It’s August again. Who’d’ve thunk? We’re rounding Columbus, OH on our way home, nosing our way towards I-70. From there it’s a straight shot back to Baltimore and then back to the pseudo-real-world. With the release of the new CD I’m hoping to start turning my economics back around – to start earning more money from music again and let being at the store ease off to being the paid vacation it was when I first started there.
As we’re driving home, my brain is filled with all sorts of things – about the politics of Columbus, IN – and about the uber-politics of America.
Columbus is NOT a large town. I don’t know the numbers on it, but despite the fact that it’s got some very rich, artistic areas to it, it’s still small-town Indiana, especially within our East Coast mindset – and yet this tiny city’s bracketed on both sides by Wal-marts.
I won’t pretend to understand the fiscal realities of huge corporate discount stores, but it seems absurd that this one-Starbucks town has two Walmarts, and it’s almost frightening to see the place walled in that way.
Heather’s majorly anti-Walmart – and for good reason. There’s plenty of statistics and
facts and figures displaying the negative effect of such a corporation on a local area – the argument goes something like: Despite often being an employer of many people, they undercut wages, providing lots of close-to-minimum wage jobs while simultaneously displacing small-businesses – and that despite being a supplier of very low-priced products, again, it undermines any local production, and most all of the money taken in is then funnelled away from the community, and usually even away from the country…
They’re good arguments – and accurate for as far as they go. And we can vote with our pocket books, and all of us people who can afford to NOT give money to Walmart can go ahead and go to Target instead… but we’re never going to outweigh the pocketbook vote of people who either through monetary neccessity, political ignorance or simple political apathy see something cheap and convenient and spend their money accordingly.
Besides – we Live in a capitalist society – it’s not a dirty word. Almost by definition, Walmart has a lot of power and pull because they’ve been the best at what they’re SUPPOSED to be doing: raking in a huge-ass profit hand over fist. They’re not in the business of building the economy, or of providing jobs. They’re in the business of doing business and any sort of greater responsibility is completely at their corporate discretion and whim.
Unfortunately, that huge-ass profit then also translates into the ability to hire lobbyists and advertisements to manipulate the government. Nothing too insidious – they’re at the top and they want to stay there and are going to do anything they can to smooth their path… they’ll keep the cost low for importing things from the various contries where they get the cheapest labour and they’ll continue to park their mega-stores wherever a city or town will give them the biggest tax-break… and our duly elected representatives are all too happy to hand these things to them, whether or NOT we shop there…
But that’s sort of where the system breaks down. I feel that the government is there for the PEOPLE – I’m sure I read that somewhere. And so, when offered a couple of (million) dollars in order to make sure that the laws benefit a corporation, one of our expensive committees needs to look into whether or not that’s in the best economic interest of the country as a whole… and act accordingly, no matter WHERE their paycheck’s coming from. Unfortunately, our votes are assuring our politicians that these things just aren’t very high on our collective agenda. In a representative government, our representatives don’t care about ANYTHING until we bloody well MAKE them care.
And so – what I’m trying to say is that I don’t blame Wal-Mart! They’re acting within a rule set that allows them to do this. If we don’t like those business practices, we need to take issue with the things and people that make them legal.
Of course, the United States operates like this… smoking is bad for you and is popularly demonized, but the government rakes in so much money from it, both in the form of taxes and lobbyists – no matter what’s in the best interest of the nation as a whole, it’s not in the best interest of Washington to actually outlaw it. The same with cell phone usage and the environment, coal and recycling and endangered mooses…
All of this of then careens into personal rights: infringement of our right to choose what we damned well please, even if it IS bad for us – and why the country would be so very different if I was in charge.
One of the biggest news items recently has been health care – Government option, socialism, spiraling costs, deficits from Hell – if nothing else, the debate must be giving political science students tons of material for discussions on double-speak and propoganda.
(an aside) In case you haven’t noticed, dear reader, I’m a WHOLE lot more politically in the middle than most of my artist / musician friends. I see a lot of pros and cons on BOTH sides and am horribly un-PC in a lot of my thinking. I hope that my occassional political rants don’t turn you off – but I spend a lot of time thinking about this stuff, and listening to BOTH sides of most of these arguments and wondering why our system doesn’t work…
And so when I come to the topic of health care I do NOT automatically side with Obama’s initiatives. Though the Rupublicans do seem to be playing things pretty low in order to hang onto the status quo, Obama’s being just as duplicitous, fudging numbers left and right and occassionally going beyond mere fudge and pushing into some thick, rich confection of falsehood that as of yet has no name.
It’s one of the few political debates that I feel SO uneducated on that I don’t have a “well, what you OUGHTA do” type solution. It’s an overwhelming problem and it’s moving slowly and confusingly for a reason. However, as usual I feel that we’re aiming for the trunk when we need to attack the roots – asking the wrong question and fighting the wrong fight.
There are fundamental questions at the base of the whole issue that aren’t being asked, and one of the most pertinent is this: Health care – is it a right? Or a service?
That’s a pretty confusing issue right there – if it’s a service, to be paid for and traded, sold and advertised, then we’re perhaps already on the right track. Competing hospitals, competing health insurance providers all trying to display why they’re the best option, spending as much on advertisement as they do on actual services, providing big bonuses to their top beauracrats and cutting corners to provide good profit margins… it doesn’t sound appealing but it’s what happens when humans are the commodity in corporate boardrooms – we’re back to Walmart again, where straight capitalism will (and has) gotten us into trouble. As much as the Right is loathe to admit it, some guidelines are strongly needed.
Oooor is it a right? It’s my RIGHT to have good health care! Well, then it seems important to remove the capitalistic part of it completely. Money doesn’t enter into the REST of our rights, does it?! (oh – wait – private schools, lawyers and handgun licenses are actually kind of expensive) Single-payer all the way! And stop bitching that it’s socialistic or too much like what the Canadians have – and beyond that – certainly stop bitching that there are tons of problems with their system – as Americans aren’t we up to the task of reverse-engineering someone else’s mess and building something that WORKS?!? (ahem, V2 rockets –> the Moon baby!!!).
As Congress and Rush Limbaugh and President Obama joust over the different possibilities under the overall header of “health care reform”, they really seem to only be fighting over some specifics of how insurance works, which really isn’t the problem. They say it over and over again: that healthcare COSTS too much!
People die hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt because they had the foul roll of the genetic dice to get cancer.
However – there’s another argument – that even if it IS a service, to be paid for and commercialized, that it’s in the nation’s best interest to have a healthy and productive work force – that we have to keep people healthy not simply because it’s the “right” thing to do morally, and not simply because people will pay through the teeth in order to feel better – but because the easiest way to keep one person healthy is to keep the person next to them healthy – that a medical capacity to battle bio-terrorism is important for national defense – that curing cancer and marketing the cure to China will be good for the economy, etc… If we look at health care from THIS angle, then yet, it’s certainly important for the government to get involved and to monitor our health and provide adequate health care to each and every citizen… and non-citizen…
Though I think I might be in favour of this last view point, the main reason I don’t htink it’s a very logical way to approach the problem is that it’s pretty fundamnteally unAmerican. We’re all about taking care of ourselves (theoretically, at least) and if the government were to REALLY take a look at what’s good for us and provide for us accordingly, it would / should probably extend from curative health care into preventative – and not just from the doctor’s point of view but from what we’re allowed to eat and do – not to mention what happens when that’s extended into government control of mental health care… that’s a huge can of federal worms that I don’t think I’ve got the patience to get into…
It’s Health care –
right vs service
socialism democracy republic
i don’t get it.
who lies more
cuts WHOSE costs?
WOW – that Saint Bernard doesn’t want to stay in the back…
