My heavens. I’ve just watched a video (The Billionaires’ Tea Party) that nearly caused me to weep. But unfortunately I can’t import it into WordPress.
I’ve often wondered where the antipathy to Obama comes from, how it’s begun and how it’s fanned, where a strange kind of messianic fervor comes from in American politics, how it is that so many voters and ordinary people seem hopelessly mesmerized, and so on.
This video, done by an Australian, definitely gives the story.
https://vimeo.com/20622744
Even if I can’t bring in the entire video, I can import two trailers:
Ostensibly it’s the tale of the rise of the Tea Party movement, but in reality it’s how the elite organizes movements that play on themes like American hatred for socialism/communism, big government, things foreign, etc., and turn that antipathy against things like universal medicare, federal regulation of polluters, Big Pharma, Food Inc., Big Oil, hatred of Obama, and all the rest.
Tom tells me the video’s only going to be up for a while longer so I’d suggest you see it soon if you want to watch the full version.
I have to tell you, and I know I’ve said this before (old-time readers have heard me on the subject), I live in a country that has universal medicare, which in this video is called things like “socialized medicine” and “big government taking over health care,” etc., and universal medicare is the biggest single blessing in my life. I don’t think you’d find many Canadians who’d complain about it. Why would they?
Yes, they’d complain about hospital lineups, shortages of doctors, etc., but if you look closely much of that comes from the same free-market capitalists and neo-conservatives who want to deep-six universal medicare in Canada just as they do in the States. I hate to say it, but many of them are in the financial pay of American HMOs who want to use NAFTA to come into Canada and tear universal medicare apart. Canadians won’t allow it and anyone who’s lived under universal medicare would know instantly why not.
When predatory capitalists allow universal medicare to run as it should, it’s the greatest blessing imaginable. And I continue to think that Americans are being sold a bill of goods by allowing it to be smeared as socialism.
When you see the numbers of poor and middle-class people in Canada who don’t have to worry about not being able to afford medical care or of losing their house because they suddenly fall sick, the lesson sinks in immediately.
What is wrong with never having to pay for a visit to the hospital? What is wrong with a free heart transplant? What is wrong with free x-rays, ultra-sounds, CT scans? Free specialist visits? Free hospices? Someone please tell me what could possibly be wrong with these things because I don’t see anything wrong with them. Cradle-to-grave medicare, at no cost.
I call universal medicare “free” but I know it is tax-supported, but that’s the only way the country could afford it, short of NESARA. (Hmmm… Is NESARA “socialism”?)
Why Americans allow themselves to be led around by people who make a simplistic and invalid connection between socialism and free medicare, I cannot fathom.
The peculiar variety of rightwing voters who call themselves “lovers of freedom” and are simply working to make the rich richer and the poor poorer is a phenomenon I have never understood. But this video goes a long way to showing me what that is all about.
It does the best job I’ve seen of laying out the phenomenon of rightwing “libertarian” groups who are funded by Big Tobacco, the HMOs, etc.
Watching it, I find myself thinking that so many people today are indeed about as gullible as I can possibly imagine anyone on Earth being. If it weren’t for the fact that the economy is almost totally in collapse because the industrialists and financiers who fund these movements have totally fleeced and hoodwinked the public, all of whom are waving American flags and carrying signs shouting no to socialism, I’d think that nothing will ever wake many elements of the voting public up.
No to financial elitism. No to predatory capitalism. No to fraud and deceit and privilege.
That is my rant for the week. I would have keeled over and died if I had not blurted it out. And burials are not free here so I need to stay alive.
Thanks to Tom for showing me this video.