Don’t know if you’ve all been following the increasing tension between China and Japan on the territorial front and China and the U.S. on the currency manipulation front… or the fact that Sovereign debt troubles are mounting once again in Ireland, Spain and Greece. Meanwhile back in America the poor continue to get poorer as the mega-wealthy get wealthier while the Republicans and Tea-Party get closer to their goal of paralyzing Washington and creating the perfect conditions for a fascist take-over that would enshrine Wall Street, Multinational U.S. firms and the U.S. Military as the direct benefactors of state power while American citizens who are not involved in the latter are left to rot as human waste.
The article referenced below is definitely worth a read if you need a bit more convincing that America is rapidly sliding towards somewhere our German friends ended up half-century ago. The point is also driven home in yesterday’s interview with Noam Chomsky (81 and still kicking!) on NPR where he reminds us that it only took a little more than a decade for the Weimar Republic to degenerate from being the pinnacle of Western democracy, science, arts and culture in the 1920s to becoming one of the most feared and depraved regimes in contemporary history.
http://www.onpointradio.org/2010/09/noam-chomsky-america
Excerpt from: Memories of Hope in the Age of Disposability
The new culture of cruelty combines with the arrogance of the rich as morally bankrupt politicians such as Mike Huckabee tell his fellow Republican extremists that the provision in Obama’s health care bill that requires insurance companies to cover people with pre-existing conditions should be repealed because people who have these conditions are like houses that have already burned down. The metaphor is apt in a country that no longer has a language for compassion, justice and social responsibility. Huckabee at least is honest about one thing. He makes clear that the right-wing fringe leading the Republican Party is on a death march and has no trouble endorsing policies in which millions of people – in this case those afflicted by illness – can simply “dig their own graves and lie down in them.”(7) The politics of disposability ruthlessly puts money and profits ahead of human needs. Under the rubric of austerity, the new barbarians such as Huckabee now advocate eugenicist policies in which people who are considered weak, sick, disabled or suffering from debilitating health conditions are targeted to be weeded out, removed from the body politic and social safety nets that any decent society puts into place to ensure that everyone, but especially the most disadvantaged, can access decent health care and lead a life with dignity. Consequently, politics loses its democratic character along with any sense of responsibility and becomes part of a machinery of violence that mimics the fascistic policies of past authoritarian political parties that eagerly attempted to purify their societies by getting rid of those human beings considered weak and inferior and whom they ultimately viewed as human waste. I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that a lunatic fringe of a major political party is shamelessly mimicking and nourishing the barbaric roots of one of the most evil periods in human history. By arguing that individuals with pre-existing health conditions are like burned-down houses who do not deserve health insurance, Huckabee puts into place those forces and ideologies that allow the country to move closer to the end point of such logic by suggesting that such disposable populations do not deserve to live at all.
Wyndtunnel 