A lot has been made of the supposed culture war in which America is engaged. It is a war that has played out in books, television, public debate and even the private lives of ordinary citizens. The war, we are told, is a religious war and the stakes are nothing less than the very souls of Americans themselves. Commentators tell us that we are at a decision point and one direction leads to salvation, but the other fork in this road leads to a secular hedonistic society that will propel us past a point of no return and sit us on a downhill race towards the end of days. With the stakes being so high what choice do we have but to find solace in the former branch of the road? We are told after all that the peril we face upon choosing the latter will be the end of religion, freedom and goodness itself will stay behind us and cease to accompany us on this vile road. The choices being a return to Hobbs’ state of nature with the brutish ruling and spiritual and physical death lurking just around the bend the prevailing winds and common sense itself should point to the former of the two roads.
The choice between death and goodness, however compelling the narrative we are sold may be is nothing more than an illusion. The mask of choices is presented to cover for the real battle that is being waged in America. It is not a spiritual war, but it is in every sense of the word a moral war.
Astute followers of the crafting and debate around the health care bill will have most certainly noticed the contrasts painted not only in the debate of the bill itself but in the long political campaign for control of the government that proceeded it. The distinctions were strikingly obvious and clear for anyone that appreciated the nuance of campaigns and rhetoric. On the one hand you had a group that was the full embodiment of the movement and societal philosophy espoused by President Reagan. Local control, deregulation, cracking down on fraud and a full blind unwaivering faith in the markets ability to deliver the best solutions for society. The opposing side of the coin offered us a return to tighter restrictions on corporations, not necessarily more government but a return of capitalism with seat belts for the road and most importantly a return of government regulated caring and a social safety net for the millions of people in the country whose salary prohibits them not from enjoying a comfortable life but from even being able to live a tolerable manageable life. Nowhere in these contrasts do we find the type of culture war rhetoric or put forward by those who tell us we are engaged in a spiritual culture war. The interesting underbelly we can see, though, is nonetheless a high stakes moral culture war between those who put their complete unyielding faith in the markets to bring forth economic justice and those who believe that a government by the people and working on behalf of the people of this country has a moral responsibility to redistribute wealth in order to bring forth economic justice.
The culture war we find ourselves in is one that is economic in nature and driven purely by greed. While those who argue against health care reform point out that insurance companies only have only roughly a 4 percent profit margin they are leaving out exactly how much that 4 percent is and more importantly how much insurance companies are paying their top executives. The CEO of Wellpoint received a total compensation package of 13.1 million dollars last year.
Angela Braly’s overall compensation rose to $13.1 million from $8.7 million in 2008, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday. Her salary rose less than 1 percent to just over $1.1 million. She received a performance bonus of $1.5 million, a sharp jump from $73,810 a year prior.
Meanwhile another insurance company was busy ensuring they continued to make profits in order to pay top executives and shareholder dividends. And one of the most profitable ways they make those profits is denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions. One of the stipulations in this new bill ends that horrific practice but only goes into effect later in the year as the lawmakers wanted to give time to the industry to adapt to the new regulatory changes. A Texas couple found out the hard way that even a new born baby could be denied insurance coverage using the cover of a pre-existing condition.
The Tracys are small business owners and would have to buy individual policies, which they have for their other children Cooper, 4, and Jewel, 11.
The family had no idea there was something wrong with Houston before he was born, Doug Tracy said.
“Prenatal, every doctor visit was perfect, his heart beat was fine,” he said.
But Tracy said he called Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Texas twice in preparation of Houston’s birth, and he asked if they could get a policy on his son before he was born.
“They said, ‘We can’t do that,’ because he wasn’t born yet, but as soon as the baby’s born go online and fill an application out,” Doug Tracy said.
He applied for Houston’s insurance March 18, and the first month’s premium of $267 was charged to his credit card, he said.
“Wednesday, the 24th, is when I got a letter of decline; they declined it the day after the [health insurance] bill was signed,” Doug Tracy said.
The provision in the health insurance reform act that prohibits health insurance companies from denying coverage to children with a pre-existing condition will take effect six months after the bill was signed into law this week.
A continuation of the Reagan conservative theory of deregulation would have allowed insurance companies to continue to deny not only adults but children coverage in order to get the life saving procedures they need. When a system allows top executives to make multi-million dollar salaries and deny health care to people willing to pay premiums because it would affect the stock price and ultimately the salary of top executives that is a system completely fueled by greed.
President Bush had two terms lasting a long eight years of which six were spent with his party controlling both houses of Congress, save a short stint early in his first term that Democrats controlled the Senate. The economic collapse was the conservative philosophy of a blind faith in the market without government regulation in full bloom. President Obama by contrast has been in office for little over one year. In that time he has managed to persuade Congress to pass a stimulus that by all accounts from professional economists helped the United States avoid another Great Depression and news has just come that in March more jobs were created in this country than have been created in any month in the past three years.
The new line of attack coming from the GOP is not that government is socializing health care, because that is a flat out blatant lie for anyone familiar with the definition of Socilism (read if you believe this lie you are an uneducated mental midget), but that the health care bill is going to hurt major companies and force them to lay off people thus more people will be losing their job in a still fragile economic climate. The attack comes from the language in the new law that closes a loop hole for major corporations. A loop hole that was created by the creation of Medicare Part D in 2003 under President Bush.
The 2003 law that created Medicare Part D was designed to set up public plans for millions of seniors without retirement plans. But there was also an employer-based plan created, and big industrial businesses like Deere (DE, Fortune 500), Caterpillar (CAT,Fortune 500), AT&T (T, Fortune 500) and Verizon (VZ, Fortune 500) quickly signed up to offer it to their thousands of retirees. The generous tax-free subsidy the government gives companies that set up and administer a plan — $665 per person this year, according to benefits consulting firm Towers Watson –didn’t exactly dampen their enthusiasm.
But what has left them wet is the closing of a $14 billion tax loophole on those benefits under the new health-care reform law. The subsidy comes tax-free, plus the companies get to write off the subsidy again, once it’s spent funding their plans.
That’s one of the sweetest double bonuses on the books. “The extra subsidy for retiree prescription drug coverage provided an extra financial boost for AT&T, Caterpillar, et al.,” writes economist Donald Marron. “Eliminating the loophole will thus reduce the value of the companies and the wealth of their shareholders, just as the [Wall Street Journal] alleges. But it’s hard to get too teary-eyed since that value and wealth were created by the loophole in the first place.”
So this new line of attack we are hearing that major corporations are going to be hurt by this bill is nothing more than shareholder greed rearing its ugly head. And look to which side is presenting this line of attack, the GOP. What does that tell us about which party supports a system of greed that enables corporate welfare of which the top executives are profiting millions of times more than any single person trying to take advantage of welfare? It is not Democrats doling out our tax dollars in the form of corporate welfare, that rests squarely on Republican shoulders. Republicans under the leadership of President Bush are the party that started this corporate welfare program and now that their major campaign contributors are screaming they are rushing to their defense to save one of the biggest corporate welfare handouts using our tax dollars of all time.
Make no mistake the real culture war in this country is an economic war between those who have mansions and those who do not have money to feed their family. Before conservatism took hold as a valid competing political and economic force in this country the average CEO made approximately 25-30 times as much and the average worker. In 2006 the average CEO made 262 times as much as the average worker. It is a culture that promotes deregulation and blind faith in the market that puts forward the false idea that those at the top are entitled, not earn but are entitled, to make large sums of money comparatively with those doing average jobs within the companies they lead. The idea that all things being equal when the top income earners are given even larger salaries they will spend that money and it will “trickle down” to the average workers in society is an ideology that is false in nature. The CEO’s have had over 20 years to begin the trickle and thus far all they have done is strengthen their hold on the percentage of America’s wealth they control.
The top 1 percent received 21.8 percent of all reported income in 2005, up significantly from 19.8 percent the year before and more than double their share of income in 1980.
Over the period of time that conservative policies have been enacted the primary beneficiaries have been those at making the most in society.
The illusion that we are fed that the culture war is between a socially liberal society that condones almost any type of behavior is presented because it is a mask for the real culture war that is occurring. When you make more than a an honest days pay you are taking away from someone else. If you make more money than you have done work you are taking away from someone else and this taking away is what causes poverty. You cause poverty if you make more than you have earned and you are directly responsible for the unnecessary suffering of other human beings. The real culture war is shrugged off by conservative income earners at the top levels as nothing more than class warfare. Class warfare is a term thrown around by those at the top who are engaged in class warfare. A warfare to protect their very way of life and privilege. But make no mistake with that privileged life comes consequences. The consequence of creating a society where some are privileged is creating a society where some are also left with a hopeless existence. An existence that is unable to sustain a family. An existence that drives married couples apart from the overwhelming stress of economic weight.
It is not Socialist for the government to put regulations in place that tax the top income earners in order for everyone in this country to have the chance at a life with dignity. It is not the government encroaching in the lives of Americans to require that companies live up the promises they make to both their employees and their consumers and pay a decent wage and provide a quality product that does not cause harm to the consumer. These are not Socialist ideals. These are basic ideals of a Democratic society that is ruled by the people that tries to work for the people so that the average American may not be a victim of the economic culture war but a person who is able to do a job with dignity and provide for their family. Make no mistake a culture war is being fought in America, but the real culture war is an economic culture war of which the stakes are nothing less than a society with two classes, one who rules and one who toils in debt, and a society in which every person has the ability to gain honest work and be provided a just wage for that work that enables them to support themselves and/or their family.
