Freefall

“This is a world that only values narrow, selfish interests; isolated, competitive individuals; finance capital; the reign of commodities; and the alleged ‘natural laws’ of free-market fundamentalism.”  Henry A. Giroux

I just watched my beloved Chelsea lose to Liverpool. My team is in free-fall, a consistent loser, even on home ground.

And Paul Ryan is Speaker of the House of Representatives. Talk about free-fall. It’s bad when it happens to a football club, even worse when it happens to a country. We’re there now, locked in that downward spiral. Like all the GOP candidates for president, Paul Ryan is a hypocrite who constantly yammers on about cutting the size of government, yet gives the Department of Defense and the entire national security apparatus a completely free pass from the budget axe, as if those entities are somehow separate from the “government.”

The mainstream press – nothing if not a reliable source of misinformation – anointed Ryan as a budget “expert,” an exceptional wonk with his head wrapped around the gargantuan federal budget, yet all Ryan does is what all Republicans of his stripe do: spin whopping lies about the looming fiscal danger of Social Security and Medicare, and insist, against all evidence, that lowering the tax burden for corporations and the wealthy will produce, as if by magic, prosperity for the rest of us. These tropes are old, false, and dangerous to the welfare of the majority of citizens, but we hear them again and again, like a mantra.

It amuses me when I hear politicians covered by taxpayer-provided platinum-plated medical insurance and generous retirement plans, demand deep cuts in Social Security and Medicare benefits. If men like Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio and Rand Paul abhor government so much, why do they accept the benefits that come with their offices? Insisting that average Americans, folks like you and me, work until we’re 70 before collecting Social Security gives them no pause whatsoever. And they never talk about where all the jobs for these codgers will come from.

According to the mainstream media shills, Marco Rubio “won” the last GOP debate and is now surging, while Trump and Bush are losing traction. How any single candidate can be named the winner of a ridiculous lie-fest is beyond me, but I’m not surprised that Rubio is the latest darling and the focus of renewed attention; I’m sure the big brains behind the GOP are thinking that Rubio, being younger and of Cuban heritage, has the best chance of attracting Latino voters in the general election. This is unlikely, but make no mistake about this: Rubio is simply a younger face on a failed ideology.

My football team lost to one of its most bitter rivals, but I can live with it because football is just a game. The fact that my country has lost its way and can’t locate its soul is far more troubling.