15 May 2006
Musings on today and tomorrow
The contrast offered by The West Wing to the current, illegitimate, White House resident makes the series' end all the more poignant. Now our only exemplar is Madam President on ABC. I'm sure it will fade-to-black fast. From a different perspective I can see how The West Wing enabled us to ignore the thugs who are flaunting the Constitution and insulting all of us who populate the USofA. Now we have no refuge, however temporary. No place to hide. It's time for our reckoning with the Bush/Cheney cabal before it succeeds in destroying our very culture we have trusted for generations.
The current "debate" about immigration, immigrants and reform in my view is a chimera to distract the country from the Valerie Plame, Iraq War debacles, scandals, no-bid contracts, National Debt and lack of fiscal discipline and accountability, and taxation issues in which this Administration has committed felonies, deceptions and arrogant ineptitude. Our foreign policy has been trashed by a suit-wearing, cognitively impaired third-rate rich kid who did not know what was going on outside of Texas, overseas and who the players were. Then there are the major foci of the public's concerns: education and healthcare.
Bush has tried every way he and his co-conspirators could to dismantle public education via No Child Left Behind and to rescind defined retirement benefits in bail-outs of bankrupt, poorly managed corporations. The health care expectations of millions of unemployed adults and their dependent children and parents no longer remains a problem for the Bush/Cheney junta; by failing to fund healthcare programs, by ignoring those without private insurance, by manipulating the Constitution-endowed bankruptcy rights, by encouraging "faith-based" non-governmental providers and by adding Part D, the prescription drug price support program, to Medicare's major medical safety net of Parts A and B. Many Medicaid beneficiaries, the poorest of the poor, are now subject to larger co-pay amounts, involuntary assignment to a Medicare HMO provider and exclusion from care other than emergency care.
I think that the Bush II legacy will be considered Luddite and regressive because they are making our fiscal, social and psychic sense of well-being radically lower for a new norm of satisfaction in the future. I'm not sanguine about America's cultural resilience to the attacks of classicism and greed. Those middle aged persons of the near future, having gone to college during the 1980's with the myriad of technological changes, freedom from fears of the Draft, Reagan's enthusiastic support for Milton Friedman's economic theories rooted in monetary policy, and the simultaneous regimes overseas of conservative, commercially-based governments, are showing how strongly they adhere to a libertarian philosophy and commercial ethics. The economic growth of the 1990's brought these independent spirits higher salaries, job mobility, two-income requirements of family lifestyles and the globalization of commerce accompanied by the emasculation of trade unions have proven to this libertarian-minded generation that money is the only reliable basis of personal well-being and for sustaining their lifestyles beyond their working years. As Donald Kennedy remarked, during his tenure as president of Stanford University (1979-1993), "Money is the marijuana of the Eighties."
New companies founded during this time discovered that tech industry job seekers were most influenced by salary and not by pensions or seniority-based employment security. So, I wonder if those of us in their parents' generation will find sympathetic, sustaining public programs decimated during the Bush/Cheney years.
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The current "debate" about immigration, immigrants and reform in my view is a chimera to distract the country from the Valerie Plame, Iraq War debacles, scandals, no-bid contracts, National Debt and lack of fiscal discipline and accountability, and taxation issues in which this Administration has committed felonies, deceptions and arrogant ineptitude. Our foreign policy has been trashed by a suit-wearing, cognitively impaired third-rate rich kid who did not know what was going on outside of Texas, overseas and who the players were. Then there are the major foci of the public's concerns: education and healthcare.
Bush has tried every way he and his co-conspirators could to dismantle public education via No Child Left Behind and to rescind defined retirement benefits in bail-outs of bankrupt, poorly managed corporations. The health care expectations of millions of unemployed adults and their dependent children and parents no longer remains a problem for the Bush/Cheney junta; by failing to fund healthcare programs, by ignoring those without private insurance, by manipulating the Constitution-endowed bankruptcy rights, by encouraging "faith-based" non-governmental providers and by adding Part D, the prescription drug price support program, to Medicare's major medical safety net of Parts A and B. Many Medicaid beneficiaries, the poorest of the poor, are now subject to larger co-pay amounts, involuntary assignment to a Medicare HMO provider and exclusion from care other than emergency care.
I think that the Bush II legacy will be considered Luddite and regressive because they are making our fiscal, social and psychic sense of well-being radically lower for a new norm of satisfaction in the future. I'm not sanguine about America's cultural resilience to the attacks of classicism and greed. Those middle aged persons of the near future, having gone to college during the 1980's with the myriad of technological changes, freedom from fears of the Draft, Reagan's enthusiastic support for Milton Friedman's economic theories rooted in monetary policy, and the simultaneous regimes overseas of conservative, commercially-based governments, are showing how strongly they adhere to a libertarian philosophy and commercial ethics. The economic growth of the 1990's brought these independent spirits higher salaries, job mobility, two-income requirements of family lifestyles and the globalization of commerce accompanied by the emasculation of trade unions have proven to this libertarian-minded generation that money is the only reliable basis of personal well-being and for sustaining their lifestyles beyond their working years. As Donald Kennedy remarked, during his tenure as president of Stanford University (1979-1993), "Money is the marijuana of the Eighties."
New companies founded during this time discovered that tech industry job seekers were most influenced by salary and not by pensions or seniority-based employment security. So, I wonder if those of us in their parents' generation will find sympathetic, sustaining public programs decimated during the Bush/Cheney years.
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