Category Archives: muttering to myself

Practical Consideration

Rachel Yehuda, among many excellent points in her talk with Krista Tippett, asked a very good question:  who would you rather have with you in a war zone, an experienced fighter or a cultured philosopher who has never faced a murderous enemy?  This question was answered “fighter” by many Jews after the Hitler regime, determined never again to be quiet victims of mass violence.  Being eternally tough and ready to kill can lead to overkill, certainly, but it is an understandable enough answer when the question is survival when an entire army is determined to kill you. 

In my quiet life I may feel pacifism is the best option in human affairs, and mildness the best choice when dealing with others, but I would certainly not feel that way faced with an army of murderers intent on killing me and everyone I love.   I’d want an experienced killer next to me to show me how to kill the motherfuckers who were after us.

I was thinking of the same thing in regard to electoral politics and influencing public policy in the USA.  Would you rather have millions marching in the street in protest of evil done in our names, or legislators strategically placed in state houses and Congress to vote in blocks to pass actual laws and give the official nod to secret horrors?   

A few years back, a movement of right wing zealots, funded generously by billionaires, formed a “grass roots” organization called the Tea Party.  This rag-tag army of staunchly conservative patriots got tremendous publicity and, with a shit-ton of money, managed to move the Republican party even farther to the right.  They made the party more extremist by “primarying” moderate Republicans out of office.   The Koch brothers and their ilk looked on approvingly, funding the campaigns of these radical reactionaries, sponsoring this group of servile champions of the already powerful, making the current crop of Republican legislators move to the right or lose their jobs.  Once in office these Tea Party true believers literally held the government hostage, at one point even shutting it down by refusing to fund government programs at a budget deadline.  That’s how you make policy, if you are a ruthless motherfucker intent on changing the world to reflect your worldview, and have the monetary clout, and organization, to do it.

It turns out not to be a matter of right and wrong, who rules, even in a democracy.  The fiction is that our elected representatives act on our behalf.  In the real world of winners and losers they act on behalf of those who pay for their campaigns and keep them in office.   It is not much of a choice on election day, in most cases.  It’s Lewis Black’s two bowls of shit and you’ve got to pick one.   

Might makes right in the Darwinian jungle of electoral politics.  If your party controls Congress you can tell a popular sitting president who won in a landslide to shut the fuck up.  You can simply deny him his constitutional right to fill a Supreme Court vacancy, nothing he can do about it.  You can do everything but outright call him a nigger, even though you’re free to insist he’s a lying Kenyan Muslim and an illegitimate president and doesn’t mean shit.   That’s the power of organized lobbying and the leverage a loud-mouthed celebrity can exert if he is given a big enough public platform via the mass media. 

A stage full of Republican hopefuls in a presidential debate– not one can admit outright that humans evolved from apes, or that the climate is changing in dangerous ways, or that human activities, driven by unchecked greed, are  destroying the planet.  That’s the co-opted Jesus and fossil fuel lobbies, respectively.  The Democratic party is not quite as bad, but it is also an incorrigibly corrupt machine oiled by the money of those legally created psychopaths, corporate “persons”, and their human counterparts who expect their will to be done.    Both parties serve their masters in a society based on the bottom line, and in this case, anyway, the customer is truly, always right.

The bottom line here — was the Bernie Sanders campaign a one shot novum, never seen before in America and never to be seen again?  Or could a candidate with principles and a convincing analysis of why there is so much poverty, misery, desperation and rage in our wealthy nation, funded by small donors (Obama bragged of the same kind of support, but took the bulk of his money from corporations and wealthy folks and opted out of the campaign finance law designed to limit the influence of these forces, and outspent his opponent two to one — and he, uh, ruled accordingly) actually win an election that was not otherwise rigged? 

On one side, a slickly marketed, relentlessly publicized, opportunistic demagogue, saying whatever was necessary to keep angry people enraged, greedy people salivating about all the luxurious things they could buy with their even greater wealth, on the other side someone actually analyzing the legitimate causes for rage, despair, the logical consequences of heedless greed, our nation’s greediest protected by laws they bought and paid for.   

The second candidate never even made it on to the ballot, since his opponent in the primary was supremely qualified, wealthy, politically connected, corporately funded, anointed next in line and the party had an immense thumb on the electoral scales before the primary even started.   

All I can say is “motherfuckers”.  Makes me want to run for office, but without at least one cocksucking billionaire to fund me (not to mention politically inconvenient skeletons cavorting in my closet, and right here, openly, in the room behind me as I type), I may as well try to start a successful non-profit organization to help poor kids prove they are not disposable pieces of shit.  In the greatest, most exceptional nation the world has ever seen.  

Dribs and Drabs

What the fuck are “drabs”?  What are dribs?  Fucking cliches… some of ’em with roots lost in the mists of time.

Yesterday, in the USA, a transgender politician, a former journalist, unseated a thirteen term douchebag in Virginia’s House of Delegates election.  The defeated 73 year-old Republican douchebag had referred to himself, apparently, as “Virginia’s Chief Homophobe”.  Doesn’t that old cocksucker know that homophobe means somebody who fears homosexuals?   What a fucking adorably ignorant faggot….  Congratulations to newly elected Danica Roem, you go, girl!

But I digress.

Cabin fever slowly roasts me as my lock-down in Sekhnetville continues.  I wasn’t told when I went for the immunosuppressive therapy two weeks ago, not by doctor, nurse, medical technician (though Sekhnet points out that SHE told me), that I could be randomly fucked up very easily with no immune system.   You’d think it could have been printed on a card every first time patient could be handed, along with the list of their expected side-effects:

“You may very well feel absolutely fine when you leave here today.  Do not be fooled.  Your immune system is suppressed, you are susceptible to every bug out there.  Stay out of crowds, restaurants, public place of all kinds, for a week.  If you go outside, carry Purel and use it after touching anything someone with a fucking runny nose may have touched or sneezed on.  Pretend you are the Boy in the Bubble for the next few days.” 

“Common sense, (idiot),” says Sekhnet, hammering home the implied “idiot” with an uncannily Alice Kramden-like facial expression.

In other news, good for Puerto Rico saying “no” to Whitefish Energy.  Look, I don’t know if it was a corrupt no-bid $300,000,000 contract to some people closely attached to the corrupt Trump administration, but their prices, if nothing else, looked a little suspicious.   Something like $300 an hour for the guys doing the electrical work on the ravaged island.   Forget that Ryan Zinke, Trump’s Secretary of the Interior, is from Whitefish, the small Montana town where the two person corporation is located, or that Zinke’s wife, Lolita Hand (if that is her name), and the wife [1] of Whitefish Energy CEO Andrew Techmanski are facebook friends.   Zinke and Techmanski (great name for a guy with a tech company, man) both say there was nothing improper about how the contract was awarded.    Shouldn’t that be the end of it?   

I’m reminded of the standard for judicial recusal from a case.  If there is “the appearance” of impropriety, a judge must recuse him or herself from ruling on a controversy before her/him.  For example, if the judge is close personal friends with one of the parties, has gone on vacations with them, flown in their private plane, etc. during the pre-trail period, there is an appearance of impropriety and the judge is supposed to recuse herself from judging the case.  Although the judge might very well be able to rule fairly and dispassionately on the merits, it looks bad if she stays on the case.   The “appearance of impropriety” standard is an element of fair play that is intended to give people faith in the impartiality and integrity of our legal system.   

So you have Antonin Scalia on TV, after he refused to bow out of a case involving his good friend, the aptly named Dick Cheney and his secret energy task force meetings that preceded the disastrous deregulation of energy in California.   Scalia was a brilliant guy, quick on his feet, with a smart mouth on him.   He was apparently personally a very warm and lovable person, odious as virtually all of his sickening reactionary pontificating from the bench generally was.   A young female reporter asked Scalia, since he had just returned from a hunting trip with Cheney, if there wasn’t an appearance of impropriety in sitting in judgment of a case involving Cheney’s claims of executive privilege, state secrets, go fucking fuck yourself, etc.   Scalia didn’t miss a beat.   

“I think it’s a sad day when Americans question the impartiality of the Supreme Court,” said the affable Justice snippily.

It was a sad day in America, without a doubt.  Doubly so because the reporter was unable to say, “granted, sir, it is a sad day, I agree, but that was no answer to my question.  I asked you about the standard for recusal, which is the “appearance of impropriety” and why you have not recused yourself from this case involving your friend Vice President Cheney.  What do you say in answer to that, you smart-mouthed bastard?” 

Of course, there’s no point to living in a dream world, right?  I don’t know if Zinke had anything to do with the contract for Whitefish Energy, and I don’t know anything about Zinke’s character, except that the fact Trump appointed him to a powerful government post does not speak well for it.  As no less an authority than George F. Will said recently (I paraphrase, but barely), anyone who is associated with Trump is irrevocably soiled with a stink that can never be washed off.   Ah, here he goes:  Pence is a reminder that no one can have sustained transactions with Trump without becoming too soiled for subsequent scrubbing. 

Well, wash my mouth out with a fucking bar of fucking soap, I have to go make some more tea and put socks on, the temperature seems to be dropping in here.   I feel some post nasal drips and drabs a comin’.

[1]    Techmanski’s wife, Amanda, is listed as one of two managers for Whitefish Energy Holdings LLC. She is a registered nurse, records show, and last month she touted on Facebook a new job she was starting as a nurse practitioner.

With Amanda Techmanski as a manager, Whitefish was listed as an “economically disadvantaged woman-owned small business” on a federal Energy Department contract it won in July for a small transmission line repair in Arizona. The company’s registered address also goes back to the couple’s remote Montana home.

A prior business venture in the last decade ended poorly for Andrew Techmanski, records in Britain show. In 2009, he resigned from a business he had helped form three years earlier to string electric lines. The company folded less than two years later, and some debts remained outstanding last year, according to records.

source

No Reason to feel like a Chump, Chump

My bad, really, in not beginning that letter to the NYS Attorney General’s office with an unmissable disclaimer:  THIS IS NOT A BILLING COMPLAINT.

No wonder that a healthcare-related letter, complaining of the lack of any sort of government agency to resolve health insurance-related problems NYS patients have in New York State, would be dropped promptly on to the Healthcare billing dispute desk of the A.G.’s office.   My letter, foolishly, began:

Dear Mr. Attorney General:

I am appealing to you for assistance, on behalf of many thousands of New Yorkers caught in a sometimes life-threatening situation regarding their healthcare.  As described more fully below, citizens of our state have no government agency that intervenes in cases where patients are mistreated by the corporations we buy health insurance from.   This is true even in cases of apparent fraud.  

An idiotic idealism had me send it, for myself and on behalf of other people many Americans believe are lucky to have any health insurance at all– and who are in danger of losing the shit care they currently have.  I am not a campaign donor, or an Ivy League classmate of anyone close to the A.G., why would I expect my letter to reach such an important man?   If I was a wealthy, connected person, what would possess me to write such a letter in the first place?  Not being one, what did I fucking expect?   Perhaps anything but the mistaken response I received:

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But still.  And although the letter is non-responsive to anything in my letter, it is easily enough straightened out.  I could do it in couple of lines:

Dear Mr. Bockstein:

Thank you for your prompt reply to my long letter to the Attorney General, though it was clearly sent to me in error.   My correspondence did not involve a billing dispute (though one section contained examples of a couple), and I never heard of St. Joseph’s Physicians or Oneida Healthcare, let alone had a billing dispute with either of them.   Please transfer my letter, and the attachments, to the assistant for Mr. Schneiderman who reviews policy-related correspondence.  Or let me know to whom I should address a new copy, to avoid a similar fate to copy number two.

Thank you, and have a blessed day.

No need to point out the obvious irony to the overworked Mr. Bockstein — that his idiotic ‘response’ to my letter is yet another stunning example of the administrative cul du sac I described in my letter as so infuriating and soul crushing to aggrieved low income patients of New York who have no government agency protecting them from the predations of the health insurance companies they are mandated to purchase healthcare through.

Or that bureaucratic responses such as his are particularly dangerous to patients being treated for serious major organ disease and already suffering treatment-related extreme high blood pressure.   When your blood pressure is dangerously close to hypertensive crisis range, a letter like that, though polite, is the last fucking poison you need.  Although it is good for me to keep in mind that the preventable death of an American who is not at least middle class is, as the law styles it, a trifle, truly.  Nothing personal.

I rest my case, Mr. Bockstein.  I’d make an idle threat to rest it in a venomous letter to the editor of the Grey Skank, but we all know how silly that would be to threaten.  Theoretically, a tart letter to the editor quoting the AG’s response would momentarily embarrass your boss, who appears to be one of the few good guys, and who is tirelessly making a good name for himself with clear future ambitions.   On the other hand, a short description of the callous, or at best, inept, functioning of his progressive office would only serve to provide more ammunition to the powerful and well-funded forces of reaction bent on returning this country to its former greatness.

I am left idly threatening to unearth my Louisville slugger, Joe Pepitone model.  And fiercely pointing out that I can be up in Albany in the time it takes Mr. Bockstein to crank out a few dozen of these fine letters, man of peace and reason though I always aspire to be.  At the same time urging Mr. Bockstein, for purely legal reasons, not to construe this as any kind of physical threat– I mutter it mildly and abstractly, for expressive purposes only, through a haze of monoclonal antibody side effects.  Though, even in my asthenic state, I recognize that, truly, the many vexations of Americans with a low income, even the most theoretically easily preventable vexations, are strictly their own affair and attributable only to their poor choices in life.

Mala in se vs. mala prohibita

I was once friends with a judge, a very smart man, who hipped me to this important distinction, which goes back to to the roots of Common Law– the principles our legal code is based on.   There are two kinds of crime: the malum in se— a common sense crime that is morally wrong and hideous in and of itself (cutting the limbs off a healthy baby only to cause agony comes to mind) and the malum prohibita, a crime that is a crime only because a law makes it so.   

It is a distinction most people never even consider.   For purposes of sometimes racist law enforcement in America, for example, by those who cry out for “Law and Order!”, no distinction is visible between these two very different kinds of law.   It is part of the ignorance and self-righteousness of fucking racists who rail against criminals and it’s the driving force behind America’s world leadership in mass incarceration and criminalization of the poor.

In 1925 in America it was illegal to buy or consume whiskey or beer.  That was Prohibition, when the Constitution was actually amended to make that the law of the land.   The experiment went badly and was abandoned about 13 unlucky years later when the Constitution was amended again to repeal that disastrous attempt to “legislate morality.”   

What was the moral issue being legislated?    Not that it was wrong to have a drink of alcohol once in a while, but that it was a grave social ill for masses of poor men to spend all of their pay getting drunk, starving their family and beating them.  There had been a widespread epidemic of drunkenness and violence among mobs of underpaid American working men in the decades before there were any labor laws in the country.  It was a massive social problem, the unfortunate synergy of hard work, poverty and alcohol. 

It turned out not be a crisis that could be cured by banning alcohol and locking up people who wanted to drink it.  After a bloody criminal reign of terror that made millionaires of criminals who organized into national syndicates to circumvent the law, and a social problem only made worse by an ill-designed law that criminalized a popular form of recreation and punished everyone (while causing millions of Americans to hold the law itself in contempt), the nation came to its senses and the law was changed.

During Nixon’s first term as president he needed a harsh law to enforce against a generation that hated him.   Nixon is on tape referring to his many enemies by words I shouldn’t write here unless I put them in quotes: “fags”, “homos”, “kykes”, “niggers”, “spics”, etc.   Nixon could not make a law to imprison these despised minorities directly, so he targeted something many of his more outspoken enemies enjoyed: marijuana.   The Controlled Substances Act criminalized the use of certain drugs according to their “dangerousness”.  Marijuana was placed in the most dangerous category of drug: highly addictive and with absolutely no medicinal value.  It remains there today, in spite of its many known medicinal uses and a wide consensus that it is no more harmful, is even far less harmful, than alcohol.  The Controlled Substances Act, enforced strictly, allows the police to arrest people en masse, under a federal law, if they are smoking pot, say, during an otherwise lawful political protest.

Remember mala in se and mala prohibita.   If you criminalize something, like marijuana, it gives you license to stop and frisk someone you suspect might be carrying it.  If they resist a search, a policeman can legally use a bit of force.  If things escalate, and the suspect (suspected of a malum prohibitum) tries to run, rarely, if ever, will a cop be prosecuted for shooting the fucking defiant criminal in the back.  

I am thinking of this in context of the current president’s most recent noise about doing something about the opioid crisis in the United States.  The crisis was created largely by overprescription of deceptively marketed, highly addictive prescription opioids sold in a lying, multibillion dollar pharmaceutical scam orchestrated by a very rich executive of dubious morality, a person who will never be held accountable anywhere, a scumbag named Richard Sackler.   Trump spoke of the opioid crisis, during his campaign, to audiences in poor areas where hopeless people were turning to opioids in despair, and they cheered, because the lying Reality TV superstar was promising people in the rust belt and coal country that he’d give them their shit jobs back when he was president.   

Tens of thousands died of opioid overdoses last year, about 150 Americans are dying opioid caused deaths daily now, according to the CDC.   Trump signed an executive order in March, scrawling his name bigly on an order creating a commission to study how to best end this crisis.  We heard little more about it (the super-qualified Jared Kushner was at one point tasked with ending the crisis, remember) until he once again rightly called it a National Emergency in an August speech, and promised, with his usual sincerity, to take immediate steps to deal with it.

The other day he ordered his Health Secretary to get busy fixing the opioid crisis, calling the crisis a National Public Health Emergency.  A man with a shaky grasp of nuance, the president may or may not have known that the funding for a National Emergency (which his own commission urged him to declare in July) can tap into billions, while funding for a Public Health Emergency can tap into a fund of only $57,000, at present.   You can read about that here, if you have the stomach for a short article.

Here is the official position of the Trump administration on our nation’s overall drug crisis, voiced by Jeff Sessions, a man deemed too racist to be confirmed as a federal judge (imagine how fucking racist you have to be not to hop over that bar):

AMY GOODMAN: Earlier this year, Attorney General Jeff Sessions vowed a major revival of the so-called war on drugs. This is Sessions speaking at the Department of Justice headquarters as he rescinded two Obama-era memos that encourage prosecutors to avoid seeking inordinately harsh sentences for low-level drug offenses.

ATTORNEY GENERAL JEFF SESSIONS: Going forward, I have empowered our prosecutors to charge and pursue the most serious offense, as I believe the law requires, most serious, readily provable offense. It means that we’re going to meet our responsibility to enforce the law with judgment and fairness. It is simply the right and moral thing to do. … And we know that drugs and crime go hand in hand. They just do. The facts prove that so. Drug trafficking is an inherently dangerous and violent business. If you want to collect a drug debt, you can’t file a lawsuit in court. You collect it with the barrel of a gun.

(the rest of an excellent discussion  is here)

Now let’s parse Sessions’ statement for just the ten seconds it deserves.  We have laws that allow us to punish people for a legislatively created crime.  Let us harshly punish these criminals who are, by definition, committing crimes, and often deadly crimes in furtherance of their other crimes.  “It is simply the right and moral thing to do,” says the moral dwarf, simply, citing irrefutably circular logic based in an unamended Nixon era law. 

I’ve often thought the proper term to refer to an outspoken homophobe is, simply, “fucking homo,” though I know it would not be politically correct to do so — as well as offensive to my gay siblings.  Think about it, though.   A loud anti-Semite should be publicly referred to (by Jews, of course, only by Jews, yo) as often as possible as a “fucking kyke”, I think.    What would hurt these hateful types more than constantly being referred to as what they hate? 

Tempting as it is to call the racist Attorney General, our nation’s top law enforcement official, a “nigger” (and what could be a crueler blow to the pride of this prissy, racist bitch of the southland?) I’ll refrain in the interests of not alienating anyone who would be offended by the objectively offensive term.   What would be the point of my giving such offense, suh?  It would simply not be the right and moral thing to do. 

Then again, right and moral are such problematic terms, as we see every day.   And mala in se and mala prohibita are often two very, very different things, the latter often driven by political calculation, preservation of privilege and perpetuation of lack of same.   Look at our prison population for a moment, and see the disproportionate lock down and disenfranchisement (another desired outcome by the Sessions crowd) of minority criminals who pled guilty to selectively enforced mala prohibita involving randomly criminalized substances. 

Makes me wanna holler.

How To Kill Creativity

Perhaps the single most important thing to do, if you wish to extirpate the creative impulse, is to remove joy and spontaneity.   Replace that flush of love that makes somebody dance with a formula to master that will allow them to know exactly where the beat is that they are dancing on.   When dealing with a young person, crushing, or perverting, a love of creativity is fairly easily done.   Take something like singing, which most people like to do and do quite naturally.   

Form a group of children, call it The Singer’s Group.  Make them sit quietly while you tell them all about the joy of singing, the history of human song, the mammalian love of vocalizing going back to the songs of the whale and before.   Then, tell them what they will sing and instruct them, note by note, pausing to point out wherever they have overstayed a dotted half note. 

By this procedure you will find out two things: which children are most anxious to please their teachers and their parents, and which are most hellbent on being creative at any price.   

It’s just me, probably, but I would infinitely prefer to play in a room full of the second kind of child.

 

Cross section of a piece of shit (a few pieces, actually)

 Patrick Radden Keefe  in the current issue of The New Yorker:

Richard Sackler worked tirelessly to make OxyContin a blockbuster, telling colleagues how devoted he was to the drug’s success. The F.D.A. approved OxyContin in 1995, for use in treating moderate to severe pain. Purdue had conducted no clinical studies on how addictive or prone to abuse the drug might be. But the F.D.A., in an unusual step, approved a package insert for OxyContin which announced that the drug was safer than rival painkillers, because the patented delayed-absorption mechanism “is believed to reduce the abuse liability.” David Kessler, who ran the F.D.A. at the time, told me that he was “not involved in the approval.” The F.D.A. examiner who oversaw the process, Dr. Curtis Wright, left the agency shortly afterward. Within two years, he had taken a job at Purdue.

source

Snapshot of a Complete Asshole

I should not let myself be distracted, I should not let myself be distracted…

A couple of weeks ago four U.S. servicemen were killed in Niger.  Two were named Johnson, one black, one white.  One was named Black; he was white.  Why they were killed in an unarmored vehicle in Niger, although the military is still actively investigating the weeks’ old the incident,  is obvious — fighting a secret worldwide war on TERROR.  Duh!  

We must, we are told, wage a relentless and borderless war against TERROR and be eternally vigilant until we have killed all of those violent extremists who hate us enough to resort to TERROR.  Our leaders have kept us all aware of this terrible, uh, fact since the World Trade Towers came down and the Pentagon took a hit in the fall of 2001.  

The WAR ON TERROR, although plainly impossible to win with military force alone, has been used as the excuse for a lot of inexcusable mischief, mayhem, murder and manipulation, but that is another story for another time.

The body of one of the four dead Americans, Sgt. La David Johnson, was apparently not found until 48 hours or so after the ambush.   When the four dead Americans were eventually sent back to the U.S., their coffins draped in American flags, the widows, at least in the case of La David Johnson’s wife, Myeshia, were not allowed to see the dead bodies inside the coffins.   Maybe it was because they were beyond recognition, I don’t know.    La David Johnson’s widow cried that she was prevented from seeing so much as his hand, to be sure it was really him in the box.

Our president called the widow of La David Johnson.  A condolence call, of a certain style.  The widow was apparently not consoled by the call.   Our president called the widow a liar, claiming angrily that he had fucking consoled her.  (In fairness to the president, he claimed only that he’d been very respectful, that she was lying about him not remembering her husband’s name and that a “wacky” congresswoman who’d SECRETLY listened in on the call was a fucking liar). *

He had his four star general Chief-of-Staff John Kelly make a long televised speech, during which Kelly lamented the lost dignity of our society, the mistreatment of women included, how nothing is sacred anymore.  Kelly then surrendered the shaky moral high ground he was shifting on, claiming that the self-aggrandizing Democratic politician listening in to the president’s call to the widow had been eavesdropping, that the nosy Representative had deliberately distorted the president’s words of condolence (Kelly neglected to mention that the widow and the representative were in a car together, or that the call was on the widow’s speakerphone, creating the impression that the Florida representative had a sinister ability to wiretap at will), was an “empty barrel”, talking shit, a lying partisan viciously trying to politicize a tragedy, someone who had falsely claimed credit for securing funding for a new FBI headquarters in South Florida.   

(Although, in fairness to everybody, and not that it’s a gigantic detail in the overall hideous picture — except coming from the mouth of a general speaking in the context of respect for the fallen, and perhaps to the family and colleagues of Jerry Dove — the second murdered FBI agent referenced by Kelly was named Jerry Dove, not Duke as Kelly said.  You’d think somebody on the general’s staff could have hit Google to fact-check the speech before Kelly gave it, wrote the correct names of the two dead heroes on a card for him.  No attention to detail in President ADHD’s post-reality administration. SAD!). [1] [2]

The widow was interviewed shortly after Kelly’s news conference.  She explained that the congresswoman, a long time mentor to the family, had been in the car when Trump called and had reported the president’s remarks accurately.   

Our thin-skinned, bottomlessly needy president attacked Myeshia Johnson vigorously on Twitter for not being grateful for something that had been very difficult for him.   He might as well have called her a lying cunt.   We would expect no less from the man, but still.

 

* Screen Shot 2017-10-26 at 12.53.42 PM.png

Adroitly done, Lyin’ Don. 

Facts?

Dear Mistuh A.G.

For reasons too tedious to detail here, I will use this platform to compose the beginning of a draft to New York State’s activist attorney general urging him to take action.   This AG is the guy who successfully sued President Winner over his fraudulent university.   In NYS the AG also proposes and advocates for legislation, as it turns out.   I have a plan.  Relatively short, streamlined cover letter with several attachments laying out the infernal particulars.   Blah blah (see #1)  blah blah blah (#2) etc.

Dear Mr. Attorney General,

I am writing to give you an on-the-ground view of the stressful health care situation for hundreds of thousands of us in New York State.  As described more fully below, citizens of our state have no government agency that intervenes in cases where patients are mistreated by the corporations we buy health insurance from.   This is true even in cases of apparent fraud.  

I urge you to propose legislation to correct this grave oversight. The need for state regulation of health insurance is even more acute in light of the current federal administration’s determination to gut all regulation.

I’ve followed your career and admire the principled and proactive steps your office has taken against the powerful perpetrators of various frauds.  Leaving politics aside, as one must in a letter like this, it is gratifying to see someone in office holding powerful entities responsible for their bad acts.  Your office is well-suited to fix what I believe is a health care emergency affecting the lives of countless New Yorkers, particularly older citizens and those living just above the “poverty line.”

It has been difficult to put the many healthcare-related issues I’ve been forced to navigate into a streamlined letter.  I am certain that my experience as a consumer who buys health insurance on the New York State of Health Marketplace is representative of the experiences of countless others.  I have confirmed this many times over the last few years.  

As frustrating as my ordeals have been, I have the benefits of fluency in English, computer literacy, legal skills.  I cannot imagine the life-shortening stress that is inflicted on the elderly and other vulnerable New Yorkers unable to get so much as a hearing for often unappealable denials of their health care.  I’ve attempted to keep this letter short and to include the devilish details in a series of attachments.

I am therefore attaching a detailed description of the “consumer help” cul du sac that desperate NYS residents can spend a few hours in, looking in vain for help with health insurance-related troubles.  Anyone in your office can retrace the useless steps.  Creating a healthcare ombudsman position would be a good first step here.  (see # 1).  

Corporate “persons” are without conscience and motivated only by a zeal for profit.  When left unregulated, it is no surprise these “persons” act as they see fit.  In the case of health insurance companies, they are free, for example, to repeatedly refer patients to “in network” doctors who are not in network. They are also relatively unrestrained when refusing to provide services, in spite of what the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“PPACA”) may have to say about it.   There is no penalty for these common business practices and they are well aware of it.  Regulations to address these things, with an enforcement arm, would be a good start.  (see #2)

Those mandated by the PPACA to purchase health insurance from the New York State of Health Marketplace may find themselves with a host of new problems during the short holiday season window for purchasing insurance.  A consumer advocate or ombudsperson would greatly aid in resolving problems and errors that presently can only be addressed by a lengthy appeals process.  See  #3

Billing irregularities, including improper bills, which are to be expected in a law as complicated as the PPACA, are probably the most common form of immediate stress most of us are regularly placed under.   The rep at your office’s consumer help desk offered help with billing problems, which I suspect are legion.   I offer a short overview of the larger problem and one recent snapshot as #4.

Thank you for your time.  I am available to amplify anything written here and to testify anywhere you may require.

Yours sincerely,

 

Death by American Healthcare (part 2 of 22,000,000)

I won’t even mention Obama, except to say “fuck that charismatic sell-out punk and the whores he rode in on.”   I buy my health insurance through the New York State exchange under the immensely complicated compromise scheme crafted under his watch.  I suffer from a serious kidney disease.   I am unable to get an appointment with a recommended nephrologist who accepts my insurance plan, one of fifty or more sub-plans offered by the corporation that provides my health insurance.  

The insurance company has now listed three doctors, each one highly recommended, as  participating in my specific plan.   You call and eventually find out, oops, devil is in the details, they don’t actually participate.  The insurance company blames the providers for not keeping them updated.   I blame corporate medicine for fucking people to death with a tireless mechanical dick.  In fairness to them, there is no regulation of their practices, so why blame them for taking advantage?

Nothing I can write here will ease my frustration or rage one bit.  I might as well bang my face against the wall until I black out.  That is probably a better bet than anything else I can do at the moment.  

I just note for the, hahaha, record, that the theory of Obamacare is that doctors are fungible, interchangeable, any doctor is as good as any other doctor.   Relationships between doctors and patients, and trust, are irrelevant.  Better to pick a name out of a hat and see a doctor than to have no doctor at all, goes the theory.  Sometimes that goes badly, as when a doctor does not believe in sharing diagnostic information with a patient with too many questions.  “I am expert,” says the doctor, “you deal with side effects from chemo,” and that should be answer enough.  You want another doctor?  Dip your hand back into the hat, motherfucker, maybe you’ll do better this time.  

Or maybe you will run full force into a wall, over and over again, until you lose consciousness.  That is probably a better bet for you today.  Have a nice day, your business is very important to us, please continue to hold.

 

Death by American Healthcare

Richest country in the world, blah, blah, blah.  Only wealthy country that lets thousands of its citizens die every year, deaths that would have been prevented but for lack of access to affordable health care.  Only country in the world where basic medical services are a commodity, administered on a profit-based model by corporations whose sole mandate is to increase profits for shareholders.  Blah, blah, blah.    The Devil, as always, is in the details.   Death by American healthcare is not always as straight-forward as it seems.

 I vented to Sekhnet’s long-time doctor about American Corporate Medicine, and the externality that, to keep profits as handsome as they are, 50,000 Americans dying preventable deaths every year is reckoned an acceptable ‘cost of doing business.’  

“Where did you get that number?” the doctor asked.  

“The number I always hear is 45,000, but I’m hopped up because I haven’t been able to see a new nephrologist for my progressive kidney disease, so I added 5,000.”

“You can add a lot more than 5,000.  Those statistics are deaths based on documented ER visits when the disease is discovered in its final stage.   Many more Americans than that die preventable deaths every year.   You can probably multiply that 45,000 by some factor to get the actual number of Americans who die for lack of access to affordable basic health care.   How many more die without ever getting to an Emergency Room?  Those dead Americans don’t even get to be statistics,”  the doctor said.    I don’t dispute the good doctor’s point.    

As a man who has now had to change nephrologists so far three times (in less than a year), and is currently without care for my kidney disease as I look for a fourth nephrologist,  as a result of Obamacare’s immensely complicated private insurance scheme, I take Obama’s famous “if you like the doctor you have, you can keep your doctor” lie personally.  That poised, principled, hilarious, smooth-talking bitch looked me sincerely in the eye and lied to my face.  

I’d have liked to have stayed with the second nephrologist very much, instead I was forced, by income-based insurance laws, to visit one who was arrogant, defensive, insecure and argumentative.  As a result of her healthcare inexpertise, and the intricacies of the government-private insurance partnership, I am now more than two months without medical care for my progressive kidney disease, kidney disease the final nephrologist labeled an emergency case.  My kidney disease is of unknown origin, though all studies seem to agree that stress makes it worse.

“You mustn’t take these things personally,” says a random anal sphincter, passing by.  

Of course, it is absurd to think that Mr. Obama lied to me personally, offensive for me to refer to him with the gender insensitive “bitch” rather than as a dick or corporate shill.   He did his best to make positive change, President Hope and Change.   Mr. Obama was certainly a much better president than his predecessor, a limited man run by a cabal of psychopaths, and his successor, a man who needs no introduction.  

By the same math, of course, Mr. Mussolini was much better than Mr. Hitler and Mr. Stalin.   That is just hyperbole talking, a gratuitous rhetorical flourish, snapping snappishly.   Nobody is comparing any American president to these maniacs, it is a grave national insult to do so and it removes history and morality from the equation.  These were dictators, for one thing, our leader is democratically elected.   The tens of thousands, perhaps as many as a million, killed by the three most recent American presidents are not comparable to the millions killed by brutal dictators like Hitler and Stalin.  Collateral damage deaths in war zones are not the same as deliberately mass murdered civilians, even when they are the direct result of an errant smart bomb or a mistaken “signature” drone strike, or they are children who die as a result of an embargo of food and medical supplies.   A fine point to the families of the dead civilians, perhaps, but a discussion for another time.

The problem with assessing the real world effects of our presidents is that we don’t even have the language to talk about it.  Without a frame for the discussion, it is hard to understand how someone like Obama, who spoke eloquently from his heart on many matters of great public importance, at the same time steadily supported the powerful forces that run our pernicious status quo and ensured that any change proposed would be incremental, at best.  

Obama campaigned on “Hope and Change” with a slogan of “Yes We Can!”.   Campaigns and their tag-lines are pretty much PR bullshit, we all know that.   Reagan used “Make America Great Again” along with “Morning in America” and a bunch of other glittering, meaningless phrases.  Anyone who voted for Obama truly hoping for the advertised hope and change was clinging sadly to hopes inspired by a very successful marketing strategy.  Obama himself repeatedly told the people who voted for him that it was their responsibility to push him to keep his promises, though he phrased it more flatteringly to himself. 

Let’s take a glance at Obama’s presidency.  Before he was in office very long he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, for things he said as a candidate, presumably. When he accepted the prize he spoke eloquently about war, poverty, racism, but asked us to recognize that while he stood on Martin Luther King’s shoulders, his hands were somewhat tied.  As president, he reminded us, he would have to authorize the ongoing war on Terror, order extrajudicial killing by weaponized drones and engage in other violent policies Reverend King might not have approved of.   He humbly asked us to remember that there is only so much an American president can do about the institutional violence of militarism, racism and poverty.

“Everyone knows you don’t mess with the American war machine.   War is deadly serious bucks, man, it’s a powerful, lucrative industry with unlimited clout and, truly, if we’re completely honest about it, you cannot separate the American war machine from racism and poverty, and if I tried to, particularly as the first black president, I’d be a dead man, I promise you,” is something he didn’t need to add.

The reason my disgust for Obama exceeds my disgust for Dubya is that I expected nothing from the strikingly incurious Dubya and I expected something from Obama.  Obama might have come into office and turned the page back towards a world order based on international law, as most of the world was keeping its fingers crossed he would, for example.   This was the direction international law was headed when Mr. Bush took office in 2000, pursuant to a one-off Supreme Court decision declaring him the winner of a close and disputed election.  The Bush administration went on to flout international law, create a novel doctrine called Preemptive War, commit war crimes (with full preemptive legal immunity for the perpetrators), and serially violate the Geneva Conventions and other international treaties against torture and inhumane treatment.  

Obama took the high road, promising to look forward, not backwards, refusing to hold anyone accountable for the atrocious state policies carried out in our name.  Eventually he had the personal courage to publicly acknowledge that, in those confusing days after 9/11, and with the best of protective intentions, “we tortured some folks.”   Good speech, bro.

The term we are searching for is neoliberal.   Bill Clinton was a neoliberal. He was liberal on social issues: a woman’s right to choose, freedom from discrimination, protection of civil rights and the social safety net, proactive policies on Climate Change and environmental protection, gay rights, pubic education, access to affordable health care, freedom of speech and expression, etc.  He was neoliberal when it came to economic policies that disfavored corporate power– he took action during his presidency to ensure that large financial interests prospered.  He smiled as he reported great economic growth on his watch and claimed that a rising tide lifts all boats.  

He also signed several key pieces of right-wing legislation that did a lot of harm to the poor and swelled the bloated U.S. prison population, disproportionately with people of color.   He had the charisma to carry it off and to be remembered as a popular liberal president.    Until Obama, many called Clinton our “first black president”.   He was a neoliberal, a social liberal capable of forming alliances with the extreme right in the interest of promoting the continued growth of the “Free Market”.

President Bush didn’t have much to do, from an economic point of view, when he took over in 2001.   He cut taxes for the very rich, as anyone in his position would have, but Wall Street was humming, as it had been under Clinton.  Clinton signed off on the repeal of Glass-Steagall, which freed the biggest financial institutions to make risky, highly leveraged bets, backed by federally guaranteed money.  This led directly to the great scam that ended in the multi-gazillion dollar losses to Americans in concerted, industry-wide fraud by businesses too big to fail and the bailout of these crooked institutions by those same taxpayers.  

Obama presided over the aftermath of this, but nobody was ever prosecuted for the massive, coordinated fraud, the vast transfer of wealth to the wealthiest.   No serious policy changes were instituted to prevent a repeat, as Wall Street stabilized itself.   Obama’s financial brain trust was from Goldman-Sachs and the other top beneficiaries of the taxpayer bailouts.  Everybody who really mattered did very well under Obama, who also continued most of Cheney’s secretive policies, while giving moving speeches about the need for government transparency in a true democracy. The disgruntled masses who got a little poorer?  They are always belly-aching.

Neoliberalism, in matters of basic profit-making by corporations, the entities that are said to create all wealth in the “Free Market,” is identical to neoconservatism.    Their interests meet in their central belief that corporate freedom to thrive in a Free Market is essential to our way of life. For the market to remain free, government policy must give these corporations many protections, such as subsidies to oil companies, payments for agribusiness not to grow certain crops, no-bid emergency contracts, tax incentives, right to unlimited campaign contributions, a revolving door between industry and government to influence policy, financial bail-outs when their scams go south and so forth.  

Why is it called the “Free Market” if the government has to play such a key role in its operation?  

Because, if we told you the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, it would make you want to rise up and smash our faces.  It really would.  

That’s why.