Your Call Is Important To Us (15 page)

For all the American brag and puff about the 60 percent voter turnout in the 2004 election, the U.S. and Canada have far lower voter turnout rates than most European democracies. (Iceland, with an average voter turnout of 88 percent, is the gold medalist.) And one of the reasons is the perception that it really doesn’t matter. To give Ralph Nader his due, special interests
are
running the political process, and they come in two different flavors, which gives everyone something to bitch about. You can write off the government because they’re a bunch of do-gooders wasting tax dollars on the quaint old New Deal, or you can shrug and give up because they are a wholly owned corporate subsidiary. Either way, it’s out of your hands and way over your head. While the 60 percent voter turnout in the 2004 election is a marked improvement over the 50 percent that dragged themselves to the polls in 2000, one group of potential voters remained resolutely apathetic in 2004, despite the best efforts of crusading celebs like P. Diddy. Young people are still avoiding the polls like the plague, even though it is the young who will bear the costs of the current regime’s fiscal irresponsibility.

In Canada, we enjoy some semblance of a social safety net, and our political rhetoric is not as polarized or fervent as the speeches of the Republican revolutionaries, or their Democratic detractors. One reason our politics are not so polarized is that we spend far less time electioneering in Canada. The United States has more elections than Canada, and longer, louder campaigns for those elections. Though Canada may be more moderate than its neighbor to the south, we too suffer from modern political malaises such as voter apathy, influence peddling, and corruption. Our politicians don’t get caught at hotels with their mistresses; they give their cronies money to build hotels. The reigning Liberals also like to blow millions on well-intentioned boondoggles like the national gun registry or the sponsorship scandal, an ongoing imbroglio that has revealed the transfer of beaucoup de federal bucks to shady Quebec ad agencies for the ostensible promotion of Canadian identity. Moreover, lest you mistake the Great White North for a worker’s paradise, our current prime minister, Paul Martin, is a junior, just like Bush. Paul Martin Sr. never made it all the way to the highest office in the land, but he was a career politician who raised a career politician. Paul Martin Jr. is also très riche. He signed his shipping company, Canada Steamship Lines, over to his sons when he took office, to avoid conflict of interest allegations, but the company has a long history of taking advantage of offshore tax breaks to boost its revenues. In fact, when Paul Martin was finance minister, he passed a law against offshore tax havens and then promptly moved his operations from Liberia to Barbados. Liberia was subject to the new law. Barbados was not. This is simply to say that even in the seemingly tax-friendly confines of Soviet Canuckistan, the politician responsible for collecting and spending our tax dollars has dodged millions in taxes himself.

Mr. DeReg and the Newt are quick to claim that money is the lifeblood of the political process, but the radical Republicans were never quite revolutionary enough to suggest a fiscal equivalent to the universal suffrage that makes democracy democratic. If money is the lifeblood of politics, then what’s voting? The lymph? Or is it the bile? The last couple of presidents have gotten about half the popular vote, but the popular vote has been about half of the eligible people, which is not even to mention the hordes that are not eligible or registered. The dictionary definition of democracy is government by the majority of the people, not one quarter of them. Maybe we need a new word. There’s a whole buffet of little-used-cracies we could retrieve from their relative obscurity; you’ve got your plutocracy, sure, but then there’s gerontocracy (government by the old), or my personal fave, kakistocracy (government by the worst citizens).

Spending billions to elect politicians we are none too thrilled about gives the whole process an air of ceremonial futility, the same sense one gets when one is sitting through a very expensive wedding ceremony celebrating a marriage with decidedly mediocre prospects. The place looks great, they spared no expense, but this public-elected-officials match is only going to last a couple of years, tops, and then it’ll all end in tears, dear. (Gee, I wonder who will get to keep all the loot?) The purpose of government, for people like Paine, was to serve as a check on bad behavior and a guarantor of liberty, not to get all pally with you. This is why government is not inherently swell, and should be kept as small as possible. The state should be big enough to protect the rights and freedoms of individuals, but not so big that it infringes upon them. But the current avatars of smaller government, Republican and Democrat alike, have somehow magicked up a state that is Jabba-like in its girth, increasingly disinclined to protect and represent the citizenry via regulation, and increasingly inclined to diddle with your personal freedom in countless asinine ways, like throwing your ass in the pokey for possession of a dime bag.

The notion that Republicans are the party of fiscal responsibility, as opposed to those tax-and-spend liberal Democrats, is laughable, after massive deficits under Reagan and titanic ones under Bush. If you think this is just a result of bad financial luck, then you aren’t hip to the Grover Norquist master plan, which has been kicking around the Capitol for years: Get government so small, so broke, that you can drown it in a bathtub. Spend and slash until there is no government! But for all their anti-government rhetoric, the Republicans are people who have been hanging around the White House for decades, like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. It’s not too hard to dig up pictures of the boys with their muttonchop sideburns, wide collars, and big fat ties, from way back in the Nixon era. And even the ones who aren’t fossils from previous regimes, like the members of the Republican freshman class, clearly love the great game of politics, even if they hate the government that allows them to practice politics, the government that they, um, are.

Government will never be fun and cool so long as it’s a bunch of old white guys arguing about math and making rules. Rules are no fun. It may shock and amaze you to discover that I am no more in favor of idiot regulations than Tom DeLay is. Part of the problem with government regulations is that there are so many, it is impossible to enforce the ones that matter, and they are written in a legalese that fairly defies consciousness. Just try to read the North American Free Trade Agreement—I double-dare you to get through even twenty pages. Yet that unreadable document is currently changing your life. If we are going to dumb this system down, I say we dumb it all the way, with really stupid rules that say what they mean and mean what they say, like the You’re Never Going to Spend All of That Act or the Hey, Clean Up After Yourself Bill.

The fact that both the presidential candidates in the 2000 and 2004 elections were to the manor born was the last little funny “I knew Thomas Paine and you, sir, are no Thomas Paine” thing. Why stick it to the king when you can thrall to the charms of your new family dynasties? People keep invoking common sense in their stump speeches, but government hasn’t exhibited much of either lately. It is my fondest hope that something will put the demos back in democracy. But I fear that I may someday have to explain to my progeny that Jenna and Barbara, the first female candidates for president, are in fact the scions of a political empire that stretches back at least three generations. And that we used to have these things called debates before President Schwarzenegger decided Jell-O wrestling was a better way to test the candidates’ mettle. Perhaps the Gipper was on to something: Government doesn’t solve problems like George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Tom DeLay. It merely subsidizes them.

CHAPTER SIX

Paxil . . . Your Life Is Waiting.

—A
D FOR
P
AXIL

A
few short years ago, when American politicians blustered about the tide of drugs coming into the U.S. from Canada, they were talking about marijuana, primarily British Columbian bud. These days, U.S. officials are still making similar statements, but not about the trade in illegal drugs. The new hot-button issue is prescription drugs. In 2003 alone, according to estimates from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Americans spent $700 million dollars buying Canadian prescription drugs. The Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Health and Human Services insist that Canadian drugs, particularly those ferried from online pharmacies, may be unsafe, and have issued numerous letters and warnings about skeevy northern merch. Nevertheless, some state governments, such as Rhode Island and Vermont, have challenged the FDA and demanded the right to buy cheaper Canadian drugs. As supporters of the initiative point out, Canada has its own perfectly lovely FDA, and our regulatory agency is
not
funded by industry user fees. America’s is, and has been, since 1992.

The importation controversy is only the most recent example of a growing concern about the price of prescription drugs. In December of 2003, Bush signed the Medicare Modernization Act, which includes a prescription drug benefit to try to help defray the rising costs of prescription drugs. The benefit will cost about 593 billion dollars, according to the Congressional Budget Office. While it is certainly salutary that the government is doing something about those poor old grandmas who have to choose between food and pills, the proposed benefit does not address more fundamental problems with the pharmaceutical industry. The reason Canadian drugs are cheaper than U.S. ones is that Canada, like most industrialized nations, exerts modest price controls over brand-name prescription drugs. In the U.S., price controls are dismissed as commie-talk and a threat to innovation. The prescription drug benefit doesn’t even propose modest cost reductions, like bulk buying of pharmaceuticals at reduced costs. Rather, the plan simply injects more cash into Medicare-funded private drug benefit schemes, making it just as much of a benefit and a boon for the pharmaceutical and insurance industries as it is for people in need. Picking up part of the tab, swell though that may be, doesn’t do a damn thing to combat or censure Big Pharma’s really serious trespasses, like profiteering, and selective release of their own research.

It should come as no surprise that pharmaceutical companies are among the world’s biggest concerns. What could be an easier sell than drugs? North Americans love themselves some drugs. While it is difficult to put an exact price tag on that love, given the secrecy that shrouds much of the drug market, it is safe to estimate that we spend hundreds of billions of dollars on drugs annually. U.S. prescription drug spending alone reached approximately $200 billion in 2002. Over-the-counter medication accounted for another $17 billion or so that year, but this figure does not account for OTC sales at Wal-Mart, the nation’s biggest retailer, so we can add at least another $10 billion to that figure. The Office of National Drug Control Policy reckons that Americans blew about $36 billion on cocaine, $12 billion on heroin, $10 billion on marijuana, $5 billion on amphetamines, and $2 billion on exotic miscellaneous substances like E in the year 2000, the last year for which their stats are available. This pushes our rough estimate into the hundreds of billions, and we have not even reckoned with the alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine industries—the multibillion-dollar legal drug concerns that supply the socially acceptable substances in your lattes and cosmopolitans, and the increasingly verboten nicotine. And then there’s the growing field of nutritional supplements and herbal treatments, not to mention the burgeoning trend of “nutraceuticals”—for example, orange juice laced with calcium—and “cosmeceuticals.”

Everybody must get stoned! We drug the old. We drug the women, ladling out the mother’s little helpers and gross buckets of estrogen. We drug the men, to keep them hard and hairy and stave off their heart attacks. We drug the children: Time for your Ritalin, Timmy! We even drug the beasts of the field, what with a chunk of the multibillion-dollar pet-care industry going to tranks for Fido. We dose our livestock with so many antibiotics and hormones that one could prescribe a course of steak tartare for routine infections and hot flashes. Oh, and then after we take all the pills, we piss them into the water. You might think you’re clean and sober, but unless you’re Amish or a fundamentalist vegan, you have
something
humming through your bloodstream or stored in your fatty tissues. Call it secondhand pharmacopoeia.

Even these staggering sums fail to account for another couple of billion dollars that represents the most insidious kind of drug spending, the spending that tells us to buy drugs in the first place, and specifies exactly which drugs we should be buying. When I said that we love ourselves
some
drugs, I wasn’t just being folksy. As you well know, from having been told ad nauseam in nauseating ads, some drugs are good and other drugs are bad. The drugs that are good are very, very good. The drugs that are bad are horrid.