How
can you believe the leadership of a party that says it supports the middle
class or that it represents working class Americans when it is and has been
conservative policy that has eroded the middle class almost to complete
destruction for over thirty years? How
are they able to claiming that they are trying to make a better America or
stronger America by increasing jobs when the bills conservatives draft are
designed (not as indirect consequence) but designed to not only reduce but
intentionally dissuade college attendance?
Conservative policy is the reason half the kids in the country have to
move back in with their parents after graduating from a four year
university. Conservative policy is the
reason why only three quarters of the kids that graduate from four year
universities barely get the jobs they do and why those jobs don’t pay as much
from your union busting dick-ish-ness.
Conservatives are responsible for the tremendous surge in tuition and
college loan debt. Conservative policy
has effectively transferred the control and issuance of education loans to of
private banks, which have steadily raised interest rates and saddled kids in
their early twenties with lifelong debt.
Just another example of how conservative policy delivers guaranteed
customers (victims) to private self-serving institutions with no ethic
allegiance to the public welfare.
As
I’ve mentioned before liberalism is based in ethics. Liberalism is based in what is right, what is
good, and what is true. The argument for
publicly funded services that protect are most basic rights of Life, Liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness, as declared by Locke, and demanded by Jefferson,
is the ethical argument. The argument
for publicly funded services is the argument for what is good, what is right,
and what is true. Organizations tasked
with the protection and care of the public can never be focused on the what’s
best for public welfare because as a private corporation they ‘re focused on
their bottom line. Would we accept this
standard of behavior from our police, firemen, or even military? Then why do we allow it in our ambulance
services that are trusted with saving lives and assisting the injured… that’s
the same thing we trust firemen for, they just have cooler uniforms. Why do we allow patient negligence and abuse
in hospitals, doctors, and nurses who are hesitant to help patients that don’t
have insurance? Sixty two percent of all
bankruptcy is due to medical debt. How
much better off would America be if our Healthcare reflected the rest of the
free world and used a public option?
That’s easy, it would be sixty two percent better.
There
are those that use the horribly construed and inaccurate book Atlas Shrugged to
defend the notion that corporations are people and should be in control of
matters that affect the public good. To
them I offer the literary equivalent counter argument of "Robo-Cop".
Now I know what you’re thinking, Robo-Cop is
only a two hour movie, and although it’s far better written than anything by Ayn
Rand, Atlas Shrugged is four thousand pages.
It’s like comparing a Chinese restaurant menu to the Bible… again not
being discriminatory as to which is better written.
That is why I am including all three original
Robo-Cop films into my counter argument, but not the TV series or the cartoon…
as I want this to be taken seriously.
I’m not asking anyone to ignore the graphic violence and gratuitous
nudity in the beginning of the movie. I
think it’s important to take note of these occurrences because in many
appropriate ways they accurately reflect the complacent acceptance of sex and
violence in present day American society.
But in looking beyond the obvious similarities to our modern world at
the beginning of the movie it is exceedingly clear that Robo-Cop is a cautionary tale
of our potential future and the consequences of Right-Wing Fascist
policy. And what better place to stage
this anti-corporatism masterpiece than in the once industrious blue collar metropolis of Detroit, a city that
is currently poised to collapse from over exposure to outsourcing and the
flight of manufacturing firms.
The
similarities between today’s Detroit and the Detroit of the film go from
striking to frightening, when you consider that recently several “developers”
have publicly announced intentions to privatize much of Detroit’s
infrastructure and public spaces. One
such firm is trying to turn Detroit’s central park into a gated city-state,
that you must buy citizenship to live in, the proposed city state will house
the headquarters for factories and mills that will be on the outside in "Old
Detroit" and operated by the peasants on the other side of the private city’s
walls (seriously… no bullshit!).
