What does capitalism, especially capitalism with a conscience, have to do with national health care and health-care insurance reform in the U.S., now under national public discussion and debate?
It is crucially relevant to the household financial betterment and prosperity of individuals and families generally and to the competitiveness of U.S.-based businesses and corporations domestically and on a global basis. The purpose and goals of national health care and health-care insurance reform are, first, to extend access to complete health care services to all U.S. citizens -- all children and adults alike -- regardless of one's health circumstances; secondly, to reduce the rapidly and increasingly prohibitive health care expense and financial burden, mainly in the cost of health-care insurance premiums and out-of-pocket expenses and insurance deductibles and co-payments, on employers and individuals; thirdly, to increase patient health-data-bank or records efficiency, as well as assure appropriate medical services and payment-for-medical services efficiency; and, fourthly and lastly, to eliminate the financial devastation to and of employing businesses, individuals and medical institutions and servicers for the treatment of uninsured and under-insured catastrophic ill-health conditions, for which insurance is often denied, capped, restricted or canceled by insurance companies and is too expensive for most individuals to personally defray. Such latter mentioned conditions and treatment can render individuals and couples insolvent, penniless and homeless, as well as bankrupt and render unprofitable the servicing medical institutions for uninsured, under-insured and uninsurable persons. Up to the present, for-profit insurers have been able to cherry pick for coverage from insurance applicants the healthiest individuals, deny insurance coverage to individuals with preexisting serious and expensive ill-health conditions and cap and restrict coverage for and cancel (drop or dump) coverage for those insured who incur such conditions -- that is, like a Ponzi scheme, they take in big and pay out small money in the aggregate as much as they can for as long as they can.
The product the insurers offer, which the policy subscribers buy, is an obligation or promise, in the form of an insurance policy, to pay the medical bills of policyholders. As for-profit health-care insurance is a business, health-care insurers attempt to make this arrangement profitable by, to the extent allowable and possible, picking out and accepting the healthiest policy applicants for coverage and rejecting, capping, restricting and canceling coverage for the long-term less healthy, unhealthy and medically expensive to treat policy applicants and subscribers.
The constituencies for the current predominantly for-profit, private health insurance system are the private, for-profit health (or medical) insurance companies and their officers, boards of directors, employees and shareholder investors and the investment funds who and that are supported, compensated and enriched from and by the premiums from premium paying members of private, for-profit health insurance policies, as well as wealthy tax-deduction obsessive-compulsive individuals and couples with tax deductible or deferred health savings accounts or self-employment health plans supplemental to the health insurance policies (or supplemental to those of their employed spouses) for individuals or couples with a side business to their employment, and the PR/lobbyist firms and conservative-Republican and marketplace-libertarian Primacy-of-Profit, wealth-class defense and advocacy organizations such as the American Enterprise Institute, The Cato Institute, The Heritage Foundation, The Hoover Institute, the private U.S. Chamber of Commerce, The Pacific Research Institute, Americans for Prosperity, and Freedom Works, and their wealth-class media gladiators and infotainers and propagandists, in my opinion, being the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter, James Dobbson, Glenn Beck, Mark Levin, Lee Rogers and Melanie Morgan, Sarah Palin, Michael Savage, kingpin Rupert Murdock, etc., and their masochistic and economically self-disenfranchising lowly grass-roots demonstrator and political activist cadries and troops and the amenable of the family and social networks of these -- the latter-day, backward-brained historical neo-Neanderthals of the U.S.
How fitting it would be if there were the singular wrathful, austere, intolerant, vengeful, Draconian, blood-sacrifice and macabre God of the old testament of the Bible and the sadistic, abominable Satan of damnation and hell fire just to accommodate the likes of this bunch and their fanatical and supercilious, hypocritical acolytes, with their brand-name badges of religiosity and sham patriotism, to an eternity of "weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth." The one area of mutuality between these two opposing supernatural entities would be for the unremitting, always fresh, unbearable torture and misery of this bunch, a bunch reminiscent of the Pharisees of ancient Israel, scorned and castigated by Jesus, and of the Roman statesman, tycoon and general Marcus Licinius Crassus, captured by the Parthian army of Mesopotamia and executed with molten gold poured down his throat.
The product the insurers offer, which the policy subscribers buy, is an obligation or promise, in the form of an insurance policy, to pay the medical bills of policyholders. As for-profit health-care insurance is a business, health-care insurers attempt to make this arrangement profitable by, to the extent allowable and possible, picking out and accepting the healthiest policy applicants for coverage and rejecting, capping, restricting and canceling coverage for the long-term less healthy, unhealthy and medically expensive to treat policy applicants and subscribers.
The constituencies for the current predominantly for-profit, private health insurance system are the private, for-profit health (or medical) insurance companies and their officers, boards of directors, employees and shareholder investors and the investment funds who and that are supported, compensated and enriched from and by the premiums from premium paying members of private, for-profit health insurance policies, as well as wealthy tax-deduction obsessive-compulsive individuals and couples with tax deductible or deferred health savings accounts or self-employment health plans supplemental to the health insurance policies (or supplemental to those of their employed spouses) for individuals or couples with a side business to their employment, and the PR/lobbyist firms and conservative-Republican and marketplace-libertarian Primacy-of-Profit, wealth-class defense and advocacy organizations such as the American Enterprise Institute, The Cato Institute, The Heritage Foundation, The Hoover Institute, the private U.S. Chamber of Commerce, The Pacific Research Institute, Americans for Prosperity, and Freedom Works, and their wealth-class media gladiators and infotainers and propagandists, in my opinion, being the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter, James Dobbson, Glenn Beck, Mark Levin, Lee Rogers and Melanie Morgan, Sarah Palin, Michael Savage, kingpin Rupert Murdock, etc., and their masochistic and economically self-disenfranchising lowly grass-roots demonstrator and political activist cadries and troops and the amenable of the family and social networks of these -- the latter-day, backward-brained historical neo-Neanderthals of the U.S.
How fitting it would be if there were the singular wrathful, austere, intolerant, vengeful, Draconian, blood-sacrifice and macabre God of the old testament of the Bible and the sadistic, abominable Satan of damnation and hell fire just to accommodate the likes of this bunch and their fanatical and supercilious, hypocritical acolytes, with their brand-name badges of religiosity and sham patriotism, to an eternity of "weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth." The one area of mutuality between these two opposing supernatural entities would be for the unremitting, always fresh, unbearable torture and misery of this bunch, a bunch reminiscent of the Pharisees of ancient Israel, scorned and castigated by Jesus, and of the Roman statesman, tycoon and general Marcus Licinius Crassus, captured by the Parthian army of Mesopotamia and executed with molten gold poured down his throat.
Folks, let me enlighten all of America as to the incontrovertible facts of life pertinent to the necessity of universal, comprehensive, cradle-to-grave, health care in our otherwise advanced industrialized, high technology society. I, the cosmological preeminent most-high prophet and sage for all time, epistemologically inspired, of sci-tech capitalist society, prognosticate, prophesize, predict and proclaim that for all organisms, indeed for human life inextricably and equally so, living is hazardous and uncertain and death is for sure, that all things, including celestial black holes and the universe, follow the inescapable and inevitable life cycle of birth, growth, maturity, decline (aging or oxidation and deterioration) and death, and that everybody dies of disease, or biological assault, accident or injury or disorder or malfunction or multiples and/or combinations of these before or during the fulfillment of all of the phases of the life cycle. No matter how healthy one's life style is with respect to one's diet, hygiene and sanitary practices, physical exercise, or how good one's genes, environment, experiences, spirituality or health practices are, we all will be health stricken, malfunction, deteriorate and die sooner or later (and not much later), most often in pain and grievous suffering unless we are assuaged with palliatives -- that is, the rich and the poor, the high and the low, the humble and the great, including doctors and nurses, health-insurance corporate elites, the holy, VIPs, mega-millionaires and billionaires, national leaders, royals and geniuses, and nonsensical, self-delusional Nietzschean, invincible, social-Spencerian survival-of-the-fittest, sovereign-individual, alpha superman libertarians, will be fatally undone and be killed or die. In short, during our lifetimes, unless we die abruptly early in life by mishap, we will all seriously need periodically whatever medical care, however and wherever, we can avail ourselves of it, and health insurance is indispensable in providing for affordable, competent and professional such care in an advanced, civilized society. (Ah haw, there is a universal built-in evolutionary and dissolutionary process inclusive of the "human," dare I say, "species" -- scientifically speaking, a post-ape hominid [the last of the hominid species] and primate -- and of every human as observable in individual human development from conception and the zygote to gestation and the embryo and fetus and the birth of the crawler infant and its morphing through its stages of toddler, early childhood, prepubescent, pubescent, adolescent, early adulthood, maturity, elder and old age and senescence, to the dismay of the neo-Neanderthal, backward-brained conservatives.)
The natural value, and concomitant purpose, of good health is to enable optimal functionality of the individual and, as a result, that individual's ability to provide for its own and its significant others' survival needs and the continuity of its biological homestead or successors (nuclear family, extended family, tribe, community, etc.). In like manner, good health and its benefit of optimal functionality enable a host of inherently imperfect individuals (doomed to inevitable eventual debility, disability, deterioration and death) -- of diverse and varying knowings, abilities and talents and physical characteristics and capabilities -- to stably network and pool and trade these most advantageously, informally and formally, to jointly act in their common interest within any given environment to competently grapple with wide-ranging and endlessly newly arising problems and dangers within their environment and from neighboring environments, and to harness and impose order on their environment. In this scenario, in the basic human tribal and feudal societies of the present and past that co-exist and co-existed with and within more advanced societies, the disability, health and elder care insurance policy of the incumbent or prevailing economic caste is and has been the sense of obligation and compassion for them on the part of their religiously-morally trained or taught children, hopefully healthy children but often not among the poor majority, and, in instances, the lure of an inheritance for the children from the wealth and property acquired by the eventually infirmed and/or physically worn down and out parents. Until the institution of taxpayer-funded federal Medicare and Society Security retirement programs for the medical care and pension support of the elderly, the modest wealth of most of the poor and middle-class debilitated and disabled elder Americans was most often expended rapidly in addressing their ill-health and in the attempt to support themselves in the absence of an income due to their unemployability and they most often became the dependents and financial burden of their poor and middle-class children for care taking and financial support, undermining the financial soundness and growth potential of the children. An unforeseen and unintended positive consequence of the introduction of Medicare health insurance and Social Security retirement pensions for the elderly has been the relief of the oppressive financial drain on the incomes of their children for their care and financial support, and thus the explosive and soaring consumer and wealth acquisition power of their children, resulting in a highly economically more mobile and egalitarian United States and a greatly expanded, richer and resilient U.S. economy. In the same way, universal citizen health insurance, with no exclusions for preexisting or emergent grave ill-health conditions or exorbitant generally unaffordable deductibles, will free millions of ill-health stricken Americans, and their employed and in-business relatives and better-off sibling looked to for support, of all classes, from the specter of colossal expenses and debt, and financial devastation and bankruptcy, incurred in paying for must-have at-all-costs medical services for catastrophic insufferable, disfiguring, ravaging and life-threatening ill-health conditions. With universal health insurance from cradle to grave, good health and optimal physical and mental functionality will be maximized within the population and over the lifespans of the individuals within the population, with one other positive result being maximized individual and national economic productivity, maximized national business competitiveness and maximized wealth creation and broad wealth distribution within our society. The added funding to expand the current largely employer-sponsored health insurance system to a universal national health insurance system that would come via modest increased federal income taxes on high income households and from a permanent diversion of scores of billions of general taxpayer dollars inefficiently spent by the federal government, is a reasonable and small price to pay for a healthier, more compassionate and kinder, and ultimately wealthier and better America for all in the very near term and for henceforth.
On the contrary, the current health-care insurance system of increasingly unmanageably high and continuously soaring insurance premiums (premiums paid in large part by employers for employee policies and directly by the self-employed and those not either employees or self employed who have the income -- as from trusts and investments, or considerable independent wealth to pay the premiums -- and a system that does not cover many millions of part-time employees and college and vocational education students who cannot afford health care insurance and the work sidelined, furloughed and unemployed and unemployable and the homeless without health insurance), with respect to the overall national health and productivity and wealth, as well as social stability, of our society, will continue to suffer and worsen (where the major propellers for increases in health-care insurance premiums are insurer revenue and profit greed, hefty insurer pay and collateral compensation packages for executives, insurance payment outlays, insurer and medical servicer losses and bad investments, servicers' defensive medical services and malpractice insurance, and noncompensation, insufficient, delinquent and defaulted compensation of servicers for their medical services rendered). It is the uninsured and under-insured student, black-market, and generic marginal full-time and part-time, employed, unemployed and unemployable segment of society whose unpaid and inadequately paid urgent and emergency medical treatment and services that account for most of the pressure on health-care insurance premiums and medical service cost increases for the adequately insured policyholders. With this segment fully insured by a universal health-care insurance system, expanded to such from the current system with modest tax increases on the income of high-income households and federal savings from the elimination of unessential government spending, curbs can be made on the premiums paid by employers and employee contributions for employee health-care insurance policies and medical care servicers, who will no longer have to raise charges to offset losses incurred for services rendered to the uninsured and under-insured. They will no longer be forced to scale back their operations, cut staff or close shop to as well cope with financial losses from uncompensated or under-compensated services rendered. Likewise employing businesses will not be driven to the financial breaking point with prohibitive health-care insurance policy financial outlays for employees arising from constant and large premium increases on policies, very often negotiated and obligated by union contract.
The proposed government option of health-care insurance that would co-exist and compete with the major private insurers is a necessity to fortify health care insurance reform and probablize that it does not fail and revert back to Cadillac health-care insurance coverage for the financially advantaged, with token, mere incidental, capped and cancellable health-care insurance for the majority and those with catastrophic and expensive-to-treat ill-health conditions. The government option would put pressure on (incentivize) health-care insurance companies to rein in soaring, and greed driven, health-care insurance premiums and to pay for major medical services for major ill-health conditions it has heretofore been averse to defray and would be available as a source of medical coverage for private health-care insurance outcasts, disputants, and abused persons desperately in need of services and immediate services.
Under the terms of the various reform schemes being tendered, we are faced with having a mandated all citizen system of privatized health care insurance or a mixed system of mandated privatized and government administered health insurance, compelling (that is, regulating with fines and other sanctions) both citizen participation and full coverage care of all citizens by insurers. Democrats and Republicans in support of the common good, beware of good intentions, translated into legislation, that go awry and backfire and explode on the intended beneficiaries and on your own reputations and careers. For a lesson, remember what new presidential candidate Ronald Reagan in 1980 said to the American public in his last debate with incumbent President Jimmy Carter, who in that debate and the preceding debates with Reagan, showed far superior verbal mastery, knowledge, competence, grace and poise to that shown by Reagan, whose best strategy in the debates until addressing the American public directly in that last debate was to create the illusion of competitiveness and competence by repeatedly using the condescending line toward Carter, “There you go again.” The killer line made by Reagan, that was the undoing of Carter’s presidency, was in the form of the determinative, fatal question posed to the American public to the effect, “Are better off now than you were before President Carter took office?” For anyone who took the question seriously in regard to the economy at the time and the economics of grassroots households, regardless of how Reagan was viewed on social and racial issues, he/she could only honestly answer in the one and same direction of “We are worse off, ” in significant part due to Congress and the President having deregulated the credit card industry, permitting it to charge annual cardholder fees and unrestricted interest rates, in addition to service and penalty charges, on card balances (a free-for-all market libertarian’s wet dream). The result was the end of restrictions on credit-card borrowing, followed by no longer outlawed usury charges on borrowing and soaring interest rates that shortly leaped from a traditional 3% cap to 6%, to 9%, to 12%, and so on, to a now 36% for many card holders, and the introduction of debt slavery interest rate of 400% on payday-check loans to low income people and financially disrupted middle class people, falling behind in paying their bills or urgently needing extra money for a special situation like paying for a funeral, a repair for a work commuting car or a truck for the self employed, service for an overflowing toilet, stopped-up sink drain or leaky faucet, or the breakdown of a laundry washer or dryer or house heater or the house's electrical system, or for episodic acute medical care, etc. President Carter, a millionaire, as wonderful as he was as a technological visionary, crisis manager, social humanist and man of conscience and fair play, unfortunately was economically myopic, like much of Congress, especially the all-millionaire Senate, and did not have an empathic insight into or sensitivity to grassroots household economics at his peril and that of the Democratic Party. Carter kept his stalwart voter base in the 1980 presidential election but lost his crossover party support to Reagan, and he was uninstalled as President and Reagan was inaugurated President on 01-21-1981. Other factors complicated Carter’s electability -- the Iranian hostage crisis (with Americans being held hostage and a pardonable U.S. military rescue attempt having been foiled by a desert sand storm) being a second important one -- but the close-up and heartfelt grassroots household economics one of being worse off under the Carter Presidency was the decisive one. The how and why this lesson of insufficient insight into and sensitivity to grassroots economics applies to the health-care reform legislation being formulated by well-meaning affluent and rich lawmakers financially myopic and aloof from the everyday nitty-gritty economics of rough-and-tumble financially common people (including small businesses and larger businesses with a history of regularly alternating in and out of the red (“red ink,” meaning operating at a loss), is that a mandated reformed system of health-care insurance secured through a health-care insurance exchange for the approximately 46 million uninsured American, acknowledged to very largely consist of an economic stratum of financially shaky, rough-and-tumble common people, many of whom cannot stably pay their household bills on time and are in arrears on bills, in addition to federal, state and local taxes and child support, and being pursued and stressed by bill and tax collectors, and courts, lawyers and government agencies for accountability and payment, will exacerbate the futile and impossible financial plight of these people with growing penalties for impossible to consistently pay health insurance premiums mandated of them, giving rise to another flank or column of delinquent bill collectors and bill payment enforcers menacing them. The top will in short order blast off of this pressure cooker with alienated Democratic Party voter defections, of this economic stratum, turning to the cynical and hyper-critical, Primacy-of-Profit Republicans and to the libertarian philosophy of get the government out of my life (except when I call on you to rescue me from the excesses and oppression of rogue businesses and such business practices, and unresponsive or wrongful government) and who will again answer the Reagan Question with the response, “We the most immediately and directly affected by this legislation are worse off!” Medically speaking, “Before it was the hospitals, medical bill collectors, county courts and sheriffs coming after us; now we also have Congress and federal health-insurance default premiums collectors joined in the financial lynch mob.” The people of this stratum of our economy will care first about how this legislation affects their household economics and ability to cope with stress, mentally and emotionally, related to their day-to-day personal situations and shuffle aside, as subordinate concerns and abstractions to themselves, issues such as the national budget deficit, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, rights issues, the green economy and party loyalty -- many are already trembling (they want the coverage but not the grief in being held accountable for paying for it, given their shaky financial circumstances) . They will respectively become Democratic Party voter defectors, especially the crossover voters, dispirited and despaired drop-out voters and remain dispirited and despaired nonvoters, weakening the Democratic Party voter base and voter growth potential. The anti-reform infotainers and politically prominent Primacy-of-Profit Republican Party cynics will exploit, negatively showcase and negatively propagandize (brutally club the Democrats) to no-end the incompetence of and grief caused by this reform, and the Democratic Party presidency and congressional majority will swiftly collapse.
The solution to this quandary, of proffering legislation that is a self-injurious and friendly-fire time bomb that will explode on one’s house if the attempt is made to move it or flee from it, is to openly engage Democratic Party friendly and non-partisan disposable front-line accountants, whose firms voluntarily prepare modest and troubled income taxpayers’ tax returns during tax-filing season, and Doctors Mad as Hell, touring the nation, in support of a single payer health-care reform system, and collaborate with these to insightfully think out and rewrite the the all-inclusive (universal) health-care reform proposal for a combination privatized and government-option system or a single-payer system designed to accommodate this problematic ability-to-pay health-care uninsured and under-insured stratum of our economy without menace to them, even if such means subsidizing some part of it, where there is no practical ability to make consistent payments for a numerous portion of these.
A government option is also necessary as a backup, or health-insurance fall-back system, to the reformed system, whatever form it may take, in the event the accounting offices (or off-the-record accounting) of the major health insurance companies have/(has) privately concluded or come to take notice that an all-inclusive, full coverage system of government regulated health insurance will have or comes to have an initial operating period of bubble income and profits, from universally mandated citizen participation in the system, and a mid-term point of financial bust (steadily operating at a loss) of the system, where they must shut down or file for liquidation bankruptcy for lack of foreseeable profitability. In the event of such a tragic development, the government option would be available as a single-payer continuity takeover system, precluding the need for scores of billions of dollars of taxpayer money from going to rescue a too-big-to-fail, but-gone-bust, private health insurance sector. In preparation for the possibly projected financial climate-change famine ahead, top executives of private insurers may have already decided to disburse a good portion of the fair-weather bubble income and profits into their compensation and severance packages and other parachute investments favoring their own (as well as those of their family, in-laws' and friends') private investment portfolios -- be prepared for off-the-record accounting to have already written off the long-term future viability of their companies. For decades we have sometimes unexpectedly seen bubble-busts of major industries: such as the precious metals (particularly gold, silver and copper trading bubble-busts), real-estate, S&L, junk-bond, dotcom, telecom, real-estate again, automobile, investment-banking, and consumer-banking in significant part currently, industries.
The United States, and democratic capitalism (the compassionate skewing or distribution in part of national wealth for the common good) therein, cannot afford to go without universal national health care insurance more than many, primarily self-centered and selfish, financially well-off Republicans and libertarians, object to and say we cannot afford to pay for it, with tax increases on their Bush-II-era windfall wealth and tax cuts. Noblesse oblige: much is expected of those who have much, as well as more is expected of those who have the most and benefit the most from the common bounty of our shared society and common land. People, please, please, please do not forget, don't forget that it was the now, "we-cannot-afford-to-spend" and "don't-punish-the-rich with Socialist class-warfare taxes," out-of-power neo-Neanderthals whose economic and costly unwarranted Iraqi-war policies under the Bush-II 8-year presidency and Republican congressional majority that engendered and precipitated the economic debacle that has wracked and mangled the U.S. economy and that initiated the huge federal spending and lending efforts, continued by the new Obama presidential administration and Democratic Party congressional majority, to rescue, stabilize and rehabilitate the dithering economy, most of the money of which has gone to Wall Street investment and financial services firms and the banking system, and to the pay and performance-unrelated bonuses for the executive staffs of these (all serving the monied investment community). So many of this rich and affluent anti-tax and anti-communitarian constituency, who exhort financially far less endowed and poor others to take responsibility for themselves free of tax-funded government programs, services and infrastructure, if divested of their inherited and parasitically and criminally acquired wealth, would not know what to do with themselves other than to commit suicide, binge on alcohol and illegal drugs as available while soiling their undies in their stinking states of intoxicated stupor and lethargy, beseech their rich and affluent relatives and social connections for privatized welfare and socialism support and help, or revert to drug and fraud money-making schemes to support themselves.
It is amusing that this bunch that touts individualism over community rises up in arms when their schools and neighborhoods are faced with the prospect of racial integration by a mere few, even better off, racially different individuals, and who have been in support of laws passed, and repealed, by Congress, denying immigration and citizenship to people of South Asian and Far Eastern ancestry, and who have been in support of discriminatory ethnic, racial and religious covenants on the selling of homes, and on the conforming aesthetic appearance of the homes of even wealthy others, in their neighborhoods. Many of them are literally up in arms again, in the first decade of the 21st century, in hostile, virulent reaction to the incumbency of a mulatto President, with some having been caught in plots to assassinate this President while he was campaigning for the office, and others yelling at Republican campaign rallies "Kill him! Kill him! Nigger!, Nigger!," and a Governor Rick Perry of the state of Texas having bandied the word "secession." HELLO! Nothing is stopping Perry and others of like mind as his from, please, seceding "individually" and personally from the U.S. and becoming expatriates abroad permanently!
P.S.: Long extinct Neanderthals were a Homo Sapiens species, belonging to the same species as modern humans, Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Perhaps they were a true different "race" of humans. They inhabited Europe, the Mediterranean, the Middle East and northern Africa before the incursion of our version of Homo Sapiens (modern humans) outside of Africa. Their largest cranium specimens had significantly larger craniums than those of our larger cranium Cro-Magnon brothers and sisters of Europe and of the largest craniums of our modern human kin. They left evidence showing that they had religion and funerals (mourned and buried their dead), used fire and cooked their food, made and effectively used a variety of relatively sophisticated weapons and tools, made musical instruments, jewelry and sculptures, wore animal skins and furs for clothes, and resided in caves, at camps and in huts or dwellings they fashioned. Human remains have been found at Neanderthal campsites, indicating Neanderthals and modern humans had occasional close interactions, maybe with modern humans having been occasional food, pets, captives or slaves for or of, or visitors or guests of, or traders with, the shorter but much more massive Neanderthals. However, universally throughout their habitats, wherever they have left skeletal remains of themselves and artifacts, Neanderthals have left no evidence that they had progressed to the practices of drawing and painting found to have been a prodigious modern human legacy from the artifacts found with modern humans' prehistoric remains and in their habitats wherever modern humans have dwelt, and yet still dwell as primitives, throughout the world, from time immemorial, however primitive their cultures. Clearly, drawing and painting were the precursors of and prerequisites for writing and mathematics and accounting, as well as design, drafting, architecture, and engineering -- the skills that gave rise to and sustain and further civilization. The terminal problem of the Neanderthals was that they were conservatives (now conservatives and neo-cons), as opposed to progressive, forwarded-minded, visionary perpetual creatives and innovators, both technically and socially. Prehistoric mass animal slaughter sites implicate them, and maybe prehistoric modern humans as well, in having routinely stampeded herd animals over cliffs as a hunting means for securing meat, compelling themselves to relocate endlessly to new habitats after having emptied earlier habitats of the easy-to-get and abundant ground meat supply, similar to what the neo-Neanderthals are doing with fisheries, forests, etc., in their totalitarian commodification and monetization of as much of nature as they can privatize and sell, nowadays. The lesson of the downfall of the Neanderthals is that those who [often tenaciously and mindlessly like automatons] hew to, or are wedded to, inviolable tradition and the past are fated to be stuck in the past and to stagnate, and to be surpassed, and to be choked and consumed by and disintegrate in the dust cloud of the past. The scientists Galileo Galilei, Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein, and the humanist social philosophers Buddha and Jesus of Bethlehem and Nazareth, and their very often more imperfect and flawed successor humanist and social evolution thinkers, teachers, activists and leaders such as Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Tubman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglas, the slavery abolitionists, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Susan B. Anthony, union and labor movement champions for worker rights and benefits and safe working conditions, Franklin Roosevelt, Mohandas Gandhi, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Alfred Kinsey, Harvey Milk, F.W. De Klerk and Nelson Mandela, Mother Theresa and Eunice Kennedy Shriver, and many others (who have ushered the U.S., and, to a lesser extent, humankind, to a time of unparalleled personal freedom from slavery, racial, ethnic, disability and gender and sexual discrimination and segregation and apartheid, to women's suffrage, civil and universal citizen voting rights, the free and legal exercise of non-psychopathic sexuality in private [psychopathic sex involving rape, pedophilia, assault, mutilation, death, knowing exposure to disease or excretory waste, animal use, etc.] and sexual preference for consenting adults, the ideal of equal treatment under and before the law of all, respect for and protection of wildlife and the environment, and the quest to abolish war), and their impacts are timeless while the clock has ticked down on and is ticking toward midnight on their detractors. We must import and emulate the practices of others where others' practices are better than our own, and adopt the benevolent-capitalism practices of the rest of the first-world industrial nations for the whole of our population -- of Canada, Scandinavia, Japan, Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. Tangentially speaking but strongly germane to the aforementioned, let us ask why are the U.S. and the Western nations so concerned with certain of those in charge and running amuck in North Korea, South Asia, Mesopotamia, North Africa and the Middle East and why has the U.S. swept from political office so many conservatives, primarily of the Republican Party, and handily voted in a democratic Democratic Party presidency? I say because the majority of the concerned watchers do not want to see hellishly nightmarish weapons under the control of and their economies wrecked by neo-Neanderthals, whose long past civilizations and technical achievements in Asia and the East were the greatest in the world until modern times. The neo-Neanderthals come in all ethnicities, colors and genders, and in all wealth and I.Q. levels and abilities and are in their exterior indistinguishable from their fellow modern humans of good will and a progressive or magnanimous disposition and mind set, on a perpetual path of positive evolution. However, when push comes to shove, they are neither braver, tougher nor smarter or as smart as their progressive brothers and sisters and may not survive them, but may be neutralized by and be reprocessed and absorbed by them, as a matter of practical necessity (as was the case for the neo-Neanderthals Adolph Hitler and the Nazis -- neo-imperialists, neo-colonists, neo-nationalist chauvinists), before they annihilate themselves and the world with their rapacious, nihilistic feudal capitalism and manical, ravenous terrorism and war. Caution: like Neanderthals and rampaging bull chimpanzees, neo-Neanderthals are smart, formidable, brutal, unmerciful, clever and crafty, and crazy too. Sometimes they outwit, destroy and chew up their would-be betters.
In another aside, social evolvers need to be cognizant of and cool headed toward their fellow absurdist utopian pacifist and angry, violently righteous-radical but well-meaning fellows who find fault as a matter of course with a military and law enforcement and political authority per se and sanctions on bad and dangerous behavior, however necessary and reasonable these may be, and who have a history in democratic societies of being boisterously intolerant of and unreconcilable with the momentary imperfections and lapses of otherwise positive, as opposed to negative, authority while being boisterously in favor of leaving lawless and besieging human monsters in other peoples' midst and other societies alone and/or of them being given a reprieve, commutation or pardon for their unconscionable and horrific misdeeds, yet who, when confronted close up or directly in blood baths by such tyrannical human monsters as Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini and their savage and murderous goons in authoritarian societies, soon shut up, cower and and get along, if not passively go along, with the program. These well-meaning fellows should have a voice at the table of progress but cannot be leaders of the progress politically or militarily, as they are naive -- although good-hearted and well-intentioned -- political stupidos and bumblers and reality retards who would lead our society on the international and domestic fronts to destruction and implosion virtually instantly.
Incidentally, where are the loving and caring voices of the pious in this discussion and debate? Should they not be in the forefront as advocates for health care and health-care insurance reform to extend good health care and health care insurance to all U.S. citizens?
In an approximation of the so very wise and deeply stirring words of the musician Prince expressed early in his career, I conclude imploring, "Love one another while you can; this may be your one and only chance." "This" referring to this precious flicker of time embodied with fragile, mortal life. And in the words of the great playwright and poet William Shakespeare, "...which makes thy love more strong, to love that well which thou must leave ere long." Forever.
PUBLIC DOMAIN by grant of the author, me.
Download a free copy of the remake, super mix of the premier and first song 'It's a Beautiful Day' under the same name or EUPHORIA: Felton Pilate at CDbaby.com and most major internet music download sites.
On the contrary, the current health-care insurance system of increasingly unmanageably high and continuously soaring insurance premiums (premiums paid in large part by employers for employee policies and directly by the self-employed and those not either employees or self employed who have the income -- as from trusts and investments, or considerable independent wealth to pay the premiums -- and a system that does not cover many millions of part-time employees and college and vocational education students who cannot afford health care insurance and the work sidelined, furloughed and unemployed and unemployable and the homeless without health insurance), with respect to the overall national health and productivity and wealth, as well as social stability, of our society, will continue to suffer and worsen (where the major propellers for increases in health-care insurance premiums are insurer revenue and profit greed, hefty insurer pay and collateral compensation packages for executives, insurance payment outlays, insurer and medical servicer losses and bad investments, servicers' defensive medical services and malpractice insurance, and noncompensation, insufficient, delinquent and defaulted compensation of servicers for their medical services rendered). It is the uninsured and under-insured student, black-market, and generic marginal full-time and part-time, employed, unemployed and unemployable segment of society whose unpaid and inadequately paid urgent and emergency medical treatment and services that account for most of the pressure on health-care insurance premiums and medical service cost increases for the adequately insured policyholders. With this segment fully insured by a universal health-care insurance system, expanded to such from the current system with modest tax increases on the income of high-income households and federal savings from the elimination of unessential government spending, curbs can be made on the premiums paid by employers and employee contributions for employee health-care insurance policies and medical care servicers, who will no longer have to raise charges to offset losses incurred for services rendered to the uninsured and under-insured. They will no longer be forced to scale back their operations, cut staff or close shop to as well cope with financial losses from uncompensated or under-compensated services rendered. Likewise employing businesses will not be driven to the financial breaking point with prohibitive health-care insurance policy financial outlays for employees arising from constant and large premium increases on policies, very often negotiated and obligated by union contract.
The proposed government option of health-care insurance that would co-exist and compete with the major private insurers is a necessity to fortify health care insurance reform and probablize that it does not fail and revert back to Cadillac health-care insurance coverage for the financially advantaged, with token, mere incidental, capped and cancellable health-care insurance for the majority and those with catastrophic and expensive-to-treat ill-health conditions. The government option would put pressure on (incentivize) health-care insurance companies to rein in soaring, and greed driven, health-care insurance premiums and to pay for major medical services for major ill-health conditions it has heretofore been averse to defray and would be available as a source of medical coverage for private health-care insurance outcasts, disputants, and abused persons desperately in need of services and immediate services.
Under the terms of the various reform schemes being tendered, we are faced with having a mandated all citizen system of privatized health care insurance or a mixed system of mandated privatized and government administered health insurance, compelling (that is, regulating with fines and other sanctions) both citizen participation and full coverage care of all citizens by insurers. Democrats and Republicans in support of the common good, beware of good intentions, translated into legislation, that go awry and backfire and explode on the intended beneficiaries and on your own reputations and careers. For a lesson, remember what new presidential candidate Ronald Reagan in 1980 said to the American public in his last debate with incumbent President Jimmy Carter, who in that debate and the preceding debates with Reagan, showed far superior verbal mastery, knowledge, competence, grace and poise to that shown by Reagan, whose best strategy in the debates until addressing the American public directly in that last debate was to create the illusion of competitiveness and competence by repeatedly using the condescending line toward Carter, “There you go again.” The killer line made by Reagan, that was the undoing of Carter’s presidency, was in the form of the determinative, fatal question posed to the American public to the effect, “Are better off now than you were before President Carter took office?” For anyone who took the question seriously in regard to the economy at the time and the economics of grassroots households, regardless of how Reagan was viewed on social and racial issues, he/she could only honestly answer in the one and same direction of “We are worse off, ” in significant part due to Congress and the President having deregulated the credit card industry, permitting it to charge annual cardholder fees and unrestricted interest rates, in addition to service and penalty charges, on card balances (a free-for-all market libertarian’s wet dream). The result was the end of restrictions on credit-card borrowing, followed by no longer outlawed usury charges on borrowing and soaring interest rates that shortly leaped from a traditional 3% cap to 6%, to 9%, to 12%, and so on, to a now 36% for many card holders, and the introduction of debt slavery interest rate of 400% on payday-check loans to low income people and financially disrupted middle class people, falling behind in paying their bills or urgently needing extra money for a special situation like paying for a funeral, a repair for a work commuting car or a truck for the self employed, service for an overflowing toilet, stopped-up sink drain or leaky faucet, or the breakdown of a laundry washer or dryer or house heater or the house's electrical system, or for episodic acute medical care, etc. President Carter, a millionaire, as wonderful as he was as a technological visionary, crisis manager, social humanist and man of conscience and fair play, unfortunately was economically myopic, like much of Congress, especially the all-millionaire Senate, and did not have an empathic insight into or sensitivity to grassroots household economics at his peril and that of the Democratic Party. Carter kept his stalwart voter base in the 1980 presidential election but lost his crossover party support to Reagan, and he was uninstalled as President and Reagan was inaugurated President on 01-21-1981. Other factors complicated Carter’s electability -- the Iranian hostage crisis (with Americans being held hostage and a pardonable U.S. military rescue attempt having been foiled by a desert sand storm) being a second important one -- but the close-up and heartfelt grassroots household economics one of being worse off under the Carter Presidency was the decisive one. The how and why this lesson of insufficient insight into and sensitivity to grassroots economics applies to the health-care reform legislation being formulated by well-meaning affluent and rich lawmakers financially myopic and aloof from the everyday nitty-gritty economics of rough-and-tumble financially common people (including small businesses and larger businesses with a history of regularly alternating in and out of the red (“red ink,” meaning operating at a loss), is that a mandated reformed system of health-care insurance secured through a health-care insurance exchange for the approximately 46 million uninsured American, acknowledged to very largely consist of an economic stratum of financially shaky, rough-and-tumble common people, many of whom cannot stably pay their household bills on time and are in arrears on bills, in addition to federal, state and local taxes and child support, and being pursued and stressed by bill and tax collectors, and courts, lawyers and government agencies for accountability and payment, will exacerbate the futile and impossible financial plight of these people with growing penalties for impossible to consistently pay health insurance premiums mandated of them, giving rise to another flank or column of delinquent bill collectors and bill payment enforcers menacing them. The top will in short order blast off of this pressure cooker with alienated Democratic Party voter defections, of this economic stratum, turning to the cynical and hyper-critical, Primacy-of-Profit Republicans and to the libertarian philosophy of get the government out of my life (except when I call on you to rescue me from the excesses and oppression of rogue businesses and such business practices, and unresponsive or wrongful government) and who will again answer the Reagan Question with the response, “We the most immediately and directly affected by this legislation are worse off!” Medically speaking, “Before it was the hospitals, medical bill collectors, county courts and sheriffs coming after us; now we also have Congress and federal health-insurance default premiums collectors joined in the financial lynch mob.” The people of this stratum of our economy will care first about how this legislation affects their household economics and ability to cope with stress, mentally and emotionally, related to their day-to-day personal situations and shuffle aside, as subordinate concerns and abstractions to themselves, issues such as the national budget deficit, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, rights issues, the green economy and party loyalty -- many are already trembling (they want the coverage but not the grief in being held accountable for paying for it, given their shaky financial circumstances) . They will respectively become Democratic Party voter defectors, especially the crossover voters, dispirited and despaired drop-out voters and remain dispirited and despaired nonvoters, weakening the Democratic Party voter base and voter growth potential. The anti-reform infotainers and politically prominent Primacy-of-Profit Republican Party cynics will exploit, negatively showcase and negatively propagandize (brutally club the Democrats) to no-end the incompetence of and grief caused by this reform, and the Democratic Party presidency and congressional majority will swiftly collapse.
The solution to this quandary, of proffering legislation that is a self-injurious and friendly-fire time bomb that will explode on one’s house if the attempt is made to move it or flee from it, is to openly engage Democratic Party friendly and non-partisan disposable front-line accountants, whose firms voluntarily prepare modest and troubled income taxpayers’ tax returns during tax-filing season, and Doctors Mad as Hell, touring the nation, in support of a single payer health-care reform system, and collaborate with these to insightfully think out and rewrite the the all-inclusive (universal) health-care reform proposal for a combination privatized and government-option system or a single-payer system designed to accommodate this problematic ability-to-pay health-care uninsured and under-insured stratum of our economy without menace to them, even if such means subsidizing some part of it, where there is no practical ability to make consistent payments for a numerous portion of these.
A government option is also necessary as a backup, or health-insurance fall-back system, to the reformed system, whatever form it may take, in the event the accounting offices (or off-the-record accounting) of the major health insurance companies have/(has) privately concluded or come to take notice that an all-inclusive, full coverage system of government regulated health insurance will have or comes to have an initial operating period of bubble income and profits, from universally mandated citizen participation in the system, and a mid-term point of financial bust (steadily operating at a loss) of the system, where they must shut down or file for liquidation bankruptcy for lack of foreseeable profitability. In the event of such a tragic development, the government option would be available as a single-payer continuity takeover system, precluding the need for scores of billions of dollars of taxpayer money from going to rescue a too-big-to-fail, but-gone-bust, private health insurance sector. In preparation for the possibly projected financial climate-change famine ahead, top executives of private insurers may have already decided to disburse a good portion of the fair-weather bubble income and profits into their compensation and severance packages and other parachute investments favoring their own (as well as those of their family, in-laws' and friends') private investment portfolios -- be prepared for off-the-record accounting to have already written off the long-term future viability of their companies. For decades we have sometimes unexpectedly seen bubble-busts of major industries: such as the precious metals (particularly gold, silver and copper trading bubble-busts), real-estate, S&L, junk-bond, dotcom, telecom, real-estate again, automobile, investment-banking, and consumer-banking in significant part currently, industries.
The United States, and democratic capitalism (the compassionate skewing or distribution in part of national wealth for the common good) therein, cannot afford to go without universal national health care insurance more than many, primarily self-centered and selfish, financially well-off Republicans and libertarians, object to and say we cannot afford to pay for it, with tax increases on their Bush-II-era windfall wealth and tax cuts. Noblesse oblige: much is expected of those who have much, as well as more is expected of those who have the most and benefit the most from the common bounty of our shared society and common land. People, please, please, please do not forget, don't forget that it was the now, "we-cannot-afford-to-spend" and "don't-punish-the-rich with Socialist class-warfare taxes," out-of-power neo-Neanderthals whose economic and costly unwarranted Iraqi-war policies under the Bush-II 8-year presidency and Republican congressional majority that engendered and precipitated the economic debacle that has wracked and mangled the U.S. economy and that initiated the huge federal spending and lending efforts, continued by the new Obama presidential administration and Democratic Party congressional majority, to rescue, stabilize and rehabilitate the dithering economy, most of the money of which has gone to Wall Street investment and financial services firms and the banking system, and to the pay and performance-unrelated bonuses for the executive staffs of these (all serving the monied investment community). So many of this rich and affluent anti-tax and anti-communitarian constituency, who exhort financially far less endowed and poor others to take responsibility for themselves free of tax-funded government programs, services and infrastructure, if divested of their inherited and parasitically and criminally acquired wealth, would not know what to do with themselves other than to commit suicide, binge on alcohol and illegal drugs as available while soiling their undies in their stinking states of intoxicated stupor and lethargy, beseech their rich and affluent relatives and social connections for privatized welfare and socialism support and help, or revert to drug and fraud money-making schemes to support themselves.
It is amusing that this bunch that touts individualism over community rises up in arms when their schools and neighborhoods are faced with the prospect of racial integration by a mere few, even better off, racially different individuals, and who have been in support of laws passed, and repealed, by Congress, denying immigration and citizenship to people of South Asian and Far Eastern ancestry, and who have been in support of discriminatory ethnic, racial and religious covenants on the selling of homes, and on the conforming aesthetic appearance of the homes of even wealthy others, in their neighborhoods. Many of them are literally up in arms again, in the first decade of the 21st century, in hostile, virulent reaction to the incumbency of a mulatto President, with some having been caught in plots to assassinate this President while he was campaigning for the office, and others yelling at Republican campaign rallies "Kill him! Kill him! Nigger!, Nigger!," and a Governor Rick Perry of the state of Texas having bandied the word "secession." HELLO! Nothing is stopping Perry and others of like mind as his from, please, seceding "individually" and personally from the U.S. and becoming expatriates abroad permanently!
P.S.: Long extinct Neanderthals were a Homo Sapiens species, belonging to the same species as modern humans, Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Perhaps they were a true different "race" of humans. They inhabited Europe, the Mediterranean, the Middle East and northern Africa before the incursion of our version of Homo Sapiens (modern humans) outside of Africa. Their largest cranium specimens had significantly larger craniums than those of our larger cranium Cro-Magnon brothers and sisters of Europe and of the largest craniums of our modern human kin. They left evidence showing that they had religion and funerals (mourned and buried their dead), used fire and cooked their food, made and effectively used a variety of relatively sophisticated weapons and tools, made musical instruments, jewelry and sculptures, wore animal skins and furs for clothes, and resided in caves, at camps and in huts or dwellings they fashioned. Human remains have been found at Neanderthal campsites, indicating Neanderthals and modern humans had occasional close interactions, maybe with modern humans having been occasional food, pets, captives or slaves for or of, or visitors or guests of, or traders with, the shorter but much more massive Neanderthals. However, universally throughout their habitats, wherever they have left skeletal remains of themselves and artifacts, Neanderthals have left no evidence that they had progressed to the practices of drawing and painting found to have been a prodigious modern human legacy from the artifacts found with modern humans' prehistoric remains and in their habitats wherever modern humans have dwelt, and yet still dwell as primitives, throughout the world, from time immemorial, however primitive their cultures. Clearly, drawing and painting were the precursors of and prerequisites for writing and mathematics and accounting, as well as design, drafting, architecture, and engineering -- the skills that gave rise to and sustain and further civilization. The terminal problem of the Neanderthals was that they were conservatives (now conservatives and neo-cons), as opposed to progressive, forwarded-minded, visionary perpetual creatives and innovators, both technically and socially. Prehistoric mass animal slaughter sites implicate them, and maybe prehistoric modern humans as well, in having routinely stampeded herd animals over cliffs as a hunting means for securing meat, compelling themselves to relocate endlessly to new habitats after having emptied earlier habitats of the easy-to-get and abundant ground meat supply, similar to what the neo-Neanderthals are doing with fisheries, forests, etc., in their totalitarian commodification and monetization of as much of nature as they can privatize and sell, nowadays. The lesson of the downfall of the Neanderthals is that those who [often tenaciously and mindlessly like automatons] hew to, or are wedded to, inviolable tradition and the past are fated to be stuck in the past and to stagnate, and to be surpassed, and to be choked and consumed by and disintegrate in the dust cloud of the past. The scientists Galileo Galilei, Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein, and the humanist social philosophers Buddha and Jesus of Bethlehem and Nazareth, and their very often more imperfect and flawed successor humanist and social evolution thinkers, teachers, activists and leaders such as Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Tubman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglas, the slavery abolitionists, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Susan B. Anthony, union and labor movement champions for worker rights and benefits and safe working conditions, Franklin Roosevelt, Mohandas Gandhi, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Alfred Kinsey, Harvey Milk, F.W. De Klerk and Nelson Mandela, Mother Theresa and Eunice Kennedy Shriver, and many others (who have ushered the U.S., and, to a lesser extent, humankind, to a time of unparalleled personal freedom from slavery, racial, ethnic, disability and gender and sexual discrimination and segregation and apartheid, to women's suffrage, civil and universal citizen voting rights, the free and legal exercise of non-psychopathic sexuality in private [psychopathic sex involving rape, pedophilia, assault, mutilation, death, knowing exposure to disease or excretory waste, animal use, etc.] and sexual preference for consenting adults, the ideal of equal treatment under and before the law of all, respect for and protection of wildlife and the environment, and the quest to abolish war), and their impacts are timeless while the clock has ticked down on and is ticking toward midnight on their detractors. We must import and emulate the practices of others where others' practices are better than our own, and adopt the benevolent-capitalism practices of the rest of the first-world industrial nations for the whole of our population -- of Canada, Scandinavia, Japan, Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. Tangentially speaking but strongly germane to the aforementioned, let us ask why are the U.S. and the Western nations so concerned with certain of those in charge and running amuck in North Korea, South Asia, Mesopotamia, North Africa and the Middle East and why has the U.S. swept from political office so many conservatives, primarily of the Republican Party, and handily voted in a democratic Democratic Party presidency? I say because the majority of the concerned watchers do not want to see hellishly nightmarish weapons under the control of and their economies wrecked by neo-Neanderthals, whose long past civilizations and technical achievements in Asia and the East were the greatest in the world until modern times. The neo-Neanderthals come in all ethnicities, colors and genders, and in all wealth and I.Q. levels and abilities and are in their exterior indistinguishable from their fellow modern humans of good will and a progressive or magnanimous disposition and mind set, on a perpetual path of positive evolution. However, when push comes to shove, they are neither braver, tougher nor smarter or as smart as their progressive brothers and sisters and may not survive them, but may be neutralized by and be reprocessed and absorbed by them, as a matter of practical necessity (as was the case for the neo-Neanderthals Adolph Hitler and the Nazis -- neo-imperialists, neo-colonists, neo-nationalist chauvinists), before they annihilate themselves and the world with their rapacious, nihilistic feudal capitalism and manical, ravenous terrorism and war. Caution: like Neanderthals and rampaging bull chimpanzees, neo-Neanderthals are smart, formidable, brutal, unmerciful, clever and crafty, and crazy too. Sometimes they outwit, destroy and chew up their would-be betters.
In another aside, social evolvers need to be cognizant of and cool headed toward their fellow absurdist utopian pacifist and angry, violently righteous-radical but well-meaning fellows who find fault as a matter of course with a military and law enforcement and political authority per se and sanctions on bad and dangerous behavior, however necessary and reasonable these may be, and who have a history in democratic societies of being boisterously intolerant of and unreconcilable with the momentary imperfections and lapses of otherwise positive, as opposed to negative, authority while being boisterously in favor of leaving lawless and besieging human monsters in other peoples' midst and other societies alone and/or of them being given a reprieve, commutation or pardon for their unconscionable and horrific misdeeds, yet who, when confronted close up or directly in blood baths by such tyrannical human monsters as Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini and their savage and murderous goons in authoritarian societies, soon shut up, cower and and get along, if not passively go along, with the program. These well-meaning fellows should have a voice at the table of progress but cannot be leaders of the progress politically or militarily, as they are naive -- although good-hearted and well-intentioned -- political stupidos and bumblers and reality retards who would lead our society on the international and domestic fronts to destruction and implosion virtually instantly.
Incidentally, where are the loving and caring voices of the pious in this discussion and debate? Should they not be in the forefront as advocates for health care and health-care insurance reform to extend good health care and health care insurance to all U.S. citizens?
In an approximation of the so very wise and deeply stirring words of the musician Prince expressed early in his career, I conclude imploring, "Love one another while you can; this may be your one and only chance." "This" referring to this precious flicker of time embodied with fragile, mortal life. And in the words of the great playwright and poet William Shakespeare, "...which makes thy love more strong, to love that well which thou must leave ere long." Forever.
PUBLIC DOMAIN by grant of the author, me.
Download a free copy of the remake, super mix of the premier and first song 'It's a Beautiful Day' under the same name or EUPHORIA: Felton Pilate at CDbaby.com and most major internet music download sites.
