We face a 63 trillion dollar fiscal iceberg over the next 75 years, mostly because we perversely allow private health insurance companies to “cherry-pick” young, healthy people out of the health-care system, leaving under-funded public systems to carry the burden of the most expensive patients. Conservatives have often maintained that the retirement of the Boomers is responsible for the impending fiscal crisis, but for the past 23 years, we have been over-paying our payroll taxes to finance the looming retirement of the Boomers. We should have been running surpluses for the last two decades. Where did our money go? Into tax cuts for the rich. Republicans and conservative Democrats stole several trillion dollars of our money. Now we are told we must sacrifice more even as the top one percent of the top one percent burn our children’s birthright in their private jets. Of course, anyone who points this out is a “socialist,” although apparently demanding, and getting, trillions in taxpayer subsidies is the epitome of free-market capitalism.
Even as the poles have been heating alarmingly for decades, the champions of corporate interests have fought a long delaying action, first denying the facts, then their meaning, and finally that we can’t solve the problem. Most human beings live within 300 miles of the sea, and all are threatened by a surge in global sea levels. Every living thing is tied intimately to the ecosystems that we disrupt so heedlessly, yet those who think this should be treated as the survival issue that it is are told to grow up, to live in the “real world” of fake politics and false impunity.
Twenty years after the end of the Cold War, the United States, the supposed exemplar of freedom, maintains nearly a thousand major overseas bases and a dozen carrier battle groups roam the oceans of the planet, pursuing a global grand strategy of denial and disruption as if we were at war with the world. We cloak this aggression in the language of patriotism and sacrifice, as if the nameless villagers of Helmand Province who we have bombed out with quarter-billion dollar stealth bombers were a threat to the United States. This is an unconscionable drain on our wealth, our most vulnerable and dedicated citizens, our goodwill overseas, and our national energy and attention at a time of real threats to our survival.
Average Americans, we are told, will never make the sacrifices necessary to address the problems that we face. This is, as Bill Moyers would so eloquently say, “bull.” On last night’s program, Mr. Moyers gave an impassioned diagnosis of the state of American democracy. Our nation’s deeply flawed policies have nothing to do with the preferences of ordinary Americans. They are bought and paid for a handful of people whose wealth finances, and is subsidized and protected by, the special interest industry in Washington and the state capitals.
It was refreshing to hear such honesty on national television, but sobering to realize that about eleven people were watching. Our vaunted democracy is a sick joke. A tiny number of people participate in politics, and even fewer are well informed about policy. Public life is dominated by superstition and outright lies. Parties go up, parties go down, but policies never budge. American politics is a shadowplay. It has the same relationship to the way we are governed as fan fiction does to the plot of a television program.
We all know this, and it’s weird that we accept it. Our futures and freedoms have been stolen for nothing more than the private gain of a a handful of wealthy people, and all we care about is what’s on TV. If we want to save our country, we’re going to have to expect more from our fellow citizens and from ourselves.
