My latest piece is up at Global Comment. Some thoughts on healthcare, freelancing, racism at town halls, and equality.
For a country that relies on the bootstrap myth, the U.S.A. certainly has a health care system that punishes people who attempt to live that way. The self-employed, the small business owner, and most especially the scraping-by creative types—artists, designers, freelance journalists—have no easy way to get health insurance. We are stuck buying our own care on the “free” market, where a single person has very little bargaining power.
On Tuesday, September 1st, I became one of America’s 46 million uninsured. I have a graduate degree, a decent amount of published writing, and multiple regular freelance clients. There is a better-than-average possibility that I could pay my bills with my writing, except for that one problem. A survey by AHIP, the national organization of health insurance providers, reports that I can assume to pay an average premium of $4734 in New York state, where I reside.
Paul Krugman explains that employer-based health insurance is regulated by the government. Corporations can get tax advantages for providing health care for employees; benefits are not considered taxable income, so companies pay less in wages and make it up in health care. Krugman notes, “[T]o get that tax advantage employers have to follow a number of rules; roughly speaking, they can’t discriminate based on pre-existing medical conditions or restrict benefits to highly paid employees.”
Campus Progress reports that only 60% of the population is covered by employer-provided health care. 26 million small business owners or their employees remain uninsured despite having a steady source of income—because it simply costs too much.
I really enjoyed this conversation–there was much more we could’ve talked about, but we discussed the problems with environmentalism for its own sake, local economies, politics, how to save journalism, Karl Marx, corporate libertarianism, and centralized currency. His book Life, Inc. covers a lot more ground, and I’m not exaggerating when I say I think it should be required reading. It comes out June 2, and in honor of Rushkoff’s premise, you should get it from your local bookstore.
Here’s an excerpt from the interview, and the video preview for the book. Check it out.
S: A lot of the things that you mention as solutions, like buying local, are being tossed around now because they’re environmentally friendly, but you talk about them as good in themselves, because they connect you to the place where you live and the people that you know.
DR: Right. Which would I rather do? Hang out with these pretty girls on an organic farm, get some really bright gorgeous chard, or go into the fluorescent-lit A&P and push a cart around with a bunch of bored people? It becomes an easy choice when you think about it from a sensual level, rather than just an intellectual level. I’m trying to show people that I’m not asking them to live an ascetic life of renunciation and denial, but actually a much more abundant life of fun and pleasure.
When people are doing stuff out of guilt, which is what people get from the sort of Al Gore/”Inconvenient Truth” method of environmentalism or the Noam Chomsky approach to politics and economics, you get the feeling that you have to hole up somewhere and not consume anything. There’s this false dichotomy set up between doing it for the world OR having fun.
S: You talk about the connection to work, whether it’s on a farm or whatever you do—when I say it that way it almost sounds like the classic Marxist argument, that people are alienated from their work.
DR: Marx really did get a lot of it. It got used in some really silly ways and was a terrible basis for a movement. That’s why in the book I speak out against movements in general—you join this whole big thing and then the movement itself becomes a distraction from whatever’s really going on.
It’s been a bit since I’ve done this, since I’ve been unholy busy, but here it is.
1. La Lubu has a comment on Octo’s Feministe post that says a lot of what I was trying to say below far better than I did. Octo also linked to this post at La Lubu’s blog that, well, yeah. Because without the basics, we can’t do any of it.
2. And Octo yet again has a thought-provoking post, this time on individualism. She’s seriously on a roll over there, and instead of freaking out because she’s violating lefty dogma, take a minute to think about it. Then think about what La Lubu said. Then…synthesize?
6. Debi has a round-up of things you can DO. She has lots of other goodness, too, including a big kiss-my-ass to everyone who’s treating her like a wayward child. Rock on, Debi. And thanks for the Arcade Fire.
7. The Jaded Hippy actually went to see Tropic Thunder to tell us all about it. Frankly, no matter how much Robert Downey, Jr. was involved, I wouldn’t have been interested in that movie before I heard anything about protests about its racism and ableism. And she’s aware that she’s white and able-bodied. Something to think about, especially in terms of the successful-satire post above.
“We have lost the relative strength and security that the old moral codes guaranteed our loves either by forbidding them or determining their limits. Under the crossfire of gynecological surgery rooms and television screens, we have buried love within shame for the benefit of pleasure, desire, if not revolution, evolution, planning, management–hence for the benefit of Politics. Until we discover under the rubble of those ideological structures — which are nevertheless ambitious, often exorbitant, sometimes altruistic–that they were extravagant or shy attempts intended to quench a thirst for love. To recognize this does not amount to a modest withdrawal, it is perhaps to confess to a grandiose pretension. Love is the time and space in which ‘I’ assumes the right to be extraordinary. Sovereign yet not individual. Divisible, lost, annihilated; but also, and through imaginary fusion with the loved one, equal to the infinite space of superhuman psychism. Paranoid? I am, in love, at the zenith of subjectivity.”
I started to think about this stuff the other day when talking with my mother about Michael Phelps. See, I love to see people excel at things. I like athletic competition of many sorts because I like to see what people can do when they really put themselves to it, and yes, I believe that some of that is innate–I don’t think that everyone could be Michael Phelps. Or Georges St. Pierre. Or Serena Williams.
I tend towards socialism in my personal philosophy not because I want to see everyone exactly the same–the “vanilla world” argument or the Harrison Bergeron one, depending on which angle you come from–but precisely because I think humans are such beautiful, individual things and I think that with the basics provided for, we could all be free to develop in whichever ways we wanted to. I want to see everyone able to reach their potential. And I think that if we didn’t have to worry so much about making a living, we’d be able to.
Octo has an excellent post up at Feministe about being a capitalist. I agree with many of her points, and of course disagree on the basic one–I’m not a capitalist. I’m in graduate school in part because I fled the retail world because I hated working for nothing but money. I made good money for a while. I could be running the entire business by now, and I could own my house and be well on my way to financial security, but I gave it up for a job I love (as a grad assistant) learning about things I love, writing all the time, and living in a city I love (while cheating on my city with THE city, NY).
I beat myself up constantly because I’m 28 and I’m already interviewing people who are younger than I am and already have what I want in life. I wish that I hadn’t made decisions based around money. I wish I’d been able to just hole up somewhere and write until I was good enough at it to make a living at it.
And I’m privileged. Most people wouldn’t have even been able to make the choices I did. Capitalism tends to tell us that if we’re good enough, we’ll get what we deserve. It just takes work, right? Yeah, George W. Bush is a good enough argument for that system being completely broken (though one could say that Barack Obama is a good argument for that system working, but we’ll see how November turns out, eh?).
There’s been plenty of talk about the Chinese athletes and the Chinese system leading up to the Beijing games, and hell, we can even look back at the parable that is the Miracle on Ice (posited of course as the victory of Us over Them in the Cold War, because the Soviet hockey team was supported by the state and the US team was a rag-tag bunch of athletes who hated each other–and a bunch of privileged college kids). Read this mostly-related post about the relative ages of women gymnasts, too.
This post isn’t really anything but me thinking out loud. It doesn’t offer any coherent arguments, so please don’t even try to poke holes in it. I just think…governments would serve us better providing things that we need, rather than trying to control what we do and say, and certainly better than blathering about what other governments shouldn’t do.
