What is their freaking problem? How could he have been any clearer talking about pre-existing conditions? Link to lyin’ CNN clip this screen capture comes from — look at how, on the graphic below, they add the words “so do” before “walk up” to make the president sound incoherent. Naturally the failing New York Times chimes in, piles on. Sad day to be an American. SAD!
I am a Jew and I love that my historically vilified people finally have a state where they can live, for the most part, without fear of abuse or death by government policy. I don’t exclude myself from my people by referring to a state where “they” can live, I just don’t live there. I speak Hebrew and have many fond memories of my stays in Israel. Anti-Semitism is real, and on the rise, here and all over the world. Anti-Semitism is alive and well in the United Nations, including in its Human Rights Council.
That said, some of the practices of the current government of Israel are not morally defensible. They rest solely on Israel’s ability to exert force. They are not all that far from certain ethnic policies of the German government of the mid-1930s. These policies, if presented dispassionately, would be opposed by most people anywhere. There is a vast, depressed group of Israeli citizens who recognize this too, but they are, like fair-minded Americans of every political stripe, unable to effect meaningful change in their democracy.
Collective punishment, such as the current restriction of electricity to Gaza, which receives only four hours a day now, was a hallmark of the government, led by Mr. Hitler, that persecuted, dehumanized and went on to kill millions of my people and many millions more who were not Jews. I’m not calling the current government of Israel Nazis, though it’s hard to deny that in certain ways they are acting like them.
There is only the basest rationale for these inhuman policies, tactics to combat hated enemies, not a strategy toward solving a shared humanitarian crisis going back now several generations. Nobody could reasonably argue that the mutual tragedy is not immensely complicated, emotionally and historically tangled, seemingly intractable, though courageous people of good will on both sides (I’m thinking of a group of Palestinian and Israeli women I read about) continue to make small inroads toward peace. I am pointing out that the pro-Israel lobby’s proposed answer to this gnarly moral question of how long-time enemies reconcile and live side by side is to punish those who speak out against Israel’s policies, no matter what those policies are.
Check out what American Jews, on my behalf, and the right wing Christians who say they support Israel, are proposing, the bipartisan Israel Anti-Boycott Act, to curtail, in one specific setting, the First Amendment right to peacefully protest. The bill, seeking to criminalize support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel and imposing huge monetary fines (minimum $250,000 civil fine up to a million) and up to twenty years in prison as punishments, already has a lot of bipartisan support in Congress.
Was it covered much in the corporate media? I have no idea, I rarely touch that stuff these days. A google search found nothing recent in the New York Times. Here’s the NY Times, an op-ed piece, from a year and a half ago, with an essay that puts the issue of Israel’s lucrative and controversial settlement policy into perspective. Here’s a summary of what the Israel Anti-Boycott Act proposes. Really?
The bill amends the Export Administration Act of 1979 to declare that it shall be U.S. policy to oppose:
The bill prohibits U.S. persons engaged in interstate or foreign commerce from:
Presumably, under this Act, touted by defenders as combatting anti-Semitism, it would be illegal for any business (“U.S. persons” in this context likely means corporations, not folks like ones we tortured some of — though how one puts a corporate “person” in jail for twenty years is a legally absurd question) to call for another country to join any economic boycott against, for example, Saudi Arabia, a country very friendly to the United States.
The ACLU recently raised a public fuss over this proposed law, in an open letter to legislators, and now many of the bill’s sponsors are actually beginning to read its text. You can read a summary of the proposed bill on-line, at congress.gov, in a couple of minutes, yet the bill’s sponsors tap-dance when journalists confront them about the bill’s unconstitutional proposals.
“Haven’t had a two minute break to read the on-line summary of the bill I’m co-sponsoring, neither have any of my aids, sorry, got to call some donors now, got to jet, bro.”
From the ACLU’s letter:
One shouldn’t be that surprised, sniffing the political winds here, that this unconstitutional law is being enthusiastically entertained by so-called friends of Israel in the U.S. Congress. The right is presented a golden opportunity to advance its agenda with this group in power now, in Israel and here. Just recall that our current president’s first foreign trip was to an oil-funded monarchy that executes people, like the fourteen that the Saudi justice system, under Sharia law, is prepared to decapitate (if they haven’t been beheaded in the last day or two) for the capital crime of attending pro-democracy protests in Saudi Arabia. They will have their heads cut off for exercising a right in an oligarchic tyranny that tyrannical types in America would be happy to outlaw here as well.
No point mentioning that Saudi weapons, purchased from America, are currently being used to destroy hospitals and water filtration plants in Yemen, the poorest country in the region, as a plague of cholera spreads. Americans are understandably much more interested in the resignation of the president’s beleaguered press secretary (and who among us wouldn’t love to know the comically named Scaramucci’s “particularly crude nickname” for the comically named Reince Priebus?). Why talk about war crimes being committed by our mega-rich Wahabist allies when we can propose laws to harshly punish speech we don’t like, speech that makes our friends look bad?
Bravo, you fucking psychos.
If, in this hot weather, you feel like having a little cold chill run up or down your spine, check out Get Me Roger Stone on Netflix. It’s a documentary about a man who claims to be, with a good deal of support to those claims, a trail blazing pioneer of political consultant/lobbyist influence selling, unlimited political campaign spending via legal loopholes and negative campaign ads. He considers himself a genius in these fields and is coy about also being a master of what he calls disinformation. Trump is this smiling sociopath’s proudest protege. The president even models his speaking style on Stone’s.
Stone’s Rules, which are featured throughout the documentary, read like a psychopath’s catechism. “Deny, Deny, Deny” is one of his rules. “Fuck ’em where they breathe” may be another.
The entire exercise for Stone is about winning and forcing his view on others, without regard for what many would consider ethics. Stone proudly announces that with the election of Donald J. Trump we are all now living in the Age of Stone. I suppose it could also be phrased as the Stone Age. Stone’s comments about ethics and morality mirror comments made by no less an authority than the man the New York Times referred to as Mr. Hitler. According to Mr. Hitler, “conscience is a Jewish invention”, morality is a Jewish device to weaken the will of those destined to rule the earth at any price.
Roger Stone had a moment of revelation when he was an elementary school student during the Kennedy-Nixon election of 1960. He loved Kennedy, a fellow Catholic with “great hair”. During his elementary school’s mock election he told every student in the lunchroom that Nixon had a plan to extend the school week to six days. Kennedy won in a surprise landslide. Stone was hooked on the rush of an audacious lie swaying an electoral outcome. He childish infatuation with JFK was short-lived, he soon developed a lifelong connection with Nixon.
Stone had a political revelation around 1964 after reading Barry Goldwater’s manifesto “Conscience of A Conservative”. At age twelve he became devoted to increasingly extreme right wing politics. He worked for Nixon, who he greatly admired. He was proud to be the youngest person connected to Nixon’s corruption, and has a tattoo of Nixon’s head on his back. He helped Reagan win with the campaign slogan “Make America Great Again”. It was one of several slogans Reagan used, decades later it would be the only one Trump needed.
In the same way that the corporation, a “person” with only one legal concern, maximizing profits, fits the human definition of the psychopath (see this wonderful documentary for a detailed comparison of modern corporations and serial killers — good website too), Mr. Stone and Mr. Trump are the human embodiments of this “no holds barred” kick ’em in the nuts approach to political dominance. Heedless of anything but “winning”, unabashed about spouting the vilest fictions, they are examples of the great men that history, sadly, produces from time to time.
A quick google search will turn up everything you need to know about the Business Judgment Rule, a firm rule of American law. The highest authorities agree — a court should not substitute its judgment for the judgment of a business making a good faith business decision.
Economists teach us about externalities. Externality is an extremely nice, bloodless, abstract term for something that may be otherwise quite hideous. An externality is a cost that is not originally figured on, an unforeseen expense associated with bringing a product to market, a downside to be calculated in determining the bottom line.
A factory makes batteries in a land where labor is cheap. Not only is labor cheap, there is no regulation against dumping factory waste into the local water system. Getting rid of toxic chemical waste safely is expensive, as every factory owner in America knows. If the corporation can just dump the chemical waste in the river they can save a ton of money, make higher profits. It’s win-win. Cheap labor force and no health or safety regulations. Huge profit vectors.
The rash of cancer deaths in children downstream in the river valley where the factory is located is an externality. It is arguably an atrocity, a sin, certainly a public relations nightmare, but its monetary cost is also, like any other business expense, something to be reconciled on the corporate balance sheet, after it is resolved by the corporation’s legal department. In practice, the families of the dead children, being in dire poverty, will settle the wrongful death cases for rupees on the dollar. The life of a dead poor kid is about as cheap a life as you can buy. The cost of paying the parents of these dead children is an externality, as is the death of the children themselves. These are not intended consequences of the business policy, they are a kind of unfortunate price paid for the business decision made to maximize profits.
The Supreme Court ruled that a corporation has only one legal responsibility: to provide profit for its shareholders. The corporation was elevated to personhood, and lately given an unlimited voice in American elections by the Citizens United ruling, but the sole legal duty of the corporation remains, as the Supreme Court decreed many years ago: to make maximum profit for shareholders and executives.
People die as a result of corporate policies. An externality. Business judgment rule. Unfair practices are committed routinely, business judgment rule. The courts will not substitute their judgment for the judgment of those running a business. It is fucking hard to run a business, Jack. Let those with the expertise, the vision and the genius, folks who actually run the business, make the business judgments. We owe them at least that much, Business Judgment Rule. God bless America, its flag and the republic for which it stands.
We are, every one of us, subject to stress. Some of this stress, if prolonged and unrelieved, will kill you. It does this by raising the blood pressure, causing unhealthy eating with its associated health problems, providing the random stroke here and there. Death by stress, the kind that makes us feel utterly powerless, is the death of a thousand cuts. Multiply the cuts by five if you are poor, because they will come at you at a fairly vigorous rate.
The life expectancy for poor people is shorter than for affluent people. The way poverty kills is as interesting as it is sickening. I have been learning about it daily as I try to get the medical services I buy insurance to help me pay for in the wealthiest country on earth.
I must point out that I am not poor, though I have no steady income, or unsteady income either, for that matter. I am not a candidate for pity or sympathy, my subsistence life is a matter of choice based on my priorities. In 2010, when my mother died, I inherited enough to live for a few years while focusing on the program I was trying to get into public schools. The money was not enough to retire on, but it was enough, if I lived frugally, to keep me afloat until I can figure out how to make a living. Fortunately for me, I have never coveted most of the things that money can buy. I own virtually nothing, beyond the mountain of boxes of paper I am too weary to sort through.
I am aware that a case can be made that I am living the life of a mad person. As is true of my kind, the idea that I may be living the life of a mad person does not unduly bother me. The life I am subjected to, constantly, for living on an income less than 200% over the artificially low poverty line, on the other hand, bothers me continually. It is the bitter taste in my mouth I often wake up with.
Today, for example, I woke to this note from a lawyer who was helping me on my “appeal”, congratulating me on the overturn of New York State of Health’s January 9, 2017 error that forced me to pay double the legal rate for my monthly premium. I will now, or at some point, be paying the legal amount for health insurance, based on my taxable income, rather than the full amount.
You won, congrats! NYSOH has 30 days to comply by redetermining your eligibility for tax credits. Provided they do so, you should expect to start paying a lower premium – my guess is for September.
It makes no difference that this redetermination takes, literally, about five seconds using their own on-line calculator. They have thirty more days, under some obscure federal law regulating the exact parameters of how agencies may fuck with poor people. You can’t reasonably expect a simple error to be corrected in less than 170 days– not if you are powerless to threaten legal action.
I read this email as, directly above my bed, an hour before my alarm was set to wake me, the woman recently sprung from the lunatic asylum began caterwauling her imagined vocal exercises. A dog, hearing this shrill, tuneless whine, began to bark in protest. I listened to my voicemail.
It was not the promised call back from the nephrologist’s office I have been waiting for, but a detailed demand from the office of the dermatologist I will see on Thursday about the form of referral I must have sent to them to avoid paying the full, uninsured price for the visit. A paper referral, like the one I brought to the nephrologist at the same hospital, will not do, the message informed me. It must be electronic and it must contain the dermatologist’s full name and NPI number and other information, which is recited in detail. The message ended by giving me a fax number for my primary care doctor to send the “electronic” referral to.
I thought of the stack of medical bills on my kitchen table. It is a large stack. The bills from the first months’ visits and tests for my kidney disease are close to two thousand dollars. This is no problem, my deductible is two thousand dollars. The bills from the hospital demand a number fifty percent higher than the number my insurance company tells me I’m responsible for. Somebody is right, somebody is wrong, it is up to me to figure out what I actually owe and to pay the proper amount. Overpayments will not be refunded.
It is the accumulated devilish details of one’s powerlessness that kill a person. I could whine on in this vain as the hysteric upstairs continues to keen, but it would be less than pointless. I want to lay out exactly what it’s like for the poor person receiving any government benefit— or handout, as it is often phrased.
We live in a country where the law permits a billionaire to take an enormous tax loss in a given year, like our president did when he lost $919,000,000 one year, and pay little or no tax for decades as a result of that enormous loss. It’s a good deal for a very wealthy citizen, no question. The tremendous saving is well worth the fee you will pay to the tax attorney to set the legal scheme in motion.
If you are not wealthy and receive any sort of government benefit, on the other hand, you will be subjected to more stringent requirements. You will have very tight deadlines to comply with these requirements. Miss any single one and you will be removed from the program with little or no right to appeal. These things are absolute.
If you are disabled and get a subsidy toward your rent, and you receive a notice to attend a face to face meeting to redetermine your eligibility, or even if you don’t receive it but the agency has prepared such a notice, you will lose your benefits for failing to attend the face to face. I was involved in many cases in housing court where this happened. It can take a year or longer, if ever, to have these benefits restored, provided a skilled advocate exerts herself heroically enough on your behalf. You know this is fair, because you are a fucking loser.
OK, we all know it’s not fair. But de minimis non curat lex— the law does not concern itself with trifles. Your paltry little housing subsidy is nothing compared to the millions a wealthy person stands to save by shrewdly using the tax code. You will be homeless, with nobody to blame but yourself. What do you want the rest of us to do? Be realistic. We are in an existential war against Terror while politically motivated alarmists are trying to convince us that strip mining the earth and burning everything we find is harming the earth beyond repair.
Who are you going to listen to anyway, the wealthy, telegenic personalities of the mass media or some artificially poor fuck whining on a blahg in an attempt to drown out the howling of a mentally ill woman upstairs? Besides, I am reminded that it is summer, time to relax. Why do I allow myself to get worked up like this? Jesus.
When I went to law school, more than twenty years ago, there was a big emphasis on plain language. Lawyers should write as plainly and clearly as possible. In the old days, we were told, scriveners, who wrote legal papers for lawyers, were paid by the word and so they laid the words on with a trowel. This practice led to unplain, exceedingly excessive language, writhing, modifier-laden legalese, language embellished, decorated, complicated and modified, as needed, or sometimes not, according to long custom, by a dozen redundant, recursive, tautologous synonyms encompassing a dozen finely calibrated shades of meaning, foreshadowing, portent, legal significance, modified ambiguity, standard boiler-plate ambiguity, ambiguousness intended and incidental, anything to the contrary notwithstanding. Reading legalese is generally a huge pain in the ass– take a glance at our Constitution or any on-line contract you must accept before getting web-based services. “Plain language!” we were told, “the law now requires anything a consumer will be bound by to be written in plain language.”
That was some precatory, aspirational, academic shit, apparently. We were also taught to use the female pronoun instead of him and his when speaking of general things. It was a fairly liberal school, I suppose, even though it had its share of rigid sociopaths on the faculty. There are, I need not point out, rigid sociopaths on every shade of the political spectrum.
I am thinking about this because I just got a determination from the New York State of Health appeals unit. It is seven pages of fairly spare legalese that concludes with the determination that NYSOH must rescind its notice of January 9, 2017 and reconsider my case in accordance with the law. It does not say, anywhere in its learned pages, anything that someone without a background in the law can understand as a clear, five and a half month belated, reversal of NYSOH’s clear error. An error, moreover (to use a word beloved of scriveners everywhere) that anyone on the NYSOH website can verify in less than five seconds.
It was only a four and a half month wait for the appeal and then, a speedy 30 days for the determination to be written up and sent out. I have only been required to loan a large corporation about $1,250 in that time and I am told it will come back to me some time next year when I file my taxes, since I was entitled to what the decision refers to as the APTC, payable on my behalf towards the monthly premium of the QHP. The subsidy, in other words.
Rigid sociopaths are currently dickering about the quickest way to dismantle the conservative think tank-born, health care industry-friendly health insurance plan that bears the hated secret Muslim president’s name. These are some dangerous, cynical, amoral motherfuckers doing this dickering. Obamacare is bad in many ways, very bad in some ways, but it is a step forward, although not necessarily in the absolutely right direction since it leaves ravenous foxes to supervise the hen house. The plan these dickheads are trying to push through will be a disaster for millions. It has a 12% approval rating among the citizens of this nation of poor bastards, which is why it was initially kept secret and why its advocates are refusing to allow public debate on the punitive details of the new bill.
The Republican plan, in fairness to them, while hurting the poor and lower middle class, will greatly benefit the rich. Who can blame the rich for trying to get richer? It’s only natural.
Like trying to repeal the hated DEATH TAX, another long time dream of America’s greediest. Check this number out– I don’t know why it is not more widely known. The so-called DEATH TAX affects the top 0.2% of our great, gullible, lynch-mob republic. For those of you not good in math, that’s 2 estates out of every 1,000. I don’t know about you, but that number of people affected by the so-called DEATH TAX, the top 2% of the top 1%, gives me goose bumps.
Have a groovy fucking day, y’all.
Monsters inspire terror, which makes our fear of them unreasoning and debilitating. We know this crippling terror from early childhood, and it is terror without chronology, just as fearful now as when we were first gripped by it. We need to remember that monsters must be fought, and that they can be beaten. It takes organization and courage, the kind of courage we give to each other during a long fight. Monsters become monsters because of their own bottomless fear, which is something that can be used against them. Monsters are bullies, and we all know all about bullies. We have defeated monsters in the past, though it has sometimes taken a grotesquely long time.
There was a time here in our great democracy, for around a hundred years, when states that favored lynching did nothing to stop the practice. Lynching was considered an exercise in liberty, enraged citizens dragging someone they suspected of heinous crimes to a tree, torturing them and hanging them by the neck until dead. Souvenirs of the lynching were sold, body parts, post cards. For daylight lynchings, people brought their children to watch the spectacle, it was an early form of reality TV. There was a good reason Southern Democrats in the Senate repeatedly filibustered federal anti-lynching bills. They were racists playing to the racists they represented, racists who would have considered a federal law against lynching a betrayal.
The example of lynching is old, of course. We no longer regularly lynch people here in America. At least not with a mob and a rope. In other places, sure, the equivalent can still be done routinely as a matter of foreign policy. Trump sells $110,000,000,000 in high-tech weapons to the warlike Saudis who will use them against the children of the poorest country in the Middle East. Obama sold the Saudis about the same amount of weaponry, as Dubya did before him, and Clinton before that.
It is merely the way business is done and there is no morality attached to it. If a business is very, very lucrative, a way will always be found to sell the product and make a ton of money. It happened for decades with cigarettes, even after their role in lung cancer and other disease became well-known, it is still going on full tilt with fossil fuels, extracted from the earth in more and more destructive ways. If the product is, say, cluster bombs, or white phosphorous (which burns flesh to the bone), both widely considered a war crime to drop, and we make them here, and sell them to third parties — well, it creates good jobs for good Americans and generates massive profits for the company that makes ’em, and for the shareholders. A lot of winners, a few losers, but that’s life.
The problem, of course, for those of us who would fight monsters, is that we live in a world where countless monsters walk among us, ubiquitous and seemingly untouchable as the zombies on TV. Is the biggest monster catastrophic Climate Change, which, in the United States, alone among the nations of the world, has a powerful, motivated, very wealthy lobby convincing the credulous that, in spite of impressive evidence of change, no change is even happening? Is the biggest monster Martin Luther King’s three headed monster of racism-militarism-poverty? That was the in-your-fucking-face monster that made it necessary to kill King. Is the systematic dismantling of all programs to protect the public, well under way by the extremists who are now mainstream Republicans, the most immediately threatening monster?
Or is the most dangerous monster a relatively small thing, like the deliberate appointment as Secretary of Education of a hereditary billionaire ultra-conservative Christian fundamentalist who has never set foot in a public school? Or the appointment of a man who sued the Environmental Protection Agency more than a dozen times to head the agency responsible for protecting our air, water and soil? Or is the appointment of a Supreme Court justice to the right of the extreme rightist Antonin Scalia the biggest monster?
These are all gigantic monsters well beyond the immediate ability of even a well-organized, disciplined group of people to fight. Our laws have allowed each of those things to take place and they cannot be changed until a massive citizens’ movement and a future election change the political landscape.
I can think of only one monster that is within my reach to take a poke at: unaccountable corporate health care in New York State. While the complete lack of government regulation of the practices of health care providers in New York State does not affect anyone I know but me, it affects the health and lives of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of New Yorkers. Let me take a long-delayed swing at this monster for a few moments, in the interest of finishing my stalled letter to the pugnacious progressive Attorney General of New York State, an official who also proposes legislation and advocates for it.
Dear Mr. Attorney General:
At this moment when an American’s basic right to affordable health care is in jeopardy, I write to alert you to a consumer health emergency in New York State. New York State has no government forum where a patient denied health services can have a grievance heard, even if that grievance is a matter of life and death. I speak of my own experiences, which I’m certain can be multiplied by the experiences of tens of thousands of low income New Yorkers, many of whom cannot advocate for themselves.
I write to urge your office to recommend a regulatory scheme to the legislature. The regulators would be able to quickly adjudicate matters like the denial of services by a cardiologist to a pre-approved patient recently released from a hospital for heart issues. At present a patient’s only appeal is to the insurance company, a company that has multiple legal grounds to deny claims (incorrect NPI number, transposed CPT code number, etc.) At the very least an ombudsman’s office is needed to supervise these widespread, unappealable, regularly occurring corporate abuses.
This letter will provide a road map to the empty shell of the regulatory scheme currently in place in our state. I will also provide examples of colorable fraud from my own health-challenging experiences.
As a self-employed New Yorker, I have purchased private insurance in New York State for over a decade, at first under the Healthy New York program and, since its abolition, under the Affordable Care Act (“ACA”). When the State adopted the ACA it merged the consumer oversight functions of the Insurance and Health Departments (along with several other disparate agencies) into the Department of Financial Services, a department that does not investigate frauds against consumers.
I am not writing to complain about the sometimes arbitrary costs of health care under these programs, but to draw your attention specifically to the lack of any kind of due process for New Yorkers who are denied needed medical services. A New Yorker’s only appeal under current law is to the company who has denied the medical service.
As a matter of fact, now that I have written these words, I am going into the other room to fuck myself. With all of the other pressing problems your office is vying with at the moment, it is hard to imagine that the death of a few more or a few less low income people, people who die disproportionately under our current health insurance scheme, amounts to a hill of beans in our publicity-driven world. An impeccably reasoned posthumous letter, I am sure, would hold greater moral clout than the letter I am struggling to complete now. I am, therefore, working on getting it to your office later, rather than sooner. I will put the finishing touches on it from my hospice bed, assuming I am still able to secure one. Have a very nice day!
The great James Earl Jones reads a short section of Frederick Douglass’s powerful 1852 speech.
To drag a man in fetters, into the grand, illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak today? …What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer.
NPR took a lot of shit from the president’s supporters for this.
Few things are more satisfying than sitting on a moral high horse and letting that horse do what horses do. The tail lifts slightly, the plats fall with a gratifying plop on unwary passersby. Nothing is easier than sitting up here, gaze toward the horizon, judging those who worship false idols, speak of doing the right thing without often doing it, feel a twinge of guilt but cannot refrain from doing what is best for themselves, no matter what the consequences to everybody else. How to be a moral force in the world? — that is another question entirely.
We are weary down here, and often enraged, to hear the endless streams of shit from the mouths of the corrupt hypocrites who run things in our democracy. Tune in to Trevor Noah, who will play you the clip of high-minded Mitch McConnell, pompously denouncing Democrats who vow to resist the Republican Health Care Bill. “Resist!” he sneers, as if these disloyal, anti-American Democrats have uttered an unprecedented stream of gratuitous fucking f and n words. Then Noah plays a collage of McConnell from a few years back vowing to resist everything Obama proposes, followed by Mike Pence vowing to do the same, also using the r-word. Neither one needs to make any reference to the n-word to make clear their unspoken feelings about the illegitimate, Kenyan-born secret Muslim presidential pretender. Their animus toward their enemy could not be clearer if they were wearing sheets.
On the other side of the aisle, politicians as corrupt and vicious as McConnell and Pence make equally sickening pronouncements. They defend indefensible compromises as the best they can do. They talk the language of egalitarian democracy while accepting huge sums of money from the same donors who support their opponents. Goldman-Sachs and their ilk support both sides in most elections, enabling them to call in favors from whichever party wins. The insurance, pharmaceutical and fossil fuel industries, same deal. Most people have little grasp of what has happened to the Democratic party, now our Neoliberal Party.
What is Neoliberalism? The belief that a healthy “Free Market” is the best indicator of good social policy. The Free Market’s health is determined by profitability. When the stock market makes money for investors everything is humming for the neoliberal. They are liberals because they believe in social progress, the right of individuals to control their own lives, the responsibility of the government to ensure these rights are respected. What makes them neoliberals is their belief that freedom is best expressed through competition and is best measured by how well private sector profits are doing. So neoliberals support a woman’s right to abortion, if needed, a gay person’s right not to be assaulted, a poor person’s right to a minimalist social safety net, while at the same time supporting the right of private corporations to do what they do best– make profit for their investors, in a Free Market.
The Free Market is theoretically based on free competition. This competition, according to the orthodoxy of capitalism, causes the best product to be offered at the lowest price. In practice, competition in modern capitalism is not free, it’s very, very expensive. In theory, however, the Free Market sounds excellent. American Health Care? Providers compete to offer the best service for the lowest price. If Private Health Insurance companies can sell a better product for less than Medicare, well, they should win and the government program should lose.
Oh, except the Free Market can never be allowed to be quite that free. Rich and powerful business leaders would likely lose a shit ton of money under that kind of competition. So our laws always protect the bottom line of those CEOs, who, in fairness to them, have spent millions influencing the legislators who will vote on the issue of how free the Free Market will be. If we allowed a government program to compete with private enterprise on an untilted playing field that would be… Socialism, maybe even Communism. Neoliberals do not believe the State should have a finger on the scale in matters of Free Market competition, except to make sure the most lucrative industries are properly incentivized to make maximum profits.
Public Schools? You can measure their progress and compare it to the progress of private schools. Let the best schools win. Private schools, of course, can throw out disruptive students, public schools can’t. There are certain other advantages that private schools have over the public schools, but let them compete freely and we’ll use metrics to see who performs better. Let the best enterprise flourish and the other fall away. “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top” were two government attempts to set the parameters of this free, if slightly unfair, competition.
What neoliberals lose sight of, sadly, is everything that is not economically quantifiable. There are important human values beyond what can be monetized or reckoned on a balance sheet. In the neoliberal view, values like compassion, empathy, creativity, community, critical thinking, problem-solving, unless used to increase the monetary value of a thing, become the equivalent of what economists call ‘externalities’– their loss becomes part of the price we pay for financial progress for the most successful competitors. While some grow fantastically rich from this theoretically Free Market competition, the vast majority find themselves living in a hell more real than theoretical.
When my sister and I were kids our father used to give us grief when we brought home Sugar Babies, Sugar Daddys and Sugar Mamas. These candies, he explained, were made by a company owned by one of the founders of the John Birch Society. I don’t know who John Birch was, but the society that bore his name was composed of white men who believed Communism was taking over America and who were determined to resist it. Dwight Eisenhower was suspected of being a possible Communist agent. Negros and Jews were mostly Commies. The Supreme Court had a couple of Commies on it, notably Earl Warren. What these Commies wanted, presumably, was egalitarianism. What the John Birch Society wanted was the protection of the American status quo. The wealthy men who founded it hated the idea of a Welfare State where they would be taxed to provide a safety net for losers.
When I was a kid, in the sixties, the John Birch Society was a fringe group of xenophobic racists, far to the right of the most conservative members of the Republican party. Fifty years later, their ideas have taken over the Republican party. The man in the White House, although he has no firm political ideals, has grasped the essential strategy of this group– play to the prejudices of your base and fuck any discussion at all. Free debate is the enemy of extreme ideas. As long as informed debate is stifled, any insane idea put forth consistently in the media will eventually win the day. That is what those who hate the idea of democracy always count on.
What is the line between the far-right lunatics of the John Birch Society and Steve Bannon and his chaos-embracing employer? The politically active billionaire Koch Brothers, Charles and David, were both members of the group their father championed. Fred Koch, who built the oil refinery for Hitler that allowed the Third Reich to refine special fuel for the Luftwaffe, was one of the founding members of the John Birch Society. It took his sons decades, but their hard work and vast expenditure in politics, which included the creation of think-tanks and legislative and electoral efforts on the state level in every state, eventually brought the extreme idea that society must protect the wealth of the wealthiest at all costs, to the mainstream, to the White House.
The Koch brothers and their billionaire ilk are not stupid, not by any means. The Koch boys are brilliant, as is the man who put Trump over the top in the recent election, self-made billionaire Robert Mercer. They do not sell greed, or self-interest, or sadistic social policies that benefit only the already super-wealthy. They sell freedom, liberty, self-determination, the right to be free of unconscionable intrusions by the government on individual freedom. They sell the moral high ground, you can bet on it.
From up here on my high horse, I shit on them all. You can rest assured they don’t give the slightest fuck what I do. How to be a moral force in the world? I wake up almost every day with that question rattling in my head.
