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Most of us can and do. But there have always been those can't or won't. I don't think people should live off the government, but I do think that there needs to be a safty net when it comes to things that are for the public good.
So when 10 million people can afford healthcare in this country but refuse to pay it because they don't want to, they deserve a safety net?
Even this issue regarding pre-existing conditons raises good questions. I know many people who don't purchase health insurance because they don't want to pay the costs and they are healthy and feel nothing will happen to them. However, when these people are involved in a car accident and then suffer a chronic injury that requires several surgeries, they complain about insurance companies' pre-existing conditions. What about the person's responsibility to get health insurance prior to being in an accident. They want it both ways. They want to not pay for health insurance yet they want to be able to buy it when they need it. That's not the point of insurance.
I hope insurance companies eliminate pre-existing conditions because many are born with chronic illnesses and you don't want to see someone die or not able to live because they can't get treated. At the same time, it is annoying that people try to cheat the system by not getting insured and then just showing up to the ER when they need help. And not all of these people are poor who can't afford health insurance. They would rather just buy a new SUV than get health insurance.
2004 AFL-CIO push their way into a Republican field office in Orlando FL, breaking the wrist of one staffer. AFL-CIO member Van Church is unrepentant: "If his wrist was fractured, it's a result of his own actions in jerking the door the way he did."
1999 - During protests by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 1547 against a non-unionized workforce getting a contract, picketers threatened and assaulted workers, spat at them, sabotaged equipment, and shot guns near workers. The Alaska Supreme Court ruled that the union had engaged in "ongoing acts of intimidation, violence, destruction of property".
1999 - Members of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 120 were convicted of striking a worker, and imprisoning another one in a truck trailer.
1998 - Teamsters Orestes Espinosa, Angel Mielgo, Werner Haechler, Benigno Rojas, and Adrian Paez beat, kicked, and stabbed a UPS worker (Rod Carter) who refused to strike, after Carter received a threatening phone call from the home of Anthony Cannestro, Sr., president of Teamsters Local 769.
1998 - During the Communications Workers of America U.S. West strike a worker was threatened with a gun, and a manager was hit in the head with a rock.
1990 - on the first day of The New York Daily News strike, trucks were attacked with stones and sticks. One union member was immediately arrested for transporting Molotov cocktails. Strikers followed replacement laborers and threatened them with baseball bats. Strikers then started threatening newsstands with arson, or stole all copies of the Daily News and burned them in front of the newsstands. Independent sources estimated over a thousand reports of threats. The newspaper recorded over two thousand legal violations. The Police Department, recorded more than 500 incidents. 50 strikers were arrested. Bombings of delivery trucks became common, with 11 strikers arrested on one day in October.
1984 - Taxi driver David Wilkie was killed by NUM strikers while driving a non-striking worker during the UK mining strike
1983 - Eddie York was murdered for crossing a United Mine Workers (UMW) picket line.
1926 - Striking workers derail The Flying Scotsman train with over 100 passengers on board
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Follette_Committee
"Between 1936 and 1941, the [LaFollette Civil Liberties Committee] published exhaustive hearings and reports on the use of industrial espionage, private police systems, strikebreaking services, munitions in industrial warfare, and employers' associations to break strikes and to disrupt legal union activities in other ways."
Last edited by ParkTwain; 09-08-2009 at 03:46 AM..
Someone tell me what should happen to those who WON'T or CAN'T. Do we just let them roam the streets as ferals and hope for the best? Surely y'all have a plan.
Just DON'T YOU DARE point a gun at me (see what happens if you don't pay the IRS) and tell me to fork over some of my hard earned money to foot the bill for those who are truly capable yet are unwilling
Well dramatic yes, but what is, is, and you will continue to pay regardless of how you feel until a solution is discovered. You should probably get to work on that.
To the OP:
You are talking about the sense of individual responsibility and citizenship showed by the elite members of society, including the most wealthy, whose actions have the greatest impact on the most Americans?
The individual responsibility of the political and economic elites in the eyes of the common man took a big hit during the late 19th century, when the richest fellows in the U.S. couldn't restrain themselves from attacking and killing union organizers, winking at racial discrimination, stuffing the poor into workers' tenements, polluting land and rivers on a wide scale, and using underhanded tactics to put competitors out of business. Then you had the absence of restraint by capitalists of all stripes, especially financiers on Wall Street, that led to the financial collapse that turned into the Great Depression (a Repub was President at that time and during the first 2 or 3 years of the Depression). It took a series of Democrat administrations, World War 2, and an assassination or two, for the damage wrought by the Great Depression to be overcome by the nation's political institutions and by its economy restructuring.
who bailed out those crooked wall street gangsters? a democratic congress, that's who! if they didn't bail them out, those wall street crooks would be out of business now and not STILL engaging in more shenanigans!
La Follette Committee - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"Between 1936 and 1941, the [LaFollette Civil Liberties Committee] published exhaustive hearings and reports on the use of industrial espionage, private police systems, strikebreaking services, munitions in industrial warfare, and employers' associations to break strikes and to disrupt legal union activities in other ways."
This healthcare reform thing isn't about the present but about the future, people just don't understand that. Insurance rants will continue to go up without reasoning, it's the best interest for this healthcare reform to take place, to put a limit on things but people just see races, lazy minorities, socialism, no hard work and so forth.
It's true when they say Americans are stupid idiots.
Very true, I'm embarrassed to be a American.
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