The Health Care Reform Act of 2010 can be the first halting step to overthrowing the the tyranny of the American plutocracy, but only if we are willing to keep unrelenting pressure upon the Congress and the President, in this election year to provide a public option, regulate the insurance industry at the Federal level, and end the antitrust examption. This will require both courage and effort.

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"To exercise power costs effort and demands courage. That is why so many fail to assert rights to which they are perfectly entitled--because a right is a kind of power but they are too lazy or too cowardly to exercise it. The virtues which cloak these faults are called patience and forbearance."

Friedrich Nietzsche (18441900), German philosopher. The Wanderer and His Shadow, aphorism 251 (1880).

"The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse."

James Madison (1751--1836), American politician and President; speech in the Virginia constitutional convention, Dec 2, 1829

"The great desideratum in Government is, so to modify the sovereignty as that it may be sufficiently neutral between different parts of the Society to control one part from invading the rights of another, and at the same time sufficiently controlled itself, from setting up an interest adverse to that of the entire Society."

James Madison (1751--1836), American politician and President; letter to Thomas Jefferson, October 24, 1787

"To provide employment for the poor, and support for the indigent, is among the primary, and, at the same time, not least difficult cares of the public authority."
James Madison (1751--1836), American politician and President; Letter to Reverend F.C. Schaeffer, January 8, 1820 (Madison, 1865, III, page 162)

Congratulations! It's a Health Care Reform Act!

Well, kinda, sorta, almost, maybe.

It is, arguably, the best that we can do under our current political limitations, where there are two diametrically opposing forces trying to pull the majority of the American People's political beliefs and inclinations either back into the dark past or forward to a brighter future.

When you look (for example) at the State of Texas (easy stomach, don't roll over), whose state Board of Education just removed Thomas Jefferson's writings from their curriculum in favor of Jefferson Davis, Joe McCarthy, and Phyllis Schafly; we can begin to realize that like Wellington's victory at Waterloo, the passage of the Health Care Reform Act was a "close run thing."

I simply wish that Texas had managed to inoculate more people against the "blind ignorance" virus that seems to affect so much of the state; after all, they managed to inoculate Jim Hightower and the late Molly Ivins, and look how well they turned out.

I mean, this was a state which, when it first declared itself a Republic independent of Santa Ana's Mexico on March 2, 1836; stated in its Declaration of Independence, "It is an axiom in political science that unless a people are educated and enlightened it is idle to expect the continuance of civil liberty or the capacity for self-government."

Thomas Jefferson couldn't have put it better himself.

Well, enough beating up on Texas. The "blind ignorance" factor generally seems to be directly proportional to the amount of money that a Texan has in his bank account.

Besides, any state that could give us Roy Orbison, Buddy Holly, Janis Joplin, Willy Nelson, and Stevie Ray Vaughn, must have something going for it.

As I was saying, there are two diametrically opposed forces in this country. There are those who are often being described as being "conservative," or "on the right," and seem to make up the majority of the elected and activist membership of the Republican Party. Their purpose seems to be to roll back all of the advances in social and economic justice that have been gained by the American people in the last century, and return to the days of the Gilded Age, where unbridled capitalism ruled, and the poor, working, and middle classes were left with the scraps that remained. It was a time when fifty-six percent of Americans could not make ends meet (Stanley Lebergott, The American Economy: Income, Wealth and Want; Princeton University Press, 1976; p. 508), and the majority of Americans were dead before they were sixty.

I would not call them conservatives; I would call them reactionaries.

These people want to see a return to "Jim Crow" and his old pal "Judge Lynch," so they can keep the "darkies" in their place. They would like to see the elimination of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, unemployment benefits, health insurance, workers rights, consumer protection, and any form of welfare that allows its recipients to retain a modicum of their dignity. They want to see the middle class shrunk to impotence. I guarantee you, when Grover Norquist states that he wants government shrunk so he can drown it in a bathtub; what he is really saying, whether he is aware of it or not--and I think he is--is that he wants to see America's middle class shrunk until it can be drowned in a bath tub, so it can never threaten the rich and their power base, as it did in the 1960's.

You see, a strong central government is required to maintain a vibrant middle class against the depredations of the rich.

The reason that our middle class has become so fragile over the last thirty years is that we have removed the protections that kept the rich from exploiting their superior economic position, at the expense of everyone else.

Taking away our legal protections has led to the saving and loan debacle, the Wall Street meltdown, Enron, Bernie Madoff, Michael Milken, and all of the rest. Deregulation, together with mergers and acquisitions, have reduced competition in transportation, retail sales, banking, manufacturing, media, communications, and every other sector of the American economy of which I can think.

On top of this, changes in tax and tariff laws in the same time period has permitted the wholesale shipping of many of the best paying jobs in every sector of our economy to foreign countries, where cheap labor and no protection for the worker or the environment is the rule, not the exception.

This state of affairs has not improved service, or choice and availability of product, in any sector of the economy of which I can think. Even cost, in the face of three decades of stagnant wages, has seen little overall change.

Because of the systematic stripping of the laws and regulations that protected the majority of Americans from economic exploitation by the rich, beginning with President Carter; it now takes two incomes, plus overtime, for a family to maintain its status as middle class, where thirty years ago, it took one.

Bertrand Russell was absolutely correct eighty years ago, in his essay "Freedom in Society," when he pointed out; "Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate."

The lack of universal health care in the United States is one of the ways the richest one percent has exercised that tyranny.

Look at it this way: if you want affordable health insurance coverage for yourself and your family, you have to work somewhere that has a very large pool of insured individuals, like a major corporation or some government entity. If over the course of time with your employer, you or a member of your family develops a "preexisting condition," you are "trapped" in that job. Your freedom to choose your place or type of employment has been further limited by the basic health care needs either of yourself, or a member of your family. You are indentured servants to your health care needs. The Health Care Reform Act of 2010 is the first step to correcting the problem.

The next step in overthrowing this tyranny of the fortunate, and reestablishing a strong middle class, is the establishment of either a Federally based public option, or across the board Federal regulation of costs in the health care industry. Included in this is elimination of the health insurance industry's anti-trust exemption, as well as renewed enforcement of the Sherman Antitrust Act against the large pharmaceutical companies, and the large, for profit, health care facility corporations.

Now of course, the reactionary plutocrats are going to do everything in their power to stop this from happening. It is up to the progressives, the true heirs to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, to lead the fight against these far right lunatics, inviting the remaining Eisenhower Republicans, Independents, and the Blue Dog Democrats to join us in this quest, to free our nation from the reactionaries who have increasingly held sway here since that grim November day in 1963.

We progressives are the force that is trying to pull this nation into a brighter future. We are not Communists; although many of us have actually read Karl Marx (unlike our reactionary counterparts), and are quite aware that what is occurring today bears a close resemblance to the self-destructive phase of capitalism that Marx described in his writings. We hold that just as in the body, a philosophy of unchecked growth without any consideration for its consequences, is the philosophy of cancer.

Nor are we necessarily Socialists; many of us have a deep and abiding respect for the potential economic power of capitalism, both in its ability to reward those who work hardest, and in its tremendous potential for diversity and adaptability.

However, what James Madison points out above concerning government, I believe applies equally to any type of power: political, economic, social, and cultural. And capitalism has an unfortunate natural tendency towards a concentration of economic power in the hands of a single or a small number of entities, in the form of monopolies or syndicates. I believe that in the end, this concentration of power sucks all of the vitality out of the system that created and supported it, just like a cancer.

In the end, we progressives believe that capitalism must be protected from itself, and its worst natural tendencies. We also believe that in the capitalistic system, the weak must be protected from those who would exploit them using the system, and the strong must be kept from destroying themselves.

This means the establishment of socialized safeguards for the vast majority of the population. This includes programs such as Social Security, Medicare for all, unemployment benefits (including re-education and retraining if required), workers' rights, consumer protection, environmental protection, reasonable bankruptcy laws, and welfare that allows its recipients to retain a modicum of their dignity. We support these programs because we realize that we are not always fully in control of our lives: breadwinners die, loved ones become ill, natural disasters destroy businesses, corporations go bankrupt, economies go south, and human error creeps into the best designs. These social programs keep members of the middle class from falling into the awful quicksand of poverty while they get back on their feet, as well as protecting the elderly and disabled, while permitting those in poverty to raise their current station.

All of these safeguards are also a part of a homeostatic system I have called Social Capitalism, in order to fully differentiate it from the antisocial Capitalism that has again become predominant over the last sixty years. The current system in place is one where the plutocrats and their corporations have gamed the American system of government to a point where risk and loss is socialized, and gain is privatized. I have written two articles about this system in the last six months ("Social Capitalism," November 10, 2009; "The Social Element of Social Capitalism," November 22, 2009; both on OpEdNews), and I fully intend to continue fleshing out this system in the next several months.

As I have stated before: Social Capitalism is about fairness, cooperation, and hope. These three ideals, if practiced assiduously by our society, I believe will prevent capitalism from entering into its self-destructive phase, where it becomes a cancer that drains the vitality out of the society that spawned it.

I remember reading somewhere that the difference between Eastern and Western thought is this: Eastern thought is based upon the principles of contemplated inaction, while Western thought is based upon the principles of uncontemplated action. In other words, those of the Orient are frozen into inaction by what might happen in the long term if one acts, while we in the Occident commit actions without considering the long term effects.

I believe that this is an oversimplification of reality, but when you look at the world, there seems to be at least some truth in it.

The United States was poised in November of 1963 to enter a period where the arts and literature would flower, helped along by the witty and urbane couple from Massachusetts in the White House. The murder of President Kennedy in Dallas, at the instigation of a group of soulless men whose only question about a work of art was "How much is it worth," killed the American Renaissance as surely as the fusillade of bullets killed JFK.

The rise of the hippies and the "counterculture" was a pale attempt to bring the American Renaissance to life, barely an echo of what might have been.

Greed and anger and fear and media disinterest and misunderstanding, and Vietnam, and the Death of Camelot's King, his brother, Malcolm and Martin, and God alone knows how many others who died from the pain and frustration of knowing that something should be happening that wasn't, and let's drop a little more acid and smoke a little more weed, and if that doesn't work we'll try peyote and coke and heroin and speed and 'ludes and anything else we could find if it'll just make us feel better for a little while.

And of course, none of it worked.

Woodstock was an affirmation of what might have been; Altamont was a damnation of us all.

As is always the case, feeling the strain of abject failure and an unwanted and undeserved responsibility for a world that was stuck, we turned in upon ourselves. We became the opposite of what JFK had asked us to become in his inaugural, and became like those who were responsible for his death.

Ask not what your country can do, indeed.

We are now facing another fork in the road: shall we once again turn inward in pain and fear, or turn outward in hope of a new tomorrow.

That choice is ours. But it will take courage and effort.

Authors Bio:

Richard Girard is a polymath and autodidact whose greatest desire in life is to be his generations' Thomas Paine. He is an FDR Democrat, which probably puts him with U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders in the current political spectrum. His answer to all of those who decry Democratic Socialism is that it is a system invented by one of our Founding Fathers--Thomas Paine--and was the inspiration for two of our greatest presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, who the Democrats of today would do well if they would follow in their footsteps. Or to quote Harry Truman, "Out of the great progress of this country, out of our great advances in achieving a better life for all, out of our rise to world leadership, the Republican leaders have learned nothing. Confronted by the great record of this country, and the tremendous promise of its future, all they do is croak, 'socialism.'