abandoning the elderly and the smartest thing Patsy ever said...

remember back when Bush was making another of his "compassionate" promises about how the his prescription drug plan would be great for the the vulnerable seniors of our nation? seems so very long ago...but seniors remember, those that survived by finding some other source for their prescription drugs that is. this brilliant bill turned into yet another excuse for Bush and his conservative hacks to transfer money from the most vulnerable of our society into the pockets of their disgustingly wealthy friends...again. sure seniors saw their drug prices drop...for about two months. then, they got slammed with a couple thousand page manual on picking their plan and suddenly were paying more for their drugs than they had been before they got a "break" bush style (much like the tax "break" those of us too lazy to make more than $1,000,000 a year got)...

they responded by doing whatever they could to get the drugs they so desparately needed and could no longer afford (mostly because the corporations had already stolen their pensions and they saw their taxes increase because the Bush "cuts" ended up turning into cuts in things like police protection and funding for education...which then had to be made up by the states, which increased taxes on income and everything else to pay for the things Bush was saying they had to do without giving them any of the money for it...an increase that went far beyond the whopping 300 dollar check they got that April). they were chartering buses in mass and heading across the border to stock up on drugs because Canada had realized that a person's health is not a "commodity" and should never be subject to the cruel realities of a "free" market that is driven by one thing and one thing only...how can corporations suck a few more bucks out of the people that can afford it least?

well...apparently the billion dollar profits of drug companies just weren't high enough...and apparently people getting the medicine they needed without skipping meals daily or being thrown out on the street is a bad thing for America...so the government and it's Big Business elite asshole friends set out to change that and make sure that there were no loopholes that would allow the some of the most vulnerable in our society to get the medicine they needed without starving to death to afford it, especially those people that had worked hard their whole lives with the understanding, no, the promise, that the nation would take care of them (not exactly an unfair exchange considering they fought off Hitler and turned the US into the most prosperous nation the world had ever seen...although perhaps that is why Bush and his pals are so against them, everything Bush and his cronies do seems to destroy the prosperity of this nation and everything good that generation once faught for).

so they went to Canada and pushed and pushed and pushed until Canada finally agreed not to sell generic drugs...drugs which do the exact same thing for a hell of a lot less money, thereby providing relief to millions more people than otherwise would be able to afford it. so now the already disgustingly wealthy corporations that milk the US elderly for billions will be able to milk them even further because they have nowhere else to go...(yes, the same people are already working on a similar bill in the UK, and you have to know that Mexico is next). so there you have it...Bush and the conservative movement are in bed with Big Business to the extent that they will refuse to provide for Medicaid and Medicare to negotiate with drug companies to get lower prices for seniors (and for taxpayers might I add...yup, keep on trickling up the money of tax payers...take from the poor and give it over to the fabulously wealthy, its the conservative way) and then take away any hope those vulnerable folks that need medicine the most have for getting their meds without skipping meals or losing their homes.

which brings me to my second point...patsy madrid is a complete moron. as evidenced by her inability to close out when ahead by 10 points in the polls with a week to go. but during the campaign she gave the most honest statement I believe I have ever heard from a career politician...when asked about taking money from corporations, her answer was basically that taking that money was just to give those people access to her. it was one of those head slapping moments where you wonder what in god's name she was thinking...but it isn't like we don't all know that is the truth about politics in America today. and I, for one, commend Patsy for talking about what the rest of us are too scared to say...for bringing it out into the open rather than keeping it in the closet and forcing us to deal with the sad reality that our representative democracy has become a corporatocracy...

hell, just look at the presidential "front-runners"...we never talk about who has the best ideas, who is the best leader, who is the most qualified, who cares the most about the American people...and never, never do we hear about a presidential front-runner because they represent the majority of Americans. no...we hear about the front-runners as the ones that can raise the most money...and they are proud of it. we have so allowed these people to denigrate our sacred institutions of democracy that it is to the point now that they brag to us that they are more in the pocket of Big Business and the supremely wealthy than any other candidate...and we applaud them for it.

even the "liberal" candidates now must kneel before the god of Big Business and "free" markets at the expense of the vast majority of the American people...and the world community...in order to raise the funds they deem necessary to win office...which has become the goal of politics, not to change the world, not to help people, not to save this country...but to win elections. and after they win the elections...they have debts to pay...and so we get things like the prescription drug bill that takes money from the poor and vulnerable of this nation and gives it to the already disgustingly wealthy Big Drug Companies...and we get no-bid contracts for the military and Iraq while our soldiers march into a warzone without proper equipment or protection...and then we applaud ourselves for kicking out some of the corrupt bastards so we can send other corrupt bastards into office who also owe debts that they will try to pay off...and we, the average American, the person that works their ass off to get by and yet pays more and more in taxes and sees less and less government services for that money while the folks in the gated community down the street gets even richer with our money...we get the shaft.

well...no longer will we take the shaft...as much as they have tried to marginalize us, it is they who are on the margins of society...it is they who have no concept of what it means to be American, or even human...and it is they who work for us, and must answer to us. but until we stand up and demand they answer to us and not to Big Business we will see our once great nation continue its slide into the most powerful banana republic the world has ever seen. so get off your ass and make demands...write to your representatives...write to your editors...run for office...take back the country.

New Whigs. We Are You.