Subject: [big campaign] New Huff Post from Creamer-Fire Tragedy Symbolizes Republican Vision of Governme
From: [email-masked]
To: [email-masked], [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 2010 09:27:30 -0400 (EDT)
List-Id: <bigcampaign.googlegroups.com>

Obion  County  Fire Tragedy Symbolizes Tea-Party-Republican Vision of  
Government 

This week, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann reported the story of the Cranick  family
’s house fire. When the family’s Obion County, Tennessee house caught fire 
on the night of  October 5th, the fire department from the nearby town 
failed to  respond since the Cranick’s had forgotten to pay a $75 fee.  
Firefighters finally responded to a call  by Cranick’s neighbor, who had paid his 
fee.  They sprayed the property line to  protect the home of the neighbor and 
watched at the Cranick’s home burned to the  ground. 
The firefighters had been ordered not to intervene to save the Cranick’s  
house – even though they were already at the scene – because, apparently, it 
 would have encouraged others not to pay the $75.   
The Obion  County fire incident is  symbolic of the moral and economic 
bankruptcy of the Tea-Party-Republican vision  of government and the economy.  
And  it poses the stark choice facing American voters in the Mid-Term  
elections. 
The  Tea-Party-Republicans – including the Republican Congressional 
leadership – talk  incessantly about how government services should be slashed.  
They believe that society should  maximize the extent to which each individual 
is responsible to fend for  themselves.  They claim that is more  “efficient
”.  The Obion County fire illustrates clearly why that  assertion is simply 
wrong. 
Competitive markets are extremely efficient at encouraging innovation,  
increasing productivity and distributing goods and services in many arenas.  
But there are other arenas where history  and experience have demonstrated 
that it is both more efficient and more humane  to provide goods and services 
through government – which, as Congressman Barney  Frank likes to say, is the 
name we give to the things we have chosen to do  together.  
The core difference in values between the right wing and progressives is  
whether we create a society where we’re all in this together, or all in this  
alone.  
Mainstream  Americans understand that there are a number of areas where it 
makes much more  economic and moral sense to guarantee goods and services to 
everyone in the  society and ask our citizens to finance them by paying 
their fair share of taxes  rather than paying for them “ala carte”.  
We came to the conclusion decades ago that government should provide  every 
child with an education, and our public schools have provided the  
foundation of American economic prosperity.  
We use government to provide infrastructure necessary to support our  
economy – roads, bridges, harbors, airports, sewer and water systems, and street  
lights.   
We provide common parks and recreation facilities that are open to public  
use.  
Government  provides for our common defense and our domestic security.  We 
don’t require each person to hire a  private army or security firm to defend 
his or her home.  That would be stupid, wasteful and lead  to anarchy.  
Government is particularly efficient when it comes to providing social  
insurance – like Social Security and Medicare.  The overhead for these programs 
is tiny  compared with other insurance programs (including private health 
insurance  plans) run by the private sector.  They have covered everyone 
reliably and effectively for generations.  That’s why they have virtually 
unanimous  public support. 
At long last, with the health care reform bill, America joined  the company 
of every other industrial nation, in understanding that it is more  
efficient and more humane for government to assure that everyone in society has  
access to health care.  Of course  one of the signals that prompted this 
change was the sheer fact that private  market health insurance caused our health 
care cost to skyrocket to 50% more per  person than any other nation – with 
worse outcomes.  Almost certainly, the Affordable Care  Act is just the 
first step in reform, since a public option will certainly be  needed to 
ultimately bring our spending in line with other nations. But it was a  critical 
first step. 
Of course, most everywhere in America, we provide fire protection  through 
the government.  We all pay  – through our taxes – to assure that if the 
time ever comes when we need to call  911 because of a fire, no one will have 
to check to see if we have paid a fee, a  clerical error on payment records 
will not cost us our homes, and firefighters  will not stand by and watch 
our homes and lives go up in smoke. And of course we  also support common 
protection because fire doesn’t necessarily stop at the  property line – just 
ask Ms O’Leary of the legendary Chicago Fire.  
The Obion county story demonstrates what happens when we forget that  
government – financed by common taxes – is the most efficient provider of so  
many goods and services.   
It makes no economic sense to allow what is likely a multi-hundred  
thousand dollar home to be consumed by flames because a failure to pay a $75  fee.  
Now, either the insurance  company or the Cranick’s will have to build a 
brand new home in its place.  Their former home was wasted because of the 
absurdity of the  system that had been set up to protect it.   
That same absurdity is implicit in so many of the other Republican  
economic positions.  Its ultimate  expression is the Republican desire to repeal 
health care reform and return us  to an out of control system run by private 
health insurance companies that has  cost us 50% more than any other country. 
 That system is wasting trillions of dollars that come out of the pockets  
of middle class Americans – just to allow private insurance companies and 
their  top executives to make obscene amounts of money.  
And with fire protection and health care, the moral consequences are also  
clear.  Bad enough that someone’s  home was allowed to be destroyed because 
of the failure to pay a $75 fee.  Would the firefighters have been allowed  
to intervene if the family pets were inside the house – what about a child?  
The Republicans want to return us to a health care system that allowed  
for-profit health insurance companies to brazenly make those same choices  
everyday. They made life and death decisions that determined whether people were 
 treated or not – and often whether they lived or not – using their own 
bottom  line as their only real guide.  They  wouldn’t cover you because you 
have a “pre-existing condition”. They would cut  you off when you got sick.  
They  hired armies of bureaucrats who do nothing but deny claims.  Some of 
the worst of these abuses are  now history because of health insurance 
reform.  If the Republicans have their way, those  new protections will be 
repealed.  
But let’s be clear. The people behind the “drown government in the bath  
tub” politics are not the kind of folks who run around in three corner hats 
and  George Washington wigs.  The Tea  Party rank and file is not the 
principal engine of anti-government fervor.  The money for the ads and the buses 
and  the radio shows are provided by big corporations – by people like Rupert 
Murdoch  of Fox and David and Charles Koch.  
The Koch brothers own  virtually all of Koch Industries, a conglomerate 
whose annual revenues exceed a  hundred billion dollars and is the second 
largest privately owed company in the  country.  
The Koch’s combined fortune of thirty five billion dollars is exceeded  
only by those of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.  
They may be libertarian true believers.  But the Kochs would also benefit  
mightily by making government small and toothless.  They would benefit more 
than most anyone  from lowering tax rates for the wealthy.  They have a 
massive stake in lowering the standards for environmental  regulation since 
their oil companies and other holdings have made them one of  the top ten air 
polluters in the United States.   
The same goes for the many funders of these ultra-right causes.  The money 
comes from very wealthy  families and massive corporations. For them the 
right wing ideology is nothing  more than a vindication for their own wealth – 
and a justification for their own  economic self interest. And the fact is 
that their economic self interests  conflict with those of the vast majority 
of their fellow citizens.  
Progressives cannot be cowed by the anti-government propaganda that spews  
forth from these giant economic interests even when it’s dressed up in the  
clothing of the small number of ordinary Americans who have become Tea Party 
 activists. 
In fact the Cranicks of Obion County Tennessee are truly emblematic of  the 
victims of the Koch brother’s vision of America. The  Cranicks are victims, 
as are the eight million Americans who lost their jobs  because of the 
greed and recklessness of the big Wall Street banks  -- because of the traders 
and CEO’s that  ride around in corporate jets and demand that smaller and 
smaller quantities of  their billions be taxed to pay for our common welfare.  
The choice we face on November 2nd is between the interests of  the 
Cranicks and the interests of the Kochs.  
Hopefully the fire in Obion County Tennessee will provide the light  
necessary to illuminate the true consequences of the Tea Party Republican  agenda. 
 And it may help provide the  spark that is needed to help mobilize 
millions of Americans to vote November  2nd and reject that agenda at the polls. 
Robert Creamer is a  long-time political organizer and strategist, and 
author of the recent  book:  Stand Up Straight: How  Progressives Can Win, 
available on _Amazon.com._ 
(http://www.amazon.com/Listen-Your-Mother-Straight-Progressives/dp/0979585295/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213241439&sr=8-1
)  

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