Some days a piece pops up which articulates something so well, so broadly and comprehensively and yet so accessibly that it’s riveting. Today was such a day, and I cannot do other than pass this one along as is, complete with annotated references.
This is the kind of thing that makes me wish I had more time and scholarship, but mostly more talent as a writer. From Counterpunch, by Ravi Katari;
“A heart that’s full up like a landfill. A job that slowly kills you. Bruises that won’t heal. You look so tired, unhappy. Bring down the government, they don’t speak for us. I’ll take a quiet life, a handshake of carbon monoxide.”
The existential sorrow in Thom Yorke’s voice has never sounded as poignant as it does today in “No Surprises”, a track of lonely capitulation on Radiohead’s monolithic OK Computer. The song evokes images of helplessness and retreat in the face of globalization and corporate capitalism. The accompanying music video features Yorke’s head in a bubble helmet that slowly fills up with water (1). The symbolism in both the lyrics and the video has become increasingly relevant since the record’s release fifteen years ago. Some call it America in Decline and it’s a theme that has been explored extensively over the recent years, months, and weeks (2) (3) (4). The idea is obviously met with skepticism. In order to understand it, we have to put it in perspective and define a context. What exactly is America and what’s in decline?
It remains the richest country in the history of modern civilization. It controls the most powerful and comparatively advanced military machine ever assembled: a likely result of spending more than the rest of the world combined (5). The two characteristics are intimately related.
Indeed, the idea that the accumulation of wealth inculcates suspicion and the need to defend it has even been discussed by 6th century philosopher Boethius in The Consolation of Philosophy: “the wealth which was thought to make a man independent rather puts him in need of further protection” (6). In fact, the need for institutional protection of private property is one of the most heavily explored topics of classical liberalist thought and framed much of the debate during the United States’ formative period. We like to think that the nation was founded on principles of total equality and personal liberty. But the chief concern among the framers was how to create a system where landowners can remain landowners without having to worry about greedy peasants.
The concept rapidly generalizes to capital accumulation today. Wealthy and privileged members of society want the government to perform its intended function which is to protect their assets. What would have previously been labeled agrarian reform is basically equivalent to progressive taxation. However, any rational politician will cater to privileged interests especially when legislative positions are virtually bought in the current system. The collection of votes is now regarding as a secondary consequence of properly financing an electoral campaign….
….Social reforms that benefit the overwhelming majority of the population—where political power is least concentrated—are marginal issues that require populist demonstration in order to enter the political arena. The civil rights movement, the feminist movement, and the AIDS movement are just a few examples. That these were issues that could not be influenced by voting highlights a particularly sinister illusion of franchise. We vote for politicians that seem relatable given their stance on satellite issues. Presidential candidates will resort to tactics such as showing up on MTV discussing underwear in order to the exploit youth culture. In other venues he’ll discuss how to be tougher on crime or how to withdraw from some foreign conflict in some vague number of years.
But where’s the candidate that speaks to immediately relevant issues such as access to health care or proper retirement benefits? The former example is pretty striking, actually. Government sponsored medical coverage has been a prominent domestic concern for almost 40 years (7) (8). Even a recent 2009 NY Times/CBS News poll suggested that 72% of the population were in favor of a government administered health insurance program that would compete with current private plans (9).
Furthermore, there’s no longer any doubt that a public option would drastically reduce health costs and thus relieving some of the burden on consumers. A 2003 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine concluded that health care administration costs account for 31% of health expenditures in the U.S. which comes out to almost $300 billion. Canada’s administration costs, on the other hand, makes up 16.7% of their total health expenditures (10). The high costs of U.S. health administration are a direct result of having to navigate the extreme complex channels of billing and reimbursement through private insurers. As one would expect, the system’s complexities are tailored to minimize payouts to consumers and simultaneously maximize profits.
The U.S. has very little to show for its insanely expensive health arrangement. Its per capita costs are twice those of other advanced OECD nations (11). However, it ranks pretty low in health outcomes such as infant mortality and and life expectancy (12).
And the burden on the general population is, indeed, quite severe. Two landmark 2009 studies by Harvard physicians David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler were able to show that the extraordinary costs of healthcare and insurance impose crushing financial burdens and leave many who cannot afford insurance to die. They found that 62.1% of bankruptcies filed in the United States in 2007 had medical causes. This value is sharply contrasted with an estimated 8% in 1981 and 46.2% in 2001. 80% of the 2007 figure had health insurance and most were well-educated and middle-class (13). Furthermore, the researchers were able to link the lack of health insurance to 45,000 working-age deaths per year in the U.S. and conclude that the uninsured are 40% more likely to die than those with private insurance (14). This figure, too, is in sharp contrast with a 1993 estimate of 25% (15). The spectrum of health outcomes parallels socioeconomic status as one would expect, but the worsening trends and sheer quantity of deaths are so morally alarming that they cannot be ignored.
The outlook is even more depressing when we examine a recent U.S. Census Bureau report which revealed a striking racial distribution of uninsurance. 21% of blacks and 31% of Hispanics in the U.S. are uninsured compared to 11.7% of whites (16). This, too, is not that surprising. The proportions are probably similar for those who drive Range Rovers, but we have to remain cognizant of the fundamental difference between the two commodities.
The consequences of private administration of healthcare are fairly predictable. A corporation’s chief concern will always be self-sustenance and growth. Consumer benefit is only a priority when it contributes to the two main goals. The touted virtue of free market efficiency is based on the symbiotic relationship between consumer benefit and corporate profit. Unfortunately, it’s not really a free market. The government is continually prohibited from acting as a significant competitor even though most of the population agrees that it should be. Because of the fundamental difference between health and Range Rovers as commodities, consumers do not have the option of simply boycotting the product or choosing a competitor and thereby placing downward pressure on costs. Saying no to healthcare is simply anti-human.
Furthermore, patent-protected pharmaceuticals will sell at premiums with markups sometimes up to a thousand percent. It’s often argued that patent protection and value markup are required in order to fund research and development. However, we cannot ignore the costs of advertising, marketing, lobbying, and profit margins. The economist Dean Baker has done significant work in exposing the inefficiencies and deceitful practices of the pharmaceutical industry that ultimately harshen the financial burden on the general public (17). He has argued for several years that publicly funded research for the development and distribution of patent-free drugs would be far more advantageous than the current system that spends an estimated $300 billion per year on prescription drugs.
The prospects for change are pretty bleak given the virtual disenfranchisement of the general population which brings us back to American decline. Media-propagated illusions are partially responsible. The current debate surrounding Obamacare is a ripe example. Government-sponsored insurance is not even on the agenda and the public is led to believe that the Affordable Care Act and its guaranteed coverage is the solution we have long waited for. This illusion is based on the false dichotomy between Democrats and Republicans. It’s a bad joke, really. Obamacare is modeled on the Massachusetts health plan the origins of which trace back to the Heritage Foundation (18) (19). It was implemented by then-Governor Mitt Romney. I’ll spare the irony.
The bottom line is that the individual mandate would require everyone to buy in to private insurance risk pools to decrease medical premiums. It will funnel hundreds of billions of dollars to private insurers and Big Pharma and further inflate their political clout. Even if it passes, an estimated 23 million of the current 50 million Americans will remain uninsured (20). Alternatives such as a single-payer system or at least a public option are completely missing from the debate even though a majority of the population is in favor of them. Of course, with these alternatives, private insurance companies would stand to lose. Corporate executives would lose money and perhaps workers would be laid off, but that overall human suffering would be less is an obvious conclusion of alternatives that are marginalized by the media and our politicians.
Thus, the current trend can be visualized as a hollowing out of the American identity. The military and financial prowess of the United States makes it an undeniable juggernaut in the global theater, but it has very little advantage for most of the population. Unemployment and healthcare are the two most pressing concerns for most Americans, but there’s very little that can be done via the electoral system due to its deeply financial nature. Those that do climb the socioeconomic ladder are driven into virtual fiefdom via debt burdens that are owed in part to the absurd costs of tuition for higher education (21). Crushing debt burdens discourage social activism and inculcate profit-seeking values. Those that cannot afford to climb the ladder or choose not to will have to confront the depressing avenues of uninsurance and poverty which only exacerbates the vicious cycle of decline.
Ravi Katari works for a health law firm in Washington D.C. He graduated from the University of Virginia with a degree in Biomedical Engineering.
Notes.
1) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5CVsCnxyXg&ob=av3e
2) http://www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas/article/82581
3) http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/american_decline_debated_contested_obvious_20120410/
4) http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175502/
5) http://armscontrolcenter.org/policy/securityspending/articles/fy09_dod_request_global/
6) http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14328/14328-h/14328-h.htm
7) http://www.kff.org/healthreform/upload/7871.pdf
8) http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3633
9) http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/health/policy/21poll.html
10) http://www.pnhp.org/publications/nejmadmin.pdf
12) http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp0910064
13) http://www.pnhp.org/new_bankruptcy_study/Bankruptcy-2009.pdf
14) http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdf/10.2105/AJPH.2008.157685
15) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8336376
16) http://aspe.hhs.gov/health/reports/2011/CPSHealthIns2011/ib.shtml
17) http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/may/31/healthcare-pharmaceuticals-industry
18) http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2006/04/the-significance-of-massachusetts-health-reform
20) http://pnhp.org/news/2010/march/pro-single-payer-doctors-health-bill-leaves-23-million-uninsured
Here is something re-tweeted by our old CIF friend Demonrho.
“one of the iggest impediments to American innovation is that people stay in jobs they hate because of fear of no medical insurance”.
True dat.
Yep. Why is it so difficult, even impossible, for so many to see what is so obvious, what is in plain sight every day of their lives? They indignantly demand to know why they should have to pay for other people’s health care and even when you point out that with every service they use, government or otherwise, with every product they buy, with every road they drive on or sidewalk they walk on, every time they turn on a light or a computer or run a washing machine or monger a war, somewhere, somehow, they are paying for someone else’s health care and in the most expensive and inefficient way possible, they cannot see it, they refuse to see it. This causes me more despair than I can possibly articulate.
Madame,
The really sad truth is, if they thought they were only paying for the health care of people like themselves, then they would be okay with it. What they can’t stand is the idea that they work hard and shiffless uppitty folk get to free ride. Which is how they see it and why they object. And why they will never, ever, understand, because the illogic is deeper than merely being blind to the obvious truth you are pointing out to them.
Bluthner;
With some reluctance, because it’s so ugly, I’ll have to say there’s an enormous amount of truth in that.
But beyond that, what they won’t see is that those of us who are blessed with good health, and therefore no, or low, medical expenses, pay for the treatment of others less fortunate anyway—regardless of the delivery mechanism.
Almost nobody, statistically speaking, can afford catastrophic illness/trauma treatment out of their own resources. It’s what insurance is all about. It takes no time at all for a halfway serious health condition to devour everything the individual paid in to the pool, and then some. Hours, if not minutes, in some cases. We’re one car wreck (god forbid, I don’t dislike him that much) away from contributing to Mitt Romney’s treatment. I’m sure we all contributed to his wife’s treatment over the years. As we should.
It’s crazy.
Gunny,
A demonstrable fallacy. We pay for those who get treated. The rest die. True, some of them die quite expensively, and we do get to pay for that.
About the time Medicare and Medicaid were passed, we could have gone all the way with a comprehensive single payer system and nobody’s ox would have been gored. That isn’t possible anymore. The reason that we continue to pay two to two-and-a-half times what the rest of the developed world pays per capita for health care is that anything less would be a direct assault on one of the most profitable industries we have, an industry that, as an economic paradigm, has arisen entirely since the 60s and which has no counterpart anywhere in the world. To speak of that industry as a failure is to miss the point entirely; it is an unprecedented success. Too many jobs and investments are wrapped up in it to stop it now without an overwhelming popular demand that just isn’t in the cards.
Gunny,
I’m agreeing with you whole hog. My only quibble is, they would understand and agree with what you are trying to tell them, if everyone in the pool looked like them. After all, it’s not a difficult concept. I’ve explained it to five year olds, who get it in under a minute. What is stopping them from grasping the point is the other thing. The ‘I don’t care what you say I am not going to share (risk, culture, anything) with them fingers in the ears NAH NAH NAH BLAH BLAH LA LA LA LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU!’ impossibility of discourse.
It’s that simple. And that sad. And will pass away from the political conversation only when they all die or they simply become so much of a rumpy minority unable to swing elections in any useful jurisdiction that no one any longer gives a shit.
I won’t live to see that happy day, but my children might.
Nat,
True that scores of millions have no insurance, and therefore don’t get treatment when they are walking wounded and need it most, but most of them do end up, end game, in hospitals to die, and we all end up paying vast amounts for that. Dying in this culture is very seldom cheap, even for the poorest. For most people the last few months cost more than all the rest of their lives, when it comes to medical care.
And you are completely right about the success of the health care industry. What is astonishing is that David Cameron is hell bent on bringing the American model to the U.K. And has rammed a law through parliament to do it. Against the will of something like 75 percent of the population at large, and 85 percent of the medical profession, and after having specifically campaigned on a 180 degree promise to do exactly the opposite.
And there are no riots in the street…
Bluth,
What you might try to impress upon your doomed neighbors is that while they may think they’re well informed about the evils of our system, what they probably don’t get is its sheer irreversibility. Think about it: the last time we tried to eliminate an entire industry was prohibition, a vastly simpler undertaking we didn’t even begin to get right. Anybody who imagines that we could somehow remove profit from “the health care segment” and leave any of the infrastructure intact is just kidding themselves. Just getting the profit out of health insurance would be a gargantuan task that would affect far more people than most imagine. I wouldn’t be surprised if those profits (and the losses that would follow from their elimination) are spread across fifty million investors.
We like to think that the nation was founded on principles of total equality and personal liberty. But the chief concern among the framers was how to create a system where landowners can remain landowners without having to worry about greedy peasants.
So tell me again who gives a fuck what the peasants think or why?
This group your trying to reason with about health care, peasants, wouldn’t be the same bunch who, for over 200 yrs., have been talking their kids into fighting and dieing in a mercenary force to protect the gilded gentry’s assets would it? Gee, I wonder why that’s not working out.
Who said”Do not attempt to make sense of insanity, by definition, it makes no sense”?
….Social reforms that benefit the overwhelming majority of the population—where political power is least concentrated—are marginal issues that require populist demonstration in order to enter the political arena.
The text above, between these two quotes, I believe to be, a more accurate and truthful assessment of the history of the condition of this country, than anything I’ve ever read.
Not an especially pleasant picture, but there it is.
Oh my God, its just too sad.
Nat,
When for-profit health care companies leap into the warm Jacuzzi of cherry-picked profits that David Cameron has built for them (they are leaping as I type) the saddest part (for citizens of the UK, that is) is- the shareholders of those companies are, in large part, going to be the same people who own the American for-profit health care system.
Cameron has just opened up huge green pastures new for them to graze.
The flip side of letting in these companies, who as you say will be as hard to get rid of as kudzu, is that letting them in is going to destroy a medical culture that has produced very good doctors and nurses etc all the while paying them… peanuts. People do medicine for love, here. Not for money.
Which Cameron probably can’t even understand, and worse is probably deeply suspicious of.
And once you break something as precious and valuable and delicate as a culture like that…. getting it back will be no more difficult than, say, re-evolving a carrier pigeon from a battery chicken.
What’s in it for Cameron and his cronies? Most of them took a lot of money from the companies who stand to make huge profits, more of them will probably get sweet deals from those companies on the back-end, but most of all it’s his religion. He’s serving the the cult of the Invisible Hand, with no notion, nor any care, about where that cult might lead the country he claims to be leading. For him it’s the pure heroin of pure ideology.
It’s always the True Believers who fuck it up for everyone.I reckon because we are, essentially, very lazy apes. Faced with a choice between facing up to the messy business of the small details and endless contradictions and disappointments and pyrrhic victories and imperfections of any and all real human lives on this earth, and finding the courage and inner resources to get on with life nonetheless, they just can’t make the running, they get dispirited, they feel that, as apes go they really deserved better, and then, lo and behold, they latch onto some monolithic idea that promises to give them whiter teeth and silkier hair and handsomer mates and, well… an illusion of immortality of one kind or another (and if they are at the top of the heap enough sway over other lazy apes to spirit away and heap up a fair bit of their surplus production, which is all that a lazy ape really needs) and they are weak, and lazy, and simply can’t resist. Christianity, Islam, Communism, The Invisible Hand, and every other Messianic sect that comes down the pike, crushing human beings beneath its juggxrnaught…
I am so sick and angry about it, I become so stressed I want to scream.
Cameron pushed through the ‘reforms’, without proper parliamentary debate. Our news services have criminally neglected reporting on what exactly is going to happen. Even the BBC has failed us. The LibDems have gone along with everything the Tories propose. The LibDems are dead electorally from now on, but it’s too late for the NHS. Labour say they’ll reverse it if they get in next time, but too much will have been lost by then.
Most people simply don’t realise what letting the American Health companies in means and have been kept in the dark.
Many people over here still depend on the BBC for their news. I’ve complained twice about the lack of depth of many of their reports. Doesn’t do any good though.
Something like 80% or more of our doctors and most Health bodies are against it, but it’s been bulldozed through. They are doing the same with all our public services. They’re even talking about privatising some of the police. The private force will even have powers of arrest!
England is in deep, deep, doo doo….
Di
I wrote letters, marched, sent money I could ill afford to the 38 degrees campaign…. all to no avail. This de-re-cession has given the Tories camo to dismantle civil society. Was no fiscal reason to do it. In fact just the opposite. But they only have one idea in their narrow little minds. Their acolytes, all of them. Not a big thinker in the whole lot. Show them any problem, all they can do in response is close their eyes and chant, “free markets free markets free markets” like zombie alter boys, whilst setting up some new regime that is actually so far removed from anything resembling any kind of free market that we, the poor sods in the general population, might as well be serfs back in the dawning days of the 12h century, sold down river to the Duke of Lucre.
In ten years vast numbers of people here will be unable to afford medical treatment without going bankrupt, as well.
Oh frabjus Day! Kaloo! Kalay!
Wow, what a sad thread you guys are running today.
Let me be the skeptic, by not being so negative. (I will at least have a bit more fun.)
We have two separate problems here: the UK and the USA.
For the UK, your underlying issue is that Parliament has all the power and does not seem to even pay attention to the public any more. When that is combined with the obvious decline of the BBC as an information source, well sports fans you have a serious problem.
The answer is, of course, to develop your own new networks of information and to use those networks to organize a better countervailing movement to the Tories. Nu-Labor is discredited, and the Lib-Dems destroyed themselves also when they joined this coalition government.
The other possible path you could take lies right there; pressure on the Lib-Dem’s. Without their votes, Cameron’s government would fail a confidence vote, which would force a new election. Perhaps the real solution is in front of you.
Now as for the USA: the health insurance industry is rapacious but they are also falling apart. Their rates have increased at twice the general inflation rate for almost twenty years now, and that increases their short-term profits but cannot be sustained. It has already reached the point where employers cannot cover their workers, so the entire rest of the business world have joined the list of their victims.
So this may be the darkness before the dawn. Even conservatives are now talking about a disconnect between employment and health care access. The simple solution is the easy one to campaign for, a point lost on both Hillary Clinton in 1993 and on Obama in 2009.
A simple solution for our health care ills would extend Medicare, the basic package to every legitimate resident of the USA. Health insurance would only be an add-on, as it already is for Medicare. We already have some sort of universal coverage in two states, Hawaii and Oregon, plus RomneyCare in Massachusetts.
Simple solutions are the easy ones to campaign for. Start there.
Kev
It is true that parlimentary politics are much more radical than U.S. politics, or can be. Once a party is in power there is very little check on what it can do so long as it holds on to a majority. Blair, for instance, eliminated habeas corpus and double jeopardy, checks on government power that had been writ in stone since Magna Carta -more or less- with a flick of his wrist. And he never told anyone ahead of time he was going to do it. And no one has thought it wise to reinstate them since.
Cameron campaigned on a specific promise not to reorganize the health service. Then set about doing just that. Simple solution would have been to stop the bloody law, and we did try, put pressure on the spineless LibDems, you name it, but we lost.
Now it is a law. Can’t do anything about that until the government changes. The LibDems know that they will never be elected in any numbers ever again, so they are beyond pressure now. We can try to get them to pull out of the coalition, but where do you pull on a jellyfish? They want their five years near power if not in it. And Clegg is one of the most despicable turncoats who ever lived as far as I can make out.
But Medicare for all? Hell yeah. How about VA hospitals for all? There are easily graspable solutions. The battle is getting the crowd who hate the idea of being in it all together to take on board that they are already in it all together. And to somehow get them to feel okay about that.
Best idea I’ve heard: spike all the drinking water from sea to shining sea with E. Fox news would close down in a week. Can’t run a fear and loathing campaign when there is no fear and precious little loathing walking around loose….
Short of that? What else works besides a common enemy (let’s not go there) or education?
KevinNevada:
No point looking at the LibDems to make things better. They’re the reason Cameron has been able to get these ‘reforms’ through. They’ve betrayed every section of society. Politically they’re dead.
Cameron isn’t a career politician. He’s only in it for the short term. Has said after 2015 he’s planning on spending time with his family at his home in the country…It explains a lot. It’s likely that many of those he’s surrounded himself with also have the same plans. For sure if they wanted to stay in politics and keep their parliamentary seats, they’d be going far more slowly than they are. It clearly indicates they are in it for the money.
I voted LibDem. Thought they’d be a decent buffer between the extremes of Labour and the Conservatives. Naively thought when they went into coalition with the Cons that they would invoke the power of a threat to cross the floor and trigger another election if Cameron pushed things too far.
I was so wrong. And so were a lot of other voters. Fool me once etc…
Bluthner:
Yep. I did the 38 degrees thing. And sent money. I’ve also pestered my local Conservative MP, but he’s so far up Cameron’s bum, I doubt he’s been out for air since he was elected two years ago. He posts in our local paper every so often and I’m all over him like a rash, but if I’m honest it’s a total waste of time.
Frustration, and grief doesn’t even begin to explain my feelings.
Di
How many of us could write those exact words! I delivered leaflets in my own neighborhood for them, for more than two years. I am now ashamed to walk down the street that I leafleted. Ashamed. I wrote to ‘Nick’ and told him so. He did not bother to reply.
And you are completely right about Cameron and Osborne just in it to launch their careers. Neither one of them was clever enough to make it as a banker. So now they are going to earn the millions the soft way. Having sold their country down the river for a score or two million each.
They are filth. And Clegg is lower than filth.
Bluthner:
A friend of ours was a life long Liberal. We saw him recently and he said he went to a meeting where Nick Clegg was speaking.
Afterwards he went up to Clegg and said how disappointed and disgusted he was.
He said he was so angry he wanted to do something really dramatic, so decided to tear up his membership card and fling it in Cleggs face, but he forgot the card is laminated. He said he tried his damnest to break it, but couldn’t, so had to be content with flinging it at Cleggs face.
I’m surprised Clegg still ventures out in public…
Di, and Bluthner:
I suspect we could multiply your rage by several million around the UK.
And from that, a backlash will erupt that will swing the next election, dramatically.
No one wants to accept this yet, certainly not trust it, but such a backlash is building against the right wing excesses here in the USA.
Item: The women are pissed off, and in my experience women hold grudges for quite a while. 28.5 weeks is not long enough to forget the incredible offensive on their rights here in the US in this year’s legislation, across many states. The latest bullshit from Arizona is a fresh example, just last week.
Item: The entire GOP, with a few honorable exceptions have also seriously annoyed and insulted the Latino voters, as a community while pandering to the Angry White Guys. Their entire Presidential slate polled about 14 percent support from Latinos, recently. The Jellyfish has emitted some very nasty thoughts in that direction. (He also thinks that his family’s odd history with Mexico makes him a “Latino candidate” . . . . another measure of his incredible cluelessness.)
Item: The seniors, who bloody well do vote, have noticed that the GOP are scheming to not extend or to save Medicare, but to actually destroy it.
I think a tsunami is about to hit, say 28.5 weeks from now.
Di
I know Clegg ventured out to a dinner a couple of nights ago where he ran into an acquaintance of mine, a woman of some voice, who by all accounts pinned his ears back good and proper. By all accounts his only response was to squeak and squirm. I doubt there are many safe rooms for him in London. All his own people despise him. All Tories despise him. Everyone else despises him.
Alas, Kev, there isn’t much scope for backlash in the UK at the moment. Labour is still a dreadful mess. Blair destroyed his party and Brown did nothing to reinvigorate it, and Ed Milliband is a third-rater no one in his or her right mind would want to hold power.
For now we are well and truly fucked.
When the next generation gets its chance, maybe, but that’s years from here.
Bluthner:
well, if Labor is a mess, then there will be plenty of openings for new faces. That “next generation” does not have to wait.
FFS, you have the Internet to use, so get organized!
Start with a “no incumbents”, no re-elections line. All new faces.
My best friend, who in his minister days did our wedding, is a teacher in Wisconsin. They were screwed by Scott Walker and his Koch-lovin’ pals. But they are now organized and the recall is pending. They will not disperse either, that state will swing Democratic this November.
Backlashes can be a bitch.
Bluthner, Tolkien is right, the sun will shine again. These reactionary radicals will be defeated. I firmly believe that.
I have no idea why that posted as anonymous and not Leigh.
Bluth, Di, thanks for expressing my feelings on the Tories and the NHS better than I could. It’s surprising hard to flesh out ‘Gnnnnnnghh!!!!!’ in a way that communicates effectively.
The Tories have played a blinder politically, much as I hate to say it. I would have supported and defended the Lib Dems decision to go into coalition with them up until the last few months – I think at the time it was the least-worst option. Now, especially post-NHS farrago, I’m entirely stumped as to what they think they’re accomplishing. They’ve had all the moderating-ability of a deaf barnacle. They are being played.
When George Osborne is able to out-manoeuvre you, you really are terrible.
Sadly I’m in a Tory constituency, and not willing to abstain from voting. I’ve been considering actually joining the LDs for a few years now, rather than just sitting on the sidelines. The local LDs are a solid bunch, by all accounts. Would I be joining a sinking ship, or is it still worth supporting the best local non-Tory option?
sibusisodan:
I lean quite hard to the left on a lot of things, but not all. The LibDems seemed the obvious choice for me over the last few years, although it’s always been a wasted vote where I live. Think of Windsor, Ascot etc.
We only have two labour councillors so the Tory’s pretty much do as they like. The leader of our council Bettison runs things just the way he likes it. Very exasperating and not really democracy.
All I know is I will never vote LibDem again. I shall go with the Labour Party in future. A vote for any other party will be wasted, and giving a minority party the balance of power has shown just what happens when you give politicians a taste of the front benches. It’s been a dangerous lesson for our country, and I’ve certainly learned from it.
The LibDems are looking at crushing defeats. I doubt they’ll claw back much of the support they once had.
Corruption and jobs for the boys has always been there, as has the public school monopoly in Parliament, but what’s happened lately takes my breath away. They really don’t care.
It’s always been said about the Conservatives, but this time they really don’t!
At worst any election needs to be about giving the Tories a bit of a smacking even if it only lowers their majorities and rattles their cages a bit. At best it would rid us of some incompetent, corrupt, morally bankrupt men and women.
And yes — I know, we’d most likely vote in a fresh lot that are just as bad.
Sib
Indeed.
I’m in the same boat. Safe Tory constituency. Local L.D.’s are solid people who do some good things (very) locally. They are never going to set the world on fire, and most of them feel utterly betrayed by Clegg’s behavior. Voting for them in the Parliamentary elections was always a protest vote. Not one I will ever make again.
Labour are on the whole so uninspiring they might as well be zombies. One or two exceptions, such as Stella Creasy, but none of them have much traction (yet) inside their party.
Maybe in a few years I’ll volunteer to work for Creasy. The rest of them…
I’m running out of words and starting to make grunting noises now, too. AND hail is battering my window.
Thanks to you both for your responses. Interesting that we three are all in safe Tory seats. I’m feverishly hoping that Scotland doesn’t go on its own, because it’ll be Tory majorities all the way from then!
This current crop of Tories…it makes me weep. Thatcher would have eaten them for breakfast, and compared to them she’s a paragon of compassion and empathy. How can they be simultaneously so apparently brainheaded and yet capable of ramming through such a caustic agenda?
I went to a radio interview for the field of competitors for the last Labour leadership election, and wasn’t impressed by any of them. I fear we’re in for a good few years in the political doldrums.
And Di, you’re right about the LDs deserving some crushing at the polls, but I wouldn’t draw the same conclusion as you about the dangers of coalition govt. It’s more an object lesson about Bevan’s dictum on Tories and a reflection on the spinelessness of one N Clegg than about the general features of coalition govt.
sibusisodan:
If they were so against what was happening they could cross the house, but there isn’t one that’s had the guts to do it or even threaten Clegg with it in order to reign him in.
Apart from all the other dreadful changes they’ve been party to, how could they allow the NHS to be disbanded. For me it’s the equivalent of treason. I was born just before it was introduced, and knew from my grandmother and mother what it was like for the poor.
I was impressed by Vince Cable. Indeed he’s the main reason I voted LibDem this time but now I reckon for all his rhetoric, he lacks backbone.
Even Shirley Williams let us down. That was a real shock.
Sorry, but to me, they are singly and collectively a disgrace.
Di, I agree they’re not giving us an example of bold leadership and thoughtful governance, and they deserve the shellacking at the polls which is bound to follow. But it’s the Tories who are defining the path they’re on, and they should take most of our ire.
You’re bang on re; the NHS. I guess I’m still too flummoxed by the way it’s been done to process properly. ‘No top down reorganisation’ my posterior. Desperately hoping that there will be some way to undo it in the next few years…
Totally off topic.
Just listened to an NPR piece Gunny about some cows near Gunnison that wandered and starved or froze to death during the winter. Rangers now need to dispose of the carcasses before they thaw and attract awakening and hungry bears which in turn could become a danger to spring hikers. Since vehicles are prohibited in that area they can’t haul them away and might use explosives to blast them into more manageable sized carrion and let the smaller critters clear it up before the bears get wind.
Anyway – haven’t heard Gunnison mentioned on national radio before – sorry to interrupt – back to knocking the Tories and Nick Clegg
Well, Ann, you’d better not wait very long or the patient won’t survive the operation. It took us a good twenty years or more for the industrial part of the health care industry to grow into what it has become but that was because it started from just about nothing. If you’re selling off the whole infrastructure in one big auction, you won’t have nearly as long. Once half the bus drivers in Croydon have what pass for their pensions locked up health care stocks, you’ll find starting over to be just about impossible.
Natasha has a point. You can then add that the majority in the USA have excellent, if expensive health care and are apprehensive of change. Hence the difficulty of getting there from here. We have missed the boat, the horse has bolted, the evolutionary tree has branched…..
It’s as Expat says, Ann (by the way, which Ann are you?) And the better news is, those of us who can’t get health insurance have forgotten what it was like, so we hardly miss it at all.
And furthermore, Ann (whoever you are), it is pretty much as Expat says: give it time and in a while you’ll just stop noticing. These things happen to some people but, really, haven’t they always? Luck favors the lucky, Ann, never forget that. Not much anybody can do to change that, not, least of all, if it’s going to make people apprehensive.
Hum. That anonymous (3:28) was me. Not sure what happened there. Of course, if this also comes up as ‘anonymous’ you will be none the wiser…
I said a while back that the LibDems had stopped delivering their newsletter around here . . .Well, I got one a few days ago. The headline ‘news’ from our ward’s two LibDem councillors was how (presumably against huge opposition from the capitalist Tory classes) they had succeeded in getting double yellow lines extended on a street near me by two metres for the local residents . . . For what purpose, I can’t imagine.
Hoo-bloody-ray.
(They were nowhere to be seen when the council, along with TFL, proposed swapping a set of traffic lights at a crossroads a couple of hundred metres away for a mini-roundabout. The local residents all wrote in response, “OK, but we want a zebra as well.” Reason being that it’s a bus route, and because of the lights was an absolute nightmare to cross. You had to wait either until there was nothing coming from any of the four directions, or just hope some turning vehicle would stop for you. Lo and behold, a few weeks on, and the lights have been disabled, roundabout and zebra – -along with new sloped access paving — are in place, everybody feels safer — especially Squirrel, who can’t suddenly get into a gallop to avoid being squeezed between two buses — and cameras are recording to see how it works. And the LibDems have expended, they say, months of intellectual effort and political negotiation on two metres of double yellow lines . . .)
Friend of mine knows a (now ex) LibDem election agent in the North East. She’s been one for forty years. She resigned in disgust last year. For decades they’ve relied on the ‘sandals, beards and Shetland pullover image, but that hardly ever had anything to do with the types who actually stood for office. They always were career politicians, and often just as (or more) corrupt than any of the others. (I had one experience of them in control of a local council, and I wouldn’t touch them with a bargepole ever after. Just as now, you could barely tell them from the Tories, and they only lasted a couple of years.) Under Clegg, they’ve stripped the ‘liberal’ veneer away and shown themselves to be the same hypocritical self-serving shits they’ve spent decades hiding from all those who never actually lumbered themselves with a LibDem council.
They don’t get near toppling the Tories where I live. Sounds as if it’s no bad thing either, although anything that would wipe the smug expressions off our well ensconced Conservative council would be really welcome.
The Labour is pretty close in some of the wards, but they don’t have a very good organisation. It’s been too many years of coming second.
I’d have thought now would be a good time for them to push a bit.
I’ve been considering offering some sort of help, as long as it didn’t involve walking…Not up to that so much these days.
I had a chat with a Labour Party activist a while back, he suggested I might stand locally. A few years ago I might have considered it but I’m too old now. I don’t have the energy such a job deserves.
One of the most satisfying things I’ve ever done, was during the Poll Tax unrest.
It really hit my business and I saw red when a local Parliamentary Tory candidate called into my shop with his entourage of young, excited – as in, ‘isn’t this a good wheeze’, suited, hangers on. I harangued him in my best fish wives voice, opened the shop door and told them to get out!