Bought and Paid For

It’s human nature to accept what we have seen for years as remaining the same.

If you see a milk bottle with a white liquid inside your first reaction is that it is a bottle of milk. But It may be a milk bottle filled with water made to look like milk.

And so with our political system even though history proves again and again that despite familiar labels, content and activities have differed over generations.

Of course, what history proves is useless if you have no clue about the history.

If you have no idea how Democrats and Republicans acted and sounded in 1960 or 1940 or even at the beginning of the 20th Century, there is no way to recognize the differences in today’s Democrats and Republicans. Without the history, it seems all the same.

It is not. In politics, labels and labels alone can identify a name but not a meaning.

While concerned people question what has happened to our political system when today’s Democrats and Republicans are not only unable to work together but worse, seem to hate each other, we are clueless unless we can understand why that is happening.

While knowledge can sometimes be a dangerous thing, ignorance always damns us to failure.

BENEATH THE LABEL

With history as our guide, we see that today both labels – Democrat/Republican – are just that, labels with little or no genuine, working content.

While there have been conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans, each party has always essentially stood for a broad consensus of interests.

Republicans have held conservative views fully aligned with big business and especially concerned for the welfare of the wealthy and powerful.

Democrats have an historical belief in the needs of the working class based on the belief that government is the only entity big enough and wealthy enough to push back against the power of wealth and privilege in an attempt to level the playing field of opportunity and potential.

The Liberal Party was established in 1943 in New York and only in New York to provide votes for the reelection of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s to a fourth term.

Many of its founding leadership came out of the labor movement and so its obvious concern for the needs of the working class. To that end, it pledged to try to humanize the conservative views of the Republican Party and to “try to make the Democratic Party honest.”

Today the power and Influence of corporate money in politics has all but eliminated any reality of what conservative means. The ultimate failure of public education to educate anyone in the past fifty years has twisted “liberal” policy into ignorantly designed programs that are doomed to failure.

Republicans today appear to divide themselves into Reagan conservatives or Trumpists. But that description fails as history shows that Trump’s focus but not his actions definitely followed the Reagan belief system.

Ronnie Reagan was famous for his description of government: Be aware when someone comes to your door, tells you they are from the government and have come to help. And the trouble with government is government itself.

That he courted evangelicals regularly and at the highest levels; and with racism when he spoke of black welfare queens driving around in pink Cadillacs, is factual.

But Reagan spoke of government with scorn and that attitude found a home in the Republican Party in a very big way. Ronnie, the former liberal leader of a union, the Screen Actors Guild, remains a hero to Republicans to this day. That his admirers see his Republican Party as different from the present one is a pure case of myopia.

Donald Trump bought those anti-government beliefs all the way – and then some.

Why scorn government when as a Presidential candidate and then President, you can do everything in your power to weaken it? Trump had 15 years as a star on national television. He saw exactly why he had that success…knew exactly how his audience felt about the delights of having an autocrat as hero simply uttering “You’re Fired” as the man in charge.

He knew that the people who were his audience would buy him in the role of President. It was to them that he said he could kill someone in the middle of Madison Avenue in New York and they would still vote for him.

It seems so.

So then where is the Republican Party today? Other than continuing its age-old support of personal and corporate wealth, mostly through tax cuts, it doesn’t seem to be heading anywhere but for the desire to have a President in power to help the cause. It didn’t even bother to produce a party platform to support Trump in the 2020 race. Its specific policies? How would we know? Where would we find them?

The recent Republican Presidential debate left the impression that it is impossible for the party to find an interest in any cause other than to regain the Presidency and in any other Presidential candidate in 2024 than Donald Trump.

In fact, the debate featured a Trump ‘impersonator’ Vivek Ramaswamy, a 38 year old pharmaceutical founder and biotech investor who kicked the other debaters in their faces by telling us that they were all bought and paid for and had been all their political lives. Trump had done something similar in his very first Presidential debate. Ramaswamy kept repeating it, laughing and trying to talk over those candidates who decided to shut him up. Then adding insult to injury he said that Trump was the best President in the 21st Century.

While that’s not much of a claim, he stole the show.

No discussion of much besides abortion; nothing on healthcare or education.

Party label is all that matters to them…Party label is all there is.

The Democratic Party’s problem is that it is seeking ’common sense’ from its young, poorly educated ‘progressive’ legislators throughout all levels of government. They seem to want what liberal Democrats have always wanted but clearly have no idea how to achieve their goals.

Both the Mayor of New York City and the Governor of New York State live by the dictate of numbers. These well intended but educationally deficient City Council and State legislators never show ‘common sense’ because ignorance prevails. Yet, they control policy and neither first term leaders can get them to end failing programs like “Bail Reform” no matter how much crime exists.

As more and more young people, especially in our cities, get involved in local politics while older residents don’t, we see the Democratic Party heading for a split that could challenge long held beliefs which the younger cast of the party is unable to deal with.

The strong, vocal right wing of the Republican Party likes to call these young people socialists and even communists, but those “scary words” have nothing to do with reality.

The essential truth is that both parties too often seem to bend beneath the pressure of corporate America’s desire to rule at any cost.

THE ALBATROSS

Joe Biden spent 43 years in the Senate representing Delaware, a state controlled by the needs, wants and looming presence of DuPont. While Biden was the darling of labor unions, he had to know that his career depended upon DuPont’s comfort with him.

He shares that knowledge with every careerist politician in the nation…no matter the party affiliation. Most career politicians have figured it out. Let’s suggest here that it is fair game to consider them ‘bought and paid for’.

Let’s look at two examples to see how it works.

While American physicians and medical scientists win an impressive number of Nobel Prizes, our healthcare system is at best mediocre when compared to other industrial nations. It is actually rated worse that our public education system.

It is increasingly evident that doctors no longer earn the kind of income they have in previous generations. This despite the rigors of schooling, of becoming Board certified, of establishing a practice and paying huge liability fees. No professionals are sued more often than physicians. But it is the loss of income that has doctors leaving private practice and becoming members of large corporate medical groups.

When they do, they receive a salary which is much greater than they have been earning as sole practitioners. In order to increase production their office hours are based on 15 minute segments with patients. Their staffs are trimmed significantly. They become employees.

Why? Insurance companies now direct medical care in America. They say what treatments will be covered. They say what the cost of these treatments will be. They say what doctors can earn in specific medical procedures.

Insurance and pharmaceutical companies support more lobbyists than any other industries.

And it was those two interests that got Congress to alter the arrangement of Medicare to include Medicate Advantage, a program based on slicing the cost of healthcare by Medicare by offering a lot of commercials, a lot of extras like dental and eye care and rent coverage and free meals and rides to a doctor while they were able to deny 60% of treatment requests that regular Medicare covered at a savings to the insurance companies of billions of dollars a year.

And finally, in 2017, Congress permitted insurance companies to take 15% out of their fee payments to doctors when doctors were paid electronically. When doctors sought to be paid by check, they were ignored and the electronic payments continued minus 15% every single payment.

And in a rare battle between the healthcare industry and Big Pharma, insurance companies refuse to pay the $1,000 per month cost of Type 2 Diabetes drugs like Rybelsus and Ozempic…if they are being prescribed for weight loss with no diabetes present.

It will be interesting to see how much Congressional ‘bought and paid for’ will buy for each industry.

We cannot deny the difficult truth of the Ramaswamy charge.

If we already hate government it is just another reason to do so..

But if we truly believe that government is the only entity to keep all Americans from being bought and paid for we must fight for good government whatever label we choose to wear.

We could do that once upon a time in history.

If only we could get millennial America to learn enough, to care enough and to do its part.