Category Archives: current events

A vision of hell

Waking up to an explosion, your home on fire.  Men with guns running, crouched like crabs, firing bursts of bullets.  As you shake your head a man grabs your mother from behind and expertly cuts her throat.  The car other members of your family are trying to flee in is hit by a shoulder launched explosive, becoming a fire ball.  You run, imagining how you are going to be killed.

Or a quiet, airless morning, no explosions, no gunfire.  No food.  Flies.  Dying children who expire without a murmur.   Hyenas and vultures casually dining together, no snarling and posing, there’s enough carrion for everyone, with left overs to drag home.

Or a person at a console, pressing a button and pumping a fist watching the screen as the targeted city is vaporized under a dramatic canopy of fire.

We lament all these hellish things even as we sigh at the inevitability of them, debate the correctness of employing them.  Homo sapiens are sometimes monsters, we reason, and sometimes there’s nothing for it but to use every weapon available to destroy these evil creatures.    Obama, who, in fairness to him, I must say I hate mostly for not being anywhere near as great a president as he was a candidate, did his share of this reasoning.  

He yielded to military advisors who agreed it was best not to put American “boots on the ground” but to instead use a top secret targeted killing program to assassinate suspected terrorist enemies with missiles launched from remote controlled pilotless aircraft called drones.  Not to do so, or stopping the program, he likely didn’t need to be reminded, would make him look weak.  The numbers of civilians killed would not be revealed.  All dead males of military age, in a generous range from young teenager to middle aged, are presumed to be enemies killed in action, or EKIA.  Fair is fair.  They could very well be!

Many are horrified when they learn that authoritarian governments use Death Squads to terrorize the opposition.   One photo of a pile of slaughtered nuns, their humanitarian mission cut short, is usually enough to get the world press howling.   The armies of freedom will sometimes march against such regimes, provided the regime is not allied with a huge business concern who has a say in the deployment of the armies of freedom.   Most authoritarian governments enjoy such alliances.   The armies of freedom have supported many such monsters over the years.   I realize I’m not going out on a moral limb saying any of these things.  Are you going to argue that Death Squads are cool?

Now the world shudders over videos of workers in a Syrian town desperately trying to save dying babies by hosing them off, in an attempt to wash away the irreversibly murderous nerve gas a power-crazed dictator attacked his own citizens with.  Dead children are carried off and respectfully laid out by stoic rescue workers.  

The current president of the United States, an angry and impulsive man, instantly does what the reflective, calculating Obama, who was lambasted as a weak and indecisive leader for refraining from massive retaliatory killing, did not do.  With the horrific images of the nerve gas attack against civilians, and the dead children, fresh in everyone’s mind, our decisive new leader does not hesitate or ask Congress or flinch in any way, he immediately orders two destroyers to launch more than fifty tomahawk missiles at Syria, presumably hitting some strategic asset of the Syrian dictator’s, the very air base he says the gas attack was launched from.  

Our president glares meaningfully at the camera as he announces he doesn’t need anyone to tell him what the right thing to do is.  After all, this is not some drone-launched missile fired by the well-meaning army of freedom that inadvertently kills a wedding party, severely maiming the few survivors, this is a targeted, proportional response to a regime using poison gas against it’s own children.

I don’t want to jump on this president, who gets so little love from most Americans, who is routinely mocked and ridiculed by every late night comedian.  I am writing this simply to underscore how routine such state violence is, and how little we concern ourselves with it, even abstractly.  

If there is a better way, we reason, there is nothing we can do about it anyway.  Powerful forces, often at the command of raging psychopaths, are regularly unleashed to slaughter anybody who stands in the way of valuable natural resources or anything else the powerful forces want.  Innocence or guilt has little to do with who will live and who will die.  This world is not a meritocracy, after all, nobody but those closest to you gives a rat’s tutu about how moral, kind, empathetic you are.

The guy who is launching the missiles, named after the close fighting weapon of the people slaughtered by the armies of freedom, certainly doesn’t give a shit.  It enrages him that a dictator would kill babies in such an inhuman way and he takes decisive action.  

Thirty-six children are said to have died in the poison gas attack.  Yesterday our ambassador to the UN asked rhetorically “how many more children have to die before Russia cares?”  We note here that according to one source over 700 children have been killed by US and Coalition airstrikes in Iraq and Syria since August 2014.  The recent SEAL raid in Yemen killed a bunch of children, at least one of whom, a pretty little girl, was allowed to writhe in agony, untreated, for hours before she finally died of the American bullet in her spine. 

In fairness to our current president, why should he care what his critics have to say about his unauthorized use of millions of dollars worth of deadly missiles against an unabashedly evil regime?  What are you going to fucking do about it anyway, big shot?

Happy Day for Motherfuckers

It’s pouring outside, rain gurgling merrily in the air shaft, a perfect day to do a little writing.  I’m working on a book about my father I’ve been neglecting recently and I thought of a great little chapter about his generosity.  I am also working on a book proposal for a much easier to complete book that I have more than half-written.    I’m also working on a letter to the New York State Attorney General, to convince him to propose legislation to regulate the out-of-control fraud of unregulated health insurance companies who do their lucrative business, sometimes enhanced by sharp practices they are not accountable for, in our state.  

But first, I needed to make two key medical appointments.  These having been hanging over me for months; in the case of the dermatologist, for three or four years.  The new kidney doctor (the excellent one I saw a few months ago is not on any QHP I could find) needs to tell me if my membranous nephropathy has yielded to my low-sodium diet and ban on non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (ibuprofen) or if I need to go on an auto-immune drug regimen to avoid the worst case scenarios of dialysis or a kidney transplant.   The skin doctor needs to look at a variety of odd things growing on my skin and tell me which, if any, I have to worry about.  

A nurse friend found me a nephrologist the other day and in a relatively short time today I was able to make an appointment.  I’ll see the new doctor in a few weeks.  Thank God for friends in the field.  

I have the number of a young dermatologist I’ve been trying to make an appointment with the last few days.  I was referred to her by my current insurance company.  I am paying literally ten times what I was last year, for a “higher” level of medical insurance and better care than I was able to get last year.   This doctor’s name came up, and as I found nothing bad about her on-line, I’ve been calling her office to make an appointment.   Although she’s listed as in-network on the “provider” list for my specific silver-level QH fucking P, her office doesn’t think she’s in-network.  They were going to get back to me, but you know how that goes.  When I called yesterday Melanie had no update for me, so today I asked Norma, an extremely nice woman at Healthfirst, to make the appointment for me.  

Norma laughed when I asked if she could put me on hold without the Dr. Mengele String Quartet, and she was able to do so.  I heard only a few notes of their infernal nerve-jangling sawing.  We soon had another receptionist at the dermatologist’s office on the line.   We learned, about 40 seconds in, that the dermatologist was not able to see new patients because she didn’t have an NPI number yet.

If you live in the cocksucking United States of America, and do not have insurance through work, or enough money to buy an expensive but good private plan, and sign up for the PPACA’s mandated product, you quickly learn about things like NPI numbers, which are site specific (the doctor with multiple offices apparently has multiple NPI numbers, or maybe not) and CPT codes, which, if not perfectly transcribed, prevent treatment.  Wrong NPI number?  You pay.   Incorrect CPT code?  No service.  

You want to call someone to fix this?  Call your insurance company, baby, they work for you.   New York State, is there any state agency I can call to get this straightened out?   Uh, no, first work this out with your insurance company, everything’s going to be fine.  Or call this 800 number for the New York State Department of Financial Services which puts you into a cul du sac from the hell our smiling former commander-in-chief, and our glowering present one, for that matter, ought to be frying in.

“Norma, I’m sorry to be venting like this to you…” but Norma was fine, so many customers are experiencing similar horrors.   She worries for her kids, living in an out of control plutocracy with two working parents, a country where it’s no national scandal that tens of thousands die every year for lack of decent medical options, while billionaires compare taxation to Auschwitz.  She worries about the increasingly demonstrative boa constrictor that is life for working people in our great nation.  She is fine with my complaints, interested in my analysis.  But it helps neither of us, helps nobody.  

When I venture my opinion on the precedent, created by our recent two-term chief executive, of killing American citizens without trial or charges, passed on to this angry, unstable fellow occupying the oval office now, she becomes quiet.  It is horrible, she agrees.  Then I cross the line, as one ranting and venting while caught in a chafing trap often does.  

“When we droned a sixteen year-old American citizen, not charged with anything, and the press secretary said, in response to a question at a televised news conference,  ‘he should have been more careful about who his father was’, the proper response for the reporter was to break the press secretary’s nose.  To show that unaccountable violence by the State, in our names, is an unacceptable answer– wipe up your blood and try again.  The American people will no longer accept that kind of crap… our government is not a reality TV show where anything flies that makes people tune in and the cash registers cah-ching.”

Now Norma was silent, and I didn’t blame her at all.  A patient and empathetic woman, she’d been wonderful throughout a long, frustrating chat.  This was more than she was being paid for.  I told her as much, thanked her for her kindness.  She told me, gently, that it had been her pleasure, wished me luck and I sat down to type.  I figured that was as good an option as going to fuck myself.  

I’m going to call my nurse friend and ask her to get me a recommendation for a dermatologist.  If I have to travel an hour from my place to get my skin scanned, as I will to see this nephrologist to have my urine and blood re-tested, so be it.  Now just sit back and enjoy the rain, it’s another happy day for motherfuckers.

 

 

Repurposing “The Deep State”

Because Americans live, increasingly, in echo chambers where our own views are endlessly confirmed– and there is no overestimating the power of the confirmation bias– the same term can quickly become a weapon for each side.   During the recent presidential election much was made of “Fake News”.  Both sides used calculated untruth and incendiary stories composed largely of bullshit to stir their troops,  though the right seemed to use it more, and to more galvanizing effect.

I saw a stat right after the 2016 election, fake news skewed something like 2:1 right, but that’s still a lot of outright bullshit from the left side.  I couldn’t find the original cite for the statistic, but here’s the Grey Skank and Steve Bannon/Robert Mercer’s own Breitbart on the well-known phenomenon.   I must say, both accounts read well and appear to be, without more research that most news consumers don’t have time to do, plausible.  Let us assume for our purposes today, and to avoid the typical distracting argument, that the left and right were equally guilty of lying during one of the ugliest campaigns in our history.

My point is that Mr. Trump and his people, who set new standards for untruth during the campaign and since (hah, so much for my fairness caveat directly above) , introducing us to “alternative facts” and so forth, quickly co-opted the term “fake news” to increase skepticism toward the corporate mass media.  One should be very skeptical of corporate media driven entirely by advertising dollars and the bottom line of shareholder profits and enormous compensation packages for its executives.  But look how quickly the term “fake news” was pointed back at the exposers of right wing ‘fake news’ and neutralized.   Who owns fake news now, bitches?   Two wrongs do make a right, yo.

Now the same has happened to the term “The Deep State”.   This description of the powerful forces that profit mightily from our globalized “Free Market” and the endless wars we are now embarked on, has been captured by the right.  To the right the Deep State is the liberal-biased intelligence community, fanatically determined to bring the new president down. Trump’s people now openly deplore the “Deep State” and everyone is right to deplore it.

A former long-time Republican government budget analyst, Mike Lofgren, spoke to Bill Moyers a few years back about the Deep State.  The permanent shadow government is not a new thing, the interests it represents go back to our original one percent, the Founding Fathers, but it’s entrenched and protected in ways we couldn’t have imagined generations ago.  Lofgren described The Deep State as ‘a hybrid association of key elements of government and parts of top-level finance and industry that is effectively able to govern the United States with only limited reference to the consent of the governed as normally expressed through elections.’  

Lofgren set out the workings of our current deep state*, now organized largely around, and justified by, the so-called War on Terror, that bold war against fear itself.  It operates by deregulation, privatization, deindustrialization, financialization of the economy, Wall Street as the only casino in town, widening wealth disparity,  permanent war, surveillance state, etc.  It all takes on the air of the inevitable, a massive conspiracy, but its only deliberate design is to maximize profits for our wealthiest citizens. 

Like the deal-makers in the administration we have now.   Exxon-Mobil was the first company to research the effects of carbon on our planet’s climate.  They made alarming discoveries, decades ago, about what became known as Global Warming and later was re-branded as the less alarming Climate Change.  Exxon scientists learned that carbon emissions, like the ones from burning millions of barrels of fossil fuel, were indeed making the world a less habitable place for human and other life.  

Then Exxon spent decades funding Climate Change Skepticism. To their credit, and against a mountain of evidence from most reputable climate scientists, they created a sizable block of Climate Change Skeptics including, apparently, our current president.

Exxon knew the lucrative product they were selling was choking the earth to death, but they were making too much money to stop.  You know the old dilemma.  It’s easy to be critical, but don’t forget, Exxon is about the most profitable corporation in the history of the world.  Now their CEO is our nation’s Secretary of State.  How’s that for transparency in government?   You’ve got to love these guys we’ve got now.   They will not let the Deep State get any deeper, despite all the fake news to the contrary.

 

 

*   Lofgren describes the Deep State as “the red thread that runs through the war on terrorism and the militarization of foreign policy, the financialization and deindustrialization of the American economy, the rise of a plutocratic social structure that has given us the most unequal society in almost a century, and the political dysfunction that has paralyzed day-to-day governance.”

 

politics smells like meat

Back in the days when I still thought “artists’ books” were cool, I entitled one Politics Smells like Meat.  Still a good, and accurate, title, since politics decides who will eat steak and whose ass will be served as that steak.  The smell of grilling meat is often delicious and easily overcomes any hesitation to eat what was, until recently, a living, sentient creature.

From the excellent Jane Mayer, investigative journalist and author of the definitive story of our secret torture program, this paragraph, in a profile of reclusive billionaire libertarian Robert Mercer, friend and sponsor of Steve Bannon:

Private money has long played a big role in American elections. When there were limits on how much a single donor could give, however, it was much harder for an individual to have a decisive impact. Now, Potter said, “a single billionaire can write an eight-figure check and put not just their thumb but their whole hand on the scale—and we often have no idea who they are.” He continued, “Suddenly, a random billionaire can change politics and public policy—to sweep everything else off the table—even if they don’t speak publicly, and even if there’s almost no public awareness of his or her views.”

The rest of the New Yorker article is here.

stage-managed liberty

“When you have stage-managed elections with the public relations industry determining what words come out of people’s mouth, candidates decide what to say on the basis of tests that determine what the effect will be across the population, somehow people don’t see how profoundly contemptuous that is of democracy”

Noam Chomsky to Bill Moyers (here)

In Fairness to Barack Obama

Let me try to be fair, for just a moment, then back into the trenches, snarling.  No, that sentence betrays too much, doesn’t seem fair, or balanced.  Let’s wind it back a bit, shall we, make it a little more personal?    

I voted for Barack Obama twice.  The first time I was actually optimistic that he might be the capable agent for overdue change he presented himself as.  The second time I voted for him on the theories of “fool me twice, shame on me” and the old chestnut of casting a vote for the lesser of two evils.   Evil, surprisingly, has become a relative thing in our desperately polarized society.  Mel Brooks’ genius definition of tragedy and comedy comes to mind: tragedy is when I break a fingernail, comedy is when you fall down a manhole and die.   Evil is now seen as who is doing what to whom and how does it affect me directly?  

We have been living for a while in increasingly partisan echo chambers.  In one chamber we find it absolutely sickening that obstructionist politicians can brazenly ignore their Constitutional duties when it is politically expedient and offer ‘explanations’ that sound startlingly like “we don’t have to do shit because this illegitimate Muslim non-American is a fucking ‘n-word’.”  This was the position publicly stated (sub silento, as they say, dog whistled) by Mitch McConnell and other prominent Republicans when Obama took office: our goal is to make him a weak one term president who can’t get anything done.  True we can’t lynch him, but we can certainly fuck him up and erase any legacy he tries to leave behind as soon as we get rid of him.

In the other echo chamber there is little question that Barack Obama was an insidious Kenyan-born Muslim intent on destroying America at all costs.   There is no doubt that he is a Negro, the son of an African from Kenya, that’s something even Hussein Obama himself cannot deny.  Many who hate Obama are undoubtedly racists, others are just, to be fair and charitable, skeptical of any Democrat who speaks well, appears thoughtful, ponders nuance, displays charisma and does not openly support the urgently needed policies they hear called for on talk radio during a time when terrorists are killing one out of every five Americans on a daily basis and violent crime plagues our once-great nation as it is overrun by hordes of threatening non-white aliens.   To be even more fair, some in this right wing echo chamber are just decent wealthy people who reasonably fear a loss of income from any policy that protects the weak at the expense of the wealthy via marginally higher tax rates.    

The divisions in our country, and the deep corruption of our pay-to-play lobbyist-driven political system, resulted in the election of a vain demagogue who seems completely unencumbered by principle, outside of increasing his own wealth, fame and power.  During the presidential campaign he promised to repeal and replace Obamacare.  He promised to create a terrific health policy that would protect every single American, not including, of course, the millions at his own rallies that will be without health care once he rams through the urgent repeal of Obamacare and restores large tax cuts for the rich.  While giving no specifics, he assured the gullible that his plan would cover all Americans, cost less and deliver much better health care.  He often ended this promise, like so many honest people reflexively do, with the tagline “believe me, believe me.”

I don’t like to think we live in a stupid country.  I prefer to think we live in a cynically manipulated country.  There’s a lot of money in cynical manipulation. The genius of America, if I may modestly say so, has long been cynical manipulation.  Look, we had this great continent with vast natural resources and incredible wealth.  There were savages living on it, attacking our settlers, impeding our ability to exploit all this wealth.  Manifest Destiny, et, voila!    

I don’t like to think we live in a country that could easily return to a lynch mob mentality, even with the increased crowing of White Supremacists and the recent surge in hate crimes.  I prefer to think we live in a country where, during desperate times, the homo sapiens fear and rage-driven instinct to mass violence sometimes understandably occurs.  Americans are no better, or worse, as a group, than the far away brown people we kill by remote controlled drones.  Americans are fair people, to the extent anyone can be fair in a world like ours.  

The plan the Republicans have slapped on the table to replace the conservative, corporation-friendly health care compromise that critics called Obamacare and vowed to repeal over and over while our nation was ruled by that tyrant, should not pass the sniff test.  It includes billions of dollars in ‘tax relief’ to the wealthiest 2% while cutting millions of low income Americans off health insurance, or making it completely unaffordable for those who had no option before Obamacare.  

In a better world somebody would just buy some TV time, invite Paul Ryan into a pay-per-view boxing ring, and simply whip the snot out of that snotty intellectual, settling the matter once and for all.  Ryan is an intellectual in the same way that a four foot tall man is a giant in Lilliput.  He read at least one very long book, a novel he bases his political philosophy on.  That he is driven by principle is reflected in his ongoing refusal to cooperate with Mr. Trump, the candidate he thoroughly repudiated during the campaign. 

I began this piece in fairness to Obama.  Here is that fairness, the PPACA is better than what existed before.  The PPACA is a deeply flawed compromise that left greedy corporations in charge of most of health care, sure.  But in fairness, it contained a few good and long-overdue things; eliminating the obscene ‘pre-existing condition’ insurance loophole, extending affordable health insurance to millions, focusing on cost-saving incentives based on preventative care, saving the lives of some of the thousands of Americans who still die every year for lack of affordable medical care.  The big flaw was that it left the gorged, rabid foxes in charge of the henhouse, but we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the demonstrably better than complete shit, can we?    

Americans like the ACA, particularly those who were uninsured before the law took effect, even if many raise their torches and pitchforks and scream for the overdue repeal of tyrannical Obamacare.  That’s OK, at Tea Party rallies Americans angrily held signs telling the government to keep their evil hands off Medicare.  

I don’t like to think badly of my fellow Americans.  I am counting on the stink of this bill, hastily prepared and designed to give money back to the richest Americans who the Kenyan Muslim simply mugged like the common criminal they always said he was, to ensure it does not get out of the House of Representatives.  There are political maneuvers available to a party that did not hesitate to shut down the government when that Negro president insisted on trying to be the president, but the backlash should be too much to allow their use.  

On the other hand, the spineless opposition party is mostly blowing bubbles of saliva so far, and making those humming sounds you sometimes hear in a Special Ed class.  Don’t forget, they depend on the same billionaires who supported Trump for their reelection campaigns.   I guess the odds are 50/50 this big winner gets to win again.  Who among us will be surprised if a few million losers lose again?

 

History and the Serenity Prayer

Watching the Ken Burns masterpiece The Civil War fills the curious mind with questions.   Brave men, pawning their own lives in the cause of bravery, charging against superior numbers in hopes of taking a hill.   Is this the greatest use of courage?  We are told it is, over and over, the ultimate sacrifice under inhuman conditions.  They may have been fighting for a despicable cause, people on both sides concluded, but you have to admire their courage.   You follow the details of one futile slaughter after another and, horrible as each detail is, you actually do have to admire their courage.  

Once black soldiers were allowed into the Union Army, after, midway through, the war was rebranded into a war to end slavery, the tide of the war began slowly, inexorably turning toward the Union.  Black soldiers fought for freedom, literally.  Eventually the Confederate side offered blacks freedom in exchange for military service.  

The Confederate army never stopped slaughtering the black troops at the end of a battle when the Union men who were not black were allowed to surrender.  Picture the bravery of a black soldier, facing death in battle and then certain death if the battle was lost.   Other Americans, captured as prisoners of war, were subjected to an American Auschwitz.  In the starving South the care and feeding of Yankee prisoners, men the Union stubbornly refused to exchange for Rebel prisoners as long as surrendering black soldiers were butchered, was an afterthought.  

After the war Henry Wirz, commandant of Andersonville prison, became the first American (though Wirz was born in Zurich) tried and executed by America for war crimes.  Almost a third of the 32,000 prisoners of war in the unsanitary open air prison died in a little over a year of the prison’s operation.  Wirz reportedly complained about the deadly conditions at the camp, but then did his duty.  Ken Burns’s narrator adds this after a shot of Wirz hanging by the neck until dead:  he pleaded he had only followed orders.  

Wirz was tried and executed, Wikipedia informs us, at the federal prison that later was demolished to build the present day Supreme Court.

We look at history with some hope of learning from its tragedies. One pretty good working definition of insanity, after all, is doing the same thing over and over and hoping for a different outcome.

I read this just now, on the second page of an introduction entitled Roots of Empire: “War is a Racket”, and it speaks as well for me as it did for the authors of The Untold History of the United States, Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick.  The most obvious questions remain unasked much of the time. I will now practice my transcribing skills:

Why do such a tiny number of people– whether the figure is currently 300 or 500, or 2,000– control more wealth than the world’s poorest 3 billion?  Why are a tiny minority of wealthy Americans allowed to exert so much control of U.S. domestic politics, foreign policy and media while the great masses see a diminution of their real power and standards of living?  Why have Americans submitted to levels of surveillance, government intrusion, abuse of civil liberties and loss of privacy that would have appalled the Founding Fathers and earlier generations?  Why does the United States have a lower percentage of unionized workers than any other advanced industrial democracy?  Why, in our country, are those who are driven by personal greed and narrow self-interest empowered over those who extol social values like kindness, generosity, compassion, sharing, empathy and community building?  And why has it become so hard for the great majority of Americans to imagine a different, we would say a better, future than the one defined by current policy initiatives and social values?  These are only a few of the questions we will address in these pages.  Although we can’t hope to answer all of them, we hope to present the historical background that will enable readers to explore these topics more deeply on their own.

Well asked!

Let us briefly tickle, if not tackle, just these last two.

Why, in our country, are those who are driven by personal greed and narrow self-interest empowered over those who extol social values like kindness, generosity, compassion, sharing, empathy and community building?  

This is a fairly easy one, our country defines people in the first category, if they, or their ancestors, have succeeded in acquiring enough wealth, as winners.  The second category, very nice people though they well might be, are mostly losers who did not inherit and cannot amass great fortunes and therefore often engage in dewy-eyed class warfare against the winners.  The American Dream is about winning, not losing, asshole.  Check out the giant winner we have in the White House now, if you doubt that.

Now we come to their thorniest question, and one that underlies many of the others:

And why has it become so hard for the great majority of Americans to imagine a different, we would say a better, future than the one defined by current policy initiatives and social values?   

I think this great failure of collective imagination is the direct result of the other values and practices cited above.  American society is organized to put winners on pedestals and to keep the tens of millions of losers invisible, or, if they insist on trying to make themselves visible, vilified.  After all, the real problem is not that we can spend trillions to prosecute faraway wars that fly in the face of evolving international law while so many in our country are in want, but that we have a savage class of human predators stalking the streets of our impoverished ‘inner cities’ and making things unsafe for the rest of us.  You see how easy that sleight of hand is?  

History, it is said, is written by the winners.  It is hard to imagine the alternative to the official story and what we cannot imagine we cannot aspire to.  We are sold the crippling myth that there are but two ideologies in the world — Free Market Capitalism and Communism.  Communism, it was proved over and over, does not work, particularly if the Free World declares unending war against it.  The Commies who flourished were as corrupt and ruthless as the Captains of Industry here, men who sometimes became great philanthropists at the end of lifetimes of ruthlessness.  The fucking Koch brothers are patrons of the arts and science, in addition to shrewdly buying political influence coast to coast to increase their already beyond obscene wealth.  

By creating this false dichotomy of Freedom vs. Totalitarianism our elites have been able to convince us of our exceptionalism in a way that forecloses the bigger argument: is this really how we want to be exceptional?  For having the most people on earth in prison for nonviolent crimes?   For having more children in poverty than any comparably wealthy nation?  For electing a man who is making America a laughing stock, if also a terrifying one?

The oversimplification of reality presented in the consolidated, corporate mass media would make a very stupid person blush, but we are exceptional that way too.

Saddam Hussein was Hitler, we had a moral duty to liberate his people from him, even if it cost millions of Iraqis homelessness and forced migration, and countless thousands of Iraqis their limbs and lives.  We are just that kind of exceptional nation.  Don’t forget to tip your veteran on the way out.

Legislative Fix

We often complain about problems, with little ability to do anything about them.   This is particularly true in the area of politics, which while always local, is increasingly controlled by psychopaths, many of them not even persons, except in a convoluted legal sense, thousands of miles away.  I don’t want to get started on this issue of local sovereignty, because I have a large fish to try to figure out how to fry (proposing needed legislation for the publicity hungry AG to propose), but just a toe-dip into it before I begin.    

When the slave states seceded from the Union in the months before Lincoln was inaugurated, their issue was “states rights”.   In many areas; criminal law, family law, business law, each state is its own sovereign, by the design of our republican government.   Under our law community standards govern many things, like what is or isn’t pornographic. [1]   This is why the federal government had to step in after the Civil War to ensure community standards weren’t imposed on people who had been slaves a year or two earlier.

The “states rights” argument has most often been used by right wing types to claim exemption from federal meddling.   “We know best how to handle our own damn Negroes and don’t need you meddling liberal troublemakers coming down here telling us how to treat them,” as indignant southern states rights advocates said for decades, while standing on the same principle to prevent debate on federal anti-lynching laws.   

Of course, now that we are living in an open corporatocracy, certain universal rules are required for maximum profit.   The doctrine here is called “federal pre-emption”– on certain extremely important issues where a uniform national law is necessary, federal law preempts the wishes of the state and locality.  

Organic farmers in local communities, for example, had better shut up about pesticides and pesticide-resistant genetically modified crops, because the Supreme Court is about to sign off on Monsanto/Bayers’ right to sell their products everywhere with no interference from local bigmouths.  Same goes for marijuana, your local preference for a moderately harmless drug of choice has nothing to do with Nixon’s 1969 federal classification of the drug as a dangerous narcotic with no medicinal uses in his infamous Controlled Substances Act (“CSA”).  The CSA allows federal prosecution of pot smokers and the arguably arbitrary imprisonment of countless Americans in a decades’ long war against “Drugs”.   Same goes for anything we say it goes for, ass wipe.

One right-wing, states’ rights objection to the conservative private industry-protecting Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is that the federal law mandates the purchase of health insurance by millions of newly eligible citizens.   Takes away the right of the local government to decide how best to protect its disposable class of asshole citizens too stupid to have corporate jobs, or public sector ones, that provide health care.  

But enough of the critique of the easy to ridicule right-wing, I’m here to propose legislation to fix a specific problem: 

that NYS insurance companies routinely deny healthcare services to mandated low-income health insurance buyers utterly unprotected by New York State law, in spite of the fig leaf of administrative supervision by the Department of Financial Services.

Just before New York State adopted the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“PPACA”) it abolished the New York State Insurance Department and removed all traces of oversight from the New York State Department of Health.  The functions of these agencies were merged into the New York State Department of Financial Services.  This agency has sole responsibility in New York State for oversight of health insurance companies, as well as all fraud investigations related to consumer fraud against insurance companies, and all complaints about the practices of financial institutions, banks and brokers.  

Everything but, according to a fraud investigator for the Department of Financial Services, who referred me to a non-responsive phone tree number, investigations into colorable fraud committed by insurance companies against mandated health-care “consumers” in New York State.

Granted, the PPACA was written by health industry insider Liz Fowler.  It is only sensible that it tilts toward protecting industry profits over the rights of individual patients.   In light of this, it is a grave oversight, and a direct threat to the health of its most vulnerable citizens, that New York State does not have an independent agency dedicated to resolving the countless daily denials of purchased health care services. The need for this agency is particularly acute now that we have a president determined to eliminate most government regulation of private industry.

A health insurance consumer in New York State looks in vain for a forum where these complaints can be adjudicated.   At minimum a well-staffed Ombudsperson’s office should be created– and the 800 number prominently displayed on the New York State of Health Marketplace homepage.  Consumers of mandated health insurance in New York State should not be subjected to the arbitrary abuse of power by unaccountable private corporations whose primary business is increasing their profit margins.  

Proposal: create an agency dedicated solely to enforcing the rights of defrauded health insurance consumers in New York State.  

I mean, seriously, dude, how hard would that be, in the looming age of Trumpcare?

 

[1]  The Supreme Court recognizes that what is titilatingly pornographic to a hipster from Brooklyn might actually induce vomiting in someone from Kenosha, Wisconsin.

Note on Son of Letter to etc.

Interesting to notice how the unconscious mind grapples with a seemingly unsolvable problem.  When you are under ongoing stress from a difficult to bear psychological torment the brain struggles against it in the background, I suppose.  Objectively, your situation might scream for relief– anybody in your position would be ready to start shouting, particularly if there is no possibility of relief.  

The way things are set up here in the Free Market, you’d better have a lot of money to buy influence if you are burnt by something that desperately needs changing.  I have been banging my head against repeated drafts of a letter that has, at best, a small chance to influence even NY State’s publicity hungry AG to take action.  First a bit from the trenches:

My Obamacare navigator (the “in-person assister” who helps consumers find their way on the opaque New York State of Health website) was on the line with me Monday when I called to get my subsidy reinstated.  The quickest way to resolve this situation is to simply run my numbers again and calculate the subsidy the law entitles me to.  

This, I learned, will be impossible to do, according to the New York State of “Health”, without jeopardizing my current coverage– they can’t grant me a special extension to refile while they examine their clear error in denying me the subsidy the law entitles me to now.  I snarled a bit then preserved my right to appeal the removal of my subsidy.

My navigator heard that I am unable to refrain from snarling at the NYS rep Clint Eastwood-like but at length, whenever my low threshold for frustration is exceeded.  Now, no doubt, she understands that this Patient Protection Act shit has driven me a bit crazy.

The first time I exploded was when they rejected my appeal request because my scanned tax return with my signature did not have a handwritten date next to my signature, only a typed one by the paid preparer, a filing date verified by the official IRS tax transcript which was sent with it…

My navigator, a lawyer who works for a busy nonprofit assisting some of the thousands fucked by the Patient Protection Act, looked over a previous draft of my letter to the AG.  She emailed that I needed to focus on what I was really asking the AG to do– in the mode of “question asked”.  At law, you can’t complain without requesting specific relief within the power of the person you are petitioning to grant — well you can, but it won’t get you anything. 

It’s like that dilemma described in “Standing on a Phantom Leg” — part of my unconscious grapple with this very issue of being fucked without a remedy at law.  The complaint can be irresistibly well-drawn, but for legal purposes, it has to state a “cause of action” and request specific relief the court can provide.  The letter as written, and posted the other day as Son of Letter, in addition to being bloated and senselessly recursive, really doesn’t state exactly what I am asking the AG to do.

Reading a skillful litigator friend’s critique I realized the most recent draft of the letter was a long foul ball.   If I wrote it to the chief of the legislature, and my congress person, and everyone else in the New York State legislature, maybe a reasonable letter– since they are the ones to write the laws.  But all the AG can do is enforce existing laws.  I have to convince him that NYS insurance companies routinely commit widespread fraud against mandated low-income health insurance buyers utterly unprotected by New York State law, in spite of the fig leaf of administrative supervision by the Department of Financial Services.

Will it persuade the AG to rush off for a news conference (he’s a progressive and a publicity hound)?  That is the only question to be asked of the letter.  Written well but not hitting the mark?  Who cares? I have no time for that kind of writing.  I need this letter to be a clean base hit if I have any hope of it spurring the AG to action.

THIS JUST IN:

The New York State Attorney General has the power to, and does, propose legislation.   Yee fucking hah!  Back to the drafting table.