After reading this morning
about Gov. Haslam’s total lack of humanity in his decision on TennCare, I had
intended to write a lengthy piece about why his idea is such a disaster but
then encountered this from Belen Fernandez, author of The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work and contributing
editor at Jacobin Magazine, in her opinion
column today on Al Jazeera Online:
The
neoliberal experiment in the US has helped mold a society disconnected from the
human condition, where oppression of the individual has aimed to thwart popular
solidarity that might threaten the experiment. What should be a universal right
to health care, for example, is instead wielded punitively against the
population, and, as acclaimed journalist and radio host Doug Henwood points out,
“Obamacare” will presumably result in a situation in which “scores of millions
are thrown onto the private individual insurance market and forced to pay
$1,000 a month for crappy coverage”.
I find it nearly impossible
to put it better. TennCare, initiated by
Democratic governor Ned McWherter, was intended as a show-piece of the
Democratic Party’s program of pushing PPP’s, public-private partnerships. These PPP’s were inflicted on the nation as a
major facet of the agenda of the Clinton administration back in the
1990’s.
Like every other neoliberal
plan to destroy the gains of the New Deal and the Golden Age of Capitalism to
which it led, TennCare has proven to be a miserable failure. And now Gov. Haslam’s answer to its critics
is to do more of the same. In addition
to this obvious assault on common sense from that perspective, this plan
ignores the fact that these companies were major players in the various
debacles which brought down the economy at the end of 2007 and gave us the STILL
CONTINUING Great Recession.
But what else can we expect
of a man who gave The Finger to one of our state’s chief employers and
producers of wealth? I refer, of course,
to Haslam’s response to Volkswagen’s impending institution of a workers’ council
and likely corresponding invitation to the United Auto Workers to form a local
at the plant. That is exactly the war
Volkswagen handles its labor relations in Germany and Haslam & Co. have no
business messing with VW’s business.
Of course, they already have
done so with their law allowing workers to carry arsenals to their places of
employment in their vehicles. This in of
the explicit testimony of numerous incidents of workplace multiple shootings
and desires of companies such as VW to avoid those kinds of insanity which
don’t happen because (1) gun ownership
is not as widespread both because of laws and differing temperaments, and (2)
guns don’t kill people but Americans with guns kill a lot of people.
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