Neither was the HMO insurance industry cheap. What they bought was direct access to the US Treasury and the involuntary premiums paid by young wage-earners that were supposed to pay for health care in their “golden years”; the power to force retired citizens into their ranks as the price of obtaining the care their Medicare taxes had already paid for; and the power to set and collect the additional premiums seniors will be forced to pay to get the benefits that they thought they had earned in a lifetime of labor.

As the Senate was voting on the bill the Republican’s master salesman, George Bush, was off on his vacation from running the war and the economy, interrupted by his rounds of fundraisers – collecting the bounty flowing from this latest sale in the Republican program of selling America.

It started by selling the revenue stream to the wealthy through tax cuts. It continued with the sale of American foreign policy to the denizens of the oil patch boardrooms and the Halliburton-Bechtel cartel; the selling the military to Boeing and the Carlisle Group; and the National Forests to the Weyerhaeuser and the lumber industry. Only the sale of the nation’s energy policy to Mobil and ADM is yet to be accomplished to complete the Republican plan to imprint the 21st Century with the images of the robber barons of the 19th. In the New Republican Century the patricians of affluence will reap the benefits while the
costs of privilege are born by the plebeians sweat and desperation.

That is the central stake in the election of 2004. Will the some of the people who can be fooled all of the time dominate the polls and let George Bush and the Republican Congress complete the process of selling out America? Will the rest of America stand up and send a message to the corporate board rooms that the Enronization of America is over and she is no longer for sale?