On The Wing

Editor’s Note:  Paul Corman-Roberts is the author of the flash and poetry collections “Coming WorldGone World” (Howling Dog Press, 2006) and “neocom(muter)” (Tainted Coffee Press, 2009.) He once had coffee and donuts with Eldridge Cleaver. You can find more of his subversion at the following links:

Paul Corman Roberts Website

neocom(muter) at Tainted Coffee Press

CONFESSIONS OF A LIBERTARIAN SOCIALIST

By Paul Corman Roberts

My confession:  in my heart of hearts, I am a patriot.  Even though I ostensibly joined the United States Air Force to escape my economically depressed hometown, there is a part of me that will always be proud to have lived in, and served, a country that could progress and allow for some modicum of free speech and opportunity to the individual. For all of my railing and ranting against the industrial giants, I’m still glad, barely, that they won the Civil War.  The union prevailed.  And to want the union to prevail is as a conservative tenant as anyone could hope to propagate.

Which is why I think a public option health program is in fact, a conservative idea.

I think the last time this column ran in Side of Grits the idea of universal healthcare was tossed out as a “Big Idea” that Obama might use to revitalize the very real “malaise” the United States is experiencing after nearly thirty years of what our forty-first president, George Bush the First called “Voodoo Economics.” Right now the economic body of our country is looking like it’s been worked over by witch doctors on Wall Street sticking their needles and pins into pie charts.

There is geographic and poetic justice to the notion that Obama, a South Chicago community organizer, should be the first U.S. President to oppose the basic tenets of Reaganomics, a nifty label for an economic policy whose intellectual birth was fostered at the University of Chicago by Milton Friedman. It’s not unlike the White Sox versus the Cubs.

Basically, the big idea comes down to this:  Is health care a right or a privilege? As of this writing, Obama nearly bet the house that the American people, and ultimately the American legislative body would vindicate the former position.

Obviously, they didn’t.

This is a big enough idea to cause a backlash of epic proportions, because an oligarchic form of Capitalism, masquerading as a “free” market system, is the ultimate form of Darwinism.

The people in power engineering the “socialist” label of Obama are radical capitalists for whom the Becks and Limbaugh’s of the world are merely mouthpieces; speculators, investors and bankers who can’t abide by a risk in profit loss, creating in fact, a fixed market.

Obama’s job of course, isn’t to change this process, but to apply strong corrective measures that in fact allow the good vessel “Enterprise” to keep sailing a strong, middle course. Obama knows this; otherwise Wall Street wouldn’t have got behind him.  The self appointed voices filling in for real leadership in the GOP claim Obama’s policies veer the ship of state toward Castro and in their more expansive moments, Stalin.

As of this posting, the “public option,” has failed to pass the U.S. Senate, courtesy of Joe Lieberman. It’s hard to imagine things getting any better, but the hullaballoo is justified because this is the “Big Idea” Obama has staked himself to, and win or lose, he stands to be the winner in the long haul of history, particularly since he has proved such a friend to the investment and insurance industries while crafting the proposal for the public option.

Don’t be surprised if the public option finds its way back to the Congress if Obama can get to a second term.  The truly conservative approach would be to preserve the consumer class that corporate America so desperately needs to preserve its hold on power.  An eroding middle class and with eroding home values that have been paying the cost of out of control premiums set by corporate insurance conglomerates can only sustain that power base for so long.

Or can it? To the radical capitalist, a “safety net” is not Darwinist enough for the pillars of the Supply-Side model.  To oppose the public option in Obama’s proposal is to in effect say “health care is not a right but a privilege.”  And they have their right to their opinion.  But do they have the right to impose that belief on the majority of Americans who don’t believe that?

If the public option doesn’t come to pass in the next few years, bet on the black market for imported drugs to make a healthy spike.  The middle classes could easily turn more and more to resources outside fixed markets, perhaps themselves over time becoming a sort of resourceful, “hustler” strata of society.  Such a society will be less safe for children and other unprotected citizens, and there will be a large numbers of both.  If one looks carefully at the booming domestic drug trade, in conjunction with the malignant yet expanding business practices of the Mexican drug cartels, a civil war is closer than it appears.

The defenders of Friedmanism, essentially casino high rollers getting their rides comped and playing with “House Money” may well then find themselves confronted with a genuine class upheaval, and all the sneering at Obama’s supposed socialism will come back to bite their faces off.

With all this in mind, the public option is easily the REAL conservative choice, far more conservative than the “single-payer” model, and oddly, available to every member of congress and the U.S. military. Meanwhile, a continuing Lassez-faire approach to regulation, and the bailout of the financial sector is a serious risk for the nation’s economic stability…these industries are patently incapable of policing themselves or consciously “leveling.”  Ask yourself seriously…where would you rather live?  Canada or Mexico?

The public option represents an effort to prop up that part of the American populace that the nation can least afford to lose in a sinking economy…the working consumer.  To choose the other way, the way things are going now, is to ensure that the gap between the extremely wealthy and the rest of us continues to accelerate. And that can only lead to further radicalism.

If financial institutions are too big to fail, what does that make the American people?  Expendable?

No the real test of health care reform will play out over a longer time, but not so long that the decisions made in this time will be easily forgotten.  Maybe for once, our short attention spans can remember a history lesson or two, like how socialized medicine didn’t make Totalitarian states out of France or Sweden, or how all these same criticism’s of government health care were the same ones made about social security.  Those criticisms weren’t true then, they’re not true now, and given the true nature of this debate, they’re also unpatriotic.