Stepping back one can see how truly amazing it is the way those who run this world from corporate executive suites have bamboozled us into believing that you deserve health care in accordance to your ability to pay.
We squawk about it. The majority of Americans believe that a system of universal free health care is more sensible, more just, more humane. But our protestations are of no significance because there it is: free-for-all, cutthroat, for-profit health care silencing all opposition.
The brainwashing has succeeded beautifully. The trick, it seems, is to just keep repeating the same messages over and over to people benumbed by overwork sitting in front of the screen, the captive audiences of a deluge of advertisements.
Every advertisement is a form of brainwashing. Those who run this world want us all to cultivate a corporate worldview, a worldview in which all the values that the corporate world represents are the values that the whole society — nay, the whole world — must adopt.
So we pay and pay and pay because that’s the most essential value of the corporate worldview. The CEOs of these mega-health-care corporations are pulling down obscene levels of wealth in the scam called for-profit health care while, at the other end of the stick, people are being made homeless by their health care costs.
Something is drastically wrong here, you will admit.
The pattern of how the wealth of nations is being distributed throughout the economy is based on the premise of might makes right. We all live by this premise. The outcome is that we have an economy in which the wealth goes to the top of the economic pyramid. The rest be damned.
Corporate wealth buys politicians. It buys elections. You might say it owns all the seats in Congress and decides who’s going to sit and who’s going to walk.
It’s a dog-eat-dog society. It is looked upon as acceptable, if not necessary, to engage in bribery, kick-backs, revolving door from government to corporate suites, voter suppression, monumental egotism and arrogance, megalomania and hubris, and, finally, the golden parachutes for especially good soldiers.
It’s down-and-dirty, folks!
Elections are not going to fix what’s broke here. It’s going to take sweeping social, economic and political change.
It’s going to take mass, non-violent mobilization, strikes, work stoppages. Our neighbors to the South have a beautiful word that captures the spirit of the uprising that’s needed — “cacerolazo!” Get out the pots and pans. Make a racket in the street so that those who try to run our lives can’t think. Occupy the highways and byways. Put an end to business as usual. Shut it down.
Ralph J. Dolan
Haydenville