I’m sorry but we need government
When I was coming of age, in the time of Watergate and Vietnam, like many others I was so fed up with government, that I came to believe that we needed to fuck up the government so it could stop fucking with us. The United States was bad, that’s what we thought, and there was a lot of justification for that point of view. I voted for Reagan, as a lot of other people did, because he said what we believed. Let’s get on with doing our thing, and keep the government from screwing up. Of course it turns out that isn’t what Reagan was doing, he was just saying that to get our votes. Figures.
Anyway, now we live in different times. Now the problem are the mega-corporations. The cure, imho, is to create new business entities that serve the users first. Sure the shareholders make money, when you take a risk and produce a product or service that people want, that’s great and there must be rewards or people won’t risk. I’m a capitalist. But the things these companies are doing now is not capitalism. They know we don’t have time to understand all the ways they can screw each of us individually. If we did, there would be no time for living. So we should hire people to study what they’re doing and route around it. Either make it illegal, or start a co-op to offer the same service or product without the gotchas.
That’s the reasoning behind the health insurance “public option,” which is a damned good idea. We’ve tried it the way the insurance industry wants to do it, and the result is a lot of needless death, sickness, and wasted money. So, they can keep doing what they’re doing, but we’re going to pool our resources and self-insure. We could either form a new entity to do it, or we could use the one we already went to the trouble to create.
That was what the American Revolution was about, freeing ourselves from tyranny. There we go again. We allowed ourselves to be snookered into thinking that using our power is a form of weakness. Reagan. I don’t think Obama is our friend (remember, he likes Reagan), but I think if we kick his ass and show our power, he’ll come around. I heard Markos say the other day that they need to reactivate the base — but that’s bullshit. We need to reactivate ourselves. Obama didn’t organize this, that’s why we’re all so confused. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t particularly want Obama. I desperately wanted to get rid of Bush. For a while I was going to vote for Hillary. So were a lot of other people.
Sure, I cried tears of joy when we elected a young black man with his young black family. It was a wonderful moment, but that moment has now passed. Now we have to decide what we really want. It’s not up to Obama to activate us, it’s up to ourselves.
But don’t be kidded, we need government, without it, companies will just make more meaningless paper value and we’ll keep having collapses. Those guys don’t have a clue where to go either. I think that may be the problem. We don’t know what we’re doing here. More on that later.