"Who wants candy?"
All efforts to rebalance the economy to something sustainable have been systematically derided as "socialism". It's clear that the past decade was merely intended to strip-mine what was left of the economic carcass, with a supernova of corruption at the end called "MAGA".
When capitalism had to get bailed out in 2008, the term "socialism" lost all real meaning. Now, it's merely a catch-all phrase used by useful idiots to defend rapacious greed and rampant criminality, while everything implodes in real-time.
If corporations pay $1 in tax, is that socialism now? Apparently so.
As we see above, the right is addicted to strip-mining the future to pay for today. If it's one thing that sums up MAGA, it's instant gratification. I just read this article, below, which is highly critical of Elizabeth Warren's economic plans. And I actually agreed with a fair amount of what was said from an overall efficiency standpoint. More regulation is not needed - enforcement of existing regulation is what is needed. Something the article doesn't mention. The real problem with this critique of Warren's plan is that it makes the obligatory assumption that the status quo is sustainable, and it's not. The right never feels obligated to account for their abject failures in improving the standard of living of most Americans.
Theirs is the economics of implosion.
Had the right only come up with their own functioning healthcare plan, maybe we wouldn't have ended up with the so-called "disaster" that is Obamacare. How easy is it to keep strip-mining the middle class to the benefit of billionaires while deriding every idea to rebalance the economy as "socialism".
Nevertheless, right wing mythology is collapsing in broad daylight.
Even Tucker Carlson recently admitted that corporations are destroying America and he also admits that Elizabeth Warren has the best economic plan.
Trump himself is all over the place desperately trying to keep bailout capitalism from final imploding. But he gets away with breaking all of the "rules" because he is a white alpha male, therefore, the pejorative term "socialism" doesn't get used against him.
"one former GOP senator and governor on Monday pointed out what could be an uncomfortable truth for Trump supporters:
‘It may shock Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), but she seems to have simpatico in the president.’
Trump’s “me-first, me-only policy” when it comes to global trade, for instance, is “antithetical to the (free trade) philosophy that has underpinned Republican policy in these areas for years. Instead, they’re consistent with the policies have given rise to populist politics of the left.”
It's in the area of corporate healthcare where the out-of-control greed of American capitalism and the arrogant unwillingness to admit failure, coalesce into catastrophe.
This growing crisis won't just be measured in bankruptcies, it will be measured in lives:
"The pharmaceutical giant (J&J) tried to blame Mexicans, doctors and, inevitably, the victims themselves for the biggest drug epidemic in the country’s history. Its lawyers reframed a corporate engineered tragedy that has escalated for two decades, and claimed more than 400,000 lives, as a “drug abuse crisis”, neatly shifting responsibility from those who sold prescription opioids to those who used them.
(Judge) Balkman found that the company’s “false, misleading, and dangerous marketing campaigns have caused exponentially increasing rates of addiction, overdose deaths”
Balkman also found that Johnson & Johnson was part of a wider collaboration by opioid makers to change medical policy in the US by creating the illusion of an epidemic of untreated pain to which opioids were the solution."
At the heart of the opioid crisis is the structure of American healthcare. It is less of a service than an industry with corporations – drug makers, insurance companies, hospital chains – wielding considerable influence over medical policy and the provision of treatment."
"A new study has found that a horrifying 530,000 families turn to bankruptcy each year due to medical bills they can’t pay.
court records of bankruptcy filers from 2013 to 2016, with the end result showing that 66.5 percent were tied to medical issues
For middle-class Americans, health insurance offers little protection. Most of us have policies with so many loopholes, copayments and deductibles that illness can put you in the poorhouse,”
Compounding the problem was the study’s finding that middle-class America could, for all intents and purposes, die out because those who file for bankruptcy based on medical bills were in worse health and were “two or three times more likely to skip needed medical care and medications”.
We need to move ahead from the ACA to a single-payer, Medicare for All system that assures first-dollar coverage for everyone. But the Trump administration and Republicans in several states are taking us in reverse: cutting Medicaid, threatening to gut protections for the more than 61 million Americans with pre-existing conditions, and allowing insurers to peddle stripped-down policies that offer no real protection.”
