The Human Race Is Slime, Part 17,000

[Note: Altho I would love to transliterate this into my Fanetik spelling system, I have been so pressed for time and energy of late that I am afraid that if I take the time to do that, I won't get this up onto the Internet. I have a number of other posts on my computer in draft form that didn't make it onto this blog, and I've got to streamline operations today.]

A group of pharmacists in Illinois are suing to stop the Illinois state government from forcing them to dispense the so-called "day-after pill". The Associated Press story, by one John O'Connor, willfully misstates the case:

A group of pharmacists asked the Illinois Supreme Court on Tuesday to throw out a rule that forces them to dispense emergency contraception despite moral objections, claiming it amounts to illegal coercion.

The "day-after pill" is not a contraceptive. It is an abortifacient. It does not prevent the conception of a human being; it merely prevents the embryo from attaching to the host woman's body to gain the nourishment it needs to grow itself to term. That is, it kills babies, period. But because the human race is slime, the readership of that article at AOL find no problem with that. At an early stage of the polling, 81% of readers "don't have a problem" with possibly killing babies with the day-after pill, and 70% think that pharmacists who regard it as murder should nonetheless be forced to sell it. The human race is slime, pure and simple. It's a pity there was no such pill to kill each and every one of the subhuman beasts who expressed themselves in favor of the day-after pill, before they could attach to their mother's womb, so we would be free of their grotesque immorality today and into the future.
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There is very little I admire about the various lines written for the actor Ronald Reagan during his extended run playing President, but I do heartily agree with this one:

I've noticed that everybody that is for abortion has already been born.
Ronald Reagan, quoted in New York Times, September 22, 1980.

The advocates of abortion on demand all, without exception, deserve to die. Likewise, the advocates of embryonic stem-cell research should all, without exception, be killed — and chopped up for parts. How can they object? They advocate that one person, in his or her embryonic stage, be killed to be chopped up for parts for third parties, usually total strangers. Thus they cannot morally object to being killed themselves so their organs can be redistributed to strangers. What's the difference? You kill one person to chop him or her up for parts, or you kill another to chop him or her up for parts. There's no moral difference whatsoever. But people don't ever think about morality if they can avoid it, and they can usually avoid it. Right and wrong don't matter; only self as against others, and I do mean "against". Convenience as against inconvenience. If the wrong thing is easy but the right thing is hard, 99% of people will choose the immoral easy thing every time.
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A recent article about body language, hilited on AOL, actually advised people how to get away better with lying! — by looking people right in the triangle formed by the eyes and nose while lying. Oh, that's what we need: advice on more and better lying!
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Another report said that the typical American lies within 10 minutes of starting a conversation! Appalling. Yes, the human race is indeed slime.
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The United States seemed for a long time to be a place where we could improve, tho certainly not perfect, the human race, by giving people opportunity to advance themselves by their own efforts, and freedom from oppression so they could speak their minds. But no such thing has happened. We seemed to hit a high point in the early 1960s, our age of "Camelot" under John F. Kennedy, but have headed more or less steadily downward ever since. Now we're a Nation of liars, thieves, cheats, sado-masochistic degenerates, and hypocrites.
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Someone talks frankly about ANYTHING and the media pounce on it. Geraldine Ferraro dares to say that race matters in a Presidential contest, and liars by the boatload pretend indignation. They land on her assertion that Barack Obama wouldn't be where he is if he were not black, and let her go almost scot-free for the absurd suggestion that if he were a woman, of any race, Obama would not be a leading contender for the Presidency. Oh? So if Baracka Obama were saying the kinds of things Barack Obama is saying, coming from the same background, no one would pay attention to her? Nonsense. Obama's message would play even better if it came from a powerful black woman, and that black woman would wipe the floor with white-bitch Hillary.
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Pastor Jeremiah Wright dares to say that the United States has mistreated blacks at home and Palestinians abroad, and that our vicious, Radical Zionist foreign policy in the Middle East, slaughtering Arabs by the hundreds of thousands for Israel, incited the 9/11 attacks, and he is to be vilified? So we never did have slavery? So we didn't kill 500,000 Iraqis, mostly children, in the 11 years between the first Gulf War and Iraq invasion? — after shooting thousands of Iraqis in the back on the Highway of Death out of Kuwait? We're angels, is that what we are to believe? We never did anything to make people hate us and want us all dead? I beg to differ.
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This used to be a wonderful country. It no longer is. New York State rightly becomes indignant that their chief law enforcer was supporting a prostitution ring, and Eliot Spitzer is vilified for having his wife stand by him as he confessed his adultery. But mere days later, the very next New York Governor replays the same scene, save for the prostitution element, and confesses to multiple adulterous affairs, with his wife — who also committed adultery — standing right at HIS side, and nobody says anything. Is it because they are both cheaters and whores? Or because they're black (and we expect that of blacks). Or because he's 90% blind, and it would be mean to criticize a cripple? Why the double/triple/quadruple standard?
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Male strippers are practically a required element of parties thrown for brides-to-be the nite before their wedding, but there's no indignation at that ugly, insane perversity. No, that's just innocent fun! — stuffing dollar bills down a strange man's g-string and maybe making contact with his sexual organs in the process is, we are to believe, just silly, harmless fun. Nothing grotesque about it, no, not at all. Not in the United States of America in 2008.
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But gay marriage endangers heterosexual faithfulness. If it weren't for those damned faggots luring men away from their obligation to women, all marriages would be intact and last forever: "till death us do part". Yeah, right.
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Our visual media are filled with insanely depraved violence and sadism — as entertainment. "Gestapovision", I call it, this vile fixation on death and agony. This is entertainment for concentration-camp guards: Auschwitz TV and Dachau Films. A constant stream — nay, river, flood-stage — of toxic waste for the mind is destroying all sense of decency in this country, perfect preparation for a country in Permanent War. Make everyone callous to human suffering — no, make them ENJOY human suffering — and they will fill the armed forces for generations of war all over this planet.
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And what of the morality of the concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands, and the progressive reduction of the middle class and poor to economic slavery — wage slavery and debt slavery? Oh, there's no moral issue in that! No, the rich EARNED "their" money. And the poor and middle class ASKED FOR their debts. They WANT to pay 30% interest, or more. They wanted their mortgage payment to double! They asked for it, damned near begged for it. And so now, if they can't afford to quit a job when the benefits are cut and the medical insurance contribution rate triples, and maybe, even, the salaries drop because the company is in trouble, that's fine. No moral issue there. So the rich have a mansion in the exurbs, and a townhouse, and a vacation home, and a yacht, while thousands are homeless and millions are losing their own, much more modest homes. There's no moral dimension to that inequality. The rich just made good choices while the poor and middle class made bad choices, that's all.
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The rich deserve everything they've got, and shouldn't have to pay taxes on it — ideally none at all, because what they do brings jobs and wealth, via trickle-down (tho we don't hear that particular phrase anymore). The middle class and poor should be grateful! They should indeed pay the rich for the favors the rich do them! The rich earned every cent they made and are entitled to keep it all. Oh? Let's explode that bit of self-justifying and self-vaunting nonsense right now.
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Nobody Makes It On His Own. From an email making the rounds on the Internet:

Guglielmo Marconi, an Italian, is generally credited with the invention of radio. However, scientists from all over the world had to make contributions before radio could be a reality. For instance, an American, Joseph Henry, and an Englishman, Michael Faraday, proved that currents in one wire could produce currents in another. Edouard Branly, a Frenchman, invented a device that could receive Marconi's transmissions and ring a bell. John Fleming, an Englishman, invented the vacuum tube necessary to receive radio waves which was later improved by an American, Lee de Forest. But none of this would have been possible without a means to collect the sounds for transmissions. The common belief is that the microphone was invented by an Irishman. But this is purely a patent mike story. (By Stan Kegel)

This is the phenomenon often encapsulated as "we stand on the shoulders of giants". As a practical matter, however, all of society, all of civilization, actually stands on the labor of the 'lowest' worker. How is a businessman to run a business without electricity? How do you live without food and clean water?
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No electrical device would work without the electric power lines strung from pole to pole or laid in trenches dug by the common laborer. Even if one could create (now, during a time when we do have electric power lines) a self-contained solar power plant at an individual house or building, who is going to put it up and maintain it? Where did the technology come from? Could any of this have been developed without those telephone poles and ditches?
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The rich didn't do any of the actual WORK of society. None of it. They didn't create the water systems and pipes without which they couldn't boil pasta or take a shower. They didn't place the sewer lines without which they couldn't take a sh*t. There would be no heat, no electricity, no water, no toilets, no ANYTHING without the common laborer. NOW who's important, big shot? Your computer couldn't have been created. There would be no Internet without telephone lines and satellites. The tycoons couldn't fly to make their business deals in Asia if "the little people" hadn't built the planes and airports. Heck, they couldn't even get to the airport without the roads the "little people" built.
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The rich didn't do ANY of the work on which everything that they claim to have achieved "on their own" depends, not ANY of it. Who owes whom?
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So why are the rich unwilling to pay money they wouldn't miss, to provide universal healthcare so that the people who REALLY earned most of their money don't DIE or live in misery from things we can cure or surgically fix? And how are the rich to keep their wealth and tidy, elegant mansions? Are the rich going to walk the beat to keep criminals at bay? patrol prisons to keep the bad guys locked up? Will the rich pick up the garbage they generate, that would otherwise pile up all over their property? What the f*ck are the rich good for, really?
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To put the very best face on it, as regards justifying the continued existence of the rich, SOME of what the rich do benefits SOME people a LITTLE. Most of what they do has no value to anyone but themselves. Do commodities futures and hedge funds do ordinary people any good? No, none. Does stock-market speculation, buying and selling stocks, do society any good? No. The money went to the corporation at the first sale, and the corporation that offered the stocks and bonds does not share in the profit from any subsequent sale. So how do the rich "earn" a profit on the stocks or bonds of corporations they do not initially fund? Why shouldn't society seize 90% or more of such socially useless profits and devote them to what they were supposed to fund in the first place: jobs, research and development, new products, new services in the economy, and the myriad things government needs to do for people — all the people, not just the rich?
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Half-Assed and Immoral Universal Healthcare. My state, New Jersey, is now thinking about how to provide universal healthcare without regard to the Federal Government. But the current thinking seems to be along the lines of Massachusetts' despicable and illegal plan: forcing people to buy health insurance, whether they want to or not, whether they can afford it or not, whether they are healthy or sick, from PRIVATE companies. That cannot possibly be constitutional. How can you force people to spend their own money on things they don't want from private companies they do not care to do business with? I didn't have health insurance for 40 years, and didn't need it. I was never seriously ill and didn't have any serious accident. But the State of New Jersey is going to force healthy young people, who can barely afford the rent, a car payment, gas, heat, electricity, phone, food, clothing, and the other necessities of life, to send money to a private company they don't want to do business with for a service they don't need, for 40 years and more? If I had had to pay health insurance for the 40 years I didn't have it, I'd have spent, in today's terms, over $120,000. For that $120,000, stolen from my pocket, I'd have had essentially no benefit whatsoever, since I was never very sick. To afford it, I'd have had to work a lot more in the paid economy, and a lot less on my own work (writing, editing, for various organizations and myself) than I was able to do without compelled health insurance. I might even have been forced to take a permanent job and give up my publishing activities, so end up having done nothing I wanted to do with my life. Is that the real intent of such compulsory health-insurance plans: to reduce even more of the population to wage-slavery, so they have to work, at whatever miserable rate of compensation corporations deign to pay, just to cover compelled health-insurance outlays?
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Health insurance is not comparable to car insurance, because you don't have to drive, and cars are dangerous so insurance is important. We're talking about being required to pay money on something you don't want, given to a private, for-profit corporation, just for the privilege of breathing. You live in X location, you have to spend your money as the government says. No. Absolutely not. The government has no more right to say that a healthy, young, single person has to buy health insurance than it does to say s/he has to subscribe to cable, buy soda or a car, or have life insurance or a thousand other things. No. Absolutely not.
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What we need is what Britain, Canada, France, and many other sane societies have: a single-payer national health program paid for from general revenues, to which the rich pay steeply more because they have vastly more but don't need vastly more. How many houses, cars, clothes does anyone need? The rich of this country, indeed, have so much money that they do not in fact have it all tied up in material possessions. Most is in stocks, financial instruments, and other socially useless things.
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It is absurd to think of ourselves as a democracy, which must mean a social democracy, if we have astronomical disparities in wealth, with thousands of people living in cardboard boxes or bedding down in sleeping bags under bridges, but others with billions of dollars each. In no other area is there such a disparity. No one is 30,000 times as tall, or heavy, or smart, or healthy, or goodlooking as anyone else. Only in the artificial measure of money, which is little more than numbers in a bank account or bits of paper that have no intrinsic value, do we have such appalling inequality.
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Without social democracy, of what value is political democracy? Do the homeless vote? I don't think so. A radical-egalitarian stance would be that, just as everyone has the same vote, one per customer, wealth should also be absolutely equal. We needn't go that far, and there do arise issues of motivation to accomplish things if financial benefit is entirely removed from the equation. But steeply progressive taxation that leaves the rich still rich, but not OBSCENELY rich, is something we can and should aspire to.
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We had that until 1986, the year of the Plutocratic Revolution, also called the "Reagan Revolution" and, more narrowly, the "Tax Reform Act of 1986". This has produced stark and intensifying economic inequality.

In the United States, wealth is highly concentrated in a relatively few hands. As of 2001, the top 1% of households (the upper class) owned 33.4% of all privately held wealth, and the next 19% (the managerial, professional, and small business stratum) had 51%, which means that just 20% of the people owned a remarkable 84%, leaving only 16% of the wealth for the bottom 80% (wage and salary workers). In terms of financial wealth, the top 1% of households had an even greater share: 39.7%.

In early 2004, a study by the Office of Social Justice of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis produced these indicative statistics:

The [richest 1% of Americans] now own more than the bottom 90% [of Americans].

The top 10% [of Americans] own 71% of all private wealth.

Over 86 percent of the value of all stocks and mutual funds, including pensions, was held by the top 10 percent of households. In 1998, the top 1 percent of Americans owned 47.7 percent of all stock.

Bill Gates alone has as much wealth as the bottom 40% of U.S. households.

In the 22 years between 1976 and 1998, the share of the nation's private wealth held by the top 1% nearly doubled, going from 22% to 38%.

In 1982 the wealthiest 400 individuals in the "Forbes 400" owned $92 billion. By 2000 their wealth increased to over $1.2 trillion.

The commentator who reported this observed:

The concentration of wealth is accelerating.

Despicable and insupportable. Why do we tolerate this? Why would we want to make permanent the tax rates that have produced this grotesquerie? How much worse will we permit things to get before a population made comfortable with violence turns on the rich with genocidal rage?
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9/11 may prove, in the long run, to have been a walk in the park.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:54 PM