The Republicans are really steamed now, because a recent Congressional Budget Office report on the U.S. fiscal and economic outlook contained two pieces of great news on the economic effects of the Affordable Care Act.
The first comment reported people signing up just about as expected, while uninsured Americans are gaining insurance protection as predicted.
The other good news item, and the real source of current Republican fury, is that something like 2 million Americans are now free to choose whether they want to work or not. The Affordable Care
Act is making it possible for people to have health insurance even though they don’t have, and don’t want, a job. No more mandatory slave labor, more freedom of choice. You don’t have to stay employed in some dead-end corporate job just to have health insurance.
What upsets the privileged elites is that this isn’t supposed to happen. Rather than enjoying more freedom of choice, most Americans are supposed to stay in bondage to the corporations for slave-like wages because they’re afraid of getting sick. Financiers are supposed to keep making tons of money on consumer debt and insurance premiums. Corporations are supposed to keep profiting by cutting wages on the pretext that there are more people wanting jobs than jobs available.
But now the labor force will naturally decline as people exercise their new-found freedom not to work. That helps even up the job seekers to the number of jobs open. Now labor costs can rise as employees demand more just pay. As corporate profits shrink, self-enrichment will slow, temporarily. And the slide of half the middle class into poverty will be arrested. Maybe.
But there’s a deeper story here, too, obscured by all the noise in the press. What’s so striking about this situation is the silence of Americans about the situation. . Nobody is cheering, or saying much of anything. Why is this?
One reason might be because the jobs they have are threatened. The penalty for speaking out or taking action against the plutocracy is to be fired. The system no longer works for citizens, it responds only to corporate power.
Another reason for acquiescence is what we’ve been trained to believe about debt. Too many Americans are mired either in consumer debt or mortgages. If we speak up, the banks can pull the plug, and our lives are turned upside down in a hurry.
Still, might we expect students to be pushing back? But young people and second-career candidates, struggling mightily to get the degree that qualifies them for higher-paid jobs, are going deeper and deeper into debt. They’ll be beholden to the bankers for most of the rest of their lives. So they’re not inclined to “get political.”
Is there, then, nothing to be done? In the days of the robber barons there were yet brave suffragettes, stalwart labor union leaders with pugnacious members in our land. There were still politicians, who, with the help of courageous, independent journalists, could make significant changes in the political and economic landscape. A prime example is “trust-buster” Theodore
Roosevelt, bolstered by McClure’s magazine and writers like Ida Tarbell, and many other fighters against monopolistic practices.
Do the privileged elites, then, have all the bases covered? All, perhaps, except one. Local community action by concerned and committed citizens who, for whatever reasons, working under whatever fortunate circumstances, declare themselves free to act so things can change. These “committed ones” operate locally and regionally underneath the corporate radar. When the time is right, they win substantial victories.
And this is happening today. When there are enough little dots on the map of change, connecting them will create a “tipping point,” and popular momentum will grind the old regime down, so the opportunity will be there to move us further along the path to democracy.