There can be no greater separation between whatever we call progressives and whatever we call conservatives than the feelings about billion dollar corporations. Conservatives fought to give those corporations rights to free speech where progressives normally view those corporations with some level of skepticism or scorn. At the very least, there is a constant battle to get those corporations to pay their fair share in taxes.

This is why the battle over Disney is such a unique battle. No single quote has had a greater impact on the past forty years of politics than Ronald Reagan’s quote from his first inaugural address. “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” No other line quite captures the sentiment of conservatism. That quote gets magnified when we deal with corporations the size of Disney.

Disney has been given all kinds of perks and favors over the years. The idea is that Disney creates more for the economy and stimulates more growth than the government ever could. So, the best thing a government can do is take a back seat and let Disney do their thing. Naturally, we will ignore that while Disney is a fine place to visit (our family has been there three times in the past six years) and they have stimulated the economy in general, as an employer their spoils aren’t exactly distributed equitably.

Such is the nature of these things. A good progressive will take the Reagan quote and insert the word corporations for the word government. It’s not that we don’t want them to exist. It’s that we want them to be tempered and regulated so that their excesses can be reined in. We want workers treated fairly. We want consumers to be protected. We want the effects of the greed that happens naturally to be limited.

What gets lost for the current crop of conservatives is that corporations have no moral compass. They can’t. As much as Citizens United wants us to believe that they are people we know they are not. They are about pure profit motive. They want to sell my daughter a “pride donut” while also seemingly catering to “family values.” They want all of our money.

So, I’m not sure what Desantis and the other movement conservatives were thinking when they came out against LGTBQ+ individuals. When they passed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill what exactly did they think would happen? Did they think Disney would purposely cut off a sizable portion of it’s customer base? Disney has made its billions by being all things to all people. It can appear to be wholesome and family friendly and also friendly to people of all lifestyle choices. They’ve made their way through that mine field. They are incredibly successful because they have done this.

So, now conservatives are going against their core beliefs. They are punishing a corporation for taking a stand. It puts progressives into the uncomfortable position of supporting a corporation like Disney. In the end, corporations are the same. They are all things to all people. They are signs of the ultimate greed and avarice driving a wedge through our society and environment. They are welcoming to all people because all currency spends the same no matter who it comes from. Corporations can and will be both. They can because they can’t afford not to be. At least the successful ones like Disney can’t.

A few days ago I talked about the death of the Republican party. I see Republicans everywhere. What in the hell am I talking about? Obviously, what you are seeing could be classified as political zombies. So, it becomes important to provide just one example of how the lack of a viable conservative alternative is impacting citizens on a regular basis.

The economy has done better under Democrats than under Republicans since World War II. You could probably go further back than that, but if we go back beyond FDR we run into problems of how we can define Democrats and Republicans. Part of that can be in how we even look at problems. One of those problems has been the rising costs of college and the college loan debt in the country. Conservatives seem to have the same outlook as they do on big business. That’s because college is big business. In Texas, they lifted caps on tuition. Not surprisingly, those costs have gone up to what we see now.

If you compare that with trends in education overall you can’t help but notice the gap. For those that don’t want to look at the data too hard, I would simply point out that Texas spends somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 per student each year. Obviously, exact figures fluctuate, but it is fairly staggering when you think about all that includes.

I’m officially not a classroom teacher. I am a support facilitator. I go into other teacher’s classrooms. Our campus doesn’t even have anyone that is profoundly disabled. Other campuses have to include support facilitators and those that provide more invasive support. These are things that most colleges and universities don’t provide. That all factors into that cost per student.

If you take a look at the costs for people to attend college in Texas you will notice that only one school came in below 23,000 per year when all expenses were considered. Multiply that four or five times and you’ll see the total cost of a degree. As you might suspect, the number of people that have 92,000 dollars lying around is between slim and none.

So, keep in mind that the cost of college is more than double that of public schools when they don’t even include special education services in most instances. They don’t provide free and reduced lunch. There certainly aren’t nearly as many guidance counselors and they really don’t employ assistant principals. The battle over student loan debt seems to be ignoring the most important element in most instances. Why in all holy hell is college so damn expensive in the first place?

A vibrant conservative party could provide some answers to this dilemma. Instead, they stoke passions amongst the old and inspire them to go into one of those “back in my day” kind of diatribes. I paid off my loans. Why in the hell should they simply erase the debt now? Well, we could start off by pointing out that college costs have skyrocketed over the past 50 years.

You lose your conservative card if you give anyone anything (unless they represent big business). So, it is not surprising that they would push back against retiring college debt. Yet, there seems to be no effort to actually provide any solutions to the problem. Instead, they let the “free market” decide and the free market is what ballooned costs in the first place.

The question is whether higher education is something worth investing in or whether it should continue to go to the highest bidder. Some people might consider free tuition to be a bridge too far. That’s certainly a reasonable opinion, but those that shoot down ideas should be coming up with some of their own.

Yesterday, some readers were very passionate about vaccine mandates in the wake of the news that Pfizer has had some successful tests of children between the ages of five and eleven. We obviously aren’t there yet, but hopefully we will have a vaccine for all school aged children before the end of the year. This of course begged the question: why aren’t all elementary schools and daycare centers mandating that every adult in the building take the vaccine? Forcing everyone else around them to be fully vaccinated just seems to make the most sense.

That conversation morphed into a conversation as to why we aren’t mandating every abled body adult get the vaccine. The FDA has give full approval to at least one vaccine. We have plenty of it to go around and the vaccine has been free for quite some time.

The Democratic party should be working from a position of strength, but they can’t seem to get out of their own way. Heavy majorities want vaccine mandates. They want a higher minimum wage. They want stiffer environmental protections. They want voting rights protected and expanded. We know all of this. Yet, little seems to happen because some within the party are worried about the fallout.

See, we know a loud minority will protest any of these things. We know this because we’ve seen it before. When President Obama was negotiating the Affordable Care Act, he took very popular planks like a public option off the table. There was no way the Republicans could support it. Except, they didn’t support any of it. They’ve been spending the past ten years trying to get rid of all of it. So, why are we worried about what planks Republicans find objectionable? They find everything objectionable.

Conservatives are up in arms about mandates. It’s antithetical to freedom they say. Except it’s the exact same thing we’ve been doing with other vaccines for decades. In order to attend public school you have to have certain vaccinations or documentation from a doctor of why you cannot comply. There’s none of this “I don’t know what’s in it” or “it’s a way for them to track you.” Sure, there are those that have always believed that, but they had to suffer the consequences of their decision.

The end result this time around is that one of the wealthiest countries in the world has one of the lowest vaccine rates in the developed world. Sure, developing countries lag behind, but they also have institutional barriers to consider. A country without those barriers can’t seem to get to 70 percent in full vaccinations. Sadly, giving people the freedom to choose means too many make the wrong choice.

Whether you mandate it or not, the Tucker Carlson’s and Sean Hannity’s of the world will spew their garbage comparing a government to fascism when doing something we’ve done dozens of times before. You can tiptoe around it or you can simply shove it down their throat. If people are going to complain let’s give them something to complain about. In the meantime, maybe then we can properly protect our children and anyone else that is vulnerable instead of hoping only the idiots weed themselves out of the population.

Do you think Ted Cruz sounds like a delusional lunatic?  Do you, like me, sit slack jawed while listening to the nonsensical tirades of Screwy Louie Gohmert?  Well, I’ve got a piece that will help you understand how we got here.

This is actually from last year, but I re-read this piece from the Washington Monthly and thought it would be a good reminder of how ultra-conservative ideologues went crazy, destroying politics in the US as we knew it.  Most interesting? They did it by adopting tactics used by the Communists in the 30s, 40s, and 50s.  The result is that they have now vilified you, me, and everyone else with whom they disagree, using ever more desperate tactics as demographics and common decency move more and more against them.

 

From late last year, George Packer of the Atlantic summarized the last 60 years of the GOP and nailed it, from pre-Goldwater to the Trump era.  Best quote:

“The corruption of the Republican Party in the Trump era seemed to set in with breathtaking speed. In fact, it took more than a half century to reach the point where faced with a choice between democracy and power, the party chose the latter. Its leaders don’t see a dilemma—democratic principles turn out to be disposable tools, sometimes useful, sometimes inconvenient. The higher cause is conservatism, but the highest is power.”

it gives a blistering picture of what we non-GOPers face against “true believers”.  And it ain’t pretty.