Profiteers are wrecking our health and destroying our security.
As Thanksgiving approaches, we should pay homage to the 17th Century Blackwater-like private security firms who made the very first Thanksgiving possible. That's the message from Serviam, a magazine committed to the unstinting defense of private profiteering in every realm of human endeavor. By the magazine's stuffed-turkey logic we should give thanks for all the profiteering and the accountability-killing privatizing that dominates what was once a public sphere. From health care to a mercenary army, profit is alpha and omega, while the moral fabric that holds us together is being ripped apart by pirates. Yes, even our health has been blackwatered. Thank-yous are hardly in order.
The Easter Bunny and be-buckled Puritans have nothing on the blackwater movement when it comes to fantasy, however. Inventing a need for themselves is something of a tradition among mercenary birds-of-prey who somehow get us to stay still while they, all beak and talon, swoop down on our treasuries, our health, and our morality. "Who will guard our diplomats in Iraq if the privateers don't?" they ask self-approvingly. There is a clue in that rhetorical and misleading question to the sorry state of the American health care system, which is entirely dominated by Blackwater-like, privateering insurance companies. "Who will provide health care if you hurt our profits?" insurance company executives and defenders ask. "Our armed forces," should answer the private security executives' question. "Uh, doctors and nurses," should be the answer to the insurance profiteers.
The blackwatering of health care - putting the power in the hands of unaccountable, non-medical, private interests - has taken a deadly toll on our health and lives. We have been so long in the blackwater that we forgot what it would be like to breathe the air of a health care system based on empathy and responsibility, a system that puts citizens' health above private profits.
It's not lost on Blackwater that it will make more money the more dangerous our lives become. That's the logic of the arms industry. War is their profit center. And it's not lost on an insurance industry that the increased fear, imagined and real, of ill health leads to higher premiums and more profits when it is allowed to make its money by denying health care to those who need it most.
The health insurance industry has no more incentive to keep us healthy than Blackwater has in helping us avoid wars.
And the stories they tell us to convince us otherwise have no more reality to them than the Easter Bunny.
At least the Easter Bunny is a cute fiction.
There is certainly nothing 'cute' or 'fictional' about what privatization is doing to us on both these fronts and others. Many lies are told, many laws are made and many others broken with impunity and immunity to get our money. It's Repug policy.
Besides the article ringing quite true, I think the interesting side concept here is that this may be the first time I've seen 'blackwater' used as a verb and an adjective, as in "I been blackwatered! Ooh it hurts!"
No doubt other parts of speech will follow.
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