The Politics of Selfishness

In another crass classic column in the Kennebec Journal by M.D. Harmon titled, “If more murder victims had guns, maybe they wouldn't be killed,” he engages in an outrageous blame the victim screed:

 “…if Kasandra Perkins had a gun, that is what could have helped her be alive today. But she was defenseless against an [sic] violent man's rage, and so she died.”

Pushing Harmon’s wild-west, everybody-packing, shoot-em-up, and dangerous gun fantasy aside for the time being, one must wonder what prompts such a blatant and boorish blame the victim stance. There is a straightforward unstated motivation - responsibility avoidance.

Stating that a woman victim died in a horrible murder because she did not have a gun, Harmon pushes the blame for what occurred onto the victim. He and therefore society is not responsible. Sound laws to reduce gun violence that society could enact are unnecessary because the victim had a less government intrusiveness recourse available and did not take personal responsibility for her own defense. ‘It was her problem, not mine’ is the implication.

The proceeding convoluted inane formula forms the core of much of the mindset currently expressed in the right wing’s “politics of selfishness.”

• Individuals languish in poverty because they are completely responsible for their own position in life; governments bear no responsibility to provide any services.
• Elderly individuals had a lifetime to save for retirement; Social Security and Medicare actually encourage an abdication of responsibility.
• The responsibility for environment degradation lies with individual litterers and consumers not packagers and manufacturers.
• Clean elections funding violates individual (i.e. corporate too) power regardless of any suggested common level playing field good.
• The safety of food and medicine is best determined by individual consumers doing their own research not some regulator or government researcher.
• Banking and finance practices are best left to wonders of the free market where individuals will win or lose according to their own wits.
• The idea of a good well funded public education available for all should be replaced by individuals buying the educations they can afford.

On and on the “politics of selfishness” goes, destroying what we hold in common care and concern as society. The worshipers of the "politics of selfishness” are a large and wide alliance of so called “liberty” libertarian leaning Republicans, anti-any-tax tea partiers, corporate GOP profits before people operatives, and the audiences and purveyors of the talk radio and faux news entertainment industry. The “politics of selfishness” absolves its adherents of societal commitments made through just taxation, recognizing regulatory realities, and far more philosophically important - citizenship responsibility.

To paraphrase a worn out gun quote: ‘Taxes, protecting people, and shared responsibility doesn’t kill societies; the "politics of selfishness” does.’

Tax Boogeyman for President!

Mitt Romney and all those running down ballot in the Republican column are convincing themselves that the upholding of the Affordable Care Act has a poisonous silver lining: taxes.

Supreme Court Justice John Roberts decided that the penalties for not purchasing mandated health insurance coverage are a tax and therefore Constitutional. After Republicans thrashed Roberts verbally and even pushed their shrill rhetoric to include one of their favorite wind-up toys, high crimes and misdemeanors free impeachment, they got back to their cynical and selfish selves to reframe the battle for health care to be all about taxes. The bottom line for the GOP on health care is neither solutions that extend coverage for the US population nor an alternative vision of true affordability and access, especially for the poor.

Maine Republican Chair Charlie “bus-watcher” Webster was quick out of the gate with the newly improved GOP attack-du-jour:

“I thought Obama said he would never raise taxes on the middle class. Well, this is obviously another bait and switch tactic the Democrats used to push their tax, borrow, and spend agenda on the American people, when all along they said this was ‘not a tax’.”

Will voters fall for an anti-tax line again?

Frankly it remains to be seen since Citizens United basically allows unlimited money to pour into our politics. Even should there be widespread support for the Affordable Care Act, it’s just from mere people not the self-important elitist financial interests with the most cash. And cash spends pretty easy and with more pronounced results tearing down something as a tax versus making an articulated case for fulfilling a genuine need in our society that requires fair investment support.

However, at the very core of this debate, one thing is visibly lacking: a viable Republican alternative. Anyone giving reasoned review to the GOP mantra about competition knows that it just leads to the high deductable, low benefit equation that benefits insurance interests’ bottom lines and only results in competition for the largest chunk of poor and middle class’s wallets in their struggle to avoid the gambling chance of medical bankruptcy. And the other GOP standard fencepost, competition between the states, is really about being able to buy into the worse levels of regulation from states that care less about their citizens and are more in political pocket of big insurance.

The bitter truth is that health care is not really a Republican priority; it neither fits with their market worship of picking winners and losers nor their “got mine, you’re on your own” attitude of class warfare. The anti-tax party is exposed once again as the anti-people party. We have not seen anything creative dedicated to health care delivery since the 2006 “Act Providing Access to Affordable, Quality, Accountable Health Care” in Massachusetts under then Governor Mitt Romney. But, hey, why go there?

Prove It Charlie

Regardless of position, using facts and not fiction in debate is expected of our civic leaders. When someone purposefully veers into outright deception and spreading false claims to build support for one’s particular position, it is disservice to Maine citizens. Argue with passion, debate vigorously, but tell the truth.

LD 1376 which reduces Maine citizens’ access to the polls by denying them the continuation of same day registration unanimously enacted by a Republican legislature in 1973 and continually used by Republicans, Democrats, and unenrolled voters without problem is a case in point. For partisan and rhetorical reasons Maine’s GOP joined the national trend to restrict ballot access using sound bite and talk radio reasoning.

Most disheartening is the largely unchallenged and I contend false assertion made by State Republican Chairman, Charlie Webster, published on June 27th regarding “witnessed busloads of new voters who register Election Day, folks most of us have never met and frankly most of us may never see again.”

I’ll be upfront; I do not believe Mr. Webster. The sad element in this affair is that his motivation seems to be to spread fear of people who for understandable reasons register at election time rather than welcoming greater involvement in our electoral process.

Mr. Webster ought to post videos of the busloads of undesirable voters swamping polls online. Surely the Republican Chairman has photos, news stories, and hard evidence to make such a charge. He should place sworn affidavits by reliable witnesses in front of us. In other words, prove it Charlie.

If proof is not forthcoming then Mr. Webster ought to apologize or the Republican State Committee ought to admonish him. If neither is forthcoming, then we as voters will need to admonish the GOP ourselves next election because truth is important.

The Lie of Equivalency

Representative Paul Ryan puts 47 million Americans on welfare. *

Simplistic repetition of rhetoric in politics regardless of issue facts or complexity is a tool that has been used with great success on the right to deceive citizens into supporting actions counter to their own interests. It raises its head frequently in the fiscal posturing machinations of today’s über-conservatives’ attacks on progressive taxation, spending that benefits people over political profits, and the mindless worship of the free market which really stands for corporations being free to harm common citizens.

Getting the lie of equivalency into circulation is the very first step. Whether it is hanging a banner on Maine’s GOP headquarters saying “Working People Vote Republican” to create an unbalanced perception or planting the specter of a mushroom cloud in the public’s mind to get the nation’s war blood up, this deceptive and simplistic approach is used time and time again to our detriment. And so the images of Republicans “having ladders on their trucks” and Iraq attacking with nuclear weapons us if we do not attack them first are evoked to push actions which makes no sense. Their objective is to ignore the core truth by using a lie of equivalency that only serves to heighten partisanship and destroy consensus, compromise, or cooperation.

A now a brand new lie of equivalency is being tested by Republican Paul Ryan as detailed at Talking Points Memo:

…Ryan reframed the entitlement cuts in his budget as "strengthen[ing] welfare for those who need it,"…

Ryan and his allies trotted the concept of changing Medicare to a voucher program that would put one of the most popular, effective, and needed entitlements on the pathway to filling private insurance company profit coffers and diminishing the level of effective help to citizens by both that action and allowing the benefit to shrink over time in relation to rising health care costs. Ryan and company got a strong negative reaction from across the political and public spectrum and even many Republicans raced to distance themselves from the rapid Ryan repulsion reaction.

Ryan didn’t have a good lie in place and just got the obligatory “at least he’s trying to do something and put something out there so we can chat about something and water down something so it looks like we do something” banter. But the powers to be do not want to address the deficit with appropriate progressive tax structures and tough decisions around exorbitant defense spending exemptions from reality. With quick turnaround, a GOP desirable lie is being auditioned to equate Medicare with welfare.

Thus cutting Medicare equals strengthening welfare for those who need it. “Those who need it” will be subject to strict and stern definition. In one fell swoop Medicare is the same as welfare and should now guide the future of the program. First there might be WelfareMedicare vouchers, followed perhaps by WelfareMedicare means testing, and of course finally elimination of the WelfareMedicare nanny state.

Medicare evokes a positive image of government serving all people well for their societal betterment, the essence of an advantageous entitlement because you are fortunate enough to be a United States citizen. The image of welfare in this context is designed to do precisely the opposite and reinforced by the misleading argument of need as a tepid low value positive over entitlement as an outright negative connotation. Ryan’s pairing of the two, a lie of equivalency, is poised now for rhetorical repeating and will be coming to a GOP theater near you.

* Based on 2010 estimated Medicare enrollment.

Percentage Perspectives

Congratulations Senator Dill! You have won a special election by a landslide that if it had gone to the GOP would have led their claims of support for Governor Paul LePage and his right wing agenda. I'm sure they had their downplaying the results spin ready just in case you nosed over the line in a photo finish but alas, they'll need to rewrite it to account for a trouncing that dismisses the idea of referendum on Maine’s direction. Speaking of mandates, you enter into office with a majority 68% win unlike Paul LePage who was sworn in after a 38% plurality of votes cast. As for the *GOTP, let the excuses begin!

* Grand Old Tea Party

Death Vouchers

“Do you realize that your leadership is asking you to cast a vote today to abolish Medicare as we know it?”
– Nancy Pelosi, April 15, 2011

The convoluted logic went like this. We were going to take something away in our existing health care system, we were going to have to reduce what was covered, some procedure choices would be pushed out of reach, some spending on inefficient older bodies and minds would need to be trimmed, some people would need to be judged in a faceless bureaucratic court of cost, and health care rationing would be introduced. The empanelled bureaucrats charged with weighing your life’s worthiness of repair would make up a cold hearted “death panel.”

The kind and loving face of the right had once again worked overtime injecting fear into the debate of President Obama’s health care reform. Yet whether one agrees with the result or not, there were not, are not, and will not be death panels in the loosest sense. The aim was to cover more people with insurance. Death panels were a leap of hyperbole about rationing.

An interesting component of rationing is the use of coupons or vouchers to give everyone the same slice of little. Vouchers are a device that invokes getting a tangible just due reward that one can spend as one sees fit. Misunderstood is that vouchers are also the device to get government money into private business hands with the least amount of government and voter controls. And like a coupon, vouchers are not necessarily intended to cover all costs, just the basics in part with you throwing in the difference. Now if coming up with the difference is a problem, and it will be, for many elderly Americans then the result is…surprise…rationing health care.

Senior fixed budgets will be subjected ever greater pressures to choose among the necessities of food, shelter, and health care in a process that is simultaneously going to be inadequate, confusing, and subject to market whims. On the political front it will be easier to reign in spending by trimming coupons a bit here and there depending on who is in power. The ability to indirectly cut Medicare as we knew it by hacking at it one remove away at the voucher level brings to mind reducing what will be covered, pushing some procedure choices out of reach, forcing decisions on spending on inefficient older bodies and minds onto the voucher recipients, leaving some people to be judged in a faceless bureaucratic market of cost, and thus introducing full blown health care rationing for older citizens. One might even call this weighing your life’s worthiness of repair the determinate factor in how one might elect to spend their inadequate cold hearted “death voucher.”

Medicare as we know it may face spending structural issues but the essential factor in the midst of all the economic debt fear of the future being spread by the right who want their profits now is ultimately about choice. We need only climb onto a tank and waive a corporate tax file to present our petition.

The Two Faced Truth