In the spring of 2009, nationwide polling in the United States indicated that approximately the same number of people identify themselves as Republicans as support a socialist economic system over capitalism: 20%. It is certainly a difficult time to identify oneself as a member of the Republican Party, while party leaders vocally oppose civil rights, support and defend torture and applaud violence and war – long after their own misguided justifications have faded. But something more significant is happening here in America – something that will not be undone anytime soon.

Certain areas of private life must be subject to the “intrusion” of government.  The roads are paved, licenses are issued, water is tested for toxins before it reaches families. Minimum safety requirements are placed on companies who make products like medicine, food, and automobiles. As a society we recognize that the companies that create the poisons cannot be relied on to determine what amount of poison can enter the water supply before it becomes a public danger.

In 2008 and into 2009, large banking institutions looked to the government  to take a step further, and insure economic stability by providing direct government support to banks, insurance companies and financial institutions; all of this in order to avoid what was widely believed would be a complete economic meltdown. Government assistance extended beyond these institutions to large corporations, which received direct subsidies from the United States Government.

In October 2008 Clinton Administration Secretary of Labor Robert Reich stated what many were thinking about the manner in which these billions of dollars in government funds were being allocated:

“We have socialism for the rich, and capitalism for everyone else.“

But as the large corporations apply for government aid to survive, the nation’s attitude towards so-called “socialism” has begun to change. Less than a generation ago, the idea of universal government healthcare was opposed by many who called it “socialized medicine.” They cited concerns about the quality of care, the availability of treatment options, and the costs of funding a first-payer government funded health care system. When this ideology – publicly funded by professional doctors organizations and large pharmaceutical companies – won, Americans suffered.

Now, every 30 seconds a person in America goes into bankruptcy due to their inability to pay heath care costs. In almost every European country as well as Canada, Japan, Cuba and Iraq – where health care is subsidized by the government – no one is ever forced to make a decision choosing between bankruptcy and lifesaving medical treatment. Here, medical problems are estimated to cause over 60% of all personal bankruptcies.

78% of those people had medical insurance at the start of their illness or medical issue. Even more surprising is that most of these people were living a middle-class lifestyle before their lives were changed by medical bills; over 60% were people that owned homes and had college educations.  Laissez-faire Reganomics and the selective politics of personal responsibility – for the struggling working and middle classes only with bailouts for the rich – have literally had a crushing effect.

The prospects of the next generation re-growing the middle class are dim.  People who are now in their twenties who bought into the myth of middle class prosperity by borrowing student loans from educational funding services, with high interest rates and impossible demands, face an unfavorable job market and with no health insurance and mountains of debt that their parents and grandparents can only imagine.

Young students who attempt college come away with student loans the size of home mortgages.  A whole generation of former students, saddled with a capitalist system of education, have come away owing the prior generations who created and endorsed the system – and will pat with years of salary from their early working lives.  The Republicans endorsed this system, actively looking the other way while the student loan industry was rife with corruption.  As early as 2001, the incoming Bush Administration was warned that lenders were trying to improperly influence college financial aid offices.

The American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers’ Barmak Nassirian put it this way:

“The day Bush was elected was the beginning of the gilded age for the loan industry.”

After years of the financial services industry donating heavily to the campaigns of Republican members of the House Committee on Education and Labor – including leading donor Sallie Mae – who donated a staggering but not surprising three-quarters of its campaign contributions to Republicans.  Ohio Republican Congressman John Boehner – who served as a chairman of the Committee on Education and Labor – has received over $170,000 in combined campaign contributions between direct donations and donations to his “leadership” PAC.  While buying a home can’t be a 10-year goal for young people who are already saddled with repayment of enormous loans, Boehner told a group of Sallie Mae executives a 2004 fundraiser to “Know that I have all of you in my two trusted hands.”

The net result is an entire generation that has only known war and debt, and is ready to accept the virtues of a government-provided health care system.  For every Meghan McCain living on a cloud, spouting rhetoric but never having to worry about money, responsibility or going without, there are thousands of young people who are well educated but who have nothing else – including the prospect of one day living without debt. For many, it will have been more profitable to be less educated and less burdened with high interest loans. Average Americans who are not heiresses now have a financial incentive to avoid being educated or educating their children. That’s the capitalist form of education.

They are living in another world, or living in denial. In the same Rasmussen Poll where 20% of those polled said that socialism was superior to capitalism, adults younger than 30 were essentially evenly divided between socialism and capitalism.

As of 2007, the economic inequality in Atlanta, New Orleans Washington and Miami is similar to that of Nairobi, Kenya and Ivory Coast. The “civil unrest alert line” is used by the United Nations to warn governments when economic inequality is likely to have a “destabilizing effect on societies.”

Republican policy, Reganomics, and Bush-Era Deregulation – which fought against government intervention, and for the financial industry, big business and the rich who got richer – has locked America’s children into debt. Not just the debt that the teabag-swinging screamers echo through the Republican party, but personal debt in a way that the wealthy among us will never understand; and which those who claim concern for the debt load on young people have completely and totally ignored.

Beyond the bankruptcies; beyond the alienated and ignored youth; in America, where over 10% of the population (more than 40 million people) have no medical insurance -  that 10% contains absurdly disproportionate numbers of minorities. That number also ignores the 12 million undocumented people within the U.S. who face real fear of deportation and open hostility should they seek care at a hospital. For uninsured people, every preventable illness or accidental injury represents a potential economic life sentence to poverty.

20% of African Americans and 30% of Hispanics in America have no health insurance. Both of these groups comprise the fastest growing demographics of the American population despite the fact that the life expectancy of African American people in the United States is roughly equal to the rates in much poorer countries where premium health care services are not available – places like China, and certain states in India.

American minority women have higher rates of diabetes, heart disease, AIDS and obesity, and in general are more likely to be in fair or poor health.

If Census Bureau projections are correct, by 2050 the number of Hispanics in the United States will double proportionally to the rest of the population.  Where Latinos comprise 15% of the population now, that number will grow to 30%. In two generations, as the population of Hispanics and other minorities, including African-Americans, grows, non-Hispanic whites will be a minority.

As these demographics change, an educated and hopelessly indebted class emerges. And widespread dissatisfaction with the quality and availability of medical care in the U.S. has already soured the country to arguments advanced by doctors and insurance companies that “socialized medicine” will not work.  This dissatisfaction is well founded when the United States’ ranking in areas like infant mortality is 29th in the world in 2008 – well below Japan, Sweden, Netherlands, France, and Canada where medical care is provided by the government.

It is clear that “for profit” medical treatment has not kept the country healthy.  Strong lobbying groups funded by doctors, insurance companies and multinational pharmaceutical corporations are less concerned with the overall health of the nation and patient care than they are with the health of profits. The very idea that insurance companies which exist because of capitalism are relied on to provide the basic human necessity of medical treatment for an entire country is untenable. Not only is it untenable, it is irresponsible. Medical care should not be subjected to a capitalist model, where the rich can afford the best care, and the poor rely on minimal emergency care or treatments which plunge them into debt and bankruptcy.

When 10% of the country has no medical insurance coverage, the emergency treatment centers bear the brunt of unpaid services. Hospitals around the country are closing, leaving fewer options for people in need of care; this weighs most heavily upon those neighborhoods of poor who receive their medical care solely from emergency rooms. The net result is an increase in unemployed and uninsured people who must rely on emergency rooms for all of treatment they receive.

From a pragmatic standpoint, it would seem that the best way to keep one’s massive wealth would be to protect it by sacrificing some wealth to promote widespread growth, economic equality and social stability rather than by hoarding wealth and promoting civil unrest.  While the UN understands that high levels of inequality lead to “negative social, economic and political consequences that have a destabilizing effect on societies,” they do not see this.

Even in difficult times they see growth through inequality, the consolidation of massive wealth, and the continued growth of massive corporate institutions.  The rich get richer, get education, get health care and get access to congressmen to have a say in how the government administers the social programs and regulations for everyone else.  They fight against raising the minimum wage, expanding the availability of healthcare and creating restrictions on the maximum rate that credit card companies can charge.  They believe they deserve this control because their hard work is more valuable than the hard work of everyone else.  It should not be surprising that their response to calls for “change” has been paternalistic vitriol damning any solution incorporating economic balance as “utopian delusions”.

The real delusion is held by a group of people who believe that, by clinging to “values” which are on the verge of extinction, they can revive the influence of failed and outdated ideas. The real delusion is believing that the public call for change represents a “shift,” rather than what it really is: social and political evolution.

Tags: green day, jello biafra, john mccain, sarah palin, taxes