[The Rude Guy Podcast #67 April 16, 2010]
[The Two Kinds of Freedom; Conservative versus Liberal freedom]
I’m Rich Zubaty The Rude Guy…We all love freedom right? We’re just a bunch of freedom lovin’ fools. But that’s how politicians fool us. Because there are two kinds of freedom.
Conservative freedom and Liberal freedom
Conservative freedom is the freedom of Thomas Jefferson. Often called Liberty. The – I’m a huge plantation owner with hundreds of slaves and I don’t want the government to fuck with me – kind of freedom. Fuck Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson was the first neocon. An aristocrat in democrats clothing who thought voting was for rich people only, and who didn’t want any politically potent church wagging a finger at his slave holdings… A world built entirely on conservative freedoms would be a dangerous hell, where nobody would stop at red lights, and corporations would pollute every river, and fresh water fishing would be an extinct pastime, right up there with teepee building. Think Afghanistan, or Mexico. Liberty is basically anarchy, commerce without responsibility, rule of the jungle. Republicans are free market anarchists, blowing up everything in their way, to make millions.
Liberal Freedom is Equality of Opportunity. The Martin Luther King Jr kind of freedom, where a person will be judged by the content of his character, not the color of his skin. It’s the opposite of… the don’t fuck with me because I’m rich, freedom. It’s the, don’t fuck with me because I’m poor freedom. It’s the freedom, the RIGHT, to equal treatment before the law in government, school, jobs, everything. It’s the authority to demand that:… I want my kids to have the same opportunities your kids have…kind of freedom.
I’m bored to death with health care talk and so are you. But stay with me here. Precisely because we were immersed in that insane debate for over a year, we’ve all absorbed some complex information, that will help us understand the two kinds of freedom. Conservative freedom and liberal freedom.
The Obama health care bill serves up BOTH kinds of freedom, and even demonstrates absolutely clearly why they cannot coexist. So let’s have a look at what we got with Obamacare. Which is really just Richard Nixon’s health care proposal 40 years late.
The main thing I love about the new healthcare bill is that it reverses the demented Ronald Reagan philosophy, that government is always wrong. Always the enemy and always the problem. That the worst thing you can ever hear is a knock at your door, with a guy standing there saying: we’re from the government and we’re here to help. That’s what we’re supposed to be afraid of? Fuck Ronald Reagan. GE TV puppet.
The liberal freedom Obamacare provides is the freedom for everybody to have health care. Not to be free FROM having health care, but to actually have it. Everyone is good enough and equal enough and qualified enough to get health care. And if you don’t have enough money then we’ll figure out some way to help you.
The conservative freedom Obamacare offers, is the freedom from government competition for insurance companies, hospitals and drug companies. Freedom from competition is the exact opposite of capitalism, but never mind. This is the healthcare industry we’re talking about. It OWNS the Congress and the courts and the president.
So, under Obamacare, the Insurance companies will not have to compete against a public option. Despite the fact that we are always being told how efficient corporations are, and how inefficient the government is, in back room deals Obama torpedoed the public option, that vile form of government INTERFERENCE — that could cut our national healthcare costs by one third or more. So, we will all pay one third more for healthcare, to preserve a fundamental conservative freedom. The freedom to make money from sick people. That makes about as much sense as closing down all interstate highways and forcing us all to drive on corporate-owned toll roads. Thank you Ronald Reagan you cockroach in the cupboards of history.
Also…drug companies will not have to compete against foreign drug imports. Our sold-out government actually PREVENTS imports, as if importing a drug is a risky behavior, but importing uninspected beef and pork from Costa Rica and Brazil is not.
Also…rest assured, there are no brand new public hospitals on the architects drawing tables. When I grew up all hospitals were in some sense public. Supported by local government. Ever since Nixon gave us private HMOs, as a substitute for his original comprehensive health care proposal, hospitals have been for-profit businesses, not, not-for-profit, public facilities.
This is why health industry stocks shot up the day after Obamacare was passed. It’s a multi-billion dollar corporate welfare giveway to the healthcare industry.
And then…there’s the GIANT disconnect. The reason this new healthcare bill will never work, is, of course, the mandate requiring all Americans to buy health insurance. Forcing Americans to buy anything IS against the constitution. I really hope this gets overturned in court or we will have all kinds of weird mandates coming down the road at us from this insane precedent. We got bamboozled into being forced to buy insurance with automobile insurance. If you wanna drive a car…in a huge country with very little public transportation… you have to buy auto insurance.
So why not…say the insurance companies…why not try it with health insurance too? Can’t hurt to try, can it? If you want to see a doctor, or even if you don’t, you have to buy health insurance. Fucking iguanas.
There is no freedom, liberal or conservative, to be found in the health insurance mandate. But all is not lost. Listen up…the reality is: there is no enforcement for this. It’s written right into the bill. If someone defaults on paying the tax they are assessed, for not buying health care, the penalty is: nothing. Nothing happens. They can’t be sued, their wages can’t be garnished. Nothing happens. It’s written right into the bill. The mandate was only ever there to pacify insurance company nazi’s like Karen Ignani and prod the sheeple to buy health insurance. Everyone knows it can’t be enforced.
And that’s good. Because frankly, this whole pathetic unworkable mess takes us one step closer to free national health care. Because, when it is proven that this fucked up compromise doesn’t work, because healthcare companies keep raising prices and gouging the government programs, created to subsidize those people, who simply cannot afford to pay for mandated health insurance…the government will plant its heels and howl at the moon and start building government hospitals stocked with government doctors. And little by little, maybe in a hundred years, we’ll have the kind of free, high-quality health care France and Canada enjoy today.
What world leaders we are…huh?
This democracy, our democracy, has gotten fucked up by our conflicting notions of freedom. But why has our democracy become a farce? Or was it always one?
I have never liked Friedrich Nietzsche, but sometimes you can learn a lot from people you don’t like. Historian Will Durant summarizes Nietzsche’s philosophy in his book, the Story of Philosophy. [p432]
Says Durant, according to Nietzsche: Democracy means the enthronement of liberty, the worship of mediocrity, and the hatred of excellence… Think George W Bush… It (democracy) means the impossibility of great men – for how could great men survive the indignities of an election? What chance would they have?… Think Ralph Nader…and Dennis Kucinich… Says Nietzsche Quote: “What is hated by the people, like a wolf by mere dogs, is the truly free spirit, the enemy of all chains, the one who does NOT adore or idolize, the one who is NOT ‘a regular party member’.” Unquote. Back to Durant: How can great men arise in such soil. And how can a nation become great when its greatest men lie unused, discouraged, perhaps unknown? Such a society loses character; imitation is horizontal instead of vertical – not the superior man, but the majority man, becomes the ideal, and the model; everybody comes to resemble everybody else; even the sexes get watered down – the men become women and the women become men. Unquote. Back to me: The guy next door becomes the celebrity, becomes everyman, becomes no man.
The movies suck, the music sucks. The education sucks. The products suck. The services suck. The government sucks. Airhead celebrities make millions of dollars selling TV commercials, while philosophical visionaries eke out an existence on food stamps and Medicaid and living in their car – or simply die of the drugs and alcohol they consumed, to kill the pain of living in a mindless world of brainwashed automatons, best depicted by the last scene in the movie, Matrix…when Neo leaves the phone booth, and launches himself down a street of human cattle, oblivious to the fact that this frenzy of human activity is all an illusion, and they are really…just…batteries. Human batteries supplying the energy to power the hardware of robot civilization. [RG voice] Ha ha ha
This is freedom? And what about those tea baggers. What the fuck is their problem? Why do they hate Obama? Certainly not because he’s a socialist. Obama is a Rockefeller Republican. Liberal on social issues, conservative on war and capitalism. A smiley charming big-eared tool of big money and the military/industrial/congressional establishment. This guy is strictly middle of the road and a tremendous disappointment to leftists like me.
But…calling him a socialist sounds good. It’s a moth-eaten soundbite dredged up by that drug addled copy-cat Rush Limbaugh…because it worked for Reagan in his war against liberal freedoms and the legacy of FDR. Brain dead iguana. No American insurance company thinks Obama is a socialist – creating a multi-billion dollar giveaway to them. That’s not socialism. It’s crony capitalism that borders on fascism for fuck sakes. Keeping in mind that fascism is when corporations run the government. What do ya think we’ve got now? Corporate communism. Businessmen’s socialism, where corporations are bailed out and human beings are free to slip underwater and drown. The further the Democratic Party moves away from the vision of FDR, the less reason it has to exist. It’s an elephant in donkey skin.
But the teabagger movement has nothing to do with healthcare, and everything to do with this country changing from white skin to dark skin. 48% of the babies last year were born to blacks and Hispanics. In ten years the number of white babies born will be a minority for the first time since we started slaughtering the Indians. That’s what the tea party is really about. Loss of, “America for white people”.
Of course they’re scared. They’ve spat on colored people their entire lives, and they can see no reason why colored people won’t spit on them when the tables are reversed. This is a deep and even, for them, a rational, fear, that is not just going to go away.
Conservatism in America is sick and dying. Thank God. The teabagger inmates have taken over the asylum. But let’s be sure we do not get fooled by their rhetoric about FREEDOM, which is gonna really be heating up again this year.
The neocon zombies are popping out of their graves. Karl Rove just published a book full of lies, and Dick Cheney actually admitted to the press he ORDERED the torture in Pentagon prisons. They want to drive us away from Obama’s right-of-center policies, back to the far far far right again. And fuck the left. Fuck FDR and his second bill of rights that called for food and jobs and housing and education and healthcare and protection from corporate monopolies – like the banking and insurance industries – for everyone. The Second Bill of Rights. No. Fuck the pendulum of history and our Leftist voter-approved mandate for liberal freedoms. For real change….
We need to understand our enemy. It’s important to understand that the fundamental neocon idea, actually made lots of sense. Good sense. On paper.
That idea was this: instead of propping up dictators around the world…assholes like Pinochet in Chile and Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines and Somoza in Nicaragua…instead of supporting right wing dictators, we should overthrow them and launch democracies. Kick out the dictators and cultivate democracy around the globe. Sounds good huh? Sounds good, but…is it working in Afghanistan? Muslims don’t even WANT democracy. And for good reason. Rule by democracy means their countries will be controlled by powerful foreign corporations. Mostly by powerful foreign U.S. corporations. Once democracies are created in any country, they can be bought with oil money and weapons and gold. They can be controlled easier than any dictator. That’s why corporations swooned with joy at the neocon agenda.
That was our big post-war plan for Iraq if you remember. We HAD no plan. Corporations were going to run everything. That was the plan. Milton Friedman’s shock therapy. Free market everything. What a great thing democracy is – corporate wolves dressed in democracy’s clothing.
But fuck the rest of the world. Who cares what happens to them. Buncha geeks and ragheads. We need the oil right? Right? Well I’m here to tell ya the chickens always come home to roost. We were all betrayed by President Ronald Reagan. That man was a forked-tongued reptile. Iguana in chief. In order to bring democracy to the “world”, the Reagan administration strangled democracy at home. They lied and manipulated and made deals with Iranians and Israelis and Nicaraguan Contras, and kept all this information from the American people, who had, through Congress, banned military and financial support of the Contras.
Pretty picture, huh? We’re going to bring democracy to the world, by hog-tying democracy at home. Our government is going to bring democracy to Nicaragua and Iraq and Afghanistan by…lying to us, keeping us ignorant and uniformed, and ignoring our will, the will of the American people…a solid majority of whom want nothing to do with these insane foreign wars for corporate profit.
That, in a nutshell, is where conservative freedom ALWAYS leads. To less freedom. Less democracy. Less honesty and openness. Less transparency in government. A nightmare where the end justifies the means and every path forward leads to more war.
The more free all people are, the more free corporate persons are, to buy and sell and steal and bribe and pollute and maim and kill. That’s not freedom. That’s not true Liberty. That’s the rule of the jungle.
Our country can NEVER be free until we get rid of corporate personhood…the never-approved-by-anyone, judicial minority opinion…losing opinion…that got quoted so many times it became a judicial precedent that corporations be legally regarded as persons. Persons who do not eat, sleep, die, pay a fair share of taxes or get drafted in time of war.
The freedom conservatives are talking about leads to slavery. Let us not be fooled. We want freedom of opportunity, not freedom from all restraint. Not just libertarian liberty. Not freedom from the knowledge of good and evil. Truth is Knowledge and Knowledge is power and power is freedom.
[bird]
Well, I chickened out on stopping paying my credit cards, as I agonized about on the last show. But I did get Citibank to give me zero percent interest for one year, which is more like it. Fuck Bank of America. They’re thieves. I hope they get broken up into a hundred pieces. Borrowing from the Fed for one quarter of one percent and renting that money out for 15 to 20 percent. That’s sixty to eighty TIMES more. 6000 to 8000% profit for those greedy bastards. So they borrow money from the Fed and screw us on credit cards…and speculate in oil futures, driving up the price so we, the ones who bailed them out, end up paying them once again at the pump. Heartless iguanas. But the GOOD news is, the State of Massachusetts is transferring $230 million dollars OUT of Bank of America because state law says credit card companies cannot charge more than 18% interest and Bank of America does not wish obey Massachusetts state law, only federal law, which has no cap. So screw them, Massachusetts is moving its money to other banks. Thank god people are getting this figured out. Money talks and bullshit can take a walk.
Ladies and gentlemen, our economic system does not work. It is nothing other than welfare for the financial services industry, and industry which does nothing for the economy. Absolutely nothing. The Financial services industry is libertarian unrestrained capitalism, that bets on silver to go down, and oil to go up, and produces not one toothpick of actual wealth for the economy. We need to get rid of Wall Street is what we need. There are other types of institutions – like state-owned and -operated banks — that are equally able to perform the basic banker’s job, of figuring out how to take people’s savings and invest them into meaningful, job-producing economic growth. Not just computerized second by second speculations on commodity price fluctuations.
[bird, or rooster or something]
If you wanna see this show keep going, send money. Lots and lots of money. Go to therudeguy.com or happyfool.org and push the donation button. And enjoy all the other free stuff there while you’re at it. Especially the oil paintings. If I could sell one of those I could buy a junk car to replace the limping, leaking, wheezing junk car I’m already driving.
Salut
