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Ted Cruz 11/19/2013 9:43:35 AM
What was that filibuster really about?
Education is Wasted On the Clueless
Senator Ted Cruz was recently in the news for filibustering against Obamacare for a near record 21 hours. Most of the time he ranted about the Alternative Health Care law, but he also threw in readings from “Sam I Am” and Ayn Rand’s ATLAS SHRUGGED, which he recommended to fellow conservatives. In one of Rand’s books, corporate executives go on strike to teach those mangy workers, who had the gall to go on strike, a lesson.
Ted was born in Canada; his father fought for Castro in Cuba, before realizing Castro was a communist; afterwards he denounced the dictator and emigrated to the Americas. Cruz’s mother was born in America so Cruz apparently is a citizen, although his father was not naturalized until 2005. Cruz attended Princeton and Harvard Law School where he was principal editor of the Harvard Law Review, something he has in common with Barack Obama. He was also a law clerk for William Rehnquist, the chief justice of the Surpreme Court, and during undergraduate school he was an excellent debater, winning several national accolades. Later he became solicitor general for the state of Texas under George W. Bush. There were periods where he worked as a corporate lawyer for several law firms. How does someone with this background become a 19th century throwback? Apparently he’s never heard of Upton Sinclair’s THE JUNGLE, in which capitalists paid their employees less than a living wage so they couldn’t look for another job or the Triangle Shirt Waist Company where young girls were paid between seven and twelve dollars a week Monday through Friday nine hours a day and seven on Saturday, constantly hounded by a foreman who would not let them use the bathroom; if they broke a needle or a machine element they had to pay for them out of their meager salaries. When a careless foreman dropped a cigarette in a wastebasket, the place burned to the ground and over a hundred women and twenty or so men were either suffocated or jumped to their deaths. We’ve come full circle. Economists say workers need $15 an hour for a living wage; yet, the highest in the country is only $9.15. Meanwhile the stock market roars toward 16,000 and Morgan Chase bank can afford to pay a 13 billion dollar fine for defrauding investors and mortgage holders and still make billions in profit. Cruz is also a devotee of perennial libertarian presidential candidate, Lyndon LaRouche, who was apparently responsible for the Hitler moustaches displayed by Tea Party demonstrators during the Health Care debate. Lyndon isn’t mentioned much these days because, like Ronald Reagan, he was once a democrat.
Another Cruz hero, Ron Paul, has been accused of racism against blacks and anti-Semitism. In a newsletter he published he referred to blacks as animals. Paul denies being responsible for any racist or anti-Semitic remarks in the newsletter, but as the conservatives say about Obama administration fumbles, “The buck stops here” and he was the publisher.
Libertarians espouse the notion that Americans should be able to do whatever they want as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else. Well, they oppose gun control, and we know that 30,000 people die every year as a result of accidents, suicide, or murder caused by guns. Libertarians also support legalization of marijuana. I don’t know that I disagree with that, but how many blacks are in jail these days for possessing or selling the stuff? Would libertarians agree that they should be set free?
Libertarians would like the American economy to return to the gold standard, which would severely limit the money supply. If we sold all the gold in Fort Knox it wouldn’t make a dent in the national debt, but we couldn’t afford to purchase more without exponentially increasing the national debt, which conservatives now seem to hate. When their president was in office, they didn’t have a problem with it. Reagan was responsible for four trillion and the Two Bushes another eight trillion or so. When Obama took office he was saddled with a trillion dollar budget deficit. Bush’s budget director tried to deny this by not counting the two wars or the money they borrowed/appropriated from social security. The gold standard was discontinued for a reason; it’s outlined in William Jennings Bryan’s great speech “The Cross of Gold” if you’d care to read it.
Cruz and other corporate supporters also disdain the Federal Reserve Board, which has kept inflation low ever since Reagan left office. It was at 22% at the time he was elected, and he had to raise taxes in order to alleviate the economic situation.
A telling point is that after Cruz’s filibuster, he voted for the bill to fund the government. So what was the filibuster about? Personally I think he just wanted to show that he was better at it than his fellow libertarian, Rand Paul. In other words he was just showing off or taking advantage of another opportunity to rant against Obamacare, something he knows we need. Insurance companies are showing their true colors by cancelling independent polices and replacing them with more expensive ones which cover areas the old ones didn’t. Some state, even Missouri, are filing law suits, claiming the new policies don’t mention the Affordable Care option, which is now available to at least 80% of those without heath insurance. Have you seen how much it costs to walk in the door of your local ER? I suffered from a recent dog bite and the clinic wasn’t open. They charged Medicare over $600 for a tetanus shot and some Bactine for broken skin.
And that’s because so many people use it who don’t have insurance. We pay that $600 and the government pays it, making the debt higher and higher.
