Organized Dereliction
The single solution to all of our problems – well, a good start anyway – is to take the private money out of politics. Actually, private is too nice a word. We’re talking special interests who are literally buying the legislation and regulations they need to make more money through the purchase of candidates through campaign contributions. These investments, for that’s what they are, are relatively inexpensive, and their payoffs are enormous. That’s why they make them.
The Republicans get their filthy lucre from the large corporations as a rule, especially the energy, financial, media, and medical industries, though when the Dems have been in power, those businesses have hedged their bets putting their damned patch on the backs of the donkeys.
The Democrats have long and famously been in the pockets of the unions and the trial lawyers. That’s why the health care "reform" measure was so weak. No caps on gold-plated health care packages for labor, uh-uh, nor on malpractice revenues. Those were two areas where huge savings could be found as well as great political leverage against the intransigents across the aisle.
In California, a measure that would have provided emergency health care assistance to children has been blocked by the teachers’ and nurses’ unions. The plan was for volunteers to be trained to administer a simple medical procedure to children suffering life-threatening seizures. The unions wanted the work, but there’s no money to pay for more laborites, which was why the volunteer program made sense.
The governor favored the bill but the Dem leadership blocked it from even coming to a vote. Quoted in a disturbing article by the Los Angeles Times’ Steve Lopez, Schwarzenegger put it this way: "Money goes in. Favors go out. The people lose."
Unions once did good. Now they don’t. Now’s the time to get rid of all public unions.
©2010 SetonnoteS
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