Why does the United States have an opioid crisis?
Same reason we have a food safety crisis and are besieged by foreign and domestic terrorists.
These sacrifices are necessary to grow Wall Street profits in a nation where democracy, free speech, worker rights, and our free press have been subverted by corporate oligarchy.
Who makes the sacrifices and shoulders the burdens?
The poor and middle class here at home.
Who benefits?
The global investor class.
It’s no coincidence President Donald Trump’s nominee for drug czar is a champion of the very drug companies which have created this crisis. Our worthless “elected officials” are so fond of profitable treason they’ve even coined a term for selling America out to the very industries they’re supposed to be policing. It’s called “self regulation.”
That’s political double speak for allowing politically influential industries to draft the very laws which govern them. Laws which need not be in the public interest when the money is right.
-That means blocking regulation of addictive painkillers with high profit margins.
Beneficiary: Healthcare industry.
Loser: Poor and middle class.
-It means embracing the use of automated traffic cameras to hand out boatloads of tickets for the slightest infraction. Even though 60 percent of us drive faster than the speed limit in a nation where law enforcement traditionally has let the first 10 mph go.
Beneficiary: Private equity funds and hedge funds.
Loser: Poor and middle class.
-It means replacing our public school system with for-profit universities and charter schools.
Beneficiary: Private equity funds and hedge funds.
Loser: Poor, middle class, and labor unions.
-It means allowing college tuition to increase three times as fast as inflation, and preventing students from using bankruptcy protection to escape those debts, while the for-profit colleges turning our kids into debt slaves are allowed to file for bankruptcy.
Beneficiary: Private equity funds and hedge funds.
Loser: Poor and middle class.
-It means blocking regulation of the excessive sodium levels in our food, because they boost food industry profits by reducing spoilage. Even though they’re also causing millions of Americans to die early from heart disease and hypertension.
Beneficiary: Food industry.
Loser: Poor and middle class.
-It means offshoring millions of American jobs to low-wage economies in the Third World while continuing to charge First-World prices here at home for the goods and services they create.
Beneficiary: Invetsors.
Loser: Poor and middle class.
-It means using government bonds to spend future generations into a permanent cycle of debt, which make schools and roads more expensive and generate huge fees for bond consultants.
Beneficiary: Banking Industry and political hookers.
Loser: Poor and middle class.
-It means replacing beef with wood cellulose in fast food burgers and tacos.
Beneficiary: Food industry.
Loser: Poor and middle class.
-It means digging up our fossil fuel reserves and selling them overseas, even though it reduces our national energy security.
Beneficiary: Energy industry.
Loser: Poor and middle class.
-It means using ethanol subsidies to turn big Midwest corn farmers into oil shieks. Even though we don’t need the fuel additive and the resulting nitrogen runoff has enlarged the Dead Zone at the mouth of the Mississippi River.
Beneficiary: Energy industry.
Loser: Poor and middle class.
-It means waging brush-fire wars overseas to support profit growth for defense contractors. Wars that kill innocent civilians and our soldiers, seamen and airmen. Wars like the one against Iraq after the 9/11 attacks, which occurred even though the nation with the fifth-largest oil reserves on the planet had nothing to do with them.
Beneficiary: Defense and oil industries.
Loser: Poor and middle class.
-It means locking up millions of Americans for trivial offenses.
Beneficiary: Prison industry.
Loser: Poor and middle class.
-It means continuing to undermine state usury laws, most of which cap bank lending rates at 11 percent a year.
Beneficiary: Banking and payday lending industries.
Loser: Mob loansharks, the poor, and middle class.
-It means warehousing enough empty homes to shelter our homeless population six times. Because it looks better on bank balance sheets.
Beneficiary: Banking industry.
Loser: Poor and middle class.
-It means allowing banks to issue enough new currency via synthetic investment vehicles (aka nonsense) to create $230 trillion of debt on a planet with only $78 trillion in goods and services.
Beneficiary: Banking industry.
Loser: Poor and middle class.
-It means shifting tax revenues from scaled income taxes, which require the rich to pay their fair share, to fees. Meaning bridge and highway tolls, park entry fees, court costs, gasoline surcharges and the like. This is the reason we now teach our kids how to beg outside their local Wal-Mart for money for sports teams and class trips.
Beneficiary: The rich.
Loser: Poor and middle class.
-It means treating fathers like criminals in family court, as if the women’s rights movement never happened.
Beneficiary: Religious nuts, courts and the legal industry
Loser: Poor and middle class.
-It means turning back the clock on LGBT rights, prayer in school, science, and hindering the ability of poor and working class women to secure a safe and affordable abortion.
Beneficiary: Religious nuts
Loser: Poor and middle class.
-It means auctioning free speech to the highest bidder online, which is how Facebook and Twitter helped Trump and Hillary buy their way into the 2016 election. Giving voters a choice between dueling Wall Street sellouts. Ever wonder why voter turnout was only 58 percent in the 2016 presidential election?
Beneficiary: Social Media Industry, the rich, and corrupt politicians.
Loser: Democracy, free speech, the poor and middle class.
-It means allowing social media organizations to undermine the free press by pirating news articles, and hijacking the advertising revenue generated by them.
Beneficiary: Social Media Industry, the rich, and corrupt politicians.
Loser: Democracy, free speech, the poor and middle class.
-It means pricing medical care beyond the reach of working Americans.
Beneficiary: Medical Industry
Loser: The poor and middle class.
These crises have been created by the treasonous greed of publicly traded corporations, whose executives have a legal obligation to maximize shareholder value by placing profits over people. They’ve been aided and abetted by an inbred U.S. Congress with an abysmal 14 percent approval rating and a ridiculous re-election rate of 90 percent.
How do the millionaire members of such a despised institution get re-elected with such frequency?
They cheat. Insulating themselves from public accountability behind gerrymandered districts, spending rules which favor candidates who pander to the rich, and laws which make it a crime for citizens to publicly protest against their reprehensible behavior
Without the systemic corruption of the Democratic and Republican machines this systemic treason doesn’t happen.
The U.S. Congress has an abysmal 14 percent approval rating and a ridiculous re-election rate of 90 percent.
How do the millionaire members of such a despised institution get re-elected with such frequency?
They cheat.
Congress has insulated themselves from public accountability behind gerrymandered districts, spending rules which favor candidates who pander to the rich, and laws which make it a crime for citizens to publicly protest against their reprehensible behavior. Incredibly, these arrogant sonsabitches have also legalized their own corruption by exempting themselves from our nation’s insider trading laws.
How much of this poor leadership is too much?
We passed too much in 2008. We’re now in the end stage of representative democracy, free speech, and the American dream. The empire is rotting away from the top down behind rich garbage like Trump and everyone on the planet seems to know it but us.
What’s the solution?
The first thing we need to do is to alter the corporate fiduciary duty rule to require executives to maximize shareholder value in ways that don’t hurt the greater good.
The second step is to abandon both the Republic and Democratic machines.
Once that’s done we should be able to create Congressional term limits, restore political contribution limits, and cap how much can be spent on campaigns again.
Once we have real leaders again the horrendously bad Citizens United and anti-Occupy rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court should die on the vine afterward in due course.
Citizens United allowed our corrupt Congress to ignore the poor and middle class by accepting unlimited amounts of money from the rich. The anti-Occupy law made it a crime to protest the venal behavior of our treasonous incumbents.
Once that’s done we can restore the military draft, so the rich are part of us again instead of over us, and the fairness doctrine, which required equal time on television for all political views.
Which would be the end of Fox and the rest of the insipid Right Wing Noise Machine.
It’s gonna be a long road back. Sadly, we’re not even on it yet.
