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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Saturday, November 10, 2007

The Soft Dirty Underbelly Of The Heath Care Debate 

...in many areas of this country in various social and cultural settings, you can't swing a dead cat without hitting someone who will drive you out of the room with a constant overbearing tendentious beatdown about how the health care system that currently inflicts us is a far better set-up than the various iterations of socialized medicine that have been inflicted on the far-flung current and former real or notional subjects of The British Crown. Oddly enough, in the area of infant mortality, it turns out that babies born in the United States are less likely to be seen smearing cake in their hair and on their face at some first birthday bash than in any modernized nation except Latvia...

Today's quiz: Find Latvia on a map...

In the United States, as an average when you include all those people who live on the lower fringes of the myth of the American Dream, infants have as good a shot at making it to their first birthday as those born in places like Hungary and Poland. Now I'm the sort of guy who can't ever discount the value of Poland. After all, the "Coalition of the Willing" would have been nothing were it not for the contribution of Poland to George W. Bush's Great War of Choice in Iraq. On the other hand, jingoist that I am, I have trouble getting beyond the idea that in my adult lifetime places like Poland and Hungary were grim, dark backwaters of the failed Soviet empire and seem like unlikely places to see the sort of short-term explosion of truth, justice, and beauty that would lead to infant mortality rates comparable to those of a nation that has annointed itself as the only remaining Super Power on the face of this little blue marble...

Such a contemplation becomes even more difficult in the face of the blindingly clear evidence that, as far as this subject is concerned, all those wildly variable and much derided health care systems in Canada, Australia, and Great Britan are superior to our true-blue flag-waving 'murkin way of providing health care The health care debate is at the root all about equitable access to the miracles of health care that could be possible in the United States. It's all about access, which is the fundamental issue and problem in our health care system...

There is simply no excuse for a country that wants to style itself as the leading nation on the planet to be at the bottom of the list of nations that have cable TV and electric lights and stuff when it comes to infant mortality rates. For all the nasty, dirty, naughty talk about "socialized medicine" from some of the same sector of political chatter that deride support for a woman's choice with regard to pregancy, there is clearly a huge logical gulf to be crossed for those who are pro-birth but anti-comprehensive-health-care if it ever becomes common knowledge that the United States is only just better than Latvia in terms of care to the newly born...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:52 PM 0 comments

Sunday, November 04, 2007

Kelo Comes To Cowboy Country 

...a desperately important but quixotic fight is looming for a number of land owners in southern Colorado. They have the bad juju of holding title to a sizable portion of 418,000 acres of remote, dry, desolate land that the Pentagon has its eye on for expansion of a training area that Army officials claim mimic some of the conditions troops might encounter in Afghanistan and the Middle East. The battle lines are drawn, pitting a handful of ranchers who are three or four or more generations down the line from the first Caucasian owners of the land against a number of elected officials and business interests who see big league dollar signs from the influx of troops either being stationed at Fort Carson or who pass through on training rotations...

A quick first reading can lead a person to reflections on Kelo v. City of New London because of the strong push that both the Chamber of Commerce fat cats and elected official at all levels put into the placement of as many as 10,000 more troops at Fort Carson in order to capture the economic expansion that such an increase would yield. A host of interests are invested in expanding a military presence in the high wild regions along the Colorado - New Mexico border for reasons that have everything to do with money and not so much to do with national security, which makes the pious flag-waving statements by - of all people - a city-level Chamber of Commerce member a far greater embarrassment than that particular worthy probably has the decency to understand...

The issues surrounding Kelo aren't going to make the nut in this case, though, because the likely upcoming play at eminent domain that will go down in this case has a far sharper focus than the muddle that served as the foundation of that mess in New London. Kelo served as a broad interpretation of the benefits of 'public use' under the 5th Amendment. Even though the Bushco-installed conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court would probably view Kelo differently than did the court of record, the simple stark fact in this instance is that the federal government has created a space wherein it can argue a pressing public need for exercising eminent domain absent any discussion of economic issues. The powerful value that property rights possesses in Eurocentric American culture is possibly more closely held in the rural Western U.S. than anywhere else, where ranchers like these are the great-grandchildren or great-great-grandkids of the people who first...well, how should we say this...laid claim to lands that Native Americans once occupied...

The underlying reasons for the developing Federal military hunger for land that has been in individual families for over a century may well be economic in nature, but the up-front argument is going to be National Security first and foremost. People who have thought that they were riding tall and proud on top of the leading crest of that whole 'Marlboro Man' wave and living the last vestiges of the sort of life that Zane Grey and Louis Lamour wrote nearly a gazillion books about over the last century are probably in for a rude surprise, because the natural power that cattleman interests (the "Landed Gentry" of the more remote portions of the Intermountain West) have had over rural politics for as long as they've been around will not stand when the same sort of crass economic interests underpinning Kelo combine with the powerful juggernaut of "National Security"...

The bitter irony that these landowners are going to face not so far down the road is that the Repub's and associated greedheads and wingnuts that they have traditionally supported, voted for, and partied with are the very same people who will be wanting to throw them off the land that has been in their families for over a century and which they thought they would be leaving to their children. They face losing the land of their forefathers for reasons that are primarily informed by the quest for the Almighty Dollar but that are couched in terms of Gee Dub's Great War On Terrorism. Kelo is coming to Cowboy Country, but it's all dressed up in camo...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:02 PM 0 comments

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