Voice of Russia
October 16, 2013
US shutdown a contrived “Punch and Judy” show – Rick Rozoff
Audio
Rather than being ashamed for causing the US federal government to shut down, political forces in the US are using it to advance their own agendas and point fingers at each other, turning it into a veritable “Punch and Judy” show. Voice of Russia regular Rick Rozoff spoke about this and more as a discussion on NATO and US military operations went into the funding aspect with a US government continuing its global military adventures regardless of how hard the people back home have been hit.
Hello, this is John Robles, I am speaking with Rick Rozoff, the owner of Stop NATO and the Stop NATO international mailing list.
Robles: What about the government shutdown in the US? There was this desperate push for this attack on Syria and then, you know, less than a month later the government shut down. Do you think that’s related?
Rozoff: Maybe the scheduling issues on both were related with each other, though… though you want to talk about grandiosity, with the federal government in part is shutting down, I would have to say, I think most people haven’t even noticed that people would appropriate to themselves, arrogate to themselves, divine attributes.
I suppose nobody has really done that since the late Roman emperors, in other words who deified and self-deified, who in at least one instance, deified their own horse, but I am afraid, we are probably dangerously close to that in terms of the grandiosity, the magniloquence of the language, the arrogance of the attitude, the unlimited entitlement and so forth that we were seeing, there’s something almost pharaonic, I mean it’s more the Egypt of the Pharaohs than it is of an alleged republic, some 250 years after its founding.
Robles: What about the government shutdown in the US? There was this desperate push for this attack on Syria and then, you know, less than a month later the government shut down. Do you think that’s related?
Rozoff: Maybe the scheduling issues on both were related with each other, though… though if you want to talk about “grandiosity” with the federal government in part is shutting down, I would have to say, I think most people haven’t even noticed… And it’s almost like the person who has a grossly inflated opinion of him or herself. I think in many ways the federal government is portraying itself as being indispensable. Of course, any federal government is indispensable to a degree. But the fact that life goes on pretty much the same, despite the petty bickering between the two wings of the dominant political model in the United States, which again is a pathetic spectacle. It is a contrived Punch and Judy show, meant, I think, to distract people more than anything else.
It should lead, in a healthy politicized society with an informed and active citizenry, it should result in a sense of repulsion for both political parties and their leaders, to the extent that people would vote them both out and in the next federal election and look for new political mechanisms or formations.
Robles: That would be wonderful.
Rozoff: Yes, it would.
Robles: I wanted to ask you…another question just came to mind when you’re talking about the shutdown of the government, all this bickering and one of the contested points (again we are getting into another topic here but) has been Obama’s, so-called, healthcare.
Now I don’t see it’s being too much of a big help for the poor and those who don’t have health insurance. I don’t know all the details on it, but what would you say, I mean, to the world audience? He is being characterized, as being some sort of socialist or something, because he is attempting to, or at least pretending to attempt to, provide the American people with healthcare.
Can you give our listeners a little bit of an insight there in the US? What’s going on with healthcare and why is that such a contentious issue and what’s the real state of healthcare in the United States? Why is that so important?
Rozoff: Although I have not indeed delved into and tried to understand the Affordable Health Care Act, perhaps to the degree I should have to be honest with you, but as we know it’s lengthy, it’s complicated, it’s laborious, it’s probably the ultimate omnibus bill that has a little bit of everything for everyone.
And it’s hard to disentangle all the threads of Obamacare, it’s also multi-phased, that is with each success year different components of it are activated.
And this year, for example, is the year at which individuals seeking to go to an insurance exchange and negotiate a private insurance contract are supposed not to be disadvantaged because of pre-existing conditions. That’s a very real issue for a lot of people, including relatives of mine.
And I have now in my line of work encountered for the first time patients who are of lower socioeconomic status, fairly destitute, who have local varieties or affiliations with the Affordable Health Care Act, – Obamacare – that permits them health insurance they didn’t have before, something almost comparable with Medicaid, to Public Aid.
But it is so complex that one would have to spend a good deal of time trying to understand it. And what we need is Occam’s Razor; we need something to simplify the process, not complicate it.
In a country where you’ve got scores of hundreds of insurance providers that make things far more expensive and far more complex than they need to be. But just to put the matters in perspective, John, the Obamacare initiative, what became Obamacare, the initiative was evocative of (similar to) what the Clinton administration was attempting to launch in the opening days of their coming into the White House, that is in January of 1993, where Hillary Clinton, the first lady, was touring the country, supposedly gaining feedback from healthcare providers and others about launching a national healthcare plan to include, at that time, perhaps 35 million Americans who had no health care insurance, that figure is probably closer to 50 million right now.
And at the time, even though there was poll after poll suggesting that if you included the Canadian system, the single-payer plan system, without naming it’s Canadian, heaven forbid xenophobic Americans adopting the system from another country. But if you didn’t identify it as being a Canadian system, that a majority of Americans preferred that to any other alternative. However, during the course of the debate on what became the Affordable Health Care Act, Obamacare, that anything like that was not even mentioned, say a comprehensive Medicare-inclusive program or any kind of government-administered, it didn’t even have to be a government insurance policy, just government-administered single-payer plan, a common program, wasn’t even in the running.
So, at the end of the day what you are going to see is tens of millions of uninsured are going to be turned over to the insurance companies, as so many new accounts. That’s the long and short of it
Robles: That’s what I was thinking, I mean that’s why all the insurance companies are involved in this and it’s just a huge cash cow for all of them. Especially if they privatize the whole system.
Why is that the Americans view providing something as necessary and normal to the citizens as healthcare is being some sort of move towards socialism? Not all Americans, but I mean, I’ve seen that accusation all over the place.
Rozoff: We have not progressed at all from, I remember as a teenager listening to former Alabama governor George Wallace running as a third-party candidate in 1968, denouncing “international communism and creeping socialism at home.” I recall it.
There of course was no creeping socialism and certainly there isn’t now. The kind of Keynesian, modest attempts at a welfare state that were implemented under the Truman, or the Kennedy or Johnson administrations are long past, I mean they are discarded for decades.
So the idea that anything that the federal government does is socialism is ludicrous of course.
For example, the bailout of the banks and General Motors and so forth was denounced by certain demagogues in the United States as being socialism. When you bailout the worst representatives, which are considered to be, you know, of rapacious capitalism and you bail them out with public monies which is to say, working peoples’ tax-dollars, and that become socialism – and that’s socialism in reverse. It’s the opposite of socialism.
Robles: Yeah…If we could back to Libya, there has been several events recently in Libya: the kidnapping of the Prime Minister, the kidnapping of this freedom-fighter turned Al Qaeda terrorist and various other events that are taking place and I think a spiral into more instability, because the situation there is getting worse. Can you comment on that?
This was supposed to be another US intervention to get rid of another horrible regime, that has resulted in another destroyed, devastated and completely unstable country. However the Central Bank, and the oil trade were taken over and the oil trade continued in dollars, and the trade from the Central Bank continued in dollars, which I think was the main goal there in Libya. If you could comment on the continuing situation in Libya and how NATO is involved?
Rozoff: That’s revelation to me by the way about the stock exchange and the bank…it doesn’t surprise me, but that’s fascinating, isn’t it?
Robles: Anyway, back to destabilized countries, interventions and continuing incursions, please. Sorry.
Rozoff: I mean your description of the scenario or the model is perfectly accurate and it could apply equally to the former Yugoslavia or to Libya, with the necessary changes perhaps to countries like Ivory Coast, Macedonia and others, Iraq, where the US supports what are clearly unprovoked armed attacks by insurgents who are in most instances based in outside countries, usually contiguous ones but not necessarily.
And then they launch what are just murderous raids inside the country. When the government then takes measures to protect the civilian population and government personnel, including elementary letter carriers or schoolteachers or police officers, they are then accused of disproportionate use of force of gross human rights violations. And then the US increasingly now and in recent years under the so-called Responsibility to Protect proviso then interferes and intervenes militarily on behalf of these armed brigands and bandits, calling them rebels in most cases, and that what’s happened in Libya.
So what you had was, for 19 days, the fairly recently inaugurated US Africa Command, that’s the first overseas regional military command created by the United States since the end of the Cold War ,we should note, has to then be tried out, has to be tested. And it was, for 19 days they launched so-called Operation Odyssey Dawn and absolutely blistered Libya with Tomahawk cruise missile attacks, bombing raids, Hellfire missiles from drones, without any…long surpassing any pretense of their intervening to protect the civilian population.
And then NATO picks up, under Operation Unified Protector and launches something like 30,000 air sorties over the country, almost 10,000 combat sorties. This is small country of six million people. And this goes on for six months of concentrated NATO air bombardment. And the end result is, not surprisingly, people like ourselves warned people exactly what was going to come out of this, which is what we see now. The country is divided into three basically, based on tribal and other differences, that rival militias and armed groupings that may vary from day to day in terms of their allegiance or composition fighting over the spoils.
But at the same time again NATO has reiterated, just in recent weeks, in the last two or three weeks NATO has reiterated, they’re prepared (NATO is prepared) to provide military training and “guidance” to the armed forces of Libya. Well, there are no forces of Libya, you indicated that in your comment.
What you have instead is something almost like the Thirty Years’ War in Europe in the early 1600s, rival groups of looters fighting for dominance in a given area.
You were listening to the interview with Mr. Rick Rozoff, a regular contributor to the VoR and the owner and manager of Stop NATO website and international mailing list. You can find part 1 of this interview at voiceofrussia.com. Thanks for listening and as always I wish you the best wherever you may be.
Source