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Random Thoughts
Are We Fools, Criminals or Ants?
by
Gaurang Bhatt, MD
 Malalai Joya, a woman
member of the Afghan parliament, who has been denied her seat and
threatened with death, said in London, "Dust has been thrown into the
eyes of the world by your governments. You have not been told the truth.
The situation now is as catastrophic as it was under the Taliban for
women. Your governments have replaced the fundamentalist rule of the
Taliban with another fundamentalist regime of warlords. (That is) what
your soldiers are dying for." She quoted Brecht in Galileo, �He who does
not know the truth is only a fool. He who knows the truth and calls it a
lie is a criminal�.
Nancy Pelosi, Rahm Emanuel, Obama and the Democrats took control of both
houses of Congress and the presidency with a mandate to end the wars and
yet gave Bush supplemental funding to prosecute wars. They overlooked
illegal wiretaps, gave phone companies backdated immunity, failed to
close torture prisons and sent additional troops to Afghanistan which
have markedly increased our war spending and casualties. They have
bailed out the banks with our tax money and kept the same incompetents
with Wall Street connections in charge.
By not insisting on a public option or single payer health insurance,
but insisting on mandatory health insurance (like automobile insurance),
Obama is surreptitiously selling 50 million captive clients (those
currently without health insurance) to the private health insurance
companies which cherry-pick healthy subscribers, deny services and waste
25% of the premiums on marketing, administration and obscene salaries
and bonuses, compared to a 3% overhead for Medicare, which many of our
idiot citizens are unaware, is run by the government. Many of the house
and senate members and committee chairpersons receive preferential and
large campaign contributions from hospital, physician, pharmaceutical
and insurance lobbies. Obama allegedly privately conceded not to further
bargain down drug prices after they promised a fictional saving of a few
billion and allegedly made a deal with former congressman Bill Tauzin
who traded his house seat for million dollar salary, just like senator
Phil Gramm did by deregulating the financial industry. Cheaper drug
imports from Canada and elsewhere are off the table because of spurious
concerns about drug safety.
The US media and Republicans are feeding lies to the public and inciting
them by polls to stifle reasoned and informed debate in town meetings.
Employer paid health insurance provides neither security or portability.
Any employer can modify or eliminate it by increasing deductibles and
employee contributions to premiums, and is subject to being dropped by
the insurer by denial or unaffordable rise in premiums. It is also
subject to denial of services at the whims of a non-medical corporate
bureaucrat making arbitrary decisions for personal and corporate
financial benefits. Some paid shills or vested party financed non-profit
organizations are spreading rumors that people on government financed
Medicare and Medicaid will be denied lifesaving treatments and subjected
to forced euthanasia. Many idiot citizens are gullible enough to believe
it. There are 40 trillion dollars of unfunded obligations of Medicare
and cuts will have to be made, but most of them will be in eliminating
waste and reducing provider reimbursements. Any sensible person realizes
that no nation can afford to spend unlimited millions to extend an
individual life especially if it is without any quality, cognition or
consciousness content in it.
The future of any society are the children. Any society where the
elderly in the evening of life are willing to smother their children in
the morning of life is sick, criminal and unnatural. The rationale
behind Medicare and Medicaid was that the elderly prone to disease and
death, retired and without work income and the indigent, who fell
through the cracks, should be the responsibility of the nation and its
workers. It was never intended that those given a privileged perch on
the shoulders of the working should exploit it by strangling with their
legs those who bore the burden. It is true that current economic
conditions are not the best to put in place new and expensive reforms.
The analogy of digging a well for water to extinguish a fire comes to
mind, but not having access to water and a fire department is even more
certain to necessitate facing the same catastrophe in the future. Taxes
will have to be raised on all (more so on the wealthy). Obama, like any
other politician desirous of feeding at the public trough and
intoxicated by ambition, lied to us and fed us the garbage of hope with
audacity, but it was our stupidity that we fell for it. If we had been
sensible we might have elected Nader or some honest man with a prior
long record of working for the public good.
We need introspection. Are we fools or knaves to vote Democratic or
criminals to vote Republican, knowing that they know the truth and still
lie? The third possibility is that we are an insect society like ants.
We have not only willfully chosen that only a queen (president) will
have the sole privilege of reproduction (enrichment and glory) or with
the demise of the queen, a few mated and dominant individuals called
gamergates in ants (Congress, Corporate leaders and wealthy others) will
have the right to reproduce (prosperity and health), but like the worker
ants brainwashed by chemicals and custom (bread and circuses) ganged up
to silence, intimidate and threaten the few rebel worker ants with the
temerity to attempt reproduction (speak the truth about health care). It
reminds me of the history of India. For over a millennium, not only did
the Indians not speak up for themselves and their compatriots, but they
enlisted in the armies and police forces of their conquerors to
intimidate the true nationalists and patriots and facilitated the
persistence of rule of their Islamic and European conquerors and their
native traitor allies. The ants like the non-whites in apartheid South
Africa, Savimbi UNITA supporters in Angola did it for a better personal
life and the security of a defended nest with adequate food for all. Now
that particular trade off is unraveling in an America with a jobless
economy.. How long will the American worker suffer in silent misery,
while the chosen few roll in unconcerned, self-absorbed, insatiable joy,
prosperity and health?
August 9,
2009
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