Sunday, May 09, 2010

Tea Party Scare Tactics

What do I think of the tea party people?

I think they would love anarchy, is my impression, and no government interference with anything. This means to me they stand for anything goes mentality and when anything goes, it's the powerful who begin to abuse their "freedom" to abuse those without. It's the history of our world.

They don't believe people have a right to affordable medical care and if you can't earn enough to pay for it, then too bad. This is third world nation stuff. Oh wait, some third world nations have health care for all their citizens.

When I was trying to figure out a way to take that cat trapping job in Eugene, but couldn't, because I can't move and I would not make enough to live or to have health coverage, the woman offering the job said she has a friend who is paying $800 a month in health care premiums, but that does not include the copays and spend downs. So many people go under just trying to pay premiums. It's ridiculous.

In my opinion right now, the tea party is a friend of the corporation and not a friend of the average American. What's their stance on health care? You're on your own, baby! Buy it or go without. Yup. If you're middle aged and have any history of health issues, the tea party says go fuck yourself.

I do not know much about the health care bill passed this year. I do know a lot of people think it will help them afford coverage for once. But it doesn't do anything to lower costs or much to address the greed in the middle, a.k.a. insurers. We don't need the middle. The middle only sucks from both ends.

Paying out premiums for health care doesn't mean you get health care. It means you have insurance. I believe health care reform would eliminate middle man insurance completely and either be single payer or cash pay by customer. To aid competition in the latter category, doctors and hospitals would need to post price lists and outcome percentages, so people could really choose, like we do any other business, by price and quality.

Now, we have no idea what we're going to be charged if we go to the doctor and two people going to the same doctor for the same thing might get charged entirely different prices. That ain't right. There can be no competition in health care to bring down prices if nobody knows what the prices are. It's a big secret.

I saw Sean Penn on TV a couple nights ago. He was raging. He was tired and venting his despair through rage. He'd been running around Port au Prince for almost 18 hours with a dying teenager, trying to find the medicine that would save him. He finally found a medical team who met him in a warehouse, set up a table, but it was too late for the 15 year old. And Sean Penn didn't take it easily.

Next time I hear the right making fun of movie actor activists, my blood will heat up. I'll think of Sean Penn, as I saw him, after a fight to the death for that boy's life. If Sean Penn is someone to be ridiculed for such behavior, then I want to be ridiculed like that too.

In other news, according to the neighbor, the Arab guy living across the street, with his young wife from Philomath, has left for Iraq or somewhere, allegedly serving as an interpretor for the US military, since he speaks the language. He is supposedly making big bucks over there, also according to a neighbor, and that is supposedly from the wife. Sure, it makes me slightly nervous, after the car bomb in NY episode. But, hopefully he is working for the military and not getting trained to blow Americans up. I'm sure that's not the case. Arabs in America are probably severely scrutinized not only by neighbors but by nearly everyone and most are just ordinary people. But when you got Arab Americans going overseas then coming back here to try to commit acts of terrorism, if I were an Arab in America, I'd understand that concern.

There was someone my brother knew, who could not find a job in southern Oregon and finally went to Iraq to work for a private contractor. He made huge bucks, but often for doing nothing and sent back reports that were horrifying, of private contractors raping women working for the company, and of wasting taxpayer dollars in extreme manner.

5 comments:

  1. You're exactly right. The tea party people have at least two problems. One they share with Libertarians: A government that doesn't do anything for the people. Defense and police. That's it. Which of course leaves a power vacuum into which steps the giant corporations - who will have no problem telling you how to live your life in minute detail.

    Paying attention to news, you regularly see stories about someone being evicted from a mall for wearing the wrong kind of t-shirt or saying the wrong thing. That's because you have no civil rights when on someone else's private property. But in the Libertarian/Tea Party ideal world EVERY INCH of ground is someone else's private property. Ergo, no rights for anyone except the super rich.

    The second problem with the Tea Party people is that they have been coopted by astroturf "grass roots" front groups that are funded by big corporations such as Wellpoint (healthcare) and GE (war profiteers). The local Tea Party rally was organized by outsiders from The Lewin Group, a fake grassroots organization that is actually owned and operated by a giant healthcare company. They're the ones who brainwash granny into going out there and screaming "Keep government out of my Medicare" (Literally).

    If there is any reader who doesn't know this, Medicare is "government run" healthcare (as the insurance companies define it).

    Unfortunately the healthcare bill that finally passed was more of a Tea Party bill than anything else: It mandates the purchase of private health insurance whether you can afford it or not. The only "give back" is that the health insurance companies won't be able to exclude pre-existing conditions anymore and they won't be able to cut you off in the middle of lifesaving treatment (a very common practice). It's not a very good deal but you can thank the Tea Partiers for that.

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  2. BTW, the deceased kitty thing really bummed me out. I'm still upset over poor Shemp. But at least this post gave me something else to grouse about. Taking my mind off of the other stuff. :)

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  3. I know, with the Liberitarians, no more public parks or national or state parks, they'd all be privately owned and operated to make money, which would mean degradation. I got told once by a Texan hunter, that he moved to Oregon because there are public lands here and not so much in Texas. If you love the outdoors, you can't be a liberatarian, because they'd sell it all to the highest bidder. You and I would be restricted to where we could pay to touch our feet, our rentals, paying to touch our feet anywhere else, if we could.

    Yes, on private property, nobody has any rights but the property owner, who can dictate what is and isn't allowed.

    The public needs to own and maintain lands, that all can use. I believe in that. Of course, OMG, that's socialism--collectively owned land. Oh my gawd. Tea party protest oncoming! How many of them want the parks sold, the rivers sold, the mountains sold? How many?

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  4. I think of tea party people as arch conservatives who want unrestricted freedom for big business while keeping a tight rein on private morality.

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  5. I think you are right, Snow. I think it's just another tactic by the powerful to control and crush the little people.

    I saw an enthusiastic tea party letter to the editor of the local paper, written by an easterner, claiming lowering the minimum wage will make things better and that poverty for low wage workers is better addressed by something about some tax, capital gains or something I don't know anything about. I thought to myself, "Boy, that guy must own a business and want to lower his employee costs."

    I hear all this crap about how everyone can make it to the top in America, if you work hard enough. But that's not true, I used to think, because pyramids don't stand upside down. You got one head honcho at the top, but to highly produce and for him to get rich, you have to have an ever widening base of workers all the way to the bottom. You can't have all queen bees and no worker bees. In a city of 10,000 you can't have even 5000 head honchos with the other 5000 workers.

    So how do you keep the little nobodies from revolting? Sign em on to religion, so at least there's heaven to look forward to. Or enlist them in your causes, like the tea party and all other political groups, so they're like your groupees and will do anything you say, I don't know.

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