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Wednesday, December 01, 2004

Democrats United

So here’s my plan for helping our friends and comrades survive the Bush Winter.  You’ve already seen two of the trial balloons these rapacious, bloodthirsty plutocrats have floated into the bleak and barren sky-- one, removing the tax incentive for businesses to contribute to their employees’ health insurance plans, and two, borrowing anywhere from “hundreds of billions to trillions” of dollars from the already-more-than-drained Federal treasury in order to create those “personal retirement accounts.” Word on the Washington street is that the first proposal is just a head fake, designed to make us all grateful in late 2005 that Bush and Congress have agreed to a “compromise” that involves merely quadrupling employees’ health insurance premiums.  (This will be hailed by Candy Crowley & Co. as evidence that Bush’s second-term agenda is “bold, but tempered by pragmatism.") But the second proposal is gonna happen, folks.  It’s what the Norquistas call a “once-in-a-lifetime twofer”:  you get to bankrupt the Treasury in order to destroy Social Security.  You gotta love it!  (It’s funny about Social Security, isn’t it?  The only non-means-tested, universally-implemented social-welfare program in the country, and it’s paid for by the most regressive tax on the books-- remember, not a single penny over the $87,900 income level is taxed-- and conservatives still hate it.  Yes, it’s a quasi-socialist program, but it’s quasi-socialism American-style:  paid for by working stiffs in the middle-income bracket and almost completely unsupported by wealthy wage-earners and the even wealthier folks whose income derives mainly from investments.)

And then think of our gay and lesbian friends, who’ll be needing untold amounts of money for all kinds of legal challenges just to keep the handful of rights of citizenship they do possess.  Think of women who will try, for whatever reasons, to terminate unwanted pregnancies even after the repeal of Roe v. Wade.  For that matter, think of the medical and travel costs involved for such women even now, and think how much worse those costs will get once that last-minute “appropriations” bill is signed, along with its sly little anti-abortion “Federal Refusal Clause” and assorted far-right goodies.  No question about it, our friends are going to be in need this long, long winter, and not all of them can buy those thick woolen socks and high-tech Arctic outergear.

So it’s up to us Democrats to protect our own.  We should create a fallback system for helping out everyone who gets devastated by Bush’s social and economic policies, every family without health care, every elderly citizen fleeced by Medicare “reform,” every gay man and lesb***n hounded by the Fell Legions of the Right-- as long as they voted for Kerry.  The Bush voters, they get what they said they wanted.

Maybe this sounds punitive and mean, at first.  Maybe even (gasp!) divisive.  But think about it for a second:  when we came around this October, knocking on doors and trying to persuade these people that they’d be better off with health care, a sane tax system, and an end to neomedievalism in US science policy, they told us we were traitors.  We said we grieved for the deaths of their children in Iraq, and they told us we were part of the homosexual agenda that’s destroying America.  Why, Tom Frank even wrote that book about how their “leaders” were taking them for fools, and they told us we were arrogant pinot grigio-sipping elitists who didn’t understand real Americans.  So maybe we better take them at their word:  we don’t, after all, really know where their “real interests” lie, and it is arrogant and old-school-Leninist of us to think that we understand their interests better than they do.  When they say they’re less interested in getting their kids inoculated against infectious disease than in getting them inoculated against evolutionary theory, we should believe them.

But when one of us needs help-- that is, one of us who tried his or her best to head off the Bush Catastrophe-- we should step up and lend a hand.  We can’t do it alone; we’ll need to pool our resources.  So while we’re contributing to the ACLU and Amnesty International and NARAL, let’s set aside a reserve of funds for Democrats United.  How, exactly?  I don’t know.  I’m only a literature professor, folks.  But maybe we could get in touch with that George Soros and ask him how we can put together a trust fund of a few trillion dollars.  I hear he’s good with money.

Who’s in?

Posted by Michael on 12/01 at 04:28 AM
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