Category Archives: current events

The Constant Sharp-toothed sucking

Frank Zappa had a song called “The Torture Never Stops”, which is about right. Like pugnacious people looking for a reason to punch someone, it’s one of those things that hums along in the background of our enraged, maddening world.  Here’s a seemingly random one, crosswise in the old throat, that I will try to briefly dislodge.  

That’s one of the beauty parts of writing.  Describe it well and experience a moment of relief.  Why am I foaming at the mouth, you ask?  Let me wipe away the foam, like Mr. Hitler delivering a coherent, if amoral, description of effective propaganda in a book otherwise composed of rabid dog spittle, and give myself that momentary illusion of relief.  

The current figurehead of our Deep State, an entitled, irascible and seemingly unhinged reality TV big shot, has promised, among other things, to abolish and replace Obamacare.   That he is the man to provide America with a health care scheme like the one citizens of every other wealthy nation depend on is as ridiculous an idea as his modern day Great Wall of China proposed for our long southern border.  I have critiqued the corporation-friendly, cynically-named Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act at length.  You can click on the Obamacare link stage left (to the right for you pogues) to read the disheartening details.  I am no friend of Obama, a probably good man with a record of accomplishments as shameful as Bill Clinton’s.  Depleted uranium and cluster bombs dropped in Syria?  Not done by Mr. Trump, that was the handiwork of my man the Nobel Peace Prize laureate.  

Anyway, in the last phase of Mr. Obama’s second term, New York State came up with a pay-as-you-go Medicaid plan for New Yorkers living slightly above the poverty line.  It’s called the Essential Plan.  The name turns out to be apt.  You can essentially get the health care you can force someone to provide under the plan.  Based on my income I qualified for this no-frills plan.  In fact, I was forced to enroll, or have no health insurance and pay a fine as a scofflaw come tax time.  

My experience with this “Essential” plan was literally sickening.  I wound up so sickened that my visit to the ER resulted in my being hospitalized for cardiac tests.  Follow-up care was deemed unnecessary, an undue burden, no doubt, on the corporation to which I paid my low monthly premium.  

When I enrolled for health insurance in 2017 I was determined to pay more and get a plan that could provide me with some measure of actual health care.  My subsidy level, and choice of plans, would be determined by my projected 2017 income.  It had to be above a certain level, to allow me to choose anything but the Essential Plan.  My actual 2016 income would have doomed me to the Essential Plan.  Luckily for me I was not asked my actual 2016 income, I was asked to project my 2017 income.  

After hours on the phone I learned what was not available anywhere on the internet– what the income threshold to choose a health plan was, somewhere around $29,000.  Nobody could tell me if this was gross or net income, so I declared my 2017 income to be a robust $32,000, to leave myself a margin for error.  

I instantly received a Notice of Disenrollment.  What I mean is that, this shit popped up on my screen within seconds of clicking in that income number.  I got a document emailed to me at the same time, helpfully labeled Template 09, like all the others, which informed that I was no longer qualified for the Essential Plan.  Good news, I naively thought.  

I will spare you a hundred details and tell you that my Navigator (the website and marketplace are so opaque it literally requires a navigator to help you get around) informed me that my income level qualified me for a subsidy of about half the monthly premium.  Meaning, with the subsidy I’d pay an affordable $230 a month for “Silver level” Obamacare with only a $1,200 out of pocket deductible.   Meaning that’s what I should be paying, under the law.  Except I’d had another notice telling me, erroneously, that I was not entitled to any subsidy.  Fair enough, we have already had vivid illustrations of what contemptible morons the administrators of the complicated and opaque program are.  

It will take about six months to have my appeal heard, my Navigator (also an attorney at a New York non-profit mandated to help consumers) informs me.  In the meantime I will pay $453 a month and have a $2,000 deductible.  Although, once they correct their mistake and reinstate my subsidy I will get a tax refund, some time in the second half of 2018, for the overpayment in 2017.  All I need to do to get an appeal of their clearly mistaken determination is to submit a letter, my 2015 tax return (the last one filed) and a Tax Transcript from the IRS.  

What the fuck is a Tax Transcript, you ask?  No fucking idea.  Click this  shit to learn all about it:  https://www.irs.gov/individuals/get-transcript.

OK, easy enough.  The IRS will send you an electronic one, chop chop.  All you need to do is create a log-in and request one.  They assure you it’s quick to create a log-in, only about 15 minutes.  Easy.  Except that each of the four times I have tried so far, over the course of more than an hour over two days, punctuated with Tourretic outbursts that have terrified, and horrified, Sekhnet, they log me out, sometimes because their system malfunctions, other times informing me it’s done for my own protection, before I can complete the process.  There is no 800 number where you can speak to a human being for assistance.  

So, I can just relax for Presidents’ Day Weekend, since there is nothing to be done at the moment.  Two days in a row, unable to complete this easy log-in business.  No reason to get excited.  Just keep loaning this giant insurance company $230 a month, since I’ll, theoretically, get it back a year and a half from now anyway.  Assuming this Orange Winner does not actually make good on abolishing the whole plan and replacing it with something terrific.  

I feel much better now, thanks, I really do.

Follow up on Raid in Yemen Story

NBC reports, January 31, 2017 4:15 ET:

Contrary to earlier reporting, the senior military official said, the raid was Trump’s first clandestine strike — not a holdover mission approved by President Barack Obama. The mission involved “boots on the ground” at an al Qaeda camp near al Bayda in south central Yemen, the official said.

source

Expect to hear no more about this story, but make a note of it.

Kudos to the New York Times

The Grey Lady, America’s newspaper of record, reports on the recent accidental killing, by Navy SEALs, of eight year-old Nora al-Awlaki, daughter of the previously executed Anwar al-Awlaki.   Awlaki’s father, Nora’s grandfather, Nasser al-Awlaki, is quoted in the piece:

Nasser al-Awlaki, the girl’s grandfather, gave NBC News a different version of events of what took place. “My granddaughter was staying for a while with her mother, so when the attack came, they were sitting in the house, and a bullet struck her in her neck at 2:30 past midnight. Other children in the same house were killed,” he said. Nora died from her injuries two hours after suffering the gunshot wound, he said. The grandfather went on to say that the SEALs burned the home after raiding it, and that Nora’s mother escaped the raid with only a minor injury. The U.S. has also killed Anwar al-Awlaki’s father and son in previous drone strikes.    source

I know I’m a nitpicky, mean-spirited motherfucker, but the Times concludes the paragraph above by reporting that the man who spoke to NBC news about the recent killing of his granddaughter had been himself killed in the drone strikes of 2011.  

We presume the Times will print a correction, if a reader writes in to point it out.  Who has the time?  Who really cares about such a seemingly insignificant detail?  There are larger issues of accuracy and credibility to concern their editors.

In a larger sense, the Grey Lady may have had it right.  It might very well feel true for Nasser al-Awlaki, that he was already killed by American drones several times over.  His petition to save his son Anwar from Obama’s kill list was thrown out of court.  His son was soon thereafter killed by a drone strike. Two weeks later his 16 year-old grandson Abdulrahim was killed by another American missile strike, also remotely launched from a Predator drone.  

Those two killings may have, metaphorically, killed Nasser al-Awlaki.  One can only imagine how troubling to his dead body the gunshot mutilated little corpse of his eight-year old grand-daughter must be.

But in fairness, and truly, America, who really gives a fuck about some family’s tragedy in far away Yemen?  Anwar al-Awlaki (you will read everywhere but in Scahill’s Dirty Wars) wasn’t a dissenting American citizen forcefully exercising his First Amendment right to oppose government actions he found hateful.   He was a dangerous terrorist, pure and simple, a powerful recruiter for hateful, murdering fanatics, the President said so.   He was very highly placed in al Q’eada when he was put on the Presidential Kill List, you can confirm that with the New York Times and NPR as well as on Fox, CNN, MSNBC.  

Chances are they all hate our freedom over there anyway, isn’t that right?   As for the beautiful little girl bystander left to die slowly in that raid, an American bullet in her spine, without medical treatment, remember that every terrorist was once an adorable eight year-old.  

Move along now, America, nothing to see here.  USA!  USA!!!!

 

 

They will kill you, Elie

“You may see this new era, with its sudden desperation, the army of full-throated angry Americans whipped up by a cynical and clever Minister of Public Enlightenment advising an impulsive, emotionally unbalanced Chief Executive, as an opportunity for you, Elie, but you should also beware,” said the skeleton of my father.  “They will have not a second’s hesitation to take any and all steps, including launching a Hellfire missile, to take your smart ass out of the game if you ever pose the slightest threat to anybody.”  

You know, this is something I’ve not been able to convey to anyone during the long, mostly fruitless eight year rule by the well-liked and well-hated Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mr. Obama.  They used to warn Cheney that the powers he was grabbing for the Unitary Executive might feel good when you had Bush in office, but that President Hillary Clinton with all that power might not feel so good to Cheney.  Cheney, Mr. Darkside, the personification of evil, told those people to go fuck themselves.  The rest, as they say, is history.  

“The American president, thanks to Obama’s courageous innovation, no longer need concern himself with the quaint and antiquated notion of ‘due process’ when your on target nerve-probing comes to his attention.   Say you achieve a modest degree of success in creating a voracious twelve mouthed funnel bringing masses of people to your platform, your, until now, little read work product here on this blahg.  The NSA can easily access everything you’ve ever written now, like a time machine, they’ve already gathered all your emails, phone records, the works, they just have to pull it up.  Reading it over they will easily see a long pattern of griping and many direct insults to powerful people who now have the absolute right to put you on a secret kill list and, literally, blow you into a thousand bloody shards.”  

I doubt very much I’ll be targeted for anything until after people like Jeremy Scahill, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and many, many thousands of others, perhaps millions, get whacked.  Obviously, I take your point, though, especially since, once again, it is, coincidentally, exactly my point.  

Look up Anwar al-Awlaki now and every mention of him connects him to Al Q’eada, intimating that his extra-judicial execution was well-deserved as the dangerous number two or three man to Osama bin Laden himself.  The New York Times, of course, identifies Awlaki this way.  Wikipedia remains uncorrected in this too.  I’m no friend of murderous fanatics, but, for fuck’s sake, when you look at the fucking facts of this case you will not applaud, as Bill Maher gloatingly did, the execution of this fellow American and, quite a few days later, his 16 year-old American born son, and today, we learn, his eight year-0ld daughter, shot to death by SEALs yesterday.    

Awlaki was one of America’s go-to imams after the 9/11 attacks. American born, telegenic, well-spoken, reasonable, he was on TV many times, sought for interviews by many major media sources.   The FBI found out a couple of the Washington DC based 9/11 killers had attended services at the large Virginia mosque where Awlaki conducted services.  They probed for connections, found nothing very promising but began surveillance and— whoa! Awlaki was having regular sessions with prostitutes!   The fucking hypocrite!

The whores interviewed liked him, he was apparently a decent guy who just wanted sex.  The FBI grabbed him, warned him that if he kept up his increasingly critical comments about the Bush administration’s wars against multiple Muslim countries, his wife and family might not be so happy to watch the videos of what he did in his spare time, if you take my fucking meaning, my friend.  

He eventually left the U.S. with his family and went back to live in his father’s country, Yemen.  He was increasingly vocal in his criticism of America’s worldwide jihad against Muslims.   The Yemenis grabbed him at one point, and, at the request of the Americans, kept him locked up, without charges or trial, for about a year and a half.  Much of this time he was in solitary confinement.

 “Well, let’s be accurate here, he wasn’t locked up without charges.  He was locked up for some kind of alleged conspiracy with Al Q’eada supporters, he was accused of planning to kidnap somebody, or something, but they never followed up on the charges, outside of tossing him into a hole for more than a year to meditate on American justice,” said the skeleton.  

When he comes out of prison he’s not convinced, oddly enough, that America is conducting a righteous search for a discrete group of murderous fanatics.  The Muslim still seems to believe that America has declared worldwide war on Islam.

“You get this detailed story from Jeremy Scahill’s 2013 NY Times best seller Dirty Wars and his documentary of the same name.  The book was read by a lot of people, not all of whom buy his premise about Awlaki and how he was killed, not only without trial, but without being charged with any specific crime.  ‘Enemy combatant’ suffices to land one on the kill list, and that designating is done at the sole discretion of the sitting president.  NPR, to take but one prominent example,  voiced some skepticism, they tell their large audience:

But Scahill goes on to argue, far more controversially, that the late cleric’s militancy was a direct result of American overkill and hostility toward Islam. Indeed, as we watch footage of Scahill and surviving relatives gazing sadly at home movies of the family, Awlaki comes close to being portrayed as an innocent victim.

“It is, without question, very controversial to try to increase public knowledge of secret wars, and secret kill lists, and secret programs that violate civil liberties up to and including depriving American citizens of their fundamental, but apparently not inalienable, right not to be deprived of life without due process of law,” said the skeleton.  “If you think the current president’s Muslim ban is bad, what do you think about the secret killing of many Muslim children by drones that first drive them insane, and then reduce them to bloody streaks on the rocks?”

You’re still a fucking commie, dad, even there in your eternal rest.  

“There’s not a shred of proof linking me to the Communists,” said the skeleton.  

The thing that chills me to the bone, and it apparently chills Jimmy Dore, who identifies himself as a night club comedian who tells dick jokes to drunks,  as much as it does me, is that no critical conversation of certain things is allowed in public discourse today.    Obama good, Bush bad.  Bush secret kill list bad, Obama secret kill list good.  As Dore points out, Obama is NICE.  He’s nice!  If he kills a 16 year-old American with a missile launched from a drone, turns the American kid into chopped meat, the little asshole must have done something to deserve it, no?  You don’t want to come close to portraying someone a good man, a thoughtful man, ordered a hit on as an innocent victim.

“The U.S. didn’t even try to refute the fact that Awlaki’s kid had nothing to do with anything.  The smug press secretary just said the little asshole should have been more careful about who he ‘chose’ for his father.  Which echoes the famous good advice to slum dwellers, pick your parents better, assholes, and don’t complain about your own poor choices,” said the skeleton.  

You’re a godless goddamned commie, dad.  

“Takes one to know one,” said the skeleton, “drone you later, asshole.”

I leave you with this, from today’s fucking news, discovered when I went to verify the proper spelling of al-Awlaki’s name:

The (dead) child’s mother, Anwar al-Awlaki’s widow, survived the raid with a minor wound, according to Nasser al-Awlaki. However, Anwar al-Awlaki’s brother-in-law was killed in the raid. The death toll varies according to the sourcing, with the Pentagon saying 14 militants died, along with “numerous” civilians. Nasser al-Awlaki said Yemenis were circulating a body count of combatants and civilians as high as 59.     source

fair and balanced coverage of the same story

 

Finding Inspiration in the Sickening Tragedy of History

I must take a moment off from trying to put all of my hard-earned insights about life into the mouth of the skeleton of my difficult, at times impossible, father.

To be more accurate:  I need to take a break from trying to put these insights into our ‘conversations’ by way of giving you, gentle reader, these hopefully tantalizing crusts to chew on.   I generously give the fucking skeleton most of the good lines because I am that kind of son.  But I’m afraid my dear old father can add nothing at the moment to what I need to say.  

“Well, it wouldn’t be the first time you completely underestimated me, would it, Elie?” said the familiar pain in the ass from his bed inside the earth.  

Most people I know are very upset at the recent political turns of fortune here in the land of the free and the home of the brave.    They have little faith that a vain, thin-skinned, attention and adulation-seeking man, born filthy rich, to a self-made millionaire father, Frederick Christ “Fred” Trump (I shit thee not), who sent the troubled boy to a military academy to make him less of a vain, thin-skinned, attention-seeker, and later battled government charges of systematic racism with this same son, aided by the evil Roy Cohn, the son by then the young president of his imperious, embattled father’s real estate empire, can lead our troubled and divided nation to better times.  They look at his Harvard-trained, Goldman Sachs exec turned successful profiteer of hate and innuendo, his Chief Strategist, and see Dr. Goebbels, Minister of Public Enlightenment, the man with the intellectual fire power to sell his passionate master’s vision of National Greatness to the persuadable, and they shudder with horror.    

Sekhnet is more upset than most.   She suffers from PTSD, is more susceptible than many to loud rumblings of the worst case scenario.   She can’t hear much on any subject related to any of this without becoming tearful.   She told me tonight that I’m incapable of talking about anything else (though, in fairness to me, I spend plenty of time doling out Obama’s share of blame for the current state of affairs).  I must therefore take a few moments from trying to craft a salable manuscript about my father and history, written with a slavish devotion to the tastes of the razor-toothed corporate cocksuckers I hope will embrace it, promote it, and pay me for it, to speak bluntly and honestly about something that quickly reduces Sekhnet to tears.   History.  

She had terrible history teachers in school who made studying the subject a boring, meaningless chore.  As a consequence she never read history once she graduated.   She much preferred the intellectual rigors of philosophy and science, though she no longer reads much of the former and doesn’t have as much time as she’d like to keep up with most aspects of the latter.   History, she says, is like the politics and ‘alternative facts’ that divide us now, a data dump of unquantifiable sludge, or propaganda, dull and/or dangerous, the stuff of which the horror we live in today is actually crafted.    

“She’s not entirely wrong about that,” said the skeleton wryly.  

I tried to explain to her that uncovering the pertinent facts and learning useful lessons from history is, indeed, an ongoing battle.  It’s like the battle I must constantly wage against anger.  There are plenty of reasons to rage, always, no shit.   The struggle not to become angry must be ongoing if it is to have any hope of success.  You might learn to eliminate the reflexive tensing of your arms, the clenching of your fists, even the snarl that might feel irresistible — but the look on your face will still betray your feelings most of the time.  

The best history is a nuanced telling of what happened in the past in the context of how this past affects things going forward.  No professional historian can actually present this story in all its nuance, though some come much closer than others.  History, at its best, is an earnest search for deeper truth about our world that inspires us to make the best choices for the future.  

It’s true that most historians write for their masters, serve a powerful force of one kind or another.  It is said that history is written by the victors, often in the blood of those they defeat and vilify.  Much of what we call history is written to justify one set of beliefs or another.   The historian, we’re told, must start with a thesis, in the manner of a scientist, and demonstrate the truth of the theory by presenting and interpreting the known and uncovered facts.  

“Sounds a lot like a data dump of unquantifiable sludge, when you put it like that,” said the skeleton.  

Yeah, maybe so.   History is slippery, I’ll give it that.  Certain things, however, happened, they objectively happened and they cannot unhappen.  There were a few hundred years of chattel slavery here, for example, from the earliest colonial days through almost the entire first century of our great democracy.   That part is beyond dispute, even if you refer to it as The Peculiar Institution and the rich people who owned slaves, raped the ones they liked, had the ones whipped that they didn’t like, as Planters.  Then the Civil War.  Then things get slippery.  

Woodrow Wilson was a great fan of D.W. Griffith’s epic masterpiece of early cinema, the innovative ‘The Birth of A Nation.’  He had the movie screened at the White House, the first movie ever screened there.  

“The aptly named White House, in that instance,” said the skeleton.  

Some feminist professor at CCNY made us watch most of the infernal movie with her, in a darkened room on the City College campus in Harlem.  I watched the thing and said to myself “I’ll be damned.”   I had no idea the freed slaves had created such a massive and intolerable wave of terror, preying on white women, raping them, and that the Ku Klux Klan, far from being the brutal, hate-filled lynching, terrorist murderers I’d always supposed, were actually modern day knights, living out a code of chivalry as impressively heroic as any from storied antiquity.  

“Sekhnet will tell you to tone down the irony,” said the skeleton.  

Fine, but I give it as an example.  The version of history that was in ascendance in 1915, when the hateful “Birth of A Nation” was made, and Klan membership was soaring, was that American blacks were out of control and needed the harsh penal laws of the southern states and brutal methods, including occasionally teaching them a collective lesson by torturing and killing the most uppity of them, to keep them in line.  It was better for everybody, these historians argued, to leave the treatment of blacks to the localities that knew them best.   Any black people who could get out of those localities migrated, en masse, to urban centers far from the former Confederacy.  Life wasn’t no crystal stair for them where they went, but it was arguably better than casting your eyes down wherever you went to avoid being strung up. [1]

The history of these things is fascinating to me, even if also maddening and grotesque.  I read historians like W.E.B. Du Bois, Eric Foner and Howard Zinn and nod my head.  These historians are speaking my language, presenting the past in a way that makes perfect sense to me, in light of the present.  Other people may not be moved by these histories at all, some might hate them, still others might never open any of these books in the first place.   I don’t say one way is necessarily better than another, but for me, as it was for my father, this shit is endlessly fascinating.  

“Well, not everybody is cut out for it, Elie.  You can see the long recitation of the horrors of history as an unbearable ordeal to put yourself through.  History is also alive.  You remember when you and your sister were little and I told you not to buy Sugar Babies and Sugar Daddies?  They were Welch candies, made by a company owned by Robert Welch, the man who started the John Birch Society– in the year your sister was born, as a matter of fact.  

“The John Birch Society were rabid right wing fanatics who believed Dwight D. Eisenhower was a Soviet agent.  The infamous billionaire Koch brothers, who have done so much to bring about a more just world — for themselves– , sprung from the syphlitic gonads of one of the founders of the John Birch Society.   Here’s what Welch published about Eisenhower, courtesy of your friend Jeeves:

  • On page 278 of The Politician, Welch summarized, from his perspective, the only two possible interpretations of President Eisenhower’s motives: “The role he has played, as described in all the pages above, would fit just as well into one theory as the other; that he is a mere stooge or that he is a Communist assigned the specific job of being a political front man.”

“Anyway, true enough, any jackass can write history.  You recall Henry Ford’s masterwork about the worldwide Jewish conspiracy, meticulously researched and based largely on the infamous Czarist forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”  

Yeah, look, you and I don’t have much squeamishness about history, but I recognize that many people do.   I will end with Howard Zinn’s inspiring message, delivered as an older man, talking about why he studied and taught history, why he wrote A People’s History of the United States:

“I wanted, in writing this book, to awaken a consciousness in my readers, of class conflict, of racial injustice, of sexual inequality and of national arrogance, and I also wanted to bring into light the hidden resistance of the People against the power of the establishment.   

“I thought that to omit these acts of resistance, to omit these victories, however limited, by the people of the United States, was to create the idea that power rests only with those who have the guns, who possess the wealth.  I wanted to point out that people who seem to have no power — working people, people of color, women– once they organize and protest and create national movements, they have a power that no government can suppress.

“I don’t want to invent victories for people’s movements, but to think that history writing must simply recapitulate the failures that dominate the past is to make historians collaborators in an endless cycle of defeat.  And if history is to be creative, if it’s to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I think, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win.

“I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past’s fugitive moments of compassion rather than in the solid centuries of warfare.”

 

[1] I have a vivid memory of my mother reading me this wonderful poem by Langston Hughes  (read the poem, but whatever you do, don’t click on the play video button above it)

Enraged Asshole

“Well, look, Elie, rage is the most terrifying and destructive human emotion.  We can all relate to that, I suppose, from both sides.  Horrible as it is to be the recipient of rage, rage unleashes a phantom surge of powerfulness, but really, as we’ve discussed, rage is a response to intolerable powerlessness.  Real rage comes from the deepest shame.  

“We can’t bear shame, which is intensely painful, so we lash out.  We can’t strike at the thing that causes us shame, most of the time, so we find someone weak to attack, someone we can beat to a fucking pulp.  Something that can’t kill us after we smash it in the face.  That’s why most people reserve rage for their loved ones.

“You have it in national politics now, the politics of rage and shame, a response to enforced powerlessness.  People are angry, for many reasons, many of them valid.  You live in a country where you’re now forced to buy private health insurance.  You buy it.  You’re having chest pains, left arm hurts, your doctor advises you to get to an Emergency Room.  You present your insurance card at the ER.  A month later a bill comes for many thousands of dollars– your sole responsibility to pay.  

“The contract you signed with your insurance company informs you quite clearly, on page 75, that where your insurance is accepted is a matter you are solely responsible to determine before accepting any medical services, even if you are on a stretcher, or unconscious, even if you’re admitted to the hospital as a cardiac patient.  There are a million aggravating things like that for most people in a hundred areas of American life.  

“So you rage.  You are powerless.  You don’t have an army of millionaire lobbyists making laws for your benefit and protection.  That power belongs to the super wealthy ‘persons’ called corporations.  Period.  Work for a corporation and you may be OK in certain ways, although you will also be subject, many times, to the arbitrary will of a powerful psychopath.  Work for yourself?  Better have a lot of money before you start out on that path.  

“Anyway, there is a tremendous amount of free-floating rage out there in America.  You see it immediately as soon as you get behind the wheel of a car.  Some of your fellow drivers clearly don’t give a fuck if you, or they, die.  You can read about it in the paper every day, more Americans shot to death.  Road rage.  Disputes that get out of hand.  It’s not the guns that kill people, of course, Elie, it’s the rage.  A law against rage?  Hah!  Fuck you!

“Anyway, you have to get outside now, so I’ll leave you with this.  The president you have now is a brand, like all of them are, like President Hope and Change was.  This guy’s brand is anger, anger and winning.  He is angry about everything, always, even when he wins.  He’s angry that millions of dead Mexican rapists fraudulently voted against him, depriving him of a victory in the popular vote that the media fraudulently claims he lost.  What is his solution?  He momentarily fixates and rages.  An angry denier, perfect man to lead the greatest nation the world has ever known, wouldn’t you say, Elie?”

The cancerous, zombie chickens of American Exceptionalism coming home to roost, dad.

This new guy

Had the misfortune to hear his entire empty, cliche-infested speech.  Vile… SAD!  

On the other hand, living proof that an angry asshole can be whatever he wants to in America, if he’s born rich enough and he’s willing to do whatever it takes.

Obamacare dramatically reduces preventable American DEATHS!

Before the puckishly named Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act became law, 45,000 was generally accepted as the number of Americans who died every year of conditions that would have been curable, had they not been diagnosed too late in an Emergency Room.  Thanks to Mr. Obama’s inspired and innovative health care scheme, that number may now be as low as 25,000 dead Americans a year for lack of health insurance.  Almost half of the 60,000,000 previously uninsured Americans are now covered under the PPACA.  An achievement anybody would be proud of, any way you slice it.   Shoot, 7,300 American veterans take their own lives every year in this country, for Christsake, as the president informed us on Veteran’s Day (20 American veterans take their own lives every day).

Admittedly, the PPACA health insurance system is still not perfect, even in states that adopted it early and eagerly, like New York State.  If you want a wee taste of the PPACA in action, and a very dry little chuckle, read the helpful paragraphs below and click on the link to see the list of providers.  This is from the New York “State of Health” “Marketplace” website.  It is for sure worth a quick click:

On this page, you will see the plans that are available for you to purchase. You can search plans by different criteria such as how much you will pay each month (monthly premium), the category (metal) of the plan you want, and/or the health insurance carrier you prefer. You can search for plans based on their quality ratings.

You can also see the plans that your doctor accepts, or plans that include hospitals or other facilities that you use. Click here to search for doctors and facilities. By clicking on the link, you will be re-directed to the NYS Provider & Health Plan Look-up website. However, this does not guarantee that your doctor accepts the plan. In addition to using the search function, call your doctors hospitals, or other facilities to see what plan they accept.

You can apply for an affordability hardship exemption if you think you cannot afford to purchase health insurance due to your projected income in the coming year. Click on Apply for an Exemption for next steps.

Disclaimer: CMS is conducting additional consumer testing regarding the public display of quality rating information.

Not to be rude, but who the fuck is CMS and when are they going to get their collective head out of their collective ass?

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day 2017

The myths we live by can sometimes break your heart.  Myths have sustained humans forever, brought people together, torn us apart.  Myths can teach us the most important truths or entrench us in ignorance.  I have no insight into Christian mythology, though I have been swayed in my life by the righteous voice of a Baptist minister, a voice that could not be silenced by the bullets that killed him.    It is that Baptist minister whose life and message we celebrate today.   

Jesus, born more than two thousand years ago– if he was born at all (a book I read makes a convincing case about the total absence of contemporary evidence that Jesus ever existed) — is believed by more than two billion people to be the son of God.   God, it is written, sent His only son to preach love in a world of human hatred and cruelty.  God, the all-knowing, understood that a powerful apostle of peace and kindness in a corrupt and vicious world must inevitably wind up tortured and crucified.  And so it was.

The myth continues that because Jesus allowed himself to be nailed to a cross for a long, painful death, while being mocked, believing in Him will cleanse a person of their sins, including their original sin– a concept I am a bit hazy about, I must admit.  I am no Christian, even as I greatly admire Jesus’s message of love and generosity.

It’s been impossible for me to disentangle the Christian message of peace and mildness from the Christian history of killing and enslaving in the name of God and His son;  good Christian killing good Christian in Thirty Year and Hundred Year Wars, good Christian killing Muslim, good Christian killing Jew, good Christian enslaving Africans who are then converted to Christianity, like millions in South and Central America converted under the sword.  There are many good Christians today who are intolerant, righteous in their hatred of homosexuals, in their support of preemptive wars.

The hypocrisy done in the name of Jesus, the Prince of Peace and the Son of God, ruins Christianity as a myth I can take much comfort from.   The Catholic Church’s long corporate cover-up of horrible crimes, actual sins, committed worldwide by priests and the church hierarchy adds a very bitter note to the mix.

The heart of a religion cannot be judged on the actions of those who distort its teachings.   It is good to remember that today as we celebrate a belated national holiday dedicated to Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr., a true Christian in the best sense of the word, a man whose life became a legend.  

Many of us were alive when King preached, when he was sent to prison for his outrageous insistence that American blacks deserved the same rights as all other Americans.  He was a hero to many decent, God-fearing Americans, even as he was hated by millions of other decent, God-fearing Americans who believed that King was a privileged Negro troublemaker who simply didn’t know his place.  

King inspired.  He spoke truth that rings across time.  See if you can listen to his Why I Oppose the War in Vietnam speech without being moved, consider the tragedy of its unheeded, irrefutable wisdom,  without tears beginning to flow.

“An unjust, evil and futile war,” he explains in his distinct and sonorous cadence.   His conscience, he said, leaves him with no other choice but to speak of it.  The time, he said, has come for America to hear the truth about this tragic war.  You can read the transcript, if you prefer reading to hearing the tones of one of history’s great orators.  

The speech connecting racism, poverty and war cost him many things, his place among America’s most admired, a canceled invitation to the White House and, a year later, to the day, his life.  More on that here.  There is a strong parallel between the story of King and the story of Jesus, especially in the endings– both were ready to die to speak truth they knew would mark them for death.  

That is at the heart of our most inspiring myths; a genius who can unharden hearts and is willing to die for the truth is the rarest of humans.   I keep thinking about the millions of American blacks who still live in hopeless, inherited poverty in a nation still deeply divided about “race”.  I often think of how little has changed for millions of Americans originally from Africa, most now several generations deeper in poverty, since the sacrifice of Martin Luther King, since the outright assassination of Malcolm X.  We will never know for certain how James Earl Ray, another lone gunman, a lifelong jailbird with at best average intelligence, and no particular resources, eluded arrest during a long international manhunt after killing King.  Speculating on who would have ordered King killed one year to the day after his Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam sermon, when he was in Memphis to support striking sanitation workers, already deep into his work to unite those in poverty, is best left to the “conspiracy nuts”.  

I have no light to shed on Martin Luther King’s murder or the horrible coincidence of his killing one year to the day after he articulated why America must address racism, poverty and a war culture, and how all three are inextricably interconnected.   The night before his murder King gave the fiery and prophetic “I Have Been to the Mountaintop” speech.  Listen to it now unmoved, if you can.  

John Lewis was with Martin Luther King in the deep south.  Lewis had his skull broken by police nightsticks in Selma, Alabama, if I’m not mistaken.   Lewis has been in Congress for decades.  The other day he announced that he would boycott the inauguration of the new president.  I didn’t hear the announcement, but heard he questioned the legitimacy of this highly questionable candidate, who lost the popular vote by 3,000,000 but managed to win the electoral college fair and square, arguably, by a margin of less than 80,000 total votes in key districts of several swing states.  

The president-elect fired back, via tweet, that Lewis ought to pipe down, that he’d be better off looking after his business in his “crime-infested” district. PEOTUS also canceled his Martin Luther King Day trip to the Smithsonian’s new  Museum of African-American History and Culture.

This was a neat bit of tweeting, for a man who reacts swiftly and strongly to any provocation.   A lesser man might have burst forth with a racially charged epithet.  The genius of this reality TV superstar is to make such things perfectly clear with printable phrases like “crime-infested.”  It conjures the hateful thing beautifully.  The crime one immediately imagines is far from the Goldman-Sachs boardroom where the most lucrative crime schemes are hatched.  One instead immediately pictures dark, angry faces, disgusted by the narrow electoral college victory of history’s most divisive and historically unpopular president-elect.

I saw a clip of John Lewis on TV the other day.  He was refuting the idea that there has been no progress for American blacks since Martin Luther King’s day.   I was glad to hear him making the point, I am glad to agree.   There has been progress.  On the other hand, for millions in generations of eternal poverty, I think of an image of Malcolm’s from Alex Haley’s autobiography. There is a knife plunged deep into your back.  The knife is pulled out a couple of inches, but is still deep in your back.  That is undeniably progress, even if not precisely the full measure of progress one might wish for.

I imagine heaven, a place where good people go after they die.  I picture Martin Luther King sitting with Gandhi and Malcolm X.   They talk about history and the long, slow bending of its moral arc toward justice.   They all agree that had they lived at another time in history they would have likely accomplished little, died unknown, instead of as international icons of hope and inspiration.  

They were each blessed to have lived at a moment in history when their voices could be heard, when they could move masses to work toward a better world.  Gandhi could not have used Ahimsa to launch a successful movement for independence except at that moment when the British Empire was collapsing.   Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X were preaching and organizing at that particular moment in American history, when the country was ripe for overdue change after decades of hard sacrifice by the despised. They were good-looking, charismatic men alive during the earliest days when electrifying men could mesmerize masses of people in their homes, from a TV screen.  Had they lived at any other time they could not have been known so widely or been so influential before their early deaths.  

I imagine Martin Luther King, Jr. is the angriest of the three of them up there in heaven.  He may be less angry than I am, true, less angry, perhaps, than those who must continue to protest a nationwide pattern of police killings of unarmed black youths, but I picture him angry up there.   He was pissed off in that I Have Been To The Mountaintop speech, as he had every right to be, having endured what he had.

This would have been the great man’s 88th birthday.  His father lived to be 84, so his son had a chance to live a long life.  He would have preferred a longer life, longevity has its place, as he said, but he was fearing no man the last night of his life.   Ponder that for a moment, along with the ongoing heartbreak of his sacrifice, before you head out to the mall for the Martin Luther King Day sales.

Letter to Whom It May Go Fuck Yourself

Office of the Attorney General
The Capitol
Albany, NY 12224-0341

Honorable Attorney General Schneiderman:

I am writing to enlist your efforts to remedy the lack of state oversight of health insurance companies under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“PPACA”).

I have admired the courageous and proactive steps your office has taken against the perpetrators of various frauds and urge you to consider this letter in the context of systemic healthcare-related fraud against a large class of vulnerable citizens of New York State.

Defrauded health insurance consumers in New York State have no forum where complaints can be resolved, outside of the NYS Department of Financial Services, which, it turns out, does not hear such complaints.

 The fraud department investigator there could not find a word other than fraud to describe what I detailed, but urged me to call the NY State Department of Financial Services Consumer Services Hotline. He assured me that they were the specialists in this area. The answering machine at the hotline, which I recognized from my first call, offers no option for resolving issues with health insurance companies regulated by the ACA, or otherwise.

 On my original call, a long wait to speak to a representative yielded the number of the proper federal agency to contact.   Calls to the U.S Department of Health and Human Services are robotically routed to a NY State number that is, sadly, the office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, where some helpful party connects you to a fraud hotline, which turns out to be at the office of the Medicaid Inspector General, where the office of legal affairs is also sympathetic, but unable to help, and so forth.

 I understand that the PPACA was drafted by Liz Fowler, a career health industry insider who went on to an executive position with Johnson & Johnson immediately after her work on the PPACA was done. I have witnessed the many attempts to repeal the law, rather than fix any of its original flaws, as most other complicated laws are tweaked and improved over time. Even so, the lack of any provision for oversight of ACA programs by New York State is grotesque. As a cardiac patient unable to see a cardiologist now for many months, the lack of oversight may also be deadly.

Although the situation I’m complaining of is personal and extremely aggravating, it is typical.  I’ve commiserated with others who suffer under similar insurance coverage. Erroneous bills are a common, if relatively innocuous, theme.

I receive bills that there is no way to resolve, most recently an invoice for $1,324 for a fully covered sonogram I had in August. It was resolved with the insurance company (Empire) and the provider to a zero balance in October. Two months later, the full bill for $1,342 was sent to me again in a Third Notice.   Nobody at Empire could give me the reason the provider had sent that bill, although the representative, who checked my account and called the provider again, informed me that, this time, it was my responsibility to pay it in full.  

Empire recently sent me an email warning of termination of my insurance for non-payment of December’s premium two weeks after their email confirmation of my payment for December and January.

More ominously, you can be denied medical service without explanation (provider NPI numbers and CPT codes notwithstanding), and there is nobody in New York State you can appeal to, except to the company itself.  Empire Blue Cross “Health Plus” recently sent me to two providers for needed medical services, a cardiologist and a physical therapy facility. Neither provided me with any service. 

I received the site-specific NPI number for the cardiologist, scanned and emailed the back and front of my insurance card, got pre-approval from his office. The consultation was halted ten minutes in and I was informed that my insurance would not cover the visit.   When I arrived at the nearby ‘physical therapy facility’ Empire had referred me to, it was a nursing home. They offer PT, but only to residents.

The circuit of government agencies I have contacted in vain came full circle with the “consumer help line” the NYS Department of Financial Services Fraud Unit investigator had me call, which I immediately recognized as the very first number I’d called.   Here is a summary of that cul du sac:

NYS Department of Financial Services referred me initially to the US Dept of Health and Human Services which connected me to NYS Health and Human Services, although an incorrect branch of that agency, the pertinent branch apparently having been merged into the NYS Department of Financial Services which took over all functions of the former NYS Insurance Department, as well as the NYS Banking Department.

The NYS Department of Financial services, it appears, conducts all oversight of health insurance, as well as all fraud investigations related to consumer fraud against insurance companies, and complaints about the practices of banks and brokers. Everything but, according to John Marconi, a fraud investigator there, apparent fraud committed by insurance companies against mandated health-care “consumers” in New York State.

My political and legal conclusions are beside the point. Whatever the reasons, the fact remains that in New York State in 2017, even under the PPACA, citizens whose health is menaced by private insurance company denials have no redress.  

Outside of a possible Article 78 (which government agency would you sue for relief?  The Department of Financial Services?) or a class action under a private attorney general or qui tam statute, what is a patient trying to get an appointment to see a cardiologist since August to do under the Patient Protection Act in New York State?   At minimum an ombudsperson, or a few hundred of them, would be a good start.

As I stated above, I’ve followed your career from the start and have admired your principled engagement in the fight against injustice.   To have a legal right that cannot be enforced is to have no legal right.   While certain injustice is accounted “the price of freedom”, the lack of legal recourse for denial of health care must not be allowed to stand in New York State.

I look forward to hearing from your office and stand ready to give any other details needed.

 Yours sincerely,

A. Schicklegruber