The recent political kerfuffle in Washington has brought about the extensive use of George Santayana’s famous quotation: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” If there is one writer in the world who has not used that quote since he came up with it in the late 19th Century, I would love to meet him or her. But I have a serious question for George he has never answered in all of his conversations and writings. Although he had a Spanish passport and was a lifelong Spanish citizen, he was raised and educated in the United States, wrote in English, and always said he was an American. He attended the exclusive Boston Latin School, graduated from Harvard, and took advanced work at King’s College, Cambridge. At Harvard he taught philosophy to such famous people as Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, W.E.B. Dubois, Gertrude Stein, and Walter Lippmann. So why did he leave his teaching position at Harvard at age 48, never to return to the United States? Did he know too many people in the U.S. who couldn’t remember the past? Could he look into the future? I’m intrigued.

Corky was recently reading a novel by William Kent Krueger and pointed out to me a paragraph leading off a chapter with an exciting definition of history: “History, in Cork’s (A character in the book!) opinion, was a useless discipline, an assemblage of accounts and memories, often flawed, that in the end did the world no service. Math and science could be applied in concrete ways. Literature, if it didn’t enlighten, at least entertained. But history? History was simply a study in futility. Because people never learned. Century after century, they committed the same atrocities against one another or against the earth, and the only thing that changed was the magnitude of the slaughter.”  Is this what Santayana really thought? Did he feel he would have a much better life in Europe because citizens were better educated?

When A Milk Cow Eats Fresh Green Grass In The Spring For The First Time.....

A small minority of true believers in the House of Representatives shut down the government and refused to pay the bills for expenditures they had approved earlier–and the Tea Party discovered the real meaning of the term “unintended consequences.” They attacked the Affordable Care Act legislation, renamed it ObamaCare, and started to use it to shut down the government if it was not repealed or “defunded.” Actually the ACA is the first opportunity for the United States citizen to stop paying double what any civilized European is paying for universal health care. There are enough good elements in the law that have the support of the American people the Republicans are scared crapless that once people are covered by it they will love ObamaCare. Oh, some radicals are still yelling “socialized medicine” and “government health care” and they insist they don’t want government “screwing around with their Medicare.”  But the unintended consequences are beginning to splash around.

The political backlash resulting from misjudgments reminds me of my farm days and the evening milking of cows who had spent their first exciting day after winter eating fresh green pasture grass. The milker had to be quick to avoid the loose ruminations resulting from a change of bovine diet. Like backlash, it could be a real gusher.

The Screwing Of The American Public

ObamaCare has many policies about lowering the costs of health care, including provisions limiting the extortionate costs of prescriptions. As an example, we have learned because of the shutdown that 40 million Americans have asthma, the most common chronic disease, and that Americans are getting screwed by drug companies by paying billions of dollars for over-priced drugs. Steroid inhalers such as Pulmicort sell for over $175 in the United States but are $20 in Great Britain–and are often dispensed to asthma patients by the British Health Service free of charge.

Eight billion dollars were spent last year buying GlaxcoSmithKline’s Advair inhaler. The company spent $100 million advertising it. Have you noticed how many drugs are advertised during meal hours? One asthma patient with a serious problem flies to Paris each year and buys a year’s supply of inhalers–and saves a lot of money! How about the drug Rhinocort Aqua, a prescription drug that costs a U.S. patient $250 a month but is sold over-the-counter in Europe for $7 a month? We have 3,300 deaths a year from asthma, and spend $56 billion trying to prevent it.

In 2012 generic drugs went up 5.3 percent while brand-name drugs increased 25 percent.  Here is a bizarre example of how patents are used by drug companies. Although the drug Colochicine has been found in 5,000 year-old Egyptian mummies, it is still patented because it is used in birth control pills and in the production of insulin. Can’t anyone in government control this fraud and crime? Did you know that it is against U.S. law to import prescription drugs? That you can’t make personal purchases of medicines from overseas mail-order pharmacies? Why are over half of the personal bankruptcies due to medical charges? Drug companies spent $250 million last year on lobbyists to keep your hands tied while their greedy hands reached into your wallet. That sum even exceeded the total lobbying costs of the whole defense industry.

Even The Senate Chaplain Prayed That the House A Senate “Save Us From This
Madness” Of Shutdown And Debt Limits

So who led this march to the sea-cliff of shakedown, shutdown, and debt limits?  Why, the Koch brothers, of course, who have financed the Tea Party and the Republican Krazy Kaucus from the beginning of Obama’s first term. They took advantage of the racism of Southern whites and the ignorance of Northern whites to try to buy the 2012 presidential election for Mitt Romney. The Tea Party, in the name of the Koch brothers, wants to eliminate all regulations except those that might keep them in power or running to the bank.

The Tea Party movement has backfired. Even Devin Nuries, a California Republican representative , has put an appropriate label on the Tea Party: “They are lemmings in suicide vests.” However, I just read the other day that not all lemmings die when they dive off the cliff. Some land on other lemmings and survive a long trip to shore.

Ironically, this Tea Party shutdown engineered by politicians and others who have no knowledge of American history have restored the idea that efficient government is necessary in a modern, complex society.  Crab fishermen in Dutch Harbor, Alaska have not been able to go to sea for the crab harvest because there are no government employees available to sign their permits. The crab harvest has to be controlled by the government for the mutual good of all crab fishermen, not those with the biggest boats and the largest number of traps. How long would the crabs last of the harvest was not scientifically controlled by government?

The early blizzard in South Dakota killed an estimated 80,000 head of cattle, about $7 billion worth. South Dakota is one of the most Republican-Tea Party-right-wing states in the country, so ranchers had supported the shutdown and the freeze, so to speak,  on the debt limit—until the blizzard. All of a sudden they needed Washington’s help---but the Department of Agriculture offices were closed. Employees had been furloughed. Heck, we don’t believe in “big guvamint” as Mollie Ivins used to say. We don’t need “guvamint” help. Get that “guvamint” off our backs! Maybe the storm of the century will generate some thoughts about government for the common good instead of the Koch brothers, corporations, and big money. Now the ranchers will have to bury about 40,000,000 pounds of beef. Because of fascists like Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court and the Citizen’s United campaign contribution decision, 216 very rich persons and organizations paid $560 million in 2012 to buy political slaves on the capitol slave market. Now they want to corner the entire market. The 216 fat cats spent nearly 11,000 times the amount an average family earns in a year—just on attack ads mostly directed at Obama.

In A Country Of 316 Million “Stuff” Will Happen

All of a sudden people in Red States found out that Americans, and indeed tourists from all over the world, love our national parks and are really pissed when they are closed.  Maybe Western Red State governors won’t be so eager to vote the Tea Party “small government” platform when they see the bills for their state picking up the tab for keeping some national parks open.  The national newspaper USA Today calls the shutdown “the dumbest political act in history,” costing the government $1.5 billion a day, or about $24 billion. The list of “stuff happens” is almost endless. How many workers and Tea Party members are going to die because the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational and Safety and Health Administration, and The Centers for Disease Control staffs were furloughed and couldn’t contain the 865,200 gallon spill of crude oil in a wheat field from a busted pipeline in North Dakota, couldn’t continue a nationwide flu prevention program, couldn’t control the spread of salmonella from “dirty” California chickens, and couldn’t inspect construction sites and factories for violations of common safety rules such as shoring up trenches? How many will die because the National Institutes of Health could not continue studies and trials for cancer drugs and other treatments? The Food and Drug Administration had to stop all laboratory research. Is health care a right or a privilege? The rest of the civilized world has answered that question, but the  let-them-die Tea Party crowd still thinks that money equals aspirin and heart transplants.

“Shut Them Down; Restore The Nation”

This is a motto for the nation headlined in a Forum letter by Ken Lucier of Moorhead.  What happened is just the opposite of what was intended. It’s unintended consequences. Ken writes we should not pay debts approved by Congress or increase taxes. I guess the United States should declare bankruptcy. Russia and China would be happy about that. Ken writes we should eliminate the Department of Education. Here we are in a tremendous battle for creative and innovative economic supremacy in the world—and we are going to allow individual states such as Mississippi and Alabama do their “thang?” If we are going to save the American “empire” it has to be through solid, well-financed educational programs. Ken wants to dump the Environmental Protection Agency.  Let’s see. Over 2,000 scientists say that humans do add carbon and other pollutants to the atmosphere. Thus humans do affect climate change. Ken has 50 scientists on his side paid by the Koch brothers that say it isn’t so. I’m going with the 2,000 scientists instead of the Koch brothers.  Who are you going to believe? According to scientific evidence concentrations of atmospheric gases–carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide–are now at levels higher than in the last 800,000 years. I’ll go with the boys who say humans do affect climate change. In Alaska permafrost and glaciers are melting fast while meteorologists have concluded that six of the twelve big storms in 2012 were really big because of human additions to the carbon load. Cut government and deny science all you want, Ken, but I suggest you keep a rowboat in your backyard.
Note to Republican (?) Texas Senator Ted Cruz and all the adherents of the Tea Party: Thank you for reminding the American people, through unintended consequences, that good government is essential in a modern, complex society. After losing about 20 points in national polls in the last few days, perhaps Tea Party members will read some American history books and get “the rest of the story.” The mechanical genius Henry Ford said “History is bunk.”  It isn’t.