Instead of blogging and tweeting, I spent most of Wednesday hanging out with Miles Solay, the singer from Outernational. A mutual friend, Casey, introduced us a few days ago and Miles reminded me a lot of Mick Jones when Mick was a kid. And Outernational totally loves the Clash. So instead of doing my work we sat around swapping music stories, playing favorite Bob Dylan songs and talking about Calle 13 (who he's on his way down to Mexico City to record with this weekend-- just one duet for Outernational's new album). Anyway, turns out my old friend Robert Greenwald did a video for an awesome Outernational cover of Woody Guthrie's, "Deportees," the song up top. Tom Morello's singing on it with them. It reminded me of a nasty, bad-natured, even ill-tempered and disrespectful, tweet I sent out to Florida's right-wing extremist senator Marco Rubio earlier today, this one:
The reason I said something that awful to a fellow American is because the U.S. has treated Cuban refugees in a very special way. Where my ancestors, like many thousands of European Jews fleeing fascist persecution, were barred from entering the U.S.-- all my relatives are in Brazil-- anti-Castro Cubans were always welcomed with open arms here, to put it mildly. That has a lot to do with why the Florida Republican Party is a neo-fascist bastion and why politics in that state has become so weird (and not "weird" in a Mitt Romney kind of way). As ThinkProgress reported yesterday, Rubio clearly has no understanding of America and harbors a fascist vision for our great anti-fascist democracy. He dismissed the importance of programs like Medicare and Social Security during a speech at the Reagan Presidential Library, arguing these initiatives “weakened us as people”:
These programs actually weakened us as a people. You see, almost forever, it was institutions in society that assumed the role of taking care of one another. If someone was sick in your family, you took care of them. If a neighbor met misfortune, you took care of them. You saved for your retirement and your future because you had to. We took these things upon ourselves in our communities, our families, and our homes, and our churches and our synagogues. But all that changed when the government began to assume those responsibilities. All of a sudden, for an increasing number of people in our nation, it was no longer necessary to worry about saving for security because that was the government’s job.
Watch this Cuban fascist trying to sneak his anti-American propaganda into the political dialogue:
Americans may have certainly taken care of each other in the absence of formalized access to affordable health care, but that support did little to drastically ameliorate the fears and anxieties of seniors. As Ted Marmor explains in The Politics of Medicare, “The biggest fears included not being able to pay for care and risking turning to children or siblings for help, or it meant relying on the charitable attitude of the doctor or hospital. Most profoundly, it was the sense that illness or injury-- bad enough themselves-- could be disastrous for family finances unless you were lucky enough to have retiree coverage from a union or government plan.”
Indeed, prior to Medicare’s enactment in 1965, “about one-half of America’s seniors did not have hospital insurance,” “more than one in four elderly were estimated to go without medical care due to cost concerns,” and one in three seniors were living in poverty. Today, nearly all seniors have access to affordable health care and only about 14 percent of seniors are below the poverty line.
Even conservative strategist David Frum saw through the lurking dangers hidden in the foreign ideology dripping from Rubio's speech yesterday.
One of the effects of the Tea Party movement is to cut the Republican Party off-- not only from the measured policy preferences of the American people-- but from the Republican Party’s own history. It shrivels the GOP into a party without heroes, or rather a party with only one hero, Ronald Reagan, and otherwise a long succession of false and deluded leaders.
And it points Republicans to a doomed future of continuing failure and recrimination. After all, if almost every elected Republican leader of the past 100 years save Reagan fell short of conservative principle, then it seems overwhelmingly probable that the next Republican leader will also fall short of conservative principle. In which case, conservative principle has become a vehicle for guaranteeing eternal conservative disappointment and alienation. Unhealthy, no?
I can't help but think if Cuban fascists hadn't been coddled by the U.S. and had had to work for immigration and citizenship status like everyone else, they wouldn't have clung to the inherently anti-American fascism that is the entire hallmark of Marco Rubio's disgraceful political career.
When Miles left my place today I opened my e-mail and found a video of Rubio's speech along with plea to send him money to help elect more right-wingers to the Senate. "The debates going on in Washington today are not much different than the challenges Ronald Reagan confronted and overcame," his e-mail stated. "We can overcome them again, but we'll need to start by electing more conservative leaders to the United States Senate. Your contribution to our Reclaim America PAC will help us support limited government candidates for the United States Senate who share our common principles, our view of the proper role of government..."On the other hand, if you're not an advocate of Rubio's fascist political ideology and you support democracy, equality, freedom and human dignity, there actually is a way to make the Senate a better place-- by replacing corporate shills like Rubio and his cronies with tribunes of the people... like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren-- and you can do that here.
So what does this have to do with Outernational? Did you listen to the song? Listen again.
