About “the discourse”.

(11 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

I decry violence.  And I denounce the attack in Tucson.  And I am NOT a gun apologist.

But I do have something to say, that in no way advocates killing, violence, guns, revolution or anything of the sort.

Merely an observation that those in power have advocated policies that have killed, destroyed, committed violence upon, stolen from and destroyed the lives of millions of American citizens.  Policies advocated mostly by Republicans but aided and abetted by Democrats.

And that the sudden talk in the mainstream media about sudden and “senseless” violence has ignored and been abetted by class, economic and other violence committed upon American citizens by the powers in Washington for 30 years.  Up to and including the very thing that is one of the causes of the Tucson shooting: Kicking the mentally ill onto the street, a policy begun under Reagan and continued ever since.

Yes, these people have put their own murderers onto the street, and by forbidding their care from concerns about “taxes” have put self-guided weapons out there that, finally, drew blood, and continue to draw blood.

But we haven’t stopped.

People in Washington have killed millions.  But they do it bloodlessly.  And with invitations to Martha Stewarts’ Vinyard.

So let me get right into it.

What happens, when tea baggers, as I do see medical care, as an extreme luxury — the extreme luxury that the insurance companies, neoliberals and obama would like it to be?

Yes, the tea baggers are stupid .. but will it matter?

Will it matter when no one can get health care but there are people getting social security?  The fact is, health care is being turned not into a right but an extreme privilege, given only to those on the pension, or the dole, or the very end (and I agree, people on SS and Medicare paid into that their entire lives) .. but people like self insured, or entrepreneurs .. there is no health care right as created by the Obama privilege.

And what about, when EVERYONE can get a gun, but NO ONE can get social security OR health care?  I mean, forgetting about the “gun debate” for a minute, or the “health care debate” does one — does anyone — realize the combination of supposed (and false and full of lies in the case of guns, but I digress) “consensus” in America is one of total destruction?  Self annihilation?  Violence, hate and killing without end?

Do people truly understand the insanity that is being engendered here?

That both neoliberal and neoconservative policies have been embraced what will in effect create a nuclear explosion, if not literally then figuratively?  That policies are being embraced that are literally designed to destroy civilizations?

When they come for yours .. your health care .. will you be angry at your sons?  You support the Democrats .. but they created a LUXURY rather than a right.  They created a luxury to suspend reality for people at certain ends of the spectrum.  Making the far right mewling about “entitlements” more than a ludicrous and phantasmical point.  You are giving health care to people with no source of income while making it impossible for those with a source of income to get health care?  

I mean, to me health care was already nutty.  Now people who make no money and who are retired can get it, while many of those are WORKING CANNOT or cannot afford it even if they could get it.

What part of “politically self destructive” would not be understood?  The Republicans may be mad meaning both angry and insane — they may talk about killing jobs.

Democrats aren’t killing jobs.

They are killing PEOPLE.  Among them, they are KILLING ME.

Now, I am mindful about clucking about the “discourse”.  We are to be worried about people being shot.  And to be honest, I am not one to advocate guns or violence of any kind.

But I am also the one being told BY THESE SELF SAME PEOPLE my basic human rights don’t matter or that if my rights matter, they are the work of delicate words and feather like rubbings on the nostrils of bigots.

 If I am gay, I can be denied a job.  If I am gay, I can be ejected without other cause from the military.  If I am gay and am killed, despite laws being passed, my death might be ignored — the practical effects of the so called “gay rights advances” of the last several years being to almost every report, MEANINGLESS to people in the real world.

I am gay.  And the allowance of the hate of the bigots, and their killing and desecration is by, among others, Democrats.

But what really affects me is not that.  Though that is just the tiniest part of it.

Your Democrats refused everything that would make such an argument moot.  Democrats talk about discourse.  Democrats talk about words.  Democrats talk about sensitivity.  Democrats talk about bipartisanship.

Democrats enact policies that quite literally over a long period in cooperation with Republicans, kill.

This is literal.  This is not discourse.  This is actual killing.  By neglect.  By blindness.  By uncaring.

(And of course, talking about sensitivity and harsh words and violence while defending and continuing official policies that encourage and allow homophobic bigots to pursue gay men, women, and the transgendered for sport).

Not that that matters.  What is the death of a gay man, after all, or a gay teenager who hung himself in his bedroom when you only voted for the person supporting policies that helped the person do that right?  It’s all so fuzzy and INDIRECT, you know.

Not at all like shooting someone and a whole bunchy of innocents at point blank range.

They refused single payer.  They refused a public option.  They refused everything and yet gave undeniable advantages to certain privileged and , yes, entitled people.  The people under 26 can get on their parent’s dole. After 2014 (WHY???)  there are, to unknown effect, insurance exchanges.   But there is no effort to contain insurance industry costs, and no apparent effort to ever contain them, either.

The people who are paying taxes are the only ones who are left.  The people getting social security are not paying taxes — leastways, any taxes that matter.

The wealthy are not paying meaningful  taxes – by continuing but professed temporary acquiescence of DEMOCRATS.

Seems like the only ones paying taxes are the people like me.

And, when it comes to people like me, everything is a fucking lie.  The Obama credit for heath care for small businesses and entrepreneurs are for people who have PROFITS that pay TAXES.  These are tax credits on profits paid.

But microbusinesses do not have PROFITS.

Microbusinesses, if they are wise businessmen, never have PROFITS.  If you understand anything about working in a capitalist economy instead of or perhaps in addition to decrying it, you understand that in order to get by everything you do and everything you make is offset by an equal and countervailing expense so that the business itself never pays taxes, but that the only taxes that are ever paid are on behalf of the employees or by the employees.  There is nothing wrong with these employee based taxes at all.  They pay for, among other things, unemployment insurance, social security for when we are finally old enough to collect, eventual medicare (for when we are eligible) and so on.

Large businesses, on the other hand, are different .. and the reason for taxing profits is a good one .. to get them to invest in the economy of America rather than, say, China (were there any difference to the laws in terms of “investing in economy” in a global world).

However, the Obama health care plan offers health care to the employees of Microbusinesses based on tax credits on PROFITS.

What this essentially means is — no profits – no tax credit.  No tax credit – no health insurance subsidy.  The people who work for the microbusiness .. are the ones paying taxes (because the owners have been given a pass by the neoliberal Obama administration among others).  

So, let’s analyze this.  The people who actually pay taxes in this economy are not (understandably and supportably) the people who have no money and make no income (the poor and the people on SS who paid into the system their entire lives).

These people get Medicare.

The wealthy get no meaningful taxes and buy private insurance.

So — the people who are working their balls off, and taking risks .. that is, working under an anvil every day, to make a microbusiness survive, and perhaps thrive .. they are paying for the wealthy and also their economic input makes it possible for people (deserving however they may be) on social security and medicare to get medical care.

But these people, less extraordinary steps, individual sacrifice and impoverishment — do not get any medical care themselves.

So, you can essentially get medical care WHILE you are a person working for the economy if you work for a). the government or b). a very large business that offers that sort of benefit.   By the way — sometimes this big business, encompassing perhaps millions or billions of dollars — is called small business, by the government.    But big businesses do not pay meaningful taxes.  And governments consume taxes.  So who pays the taxes?  Who pays for everybody else?  I am not a conservative and do not mean to turn this into a soap opera, but, really .. who?

Those who actually are in the demographic that PAYS THE TAXES are the ones told that they have NO HEALTH CARE.  I am one of those people.

Those who provide — those who provide the tax income.  They have no social security yet.  They have no medical care.  They live or die by their wits or their business acumen.  They are the “borgeois”.  They pay.  They suffer.  They, the ones who actually produce useful goods and services in the prime of their lives — they die.  They will have a mandate in 2014 to buy health insurance.  While there are rules, there is at least presently no regulation, and where there is regulation there is no apparent or believable criminal penalty for not acting honorably to provide health care to those who paid for it.  No one has gone to jail for the theft of trillions of dollars of health care fraud.

Does anyone see what is wrong with this picture?  Does anyone see how this fuels resentment — not even to say, destroying the very people who make the system, possible in the first place?  There are people (the wealthy) who are in effect sending their tax payments overseas by outsourcing and playing in the global (not “America first” economy).  There are other people, the elderly, disabled and the poor, who are receiving the benefit of what they’ve worked for.  And, as an unabashed liberal I would say, receiving this remuneration for taxes paid in the past, this is good, this is right, this is proper.  This is not largesse.  This is PAYMENT.

However.

The ones who work and die — those are the ones who pay medical care — AND EVERYTHING ELSE — for everyone else.  Large scale social programs always depend on the input of the present workers because the money having been paid in by the previous workers has always and will always have been already spent.  Apparently, for us, foolishly — on shit like tanks and whatnot.

But still, already been spent.

Tax payments by the young fuel the choices of the future.  Not those of the middle aged.  The tax payments of the middle aged make real the choices of the PAST.

For conservatives, this in an inconvenience.  A matter of theft needing the right words to seem benign.

For me, this is a debt — a debt it seems more and more unlikely for me to survive until or to ever collect upon for myself, but only for me to pay parents.  

Still, a debt.

But it is also a debt that should not abrogate mindfulness.  The mindfulness of the ones who need to pay NOW and what it is that happens that impacts their ability to help NOW.  Chief among that, their health and productivity.  The health and productivity they NEED to pay back the debt of the present and future generations.  The health and productivity of the ones who PAY TAXES to SUSTAIN THE CURRENT SYSTEM.  Because the wealthy don’t.  Because no one does.  Because only the chumps in America in the present day, do.

And those chumps are the chumps that work not for ginormous business, or even, by American government standards, by small business — or by the government itself.  Of course, the ginormous businesses, which are called by American businesses, “small businesses” and others, send their profits and employess to places like India.

But by MICRO-BUSINESS.  The sustainers.  The payers.  The American payers.  America’s main street INCARNATE.

While they are told to pound sand and that THEY DIE.  Most despicably, the indirect fascist apologia of Obama administration supporters that the dying of the productive — the literal death of the American working class – is a good thing.  Oh, not that we die.  NOT EXACTLY.  Just that we pay without getting health care.

Just that we pay.  While we die.

Just that, the good they did for certain people was great, along with the extra and extreme profits they brought people like Wellpoint, and that, well, the dying of the people expected to pay for this party was, well, the price of doing business.  And a hefty campaign contribution, or maybe just continuing victory of the Democrats, to boot.

Among other things, this might be a bit counterproductive.  There are people who profit off your illness — those people will get along just fine.  There are people on the other hand who are taxed for among other things to keep money flowing to keep you healthy — but those people, like me, have no health care and they die.

Now the Obama administration is talking about, via its Social Security commission, of depriving those who have what is little of what remains, their entitlement.  Their true entitlement.

My father, for example, is one of these people. They are mad as to the possiblity.  The possibility of the tiniest diminution of what they get. And who can blame them?  I don’t, certainly.  But, all along, I’ve been fucked.  And I’m the one being asked to pay.  And I’m the one, being counted on to pay, while I’m the one being told, essentially, to, if I get sick, to die.

Now, I am already angry about dying.  Honestly and without undo resentment, I kinda don’t like it.  I don’t like being asked to pay taxes, and to be penalized and to also die for the privilege.  In my generation and in my demographic there is no good stuff.  There is only payment and suffering and damnation.

But, honestly, there’s another factor here .. the factor of killing the golden goose.

I think if you were wise, you would find a way for 30, 40 and 50 something workers to get health care — not just if they were in the right situation but ALL THE TIME.  For perhaps the reason that you would want them to continue paying to keep shit from collapsing inward, literally no one else wanting to or willing to do anything to stop that.

But this seems bizarre and stupid in today’s America.

Let me be perfectly honest with you with what I think and understand, from my perspective, has happened.

The neoliberal Democrats have attempted to appear true to the Democratic mindset by superficially and preliminarily appealing to the poor and those who have the delusion that it is possible to have something for nothing.  And, in the meantime, and it is not truly debatable, have in so doing negotiated with multi-billion dollar paper pushing corporations in dark corners.

And there is the standard and true Democratic line .. the Social Security trust fund, technically is not in trouble.

But what Alan Simpson (he of the 300 million tits) said is also true — THEY ALREADY SPENT YOUR MONEY.  Although it’s not 300 million tits .. it’s 300 billion gallons the MIC has been sucking off you, for decades.  And the thieves telling you you’re a putz for believing it, and that they’re going to have your money, and that you should find someone else to pay what they owe.

Me, for example.  Me, the non union guy (not by choice) who has worked his whole life and who has no nothing.  I am the middle guy in your clash of the titans.  The person you can take everything from.  Except that you are going to kill me.  Me and everyone like me.

Your money — it’s gone.  The neoconservatives and neoliberals spent it.  You won’t take it back.  You won’t punish them.  But you will punish the only and diminishing class of people in America who both make goods for other people and who ALSO pay taxes — American taxes that bring benefits to Americans.  And deny them health care, to boot.  The only ones who can keep this Ponzi scheme running.

And, by making people like me — the only ones left — suffer and die .. this may work for a while.