While going about our ordinary lives—though those cannot, at the moment, include accessing federal Internet sites, visiting a National Park, or being able to take advantage of a federally-funded health study—most of us seem oblivious to the fact that we are experiencing a coup. Those hundreds of thousands who have been furloughed or are working without pay may be more aware. Still, I doubt they would use the word coup to describe the current situation.
I’m not talking about a coup as when a renegade faction of a country’s army turns on its executive branch, replacing a head of state. Not a coup such as those that have taken place in Guatemala, Indonesia, Iran, and Chile, with active involvement on the part of the United States. Today’s US military is a business, and as long as it continues to protect its bottom line it is unlikely to revolt. In those other coups, hostages were tortured and murdered by the tens or hundreds of thousands. In this one, hostages are being forced up against a wall of impotence and immobility.
The coup we are experiencing now is economic in nature. You won’t find it described as a coup anywhere in the corporate press. It has been called by a series of other names: recession, sequester, and partial government shutdown. Failure to raise the debt ceiling is the next-level threat. In my opinion, all these examples of governmental brokenness constitute a coup because they hold hostage every government function dedicated to making life livable for the majority of citizens.
The perpetrators of this coup were unable to defeat Barack Obama at the polls or oust him from office. So they are trying to immobilize him, prevent him from succeeding with any of his proposed measures.
Who designed and orchestrated this coup? Clearly the Koch brothers and their colleagues, as well as other billionaire arch conservatives unwilling to risk the slightest exercise of democratic prerogative. Although many pundits blame the extreme right wing of the Republican Party, or tea partiers, I don’t see them as being anything but a front.
There has been a great deal of public information about the Koch brothers and their long-range planning meetings, some of them right here in New Mexico. Beginning on the day Obama won a second term, or perhaps before, these strategists made the failure of our first African American president their number one priority. The obscene rants of racists, the absurd “birther” movement, and the accusations of “socialist” or “socialized medicine” have simply been byproducts. Vastly more important strategies have included committing and covering up major economic fraud and placing every possible obstacle in the way of all Obama’s initiatives. Healthcare reform has been the most important of these.
When some modest success at economic relief was achieved—even if only within the broken capitalist model—and when the Healthcare Act was ratified and ratified again, the perpetrators of the coup had no recourse but to try to shut down the government altogether. They have done so at great personal risk, and the obvious cracks in their ranks may be what finally cause them to fail.
Or, they may not fail.
I would love us to be able to call things by their real names. I hate it that euphemisms are invented, euphemisms that stand in for and distort reality such that we remain complacent about what’s really being perpetrated and by whom. The expertise with which these linguistic traps are set is mindboggling. And the money spent to promote them seems infinite.
Take the Affordable Care Act. The need for decent and accessible healthcare is evidenced by the huge numbers of people who have already applied, even when it has meant spending hours on slow or faulty websites. The inadequacy of the Act is evidenced by the fact that even if everyone eligible manages to obtain better coverage, approximately thirteen million Americans will still be unable to qualify for, or unable to afford, one of the new plans. These opposing realities speak volumes about how much we need a single payer healthcare system, and about how little President Obama was actually able to get from the powerful pharmaceutical and insurance companies. Yet his watered down plan was still too much for the coup’s perpetrators.
Healthcare coverage is most successful, universal, and costs less in those countries that have chosen to put into place a system like our Medicare. Any attempt to extend that here is met with cries of “socialized medicine” or worse. Recent news stories report fracking gaining traction here in the United States, while the European Union has wisely banned it until further studies can be carried out. Despite rhetoric to the contrary, our government continues to make war in dozens of countries. Military expenditure is exempt from the government shutdown, and most of our elected officials have never even suggested that the money spent on killing might be put to better use in infrastructure, healthcare, education or job creation. Our so-called leaders routinely ignore the dramatic climate change that has already caused such devastation, and that by 2047 is predicted will raise the earth’s temperature to the extent that its coolest days will be hotter than its hottest days are now.
It might be rational to assume that the current coup is being orchestrated by those who understand these things. But no. It is being perpetrated by those who disregard such truths, whose arrogance and greed look only to their own bottom line.
October 11, 2013