it even got off the ground — and the instruments of that destruction were employers and private insurers.

Employers are not known for willingly doing right by their employees, so in general they will pay as little as they can get away with and offer as few benefits as possible. It’s a common practice for many companies to schedule workers less than 40 hours a week just so they won’t be considered full-time — and as a rule part-time employees are not eligible for such perks as paid vacations and insurance. If Obamacare mandates that employees working 30 or more hours a week would be eligible for insurance, it’s a simple thing for employers to limit their workers to 29. Now who didn’t see this coming?

Employer-based insurance is stupid to begin with, so employers would have rejoiced if they didn’t have to be involved at all. Private insurers, on the other hand, hated the idea of being left out. After all, these companies exist for one reason only — to make money. Helping people cuts into profits, so they will avoid helping whenever possible, as long as the law allows.

It would be delusional to think that those governing the United States would see the light and decide to craft a universal single-payer insurance system anytime soon, but a public option would have begun to pave the way. But when a public option was left out of the discussion about an Affordable Care Act, the message was clear: don’t get your hopes up about reform.

Whose right to bear what arms?

Okay — let’s take another look at the second amendment. It says, “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

Let’s leave aside the “well regulated militia” clause for a moment, which in my mind clearly establishes the government’s authority to regulate arms — and what would a militia be without arms? As the NRA and its field representatives (otherwise known as legislators) keep reminding us, the second amendment protects “the right of the people to keep and bear arms.” Notice — it says “arms,” not “guns.”

As we all know, the government already regulates arms, everything from automatic rifles and machine guns to nuclear weapons. Some restricted small arms may be available with special permits, but no one gets to keep and bear a rocket-propelled grenade or an A-bomb. And everyone I know seems fine with this arrangement.

Which takes me back to the “well regulated militia” part, because regulating a whole host of weapons is totally in keeping with the second amendment. Restricting the sale of “assault-style” weapons would be no more unconstitutional than restricting the sale of an Abrams tank or an F-18.

But of course all this is far too logical for staunch “second amendment” supporters to wrap their heads around. Even legislators in the NRA’s pocket won’t admit to understanding this rationale, although some of them may secretly acknowledge its truth.

So the bottom line is this: the government either has the right to regulate all arms if it sees fit, or none. If you vote for “none,” you may have another reason to avoid walking on your neighbor’s lawn — because it might be mined.