I've been involuntarily absent from this space since the 15th, first with an unusually full schedule of union and neighborhood-association activism, next in a struggle with a low-grade but very nasty virus.
Nevertheless I could not remain silent when Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna joined the national lawsuit to kill health care reform and continue killing the 44,000 people exterminated each year because capitalism – which uniquely controls government and governance at all levels of the United States – insists health care is a privilege of wealth rather than the human right recognized by all civilized nations.
This of course is the (mostly unacknowledged) core issue in the health care reform struggle: the capitalists' longstanding effort to exterminate by neglect and abandonment those of us they can no longer exploit for profit versus our right as human beings to share in the life-sustaining benefits of civilization.
Though McKenna is a Republican – I write this as background for those of you who do not live in Pugetopolis – until now he carefully presented a centrist image to Washington's voters, the vast majority of whom are Left-leaning independents. McKenna thus easily won re-election in 2008 by a percentage-point majority of 59-41, this in a state that gave Barack Obama a 58-40 victory, with another 1.2 percent of the vote going to Ralph Nader and the candidates of the Greens and two socialist parties.
There are three relevant points here:
The most obvious is that McKenna's signature on the care-killer lawsuit is spit-in-our-faces gotcha aimed at every Left-leaning voter in Washington state – that his meticulously cultivated moderate pose was never more than a Big Lie – which means that from now on, all ostensibly “moderate” Republicans should be regarded as liars and therefore potential betrayers;
Its corollary point is a dire warning – that the Republican Party is finally fulfilling its purpose as the vessel of U.S. fascism, a scheme dating back to the GOPorkers' semi-secret alliance with Mussolini and Hitler during the years before World War II – the message of which is that no Republican, however moderate the disguise, should ever again be trusted to be anything other than savagely reactionary at heart;
The third point – simultaneously the most terrifying and the most overlooked – is that the Roberts Court will almost certainly uphold the care-killer suit.
Meanwhile Crosscut, a middle-of-the-road online daily in Seattle, has emerged as a McKenna apologist (the writer is Crosscut-founder and longtime local journalist David Brewster):
“McKenna's move can't help him with the independents he has been courting with his moderate politics. It also appears to be quite a longshot legally...But given the nature of blogspheric politics today, I'm not sure McKenna has much of a choice on the issue, risky as his stance is...In short, he was trapped by the polarized politics of the day and the GOP's need, now that Obamacare is about to be enacted and the "Repealicans" put on the defensive, to keep up the warfare against the Democrats' big achievement.”
Late in the ensuing discussion, I responded accordingly, for which scroll far down:
To those of us who understand the magnitude of the Nazi-like malevolence the Republicans have evoked in recent years – the success of a scheme that began at least a decade before World War Two (when the GOP allied itself with Hitler, Mussolini and Franco to become the U.S. vessel of fascism) -- any notion the Supreme Court won't uphold the GOPorkers' murderous anti-healthcare lawsuit is PollyAnna absurdity.
The Roberts Court -- specifically tailored to complete the transition from republic to hard-right oligarchy that began on 22 November 1963 -- tossed out 100 years of established law in its Citizens United decision. (Note: in the mentally befogged condition imposed by this damn virus, I originally referred to the Roberts Court ruling as "United Voters," thereby providing -- at least to certain critics -- irrefutable proof I am a drooling imbecile whose talents are but cunning masquerades that serve only to conceal a rampant Inner Idiot.)
What the Roberts Court did is end all pretense government and governance in the United States serve any purpose beyond the perpetuation and expansion of capitalism: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and bottomless poverty for the rest of us.
Hence the terrifying probability most pundits don't dare admit is that -- especially given the precedent of Citizens United (which effectively nullified constitutional democracy by replacing the One Person One Vote principle with a new doctrine of Maximum Wealth Is Maximum Power) -- McKenna et al will prevail.
Indeed were I a gambling man – which I'm not – I'd bet on it.
Thus health care in the United States will remain a privilege of wealth rather than the human right it is in civilized nations, and the murder-by-neglect of the 44,000 persons slain each year by lack of health insurance will continue to function as intended, ridding capitalism of those of us who can no longer be exploited for profit.
This matter of life and death has been the core issue of the health care fight from the very beginning.
As to AG McKenna, he has merely answered the ultimate question of class struggle – which side are you on? – and shown us his true colors.
Later still I added the following:
The climate of intensifying hatred the Republicans have methodically agitated into increasingly violent expression -- the death-threats against elected representatives and their families, the assaults on elderly and disabled people at political gatherings, the undercurrent of racial, ethnic and homophobic bigotry brought ever closer to lynch-mob boil – this is not "hyperbole."
Indeed it is by far the most appalling manifestation of malevolent mindlessness I have witnessed in all my 70 years.
Yes there was murderous malice aplenty expressed during the Civil Rights Movement, but the perpetrators were mostly the spawn of the more backwardly in-bred regions of the white South.
This new fury, by contrast, spans the entire United States -- as if the GOPorker demagoguery were intended from the very beginning to invoke from men and women alike the dormant demons of white America's Inner Ku Klux Klansmen and send them out to terrorize the entire nation.
To anyone who knows European history -- to anyone who has not suffered reduction to Moron Nation ignorance and is neither willfully dishonest nor in PollyAnna denial -- "Nazi-like" is therefore an absolutely accurate description of what obtains.
And given its dreadful accuracy – its hideous truth that even dunderheads and dunces can confirm with minimal research – it is a genuinely frightful warning of things to come.
It is also a warning I take very personally.
Precisely as some of the more antagonistic comments here reveal, there is a growing, incipiently murderous prejudice that those of us who are retired or disabled (I am both) are somehow the true cause of the economic crisis – never mind that even the capitalists themselves admit the crisis was precipitated by capitalist greed run amok.
Such antagonism rejects the fact we earned the Social Security pensions we are now collecting – that the funds were deducted from our own paychecks when we are working.
It also ignores the fact that stipends for the unemployed and for those disabled people who have never worked are – at least in the civilized world – mandated by the social contract, the notion that one of the functions of society is to care for those who cannot provide for themselves, whether temporarily or permanently.
As in the final years of Weimar Germany, a growing number of the antagonists no longer bother to hide the fact they would rather see us dead – a “Nazi-like” attitude in every sense of the word.
LB/27 March 2010
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