Another Take on the Deficit Commission: "Fix Health Care"

So it all comes back to health care (0.00 / 0)

Dean Baker reminds us that, when you follow all the threads back to their origins, the real cause of the long-running deficit is the out of control cost of our health care system. Even if we slash and burn Social Security and Medicare, and repeal the health care legislation, we will still have the escalating cost of health care, and, therefore, will not have solved the perceived problem. For this, and other reasons, I believe we are seeing the final employment here in the U.S. of what  Naomi Klein described in her excellent book Shock Doctrine:

The adherents of Thomas Friedman's Free Market Theory, often referred to as "the Chicago boys," took over the IMF and populated the World Bank from the days of Reagan onward, and they used their position to force third world nations needing loans from the World Bank to install free market theories, opening up their economies to domination by Western corporations and financial interests; they required almost instant conversion of the countries' economies to "free market" and globalization, and the conversion was achieved with just such "shock therapy." The results almost always were to destroy the social fabric of the countries, concentrate the countries' wealth even more in the hands of a minuscle top elite, and leave the big international corporations in the driver's seat.

Sound familiar? Well, now its our turn. We are well on the way to being a banana republic, and, if the "recommendations" of the Deficit Committee's co-Chairs are imposed on us, we will have arrived at the destination planned for us: America will be a Third World Country, under the thumb of the global corporations and Wall Street.

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by: Teddy Goodson @ Sun Nov 21, 2010 at 05:28:46 AM UTC