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Reality Check: And Readers Responses Dec 8th
HARBINGER OF THE FLOWER PEOPLE
James Campion
It’s official; the Boomers will doom us all.
The Medicare Bill has sealed the deal.
This latest atrocity funneled by your congress and peddled by this pitifully mediocre president has handed the blank check to the majority of Americans careening towards retirement, and by the time these haughty fuckers are done with Social Security and Medicare and every other ounce of bureaucratic fat, we’ll be left scraping sticky change from the curb.
It’s over.
There have always been fears and debates about the terrible bushwhack the hippies will eventually wreak on the fumes of The New Deal. It has now become a sickening reality.
Benefits for everyone! Yay! Let’s coddle the Flower People until they suck us completely dry and we’re scrambling for provisions alongside Mad Max in the desert.
I thought these people wanted to live in communes and fiddle with anarchy and drop homemade chemicals until the Grateful Dead sounded good. Are we to perpetually hold their hands until we end up in the shitter? The federal budget deficit is at a whopping $374 billion and counting. We’re basically a nation at war teetering on recession with a bevy of tax cuts kicking in. And now we learn that over the foreseeable future we will fund every penny of these fantastic new benefits from our coffers?
It’s important to note that wanting everything, but paying for none of it, has put California on the brink of economic collapse and prompted the ushering in of a barely articulate pop icon into governance. Look, I’m not going after the 40 million elderly and disabled who use Medicare currently. These people actually vote. Politicians are only interested in appeasing voters, and a preponderance of youth in this country could not give half a fart about voting, so they lose out. But what of the rest of us who are staring down two decades of a financially bruised federal government that has been fueled on these benefits for three-quarters of a century and will have its hand out when its our turn.
Just the thought of it makes me want to exhume Timothy Leary right now and smack him on principle.
The Bush people needed a victory somewhere, somehow. This is it. Give the store to elderly, call it a win and forget the Iraqi mess. And, best of all, it doesn’t matter until 2006, and by then it’s already second term, baby!
Meanwhile it’s party time over at the multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical companies and the insurance companies and the plethora of doctors who are all in the same money pile, sipping Champaign coolies on the back nine and making secret deals on what drugs to peddle to a nation hopped up on so much legal narcotics we’re ready to salute anything.
This isn’t about helping the elderly or making good on campaign promises. This is about feeding the machine. Those elderly who care have been getting breaks with Canadian prescription drugs for years. The power of pharmaceuticals rivals tobacco, oil and beer right now. What they say goes. And they can’t have cheap drugs being purchased on the Internet when there are locals to be prized.
This bill has effectively taken the onus on ceilings for prescription drug prices out of the hands of the government. This is good. But now private insurance companies and drug middlemen, known as pharmacy benefit management companies, will merrily continue to hike the world's highest drug prices into spheres best understood by honest South American drug runners, who have to actually work for a living. This is not good.
Did anyone notice the spike in pharmaceutical stock prices on 11/24? I don’t have the space to get into the imminent dangers of this bill to existing HMO’s or how the AARP lobbies have manipulated benefit packages for years or what this could mean politically to Bush or any other useless pustule running around the capital. Read the Wall Street Journal for that noise. But make no mistake, this is about who is eventually going to pay for these bones being tossed to the elderly in exchange for votes.
Let that read you and your children.
And what are we paying for?
Someone else’s overpriced medicine.
Hope there’s some left for the rest of us.
© James Campion Nov 27th 2003
realitycheck@jamescampion.com
www.jamescampion.com
READERS RESPONSES Dec 8th 2003
jc,
In response to your 10/29 column, "Anarchy in Bushland", I believe the Iraqis are targeting our top people! First it was that UN dude who got blown to bits and now they tried to zap The Boy Who Cried Wolfowitz! No wonder Cheney is locked up in the Bunker tighter than a Republican's fist on his wallet. As long as it’s somebody else's money (you and me), they are ready to let this thing bankrupt us completely! I admit when the war started I didn't speak up against it because of its seeming inevitability, but this is the worst botch since Grady Little leaving Pedro in to face Matsui! President Clark I presume...
Buzz
Campion,
It does seem like no one is in charge on this Iraq thing. But I feel what probably many Americans feel, like I have no power to stop it. Protest? Vote? What could possibly stop this "machine" you’re always going on and on about? Can anyone make a difference anymore? Should any of us continue to sacrifice our lives for conglomerations and corporations and ideologies and oil or even this false sense of safety anymore? The whole thing has got me in the "what’s the point?" state of mind.
Kathy Visconti
JC,
While I'm a registered Republican, I have to agree with you that something has to be done in Iraq, and soon. The American people cannot and must not accept the almost daily killings of our soldiers. It seems obvious that the terrorist philosophy in Iraq is to get rid of one American a day. While the solution will not be an easy one, I agree with you that action has to be taken ASAP.
John M.
Reality Check,
The supine Mr. K is back. And you know what? I'm tired. Sick and tired of this "we gotta know everything" attitude that's grown over the years.
There's no mystery anymore - nothing left to the imagination. I don't want to see what an empty-headed ditz Jessica Simpson is, but thanks to "Newlyweds" that's one less masturbatory fantasy I have. I don't need to see all these shows where strangers are pitted against each other. The gossip runs more rampant than it does in a pack of prepubescents with a Tiger Beat. I want people to just shut the fuck up.
And so it goes with this incessant play by play on Iraq. I have this theory: baseball would be a 1000 times more interesting if we all just woke up the next morning and read about what happened. If you had the chance to go back in time and watch the '27 Yankees, I bet you'd come away from that saying "what a fuckin’ yawner, except for when that fat drunk guy hit those home runs." We always put a positive spin on things as we age. Hell, 100 years from now Britney Spears will probably be hailed as a musical genius. Everyone waxes poetic about WWII. Why? Because we had Movietone reels once a week, not this 24-hour cable bullshit we have today. And forget politics. You can't flip the channel without seeing a fucking Democrat or Republican going on and on like fucking school boys, all for our right to know. They still won't tell us who blew Jack Kennedy's head open. How about our right not to know? Does that sound irresponsible? What are you doing about your crusade? Replying to this column? That's going out on a limb. As for Iraq, nothings gonna change if we don't know every burp and fart that goes on. Fact is we're in there already and we ain't gettin’ out no matter how grizzly it gets. To do that now would be worse than staying, quite frankly. So let's cut the chatter, huh? Anything to give politicians, and everyone else for that matter, less to talk about the better. Now where's that next mass extinction?
The Supine One
Hey,
You’re an idiot. I can’t take this awful shit anymore. I hate you’re fucking guts and disagree with everything you write, but I can’t stop reading it. What the hell is wrong with me? Jesus, I need help.
Keep it up,
Ted Rothschild
James,
"The Sky is Falling, By The Way" is classic, old-school Campion in all its vitriolic, inane reverie.
Thank God.
Wait... there is no God.
pete
JC,
"...despite the alarming lack of hyperbole from the science community, chunks of the sun are dropping to earth. I see this as big news." is some amazingly funny shit. I laughed hard reading this lunacy. This piece proves that after all these years, Reality Check is consistently one of the most curiously humorous takes on the world I read on a weekly basis.
Thanks for your efforts,
Franco
Well gee,
Let me jump in my space ship and fly the 93,000,000 miles to the sun and take it's temperature to see if it's feeling alright. I agree that the enormous solar flares are a cause for concern, but I really don't see the point in panicking since our most sophisticated space crafts would take approximately 1,000 years to get there, and would actually burn up way before that. I don't mean to be offensive or anything, but what the fuck do you want me to do about it?
Sincerely,
Donovan
Previously by James Campion on Hackwriters
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