Baseball, Mom, Apple Pie, Home of the Brave and Land of the Free … the American Homestead of core values.
Although in reality such a homestead does not exist, we still talk of the American Dream – core values that have been the specific notions around which elections have been won and lost. As an internal visualization tool, The American mythical homestead has driven the grandest, most successful and most popular events, changes, adjustments, creations and repentances that we’ve seen in our history.
This idealized homestead never included a unanimous endorsement of supposed free-market economics dominated by naturally sociopathic corporate entities. It never included subordination of individual rights and freedoms to the priorities of corporate dominance and certainly did not include evolution of the government into a source of camouflaged corporate welfare.
In that regard, a pure and successful free-market society has never existed, has never proven itself a success nor proven itself a universally beneficial system for public well-being.
Chartering corporations in the 19th Century was a means of financing expensive public works for the common good and was never intended to create non-human “entities” with citizen status who would eventually pool vast amounts of cash for legislative bribery. The consequence of that action has been the current lopsided economic oligarchy in which combined financial assets beyond the means of individual citizens have overwhelmed equality – creating instead a vastly uneven field upon which life and subsistence in this country occurs.
Such could only be accomplished through political activism driven by cash offered to humans who could and would follow the money with those same votes they were elected to wield on behalf of individual human constituencies.
When pondered and considered honestly; when valued for what they truly represent, our mythical core values reflect the undeniable rebuttal to politicians who declare that government should be run as a business.
At best, that notion reflects a very narrow view of economic reality in this country and is perhaps best exemplified by the recent candidacy and foolish economic speeches of supposed successful capitalists. Such candidates have used an inappropriate logic from a prior time and circumstance that suggests a weak grasp of anything below the affluent level of life in this country.
President Trump typifies many politicians who have come to equate their personal financial success as a blend of entrepreneurial wisdom and determination fortified by civic understanding of the laws of economics. His opinions reek of a condescending self-interest based that suggests economic ignorance regarding the value of working and middle-class America.
Most of these prominent megaphones want you to believe that justice for all is found on the back of a dollar bill more so than in any Constitution and for decades the Republican Party has portrayed itself as the home of the most fiscally wise and honest conservatives.
In reality, once unleashed by their political successes beginning in the 1990’s, with great fanfare they put on the Sacred Miter of reform, picked up the Scepter of change and Vestments of political righteousness to affect a “fiscally responsible makeover ” that in reality more than anything else set in motion today’s most powerful contemporary economic embarrassments.
For example we saw a welfare reform in the 1990’s that has only marginally resolved even half the problems of poverty in this country.
We also saw an irresponsible and self-interested repudiation of the Clinton presidency’s attempt to address national health care inadequacies. Resistance to the Clinton efforts was foolish, ideological, partisan and primarily greed-based.
We also have seen going back to the presidency of Reagan how the “fiscally responsible” party of change actually changed many American core value freedoms into unprotected vulnerabilities subject to the whims and greed of corporate capitalism.
Somewhere along the line came the idea that government should be run primarily like a business.
More recently, during the term of President Obama, Republicans wasted an enormous amount of time and tax money in more than 50 failed attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Even within a party majority in both houses, Republicans failed to repeal the Act and had nothing to offer as an alternative. Do not doubt that health care and health insurance corporations were crying alligator tears all the way to the bank.
Republicans have never satisfactorily explained at a national or state level how running the government as a business specifically benefits and protects the physical and economic well-being of the majority of citizens.
While any business will look at its bottom line and look for ways to refuse to spend money, such is not the principle priority of government. We do not need first and foremost a government that from the outset looks for ways to say No.
What would a government do with “greater profits” created from denials and refusals to spend on the social infrastructure that supports and protects all citizens?
If not the citizens, then who are the shareholders to whom government business-runners owe their highest allegiance? We have already seen what they would do.
A simple examination of the Medicare D legislation reveals that the single most effective use of government surpluses is not unlike what Republicans did with Social Security dollars. By arm-twisting and with no eye single to what’s best for Social Security recipients, they twisted so-called reform into a slop trough for business – forcing greater sums of tax dollars directly to businesses in the form of required choice of allotment of citizen-owned government cash.
You are now required to spend part of your social security dollars by legal allotment. The government will give it only to a corporation – all you get to do is choose which shark you want to pay..
Having taken some whacks at Republicans, I’m not about to imply that even a victorious Democrat would be able or even willing to reverse many of the legislated mistakes of the past 20 years in this country.
It is obvious to those who are not blinded by partisan advocacies that neither party’s victories in the future will guarantee any movement for genuine reform unless among those victories a specific mandate is included. It must be a mandate that reflects the will of the people; a mandate opposed to bought-and-paid-for civic policies enacted at the behest of monied lobbyists.
Voters must simultaneously have opportunity or means of formalizing a mandate to remove, severely restrict or equalize the playing field when it comes to lobbying our representatives for change. We need to intervene and force corporate lobbyists out of our elected officials’ waiting rooms.
We’re losing our trust in whatever the Mythical American Core Values ever were. Nothing is taking the place of that trust except perhaps cynicism and an ever deepening self-absorbed behavioral pattern; a pattern that only underlines what historians will eventually describe as the reason for the collapse of the middle class and the slide into economic disaster of every low-income family and single citizen in this country..
A future mythology may be only a speculation about an American Dream once believed to exist.
Curmudgeon at Work 