Category Archives: current events

She asked me why the vets who died waiting were so docile

I have a feeling these 40 dead veterans are just the tip of the iceberg.  Doesn’t seem right that they could have been so docile, my only theory is depression over their powerlessness.
 
We routinely say “thank you for your service” to people our great democracy has fucked over so many times in recent years. Redeployed over and over, deployments extended, sent into combat without combat armor against non-uniformed insurgent armies whose main weapon is the roadside bomb, criticized by the former Secretary of War (“we fight with the army we have, not necessarily the one we might like”), kept alive, due to advances in technology, with traumatic and disabling injuries that would have killed them even 15 years ago.  It’s hard to imagine who among them would NOT have PTSD, something the military resists diagnosing, since so many soldiers would rightfully use it as a reason to get sent home.   Let us not forget, hyper-masculine army culture prevents many soldiers from admitting they are depressed, anxious, in a panic whenever they hear noise.
 
Suicide has become the leading cause of death for our military lately.  I’m sure they feel hopeless, are promised over and over that they’ll get the life saving services they need and– uh, maybe next month.  Hang in there, buddy!  Have a nice day!
 
To me it’s a mindless extension of the selfish notion that everything, including schools, should be “privatized”, run with both eyes on the bottom line, with the attendant diminution of the value of human life (unless, of course, that human is wealthy).  The corporate mentality — hide inconvenient things, have robots answer phones so you don’t have to pay people to do it, screw the customer if they don’t like it, pay yourself first, maximize profits in every possible way, change the laws to keep more profit, and, above all, get your bonus.  Why the hell would you give pay incentives to VA administrators for properly running their hospitals in the first place?
 
This country may never have been the place it pretended to be, but it is worse now, in terms of the partisan hatred afoot, than at any time since the Civil War (or for the 100 years after that if you were what was nonchalantly called a ‘nigger’, especially if you didn’t know how to act).  I read about that June 21, 1964 lynching in Neshoba County, Mississippi the other day and shuddered to think I was alive and in 3rd grade when it happened, ten days after my 8th birthday.  This is not ancient history.
 
Around that time local racists sent my mother’s friend Mildred Rose an anonymous letter, on whose envelope some hate-twisted coward had scrawled COMMIE.  Mildred was a Commie (and my mother too, for that matter) because she supported busing to achieve racial integration TEN YEARS after Brown v. Bd. of Education.  Talk about incrementalism.  Schools are as segregated now, I’d wager, as they were in 1953.  All deliberate speed, yes indeed.  
 
Apparently when Senator Eastland pushed for the overtly racist William Cox (who first dismissed the indictments against most of the lynch mob who killed three young men, after burning down the black church they were using to organize a voting drive)  to be appointed to the federal bench in Mississippi he told Robert Kennedy “tell your brother to appoint him and I’ll let you have the nigger”.  The nigger was Thurgood Marshall, who got a seat on some appellate court without the dixiecrat’s opposition.
 
This country has traditionally been very bad for (apologies in advance to anyone offended)  homos, niggers, spics, Jews (I still like that we get that capital letter), Asians, Native Americans, socialists, intellectuals, a lot of other people.  I heard the other day that homosexuality was listed in the DSM until 1973, the year I graduated high school.  No wonder Ricky S____ was so coy about staying in the closet, light in the loafers and giggly though he also was (when not tearfully depressed).  Being gay was a shameful mental illness, the experts said so, don’t you know?  Many teenagers still kill themselves every day because of homophobia, in spite of a more nuanced understanding of homosexuality, and great social advances in attitudes toward it.
 
In certain ways we’re better as a nation now, in some ways much worse.  That profit drives everything and money equals speech may be the end of the game for democracy, no sense to even pretend otherwise.  I give $100 to some cause, everyone I know does the same.  Charles and David Koch kick in $1,000,000 and let’s just call that all Free Speech, how about it?  Can you say it with me, boys?  Free speech in the Free Market, Freedom on the damned march, get out of the way if you hate our freedom.
 
And the best part for those with the means to effectively exercise their free speech, you can buy your free speech anonymously, if your lawyers set up a 501(c)(4) nonprofit political action committee (PAC).  What Commies disparagingly call Dark Money is really a robust expression of freedom, in the opinion of those efficiently influencing elections and legislation.
 
On the other hand, can anyone tell me why a PAC is tax exempt, just like a charitable nonprofit prohibited by law from engaging in political action of any kind on pain of losing its tax exempt status?  Can anyone tell me why a 501(c)(4) is not required to disclose who funds it?  
 
The answer, of course, is as self-evident as the proposition that all men are created equal.   It is the same reason a dog licks its privates. Because it can.  Since money equals speech, those with the most money get to lick, or be licked, wherever they want, since it’s a parliament of pandering prostitutes.   Freedom is a beautiful thing, to those free to enjoy it.
 
But enough ranting, time to shave and exercise some of my other inalienable rights.  Goddamned shame about the way this country treats those brave souls we send into hell and then thank for their service, as we tell them to have a very nice day and let them wait, on secret lists, to die.  A small percentage of the corporate taxes unpaid by GE, Exxon, Apple and their ilk could fund a first rate health care system for veterans, but that would be so damned unfair to corporate CEOs!

Just One Question for the President

There are very rich, cynical people who, because speech has now been equated with money by the Supreme Court, can speak ten or a hundred million times more articulately than the average struggling mutt.    It is now common knowledge that the extremely privileged have unfettered access to lawmakers, who, dependent on their wealthy benefactors’ generous campaign support, will move mountains to privilege the advantages of the already privileged at the expense of everyone else.  

There are two brothers, the Koch brothers (pronounced “Coke”) who are only recently becoming well-known for their tireless, well-funded and influential speech against sustainable environmental policy, universal health care, collective bargaining, a living wage and many other things an unbiased person might consider basic rights of citizenship in a wealthy democracy.   The Koch brothers combined “worth” of about 100 billion dollars, puts them close to the richest twosome in the world today.  As anyone who has been following the news recently knows, it will never be enough to be among the richest people in the world today without making every effort to become richer still.

 

The Koch brothers stand to double their money when Obama quietly signs off on the other half of the Keystone pipeline (he’s already opened the southern half).  This pipeline will pump oil sludge, tar sand, the dirtiest form of nonrenewable fossil fuel, from Koch-owned lands in Canada to refineries and shipping points in the American south.   It will enable the profitable extraction of a very dirty and unsustainable fuel source that climate scientists (but, in fairness to science-deniers, only about 99% of them) say will put immense amounts of additional carbon into the biosphere.   It will accelerate climate change at a time when we need to slow it down, for the survival of life on the planet.  The extraction leaves behind a ravaged strip mined landscape and the toxic consequences are frighteningly far reaching; on the other hand, the Koch Brothers stand to make as much as $100,000,000,000 when the president quietly signs off.

 

My question is a purely rhetorical one that I will never have access to actually ask:  do you work directly for the Koch Brothers, my man?

 

I mean no disrespect to our president.    I love a Nobel Peace Prize winner with a sense of humor.  I’m just frustrated because he speaks so well and people want so badly to believe pronouncements that let them cling to the ghost of idealism rather than accept the evidence of even more eloquent and entirely consistent actions.  It’s depressing to judge this good man on the damning evidence of what he actually does, rather than on the strength of the uplifting things he has the talent to say.

 

And so it is with Obamacare, written by a lobbyist for the health insurance industry who has since gone back to work for that industry.   There are corrupt scumbags on both sides of the aisle, and in the aisle, and sliding slimily through the revolving door between lobbyists and legislators, everything oiled by the money, er… speech, of the legally created persons known as Corporations, entities whose only consideration, like the Koch Brothers, is maximizing profits.  If the corporation was actually a person it would be a psychopath.  And so it goes.

 

I received no invoice this month from Obamacare — which does not allow me to keep any of the doctors I’ve seen for years–  so I called on February 20th to find out how to pay.  Can’t do it on-line or by phone, it emerges, so the nice woman at the insurance company emailed me an electronic copy of their invoice, prepared 2/14 and not received by most consumers yet, with this maddening sub-punchline:

 

IMPORTANT MESSAGE: Our records show that you have not paid your premium for this month.   This premium is now overdue.  This bill includes your overdue premium in addition to the premium you owe for next month.  If we do not receive both of these premium payments by the due date set out on this bill, your coverage will be suspended.  Any charges for services (claims) will not be paid.

 

 So the consumer, not billed until the last week in February, deemed late and threatened with cancellation unless the “overdue” (payable by 2/28 at 5 pm. after all) premium and the preemptive March premium payments (payable by 3/31 at 5pm) are both mailed and received by the due date.

Punchline: there is no New York State agency, known to the operators and supervisors of the New York State of Health Marketplace, that monitors or oversees the business practices of the corporations that do business in that so-called marketplace.  

 

Nor is the hundred million dollar website easily navigable, or even updated, there is no on-line support to be accessed, nor any way to email anything to anyone at the Marketplace.   You can theoretically initiate a web chat, but that feature is not currently working.  The FAQ section, last updated in December 2013,  has nothing about complaints, grievances, appeals or getting help, outside of calling their overwhelmed help line.  

 

On the plus side, waiting times to speak to operators have gone down impressively, from over an hour to about ten minutes.  The operators are helpful, and overwhelmed and their hands are tied.  The consumers, well, can you spell SCAMMED, good citizens?  LOL!   Have a very nice day!

Symptom of Terminal Capitalism

After a young man named David Karp sold his internet creation Tumblr for something around a billion dollars the questions began.   Forbes asked how Karp would face the challenge of monetizing his somewhat idealistic invention, you know, because selling something for a billion dollars is only the first step in the insane dream that is today’s runaway capitalism.

I suppose Forbes was correct to ask that question, it’s a burning question its readers want to ponder– how do you turn one billion into two and then a hundred billion?

It may just be me, but living in a society that values and honors only the accumulation of vast unneeded profits, and wilfully ignores the misery the system creates, dismissing as externalities people poisoned, children starved, homes destroyed, the world made uninhabitable, hope effectively removed from millions and millions of lives, it grinds me down sometimes.

Evil is not only the deliberate bad things done to torture others, it is also the blind focus on acquiring more than can be spent in a thousand lifetimes and the vicious damage it casually causes out here where only the fittest are fit to survive.

On the other hand, I have to be thankful that runaway capitalism doesn’t give a rat’s ass about me and leaves me to live my life, as much as I can, by my ideals.   

We Get the Government We Deserve

Democracy, when it’s bought and paid for by very wealthy people and corporations, does not concern itself with the trifles faced by isolated individuals.  It rightfully concerns itself with taking care of the customer, who is always right.

For example, if you are an individual with newly diagnosed hypertension, and have a follow-up appointment with your long-time doctor scheduled for January, you should not worry that he is not on any of the new insurance plans offered by Obamacare.  After all, you can drop dead of a heart attack, or have a stroke, any time and with or without a doctor’s supervision.

None of my long-time doctors seem to be participating in any of the insurance programs being offered on the NY State Health Exchange.  So I could enroll and pay for insurance today, and look for new doctors in the next few weeks.  Or I could not sign up today and just pay the fee of my long-time doctor for a visit in January.

The NY Times reported today that the deadline for enrolling in a health insurance plan has been quietly extended by 24 hours, in light of how screwed up the enrollment process is, how poor the buggy $600,000,000 website still is.  Of course, the government did not announce this extension officially, since they don’t want people to wait for the new last moment to crash the website.  One notes (though the NY Times did not)  that the NY State of Health website was shut down last night at midnight, until 8 a.m. this morning, for “routine maintenance”.

There is no doubt that Barack Obama is a brilliant man and a skilled self-promoter.  He ran two winning national ad campaigns:  YES WE CAN (you’ll find out who WE is)  and CHANGE YOU CAN BELIEVE IN (if you’re gullible and/or desperate).  A black friend snorted when I reflected on the man’s seeming lack of discernible moral or political convictions– “who did you expect the first black president to be?  Malcolm X?” and she laughed a bitter little laugh.  

Plus, it must be admitted, the man has, through no fault of his own, stirred up an unprecedented degree of violent opposition just by being a black man in a nation built by black slaves.  The unexpurgated “n-word” is still in wide use, and very often in the air when opponents speak of Mr. Obama.

So, maybe I should not be so harsh on the president, even though he lied when he said “if you like the health care you have, you can keep it.”  After all, when pressed, he apologized for lying– doesn’t that make it much better?  How often does any politician or person in power actually apologize?  It takes a big person to admit he lied, does it not?

In fact, I’m sorry now that I am not more grateful for the great job our Nobel Peace Laureate President is doing (murder of civilians and widespread PTSD from drones notwithstanding).  Just wish I could make an appointment to see my doctor, after seven years of paying up to 25% of my income for health insurance that no longer is offered.

How Nazis Almost Always Win

45,000 Americans who die every year for lack of health care, diagnosed in the ER in terminal condition from diseases that could have been cured with timely intervention, is but one price we pay for freedom.   15 times the number of people who were killed on 9/11, this number evokes little terror for most people.  Probably as many Americans die by gunshot, traffic accident, many other causes.  45,000 preventable deaths a year in the greatest country on earth, because of an inadequate profit-driven health care system that also provides the most modern and cutting edge medical treatment in the world, is not seen as a major problem. 

We all know American health care, compared to that in the rest of the industrialized world, is broken.  There’s a strong argument that the cause is the “free market”– you get the health care you can afford to pay for and that unbridled competition is preferable to any kind of government regulation in delivering the best product to consumers.   Obama’s bold plan, to leave fewer Americans dead in the ER from preventable diseases, was a compromise with the “free market”, based on the plan of the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation and drafted by the health insurance industry.  Is it better than what existed before when there were virtually no rules for what health insurance corporations could charge?  Probably.  Is it an excellent way to control out-of-control health care costs in the US and the crisis in American health?  Probably not.

But I have to sign up.  So I call 1-855-355-5777, the help line.  They can help you if you are an employer, an employee, a navigator, a broker or all others.  It turns out, if you are “all others” that the menu is only for generic help, there does not seem to be anyone who picks up the phone at any of the options, even though a recording apologizes for longer than usual wait times due to overwhelming demand.

So you initiate a screen chat with a nice woman named Sonia.  You ask the specific question that is hanging up your application, disabling you from applying before the 12/23 deadline. Sonia writes back that screen chat personnel are not authorized to answer such questions and that you should call the help line, 1-855-355-5777.  This number, of course, puts you in an endless loop, as far as I can tell, since there seems to be no place to wait your turn to speak to a representative, unless, perhaps, if you are a navigator, broker, employer. 

I tell Sonia I was unable to get any information in several calls to the help line and ask if perhaps a “navigator” can help me navigate enrolling in Obamacare.  She gives me a bunch of numbers, I call each one and I leave my name and number seven or eight times.  I’m told by one place that the wait for a navigator call back is about a week.  At another place I’m given an email address I check twice, to contact a navigator by email.   I get this message when I try to send my email:

Error   The address “marcia@manhattancc.org​” in the “To” field was not recognized. Please make sure that all addresses are properly formed.
I take a chance and add a dot and get this:
Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:     marcia@manhattan.cc.orgTechnical details of permanent failure:
DNS Error: Domain name not found

I leave her another voice mail, but I’m not optimistic.  I call the help line again, and have the same experience.  I hang up the phone muttering about how the Nazis always win.
Here is how they do it:  they are relentless in opposing what they hate.  They want to string it up on a lamp post, drown it in a bath tub, and they say this over and over, boldly and publicly.   They take no prisoners.  They call what they hate the most destructive and dangerous thing in the world.  They urge their followers to use any means necessary to destroy the dangerous and destructive thing before it kills them.
So in the case of this deeply, possibly fatally, compromised “Affordable Care Act”, they can scream from the rafters about the ineptness of government to solve problems, and then when you go to get your problem solved, and the government’s help line is not helpful and the on-line government help cannot help you solve it, you realize again: this is how the Nazis always win.
Somewhere the CEO of a health insurance company is smiling as his $25.000,000 bonus check is delivered to him by a young boy dressed as Santa Claus.  And somewhere the fat ghost of bloated Hermann Goring sneers, doing his best impression of our own Dick Cheney.

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Why So Many Kids in Slums Get Shot

We live in a society where a monetary value is placed on every life.  The lives of those who are born wealthy are placed on a much higher level than the lives of those who are born poor.   Better health care for their pregnant mothers, better places to live, better schools, better food.  When the kids are teenagers, the children of the wealthy are firmly on one track, the children of the poor are on the other.  

It becomes clearer and clearer to those born in slums that life in America is not necessarily a meritocracy where anyone can win the lottery.  They learn quickly that there are winners and losers, and the odds against them winning anything are maybe 1,000 to 1.  Kids start to give into despair: drugs, making as much money as possible on the streets, carrying guns, getting pregnant, shooting other kids who they perceive as disrespecting them.

We can say that it has always been so, but rarely has the difference in outcomes been so stark or the violence and hopelessness kids in poverty face so brutal.  The children of the poor have less opportunity than they did 40 years ago while the children of the rich, as a group and individually, are fantastically richer.

I don’t know where Jay Z grew up, but I know he is married to one of the most beautiful and famous women in the world, is a millionaire many times over and recently started a side business as an agent to the stars.  His first client Robinson Cano, recently signed a $240,000,000 contract to play second base for the Seattle Mariners.   Jay Z defied the experts in securing this huge ten year contract for his 31 year-old client, who had been offered more money per year by his team, the Yankees.  Jay took his percentage of $240M instead of a piece of $175M.  In the American schema, he won big time, got his client what nobody thought he could, a contract many feel will become an albatross for the team that committed to paying a 39, 40 and 41 year-old $24,000,000 a year for his services.

I saw the clip of Robbie at a news conference in Seattle, looking hurt, explaining why he didn’t sign with the Yankees, his first choice to play for.   It took me a couple of days to make the connection, and then to begin shuddering anew at the horror, the goddamned horror, of the society we live in.

“I felt the Yankees disrespected me,” said Cano, looking truly sad about it.

The Yankees as an organization have always been jerks, big time, more often than not they act like the corporate assholes they are.  But I wondered about a raise from $15,000,000 to $25,000,000 a year being a sign of disrespect.   Then it hit me.  Jay Z.

That’s how an agent wins, getting his client the biggest contract, period.  Jay needed to make a splash in his new business.  If his net worth is, say, $50,000,000, you can understand why he’d want to add some zeros to that as quickly and publicly as he can– it’s a matter of respect.  (I just googled my man’s net worth– the bitch is worth $500,000,000 according to Forbes– same thing applies about adding zeroes, he’s only halfway to being a billionaire, after all).

“Nah, Robbie, they don’t respect you, man,” I can hear Jay Z telling the impressionable Cano as the negotiations started.  Jay Z and his Yankee hat, Jay throws the hat on the floor.  “True, and I’m sad to say it, you know I love the Yankees, but Ellsbury for virtually what they are offering you?   Are they pulling our dicks, Robbie?  Ellsbury for Cano?  Really?”  Jay is no doubt a persuasive man with a story, hitting that note of disrespect like the master Hip Hop producer he is, and at the end of the day, as they say, he was cashing his share of $240M rather than the insulting $175M the star’s current team was offering.

Now Robbie will cash a winning two million dollar lottery ticket every month for the next 120 months, instead of just for the next 84.  Big difference, right Jay?

The principle of the thing makes me want to holler, like whenever I see a great actor on a TV commercial.  The guy made $15,000,000 on his last movie.  “Oh, but he probably got a million bucks to make this 30 second spot, it took him an hour, and he gets a check every time the commercial airs.  Why wouldn’t he do it?”

The only reason I can think of is to send the message, no matter how quietly, that not every person who has talent and becomes rich is a whore.   Or maybe to send the message that one can be content to win the lottery every few weeks, without making an extra million on the side whenever possible.  Or, I don’t know, because so many kids in the slums are killing each other because we live in a society with only one value— get as much as you can and don’t worry about losers calling you greedy– and they ain’t never going to amount to much by that vicious bottom line.

A Shameful Business

I am, I have to admit, in the manner of my father to the end of his life following the fortunes of the Detroit Tigers, a NY Yankee fan.  Leaving aside the obvious idiocy of drinking the Kool-Aid of organized sports in the first place, rooting for the Yankees goes against the rest of my worldview.  The Yankees are the professional sports franchise that exemplifies empire, privilege, corporate snobbery, true, but it’s a childhood thing not amenable to analysis as anything but childish preference and misplaced loyalty.  

My dad rooted for Hank Greenberg, the Jewish Babe Ruth from the Bronx, a Detroit Tiger during most of his Hall of Fame career in the 1930s and 40s.  “How’d the Tigers do?” my father would ask, half a century after Greenberg retired, if the subject of baseball scores came up, which it sometimes did.  I never had any idea how Detroit did, why would I?  I suppose I’m that way about the Yankees because of Mickey Mantle and being eight years old when baseball came into my world.

The last few seasons my main interest in baseball has been checking the box scores to see how Robbie Cano had done.   Another 3 for 5, two doubles and a home run, Robbie on a tear, ten RBIs in the last three games, raising his average another six points after being in the doldrums for a week or two.  It made me feel good, for a few seconds, whenever Robbie was putting up Cano numbers.  To the millions who don’t give a rip about this sort of thing, I understand completely.  It’s how I feel about something called a Hat Trick.  No idea what it is, no interest in finding out.

The point of the shameful business is not that a grown man might distract himself by checking the graphed statistics of a man making fifteen million dollars a year to play a game boys love, or that thousands of people are employed in a vast industry paid to make sure these stats are charted in real-time and available on the internet.  

The point of the shameful business is what goes on with men making fifteen million dollars a year to play this game at an elite level.   Robinson Cano will be playing second base for Seattle under the terms of a ten-year contract he recently signed with them for $240,000,000.   The Yankees were offering basically the same yearly pay, about $24,000,000, but only for seven years– until Cano turns 38, well past the prime of most baseball players.

Well, Cano would be a fool to leave $70,000,000 on the table.   It’s been said often, he’d be foolish to let sentimentality dictate a business decision.  Why would anyone leave $70,000,000, or a penny, for that matter, on the negotiating table?

Except, can anyone tell me the difference between earning $15,000,000 a year and earning $24,000,000 a year, or career earnings of $330,000,000 or $260,000,000, except in a society sick to the death with relentlessly competitive greed?

Dialogue is, sadly, not always possible

I got the following email, from an old friend who has become decidedly right-leaning since 9/11, with this subject line:

Increasing Clouds and hunderstorms for Climate Alarmists, by Paul Driessen from Townhall

Excerpt:  “In short, our Earth’s climate may well changing, as it has repeatedly throughout history. But the changes are natural, and they are thus far hardly catastrophic – nothing like the wooly mammoth ice ages or Little Ice Age, and little different from any of the 20th century. Moreover, the changes are natural in origin. They are not due to humans, and they are not occurring in ways the alarmists and their models predicted

We truly need hydrocarbon energy: to lift more people out of poverty, maintain our living standards, and ensure the wealth and technology to adapt to any climate changes that nature may visit upon us (with or without some contribution from human carbon dioxide). Climate alarmism undermines all of this.”  

http://townhall.com/columnists/pauldriessen/2013/10/20/increasing-clouds-and-thunderstorms-for-climate-alarmists-n1728001/page/full

And, because we’d agreed many times, as recently as last week, to avoid partisan political discourse, I wrote back with this bark of anguish:

Don’t send me this kind of thing, OK?  The visible and toxic shroud of man-made pollution over much of the world has nothing to do with climate, fine, let’s pretend we agree the only problem here is those goddamned agitating, lying commies who want to end capitalism.
 
Her reply:
Jeez Eliot, I sent you a scholarly piece which showed how more and more scientists are coming together (across the previous divide)!
My reply:
“Climate Alarmists” is a term developed by the fossil fuel industry and their public relations machine to dismiss the science behind human activity’s role in global warming (there was an excellent Frontline piece on this branding of “alarmists” a couple of years ago).  The term is deliberately dismissive, these scientists are hysterical, alarmists.   It would be like me sending you a scholarly article from Al Gore headlined “sun sets on climate change deniers”, no matter how scholarly the article might be.
 
Oh darn, in popping on to google to get the link to the Frontline piece, I had to scroll through a full screen of posts debunking the “hooey” — by those who believe Global Warming to be a commie hoax– of Frontline’s ham-fisted hatchet job on Climate Change Skeptics.  
Note–  alarmists vs. skeptics. Who are you going to believe?   We are not deniers, dear, we’re simply informed skeptics seeking to allay the damage done by biased alarmists with a political agenda.  
Sheesh.