Mass death helps the right-wing anti-government crusade, y’all

Graph from yesterday’s New York Times:

Screen shot 2020-04-14 at 2.04.54 PM.png

The graph speaks eloquently for itself.  Two nations are hit, on the same day, by the same pandemic.    In a nation whose federal government is led by a party that believes government is the enemy of freedom, the results are fairly predictable, a radically multiplying death count.

Total deaths in South Korea, where prompt govenrment response flattened the curve effectively:  about 220.   America, no longer a laughingstock, is number one in the world in coronavirus deaths at (as of 4/13/20) 22,000 and climbing.  source

Those of us who want to survive this plague are up against two formidable enemies: a highly infectious virus and a racist, right-wing political movement dedicated to the concentration and protection of vast wealth for the few.  

That the poor are disproportionately dying in this pandemic is a great boon for these Nazi-admiring patriots.  “Fewer votes we need to suppress!   If all these angry fuckers survived, and managed to vote, our people would be voted out instantly.   Fortunately, that won’t happen, because we live in the greatest nation Jesus Christ ever created.   USA!   USA!!!”

Education and Clarity of Language might not help you

Yesterday’s attempt at an Op Ed for the Grey Lady ended with this now deleted paragraph about the seeming impossibility of getting my improperly terminated health insurance back during a raging plague.  Observe the plangent notes of heroic  self-pity:

So I am left to accept my punishment and practice mindfulness.  I sit here lowering my blood pressure, and my heart rate, by thinking of the miracle of communication — how I can sit and convey these deeply fearful things to a stranger, merely by arranging the words properly on a page.  I hope someone will remember I did this when they are lowering my body into a mass grave.   My murdered ancestors would want no less for me.

Admittedly, useless — DELETE! — though I do still greatly appreciate the miracle of written communication, as far as it goes sometimes.  Nothing like writing the situation out clearly when you are in great trouble or danger.

Today I wrote this concise complaint to the NYS Department of Financial Services, the NYS agency that regulates all insurance, financial houses, hedge funds, banks, etc. in New York State,  My latest attempt to take a flying fuck at a rolling donut (though their on-line consumer complaint form immediately fixed a similar insurance termination without notice problem back in January):

I was informed Friday afternoon, when I called my insurer after being told by a doctor that my insurance came up “inactive,” that my Healthfirst health insurance, prepaid through June, had been cancelled, effective March 31 by the New York State of Health Marketplace. According to Healthfirst, no reason for this termination was given by NYSOH.

NYSOH, I was told, had sent Healthfirst notice of their intent to terminate my ACA insurance on March 11.  Neither Healthfirst nor NYSOH provided me any notice of this termination, not prior to the effective date nor since.

I am instructed to call NYSOH, an overwhelmed and unresponsive agency on a good day, where one hears this recording:

New York State of Health is experiencing high call volume.  Because of the public health emergency we are extending the due date for people who are expected to renew before April 15.   You will receive another notice of the new due date before any changes will be made to your coverage.   You do not need to take any action at this time.  

Also, because of a new federal law, no person who currently has Medicaid coverage will lose their coverage during this emergency.  If you are enrolled in Medicaid and get a notice from New York State of Health telling you that your coverage will end after March 18, 2020, you can disregard this notice.  You will have no gap in coverage.  If you have Medicaid you do not need to report any changes to your account except a permanent address change.

I have to assume that termination of prepaid health insurance without notice violates some NYS law, administrative rule or something, in addition to the due process protection of the US Constitution and the PPACA.  One searches for New York’s legal answer to this question in Titles 10 (Health) and 11 (Insurance) of the New York Codes, Rules and Regulations  in vain, there is no chapter on point. 

(I was wisely advised to follow my hunch and delete this line:  I am still waiting (since early February) to hear back from your office for a citation to the text of the controlling law.)

Can you help me get my improperly terminated insurance back during this worldwide plague? I’d be eternally grateful.

Alternatively, can you direct me to the nearest rolling donut?

You Have the Right Not To Be Angry

If you are not wealthy in this country, you have a very limited right to express anger publicly.   Anger, like health care, is a privilege in America, not a right.

A wealthy person who feels aggrieved may hire a team of lawyers to legally bludgeon the person who inflicted the injury.   An angry wealthy person may take out a full-page ad in the newspaper of record, calling for vengeance against someone he hates.   Our current president did this, as a private citizen, when he purchased a full-page of the New York Times to call for the death of five boys locked up for, and eventually exonerated of, a heinous crime.    Anger is all the rage among the rich and powerful.  It is a luxury not permitted to the weak.

I was told in no uncertain terms in January, mistakenly it turns out, that my Affordable Care Act health insurance had been properly terminated without notice, for my failure to do something I had no notice of.   I’d been told by the insurance company that everything I needed to do to have 2020 health coverage had been done.  Then they informed me I had no health insurance because I’d failed to pay a “binder” during a once-a-year ten day grace period that nobody told me about.  The invoice made no mention of a do-or-die grace period.

I had no warning, no chance to fix what they told me was fatally broken in our contract.   This lack of a heads-up struck me as fundamentally unfair, as it probably is, except in a world where superhuman corporate “persons” rule over regular puny earthling persons who proceed at our own peril.

I was angry about this, even after the multiple complaints I submitted resulted in the reversal of this irreversible decision.   Within a very short time I had my insurance restored;  in fact, I had a call from the insurance company apologizing and telling me that my insurance had never actually been terminated.   I rescheduled a canceled cardiologist appointment and had an expensive treatment paid for by the insurance company, at about 30% of the uninsured sticker price, with only my co-pay required from me.

Still, I was irked about the lack of accountability for a health insurance company that had made me suffer agonizing anxiety as I exerted myself mightily to find the hidden legal remedy (hint: NYS Department of Financial Services).  I am pretty sure that the “mistaken” termination had been unlawful, this seems clear by how quickly the final determination against me was changed.  

To my dismay, nobody I spoke to in the city, state or federal bureaucracy could tell me what that violated law was, not its name, its existence, what exact patient protections it contained.  I wanted to see the text of the law, to read the precise patient protections my health insurance provider had ignored, to such unfair and frightening effect.  It is apparently not the right of a powerless citizen to have this kind of information.

I began lashing out in letters and emails, and on the phone.  A Resolution Specialist from Healthfirst called and promised me a written apology and a record of the many calls I’d had with the insurance company, which would allow me to trace exactly what had been done to me and how it had been corrected.   I wanted a roadmap of how the unknowable law had been violated.  I feel a strong need to inform others in my situation of their rights and legal remedies.   None of what I was promised by Healthfirst was delivered.  

I became increasingly unsettled, as my case was repeatedly “escalated” and never resolved.  I included some inflammatory remarks in letters and phone calls and asked pointed questions about some very obvious things.  

For example: due process is guaranteed in our constitution.  It is fundamental to a free society that people have the right to some kind of hearing, some process, before they can be deprived of something they legally own.  In my case, I’d re-enrolled for coverage in time and subsequently paid for my health insurance through June.  How was it legal to void our contract without notice to the consumer?

As if in answer to this question, I was informed on Good Friday, during this pandemic (not a very good Friday for me) that my insurance had been terminated again, without so much as an email to inform me of this sobering fact, and without any reason given, effective March 31, 2020.

I learned this when I had a call from a doctor I was scheduled to see (over the phone) on Wednesday telling me my insurance came back “inactive.”  When I called Healthfirst to snarlingly enquire, the rep confirmed that they had been instructed to terminate my insurance by the New York State of Health Marketplace, the state’s sole purveyor of Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act health insurance policies.

In the absence of law, those with the power to do so can freely oppress those who are powerless.   If you have no power, you must not be angry about this.  Anger is so bad for your health, your immune system, all of your relationships!

I was told the New York State of Health contacted Healthfirst on March 11, instructing the private corporation to terminate its contract with the patient.  No reason was given.   Any day between March 11 and March 25 would have been an ideal time for either or these entities to inform the patient of the jeopardy he was about to face (no health insurance during a worldwide plague) and the need for immediate action on his part to prevent the loss of the insurance he’d already paid for.  

There was no email, phone call or letter — none from Healthfirst, none from the so-called New York State of Health.   Healthfirst sent me a notice that my ongoing cardiac treatment had been approved through July, an invoice showing that my premiums were paid through June, and numerous instant email reminders that I’d not taken the voluntary customer satisfaction survey after each call.   Not a peep about the insurance cancelled ten days before I found out about it when a doctor’s office alerted me to it.

Had the doctor’s office not called, I’d still be blissfully unaware that my health insurance has been quietly null and void for thirteen days and counting.  Seems there should have been some legal process due before a patient is deprived of healthcare during a pandemic, no?

The well-paid CEO of Healthfirst would be perfectly within her rights to be furious at me, after being subjected to provocative lines like these, no matter how otherwise accurate they might be:

A corporate “person” is an appetitive psychopath, without conscience or remorse, driven to devour and only constrained by the rare regulation in place to restrain the gnawing impulse to maximize profits, a corporation’s only legal imperative.

The removal of health insurance during a plague is arguably an excessive punishment for an impolitic expression of something that is well-known: private health insurance corporations have every incentive to cull from their rolls older, low-income patients who cost them far more in medical care than they pay in premiums.   That’s just good business sense, however else one might feel about it.  

Why the New York State of Health intervened a month ago, as I was told by Healthfirst the other day, with no reason given, to terminate the ACA insurance of a customer who had re-enrolled and completed his end of the contract with a private insurance company is a question I will not be able to get an answer to any time soon.   During this terrible plague, everyone is overwhelmed, many mistakes are made, lines for help are very long and it is best to stay calm, even when provoked to great fear and anger.  Particularly if you are powerless in a state ruled by the bottom line.

That said, it would be a wonderful thing for citizens to actually be allowed to know the laws that protect them from arbitrary and capricious decisions with terrifying consequences.  It’s kind of maddening that we are not, if I might be so bold.

 

An unknown consumer law is no law

Under the New York law that administers the troubled, frequently attacked, never amended, industry-drafted Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the January termination of my health insurance, by Healthfirst, was overturned by Healthfirst.  

On January 22, 2020 I was informed that my insurance for 2020 had been terminated, without notice, for failure to do something I was also given no notice of.   On January 28, pursuant to my on-line consumer complaint at the New York State Department of Financial Services (where else?)  I had an apologetic call from Healthfirst.  

My insurance had never been terminated, I was told, the supervisor who claimed it had been, and filed the internal appeal I’d lost, had been mistaken when she told me my health insurance had been cancelled.   It had never actually been terminated at all.

Apologies were offered, I beat the poor rep into the ground forcing more and more explicit apologies and admissions out of her.   I paid my premiums through June and lived happily ever after, though I never was able to learn what law had revealed Healthfirst’s “mistake” to it, what law had caused it to overturn an apparently unlawful determination against me.

I have been seeking since to find this law, to cite it by name,  quote its language and set out the requirements for a legal termination of a New York State citizen’s health insurance.  I’d like to help inform my fellow low-income citizens that there are laws in place to protect us from unfair, in fact, illegal, termination of our ACA health insurance and a way to enforce that law and keep our health insurance.   Nobody I have reached in the state government can find the applicable provisions of law for me.  

A law that calls itself the Patient Protection Act (or it used to, before Trump changed the name), while leaving information about key protections unknowable, is useless.  Worse than useless, really, since the legal protection actually exists, only it’s secret — unless some concealed right is accidentally triggered by a lucky individual who files the right hidden complaint.  I will keep searching, apparently it can take a long time to answer certain seemingly straightforward  questions of law and fact.

Just as it will be a while before I can learn what “mistake” resulted in my insurance being irrevocably cancelled again, as I learned yesterday, this time by the government agency that administers the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in New York State.  The agency that proudly claims that it is helping all New Yorkers during this public health crisis.

Law, it’s so last century.

 

Death By Corporate Bureaucracy

A cautionary tale about conservative, industry-drafted half-measures to protect all citizens from death due to lack of health care, a human right, particularly in a country as wealthy as ours. [1]  

I had a call from my nephrologist’s office yesterday.   Due to the pandemic, the doctor is doing telephone visits only.   Would I like to keep my appointment for next week?   If so, I’d need to take a blood test two or three days before.   We made the arrangements, since it is a good idea to keep an eye on a potentially fatal kidney disease that seems to be in remission. 

An hour later I got a call from the Insurance Verification Unit of the hospital the doctor works for.   The woman informed me that I came up as uninsured.   As we spoke she ran my Healthfirst ID number again — insurance inactive.   That’s not possible, I told her, I had a hassle with the insurance company in January, but that’s all been straightened out, no gap in coverage, premiums paid through June.   She told me to check with them and call her back with the update, or else I’d have to pay the full uninsured price for blood tests and the telephone visit with the doctor (non-negotiable retail prices nobody can tell you in advance, of course).

I called Healthfirst.   After a rocky first start where I antagonized an agent named Cat by brusquely instructing her to call my doctor’s office and tell them my insurance was in effect, resulting in being placed on hold for fifteen minutes, I called back.   The second rep, a pleasant woman named Annie, responded immediately, in her heavily accented English, to my gentler query.   “No,” she told me within a few seconds, “your insurance was cancelled on March 31.   We didn’t do it.   It was the New York State of Health, you have to re-enroll with them.”

Annie informed me that a month earlier, on March 11, 2020, days before the pandemic epicenter where I live went into lock-down due to the public health emergency, The New York State of Health, sole purveyors of Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act insurance in New York State, sent Healthfirst a notice that my insurance would be cancelled effective March 31, 2020.   No reason was given.  I was paid in full and she could see I’d re-enrolled for 2020 prior to the original December 15 deadline, having done so on December 6.   Annie told me I needed to call New York State of Health and immediately try to re-enroll.

“Why didn’t Healthfirst notify me three weeks before my insurance was cancelled that I’d better get busy if I wanted to remain insured in April, during a pandemic?”

“It was not Healthfirst, it was the New York State of Health, you have to call them, we cannot call them for you,” said Annie, helpfully.   She explained that it was a law, she didn’t know which one, or maybe a policy, that prevented Healthfirst from being able to help me keep the insurance I’d paid them to provide me.  She just knew that, unfortunately, Healthfirst couldn’t do anything to assist me, it was up to me to work it out with The New York State of Health.

I called the New York State of Health Marketplace, the most opaque, overwhelmed and incompetent bureaucracy I have ever encountered (and I spent years dealing with Adult Protective Services and NYCHA two infamous paragons of overwhelmed inefficiency) .   This is what I heard:

Thank you for calling the New York State of Health, for English press “1”

New York State of Health is experiencing high call volume.  Because of the public health emergency we are extending the due date for people who are expected to renew before April 15.   You will receive another notice of the new due date before any changes will be made to your coverage.   You do not need to take any action at this time.  

Also, because of a new federal law, no person who currently has Medicaid coverage will lose their coverage during this emergency.  If you are enrolled in Medicaid and get a notice from New York State of Health telling you that your coverage will end after March 18, 2020, you can disregard this notice.  You will have no gap in coverage.  If you have Medicaid you do not need to report any changes to your account except a permanent address change.

If you need assistance applying for coverage or have a question about your individual marketplace account, press “1”

If you are an in person assister, which includes navigators, brokers, certified application counselors and health plan facilitated enrollers, press “2”.

All other callers, or callers that have pressed one, please continue to go fuck yourself.  After only a few hours on the phone today you will have the opportunity to have a quasi-judicial arbitration of the decision against you that will be decided (probably in your favor) within three or four months [2], possibly more because of the unprecedented public health crisis that is quickly killing thousands .  Please continue to hold.

The next few hours were spent making a lengthy telephone log for Healthfirst, including my recorded, at times learned, lectures on the routine mistreatment of low-income healthcare customers, the incentives for corporations to cull the rolls of people like me, 63, low-income, “takers” who force the insurance company to spend way more than they take in from my premiums.  I described the abolition of the Department of Insurance and the Commissioner of Insurance position back in 2011, when NYS was an early adopter of Obamacare.  I compared the decision to merge oversight of health insurance with regulation of all financial services in New York State to the Supreme Court’s cynical conclusion that since we had a half-black president we were now “post-racial” and since racism is dead there is no need for federal enforcement of the Voting Rights Act Martin Luther King had fought for.   I brought in Justice Tawney’s “no rights that a white person is bound to respect” in the context of the rights of low-income patients protected under secret laws that nobody is entitled to see.  

I described the troll bureaucrat at the NYS Department of Financial Services, the man assigned to locate and send me the citation to the law that had overturned Healthfirst’s illegal termination of my insurance.   He wrote to tell me I had my insurance back so what is my problem?  Why do I even need to know the law Healthfirst had allegedly violated when allegedly illegally terminating my insurance?   He’d research the law I’d asked about when he got the time, but I needed to be patient, it had only been two months– AND WE’RE IN THE MIDDLE OF A PANDEMIC.  No response to my letters to Healthfirst CEO Pat Wang or the office of the NYS Attorney General.

Eventually a sympathetic Healthfirst supervisor named Monique, who I spoke to for perhaps an hour, put me through to “Legal”.   This department, presumably, would at least be able to tell me the law they had reconsidered in reversing the “mistaken” termination of my insurance in January.   By the time Monique patched my call through, of course, their office was closed.  I heard a message about making a request for your records, with an email address I very much wanted to have, but I was too slow to jot it down.   I was told to leave a message and they would call me back.  I have been told numerous lies by Healthfirst in recent weeks, so I am a bit skeptical about this promise being kept, but I left what I hope was a relatively calm-sounding message.  

“They will definitely call you back,” said the optimistic rep I called next, to ask for the direct line to the law department.  Of course, he didn’t have it, or the email contact for them, but he assured me that if you leave them a message they “have to call you back.”   I smiled a bitter smile he could probably hear over the phone, took a breath and told him my recent history with untrue promises from Healthfirst.  I didn’t bother to quote the Arbeit Macht Frei [3] lines from the end of the absurdist word salad I’d received last month from Healthfirst:

Healthfirst takes grievances seriously and wants to assure you that all issues are thoroughly investigated.  Healthfirst sincerely apologizes for the miscommunication and any inconveniences it may have caused you. Our mission is to provide Healthfirst members with high-quality health care. Your satisfaction and well-being is our number one priority.

My best guess as to why an agency all NYS consumers who buy Obamacare health insurance are forced to deal with only once a year at renewal time for everybody, in the hectic days between Thanksgiving and Christmas, would intervene in March to summarily cancel a valid insurance contract between a consumer and a private corporation (making a sham of our vaunted “free market” where business contracts are sacred) is the standard functioning of bureaucracy.

Perhaps when Healthfirst told me they’d cancelled my insurance back in January, before apologizing a few days later for their “mistake”, somebody at Healthfirst — during the two or three business days this mistaken cancellation was in effect — conveyed this erroneous cancellation, as mandated by law,  to The New York State of Health.   True to form, this crack outfit got right on it, irrevocably and without explanation (or notice to the insured) canceling my insurance two months later.

A paranoid thought enters my head in the absence of a rational, or even irrational, explanation:  I’m being retaliated against.   Who is retaliating?  

Perhaps the director of the overwhelmed New York State of Health, a politically adroit woman named Donna Frescatore, a political appointee who has been running the New York State of Health Marketplace since its inception, a public servant to whom I have been unkind, here and in numerous emails, when critiquing her opaque, cumbersome, asshole mechanisms for administering healthcare justice, or correcting the many mistakes made by her overworked, undertrained staff.  

When I asked for her name years ago I was told that it was NYSOH policy not to allow reps to divulge her name or contact information, they’d all been read the order.  Admittedly, they admitted, NYSOH is not a private corporation where such secrecy is routinely guarded, it’s a state agency, a public agency, but still, they had their orders.  At the time public servant Ms. Frescatore, now also in charge of Medicaid in NYS, was difficult to locate.  Not anymore.   Here she is, first google hit:

“NY State of Health continues to meet the strong demand for comprehensive, affordable health insurance coverage,” said NY State of Health Executive Director, Donna Frescatore.   Feb 20, 2020

It probably didn’t help matters that I included a few snide, angry, intemperate couplets like this one, toward the close of  my second letter to the CEO of Healthfirst:

A corporate “person” is an appetitive psychopath, without conscience or remorse, driven to devour and only constrained by the rare regulation in place to restrain the gnawing impulse to maximize profits, a corporation’s only legal imperative.  

Of course, this kind of viciously overwrought snideness, defensible or not,  is understandably infuriating and never yields a good result.   Who am I to express such unrestrained anger to the head of a corporation that has already had someone call to apologize verbally for accidentally fucking me?  Who am I to demand to know the law under which my arbitrary denial of health insurance was overturned?   

Who knows who eventually read these words, addressed in an electronic supplement to the Department of Financial Services complaint that forced Healthfirst to overturn it’s final determination that I’d have no health care in 2020 (unless I paid full sticker price for it)?

I am wondering why:

1) there is no notice requirement before a health insurance company can terminate health insurance.  (I had absolutely no notice of the “ten day grace period” they suddenly waived after my DFS complaint)

2) NYSOH Marketplace, sole provider of ACA health plans in NYS, does not inform consumers of the practice of insurance companies abruptly (and “mistakenly”) terminating insurance for failure to pay during a “grace period” nobody is informed of

3) there is no provision in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, or NYS law, that requiress notice of termination policies and fair access to the new NYSDFS complaint process that can force compliance with the law.

Is there someone I can talk to at DFS for more information about these questions?

I was eventually referred to the aforementioned troll.  A few days later I got a letter from the NYSDFS instructing me that since my insurance is a form of pay-as-you-go Medicaid (my income being 167% over the official poverty line) I may not use their handy on-line complaint form, the one that restored my insurance within two business days.  

Because of the low-cost insurance I have, a kind of pay-as-you-go Medicaid created by the ACA, I must wait on line with the rest of the poor people at another state agency, where the newly promoted Donna Frescatore is also deputy director of Medicaid in NY State.   This agency, the New York State Health Department, has no on-line form, or on-line help, or anything else (it’s designed for the poor, after all), but, stay positive and have a nice day, Dude!    

Remember, stress is very bad for your immune system, particularly during a plague!   Please continue to hold, just pretend your life doesn’t depend on it!  

LOL.

 

 

[1]  When the law protecting  low-income patients is designed by the conservative Heritage Foundation, whose mission is to protect the profits of private enterprise, you get more deaths during a health emergency than would generally be considered acceptable in a civilized nation.   The business of America, after all, is business.

[2]  One year I was denied health insurance for three months while I waited for a determination from a NY State of Health arbitrator that the NY State of Health had mistakenly denied me coverage.   Another year it was about six months before the premium subsidy I was entitled to was applied, retroactively, to my account, which I’d been paying full price for pending the decision in my favor.  

[3]   The German words meaning “Work Liberates” were worked in wrought iron on top of the gates to the infamous Nazi death camp where slave laborers for German industry (including Bayer) were worked to death.

 

Critical Thinking Skill Builder

In an age when pencil-necked eggheads are mocked as cuckolded weenies, and critical thinking is discouraged in public discourse, it is more important than ever to keep the critical thinking skills sharp.   I offer the excellent analysis, from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, as a great short primer on how to critically read mainstream news.    Check out Janine Jackson’s brilliant, and simple, dissection of the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post’s contorted description of President Trump’s accidental bit of truth-telling, when he candidly revealed to FOX news that making access for voting easier was “crazy,” explaining that expanding voting options would result in:

“levels of voting that if you ever agreed to it you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

Here is the paragraph Janine Jackson dissected, read it slowly and thoughtfully:

Trump didn’t expand on the thought. But he clearly linked high turnout to Republicans losing elections. The most generous reading of his comment is that he was referring to large-scale voter fraud resulting from the easier vote-by-mail options; Trump has in the past baselessly speculated about millions of fraudulent votes helping Democrats in the 2016 election. The more nefarious reading would be that allowing more people to participate in the process legally would hurt his party because there are more Democratic-leaning voters in the country.

As Janine Jackson points out, would you rather be generous or nefarious?  An idiotic reduction of the choices.

Here is a line edit, for clarification:

Trump didn’t expand on the thought, frequently expressed privately by Republican strategists acknowledging the unpopularity of most of their policies, which tilt famously toward the wealthiest 1%.

But he clearly linked high turnout to Republicans losing elections, something borne out in recent elections as his party veers to the extreme right; reducing turnout is something his party’s voter suppression efforts in many states is designed to do.

The most generous reading of his comment is that he was not lying this time, as this paper has documented he has publicly done over (insert latest number, north of 20,000) times in the course of his presidency.  

He was likely referring to the completely debunked claim of large-scale voter fraud resulting from the easier vote-by-mail options;

Trump has in the past baselessly speculated about millions of fraudulent votes helping Democrats in the 2016 election.  Mike Pence and Chris Koback, two Trump loyalists appointed to investigate this alleged fraud, were unable to turn up any proof of widespread voter fraud in the months before their commission was disbanded.

The more nefarious logical reading of the president’s comment would be that allowing more people to participate in the process legally would hurt his party because there are more Democratic-leaning voters in the country.

Not so fucking hard, Jeff, you evil fucking fuck.

 

 

 

Pinhead Heir Emerges as Pandemic Czar

Sekhnet gets upset when I read her the most recent raving from our cunningly survivalist, unhinged, counter-grammatical Commander-in-Chief.   Most people I know cannot watch the compulsively lying, floridly bragging president who needs attention and approval as much as the angriest two year-old.  Some profess to become physically sick watching the reality TV star spew his divisive non sequitars. I can picture millions projectile vomiting as he speaks, though I admit, I’ve never seen even one Trump hater do it.   As for me, I can eat anything while watching short spurts of his shit spewing without even a twinge of nausea, though I avoid hearing him whenever I can.

Late last night Sekhnet read something on her phone that caused her to roar in disgust.  Mike “Cure Your Homosexual Child or Spend Eternity in Hellfire” Pence had, apparently, announced that Jared Kushner was officially in charge of all interactions with FEMA.   There had been a jumble at the top of the dungheap that is Trump’s supremely disorganized, jealous, competitive administration when it came to whether medical experts, Christian extremists or born-wealthy pinheads would have the final say about how to best fight this deadly and highly infectious disease.   A lot of back and front stabbing in Trump’s inner circle, as the Mooch described from his week as Communications Director for America’s Greatest Winner.  

Now Jared Kushner, flushed with his unbelievable victory in the war on Opiate Abuse and his successful brokering of a totally fair, one-sided peace deal between Israel and the Ungrateful, Loser, Uncooperative, Opportunity-blowing Palestinians [1], was in charge of the federal response to the coronavirus plague.   Sekhnet was almost howling at the news.   I couldn’t blame her, and I didn’t take the opportunity to ask her to pipe down because she was going to make me vomit.   I’ve acquired a fairly strong stomach.  That said, Kusher is a mediocrity who can barely craft an English sentence, and who, also like his powerful father-in-law, would be rightfully unknown without the vast inheritance he got from his father, and, in Jared’s case, outsized talents for ass-licking and arrogance.  

This example of Jared’s oratorical brilliance, for example, leaps off the page.  The new liaison between Americans at risk of dying in this pandemic and FEMA made this childishly nonsensical remark about the proper use of federal stockpiles:

the notion of federal stockpiles was it’s supposed to be our stockpile, it’s not supposed to be the states stockpiles that they then use

 Even the cadence of it is childish, like Boof Kavanaugh’s petulant “even when I did good enough at the confirmation hearing, they attacked me unfairly”.   The notion of somebody in charge of a vast health emergency being stupid enough to utter something like that on live TV… well, it’s supposed to be qualified, in some way, the person in the position to utter something that stupid, or else not.  It’s our right not to die, not his!

It is hard not to admire the unintended irony of this one, while we’re all “trying to think about who will be a competent manager” :

“What a lot of the voters are seeing now is that when you elect somebody to be a mayor or governor or president, you’re trying to think about who will be a competent manager during the time of crisis,” he said. “This is a time of crisis, and you’re seeing certain people are better managers than others.”

source [2]

The man is clearly an imbecile, qualified for nothing but looking like an imperious, entitled, well-born SS officer.  

Here is a great opinion piece from Paul Waldman on the half-wit in charge of the federal response to the pandemic, from the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post and here’s an equally good one from Michele Goldberg at the New York Times.   Read them and join Sekhnet, and countless other concerned Americans, in a good group howl.

 

[1]  I found myself howling, in laughter– not horror–  at the CNN chyrons as loyal Jared was giving himself and Trump props for the historic peace deal that his genius father-in-law had enlisted him to draft.  Check out the wonderful start of Christiane Amanpour’s interview with the great man, and mind the comically brilliant chyrons.   It’s not like both sides are needed at the negotiating table to craft a fair compromise, particularly when one side are stupid, evil, losers! ROTFLMAO!  

20200406_152705.jpg

 

[2]  The incoherent ass-covering is kind of fun to watch, in a sick way.

from that same NPR piece:

A day after Kushner made his remarks, language on a government website about the national stockpile was changed to more closely reflect his description. But a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services said the department had been using the new language for weeks. The assistant secretary for preparedness and response “first began working to update the website text a week ago to more clearly explain to state and local agencies and members of the public the role of the” Strategic National Stockpile, the spokesperson said.

When asked Friday about his son-in-law’s remarks, Trump said Kushner was “talking about our country.”

“We need it for the government and the federal government,” he said, complaining that state governments should have had their own stockpiles. “The federal government needs it, too, not just the states,” he said.

Why the Extreme Right are actually Nazis

I now use the word “Nazi” for the right wing extremists who are currently calling the shots here in our exceptional nation.   I know the word has an intemperate, hyperbolic ring to it, but hear me out.   Many governments have been oppressive, autocratic, several were/are openly fascist.   The Nazi regime stands head and shoulders above all these because of their openly racist criminality (draconian racial laws, death squads, death camps and so on) in the name of an imaginary ideal: to purify the blood of the most exceptional “race” in history.   A hallmark of Nazis everywhere is their willingness to see millions die in order to achieve their goals.  As that unimpeachable expert on Nazi philosophy and practice, Dr. Josef Goebbels, once remarked during the war: if we win, history will regard us as the world’s greatest benefactors, if we lose we’ll be remembered as its most notorious criminals.  

The American Extreme Right is animated by many of the same sentiments that ignited the Nazi revolution.  It is based, largely, in racism, organized hatred, a stilted “meritocracy” based on loyalty and anti-democratic obedience to the will of a superior being, an infallible leader.  In a pinch they don’t care how many of their “enemies” need to die so that they might prevail, a characteristic their ilk demonstrates daily in this pandemic we’re currently all trying to survive.

In 1954 the Supreme Court belatedly, almost a hundred years after a decision stating that blacks could not be citizens or possess any rights “the white man is bound to respect”, ruled that segregated education is an unconstitutional infringement on the rights of “non-white” Americans.   Recall at the time lynching was still practiced in many parts of the country.   The National Guard had to be called in when schools were integrated, by a few brave children, to protect these kids from being murdered by screaming crowds of outraged racists.

Almost immediately a small group of wealthy reactionaries formed the extremist John Birch Society in reaction to this indignity.   They got up and running, Fred Koch, father of the infamous Koch Brothers among them, in 1958.   They were appalled that Negroes were given full rights at the stroke of a pen by the Supreme Court, a court they were convinced had been taken over by Communists.   They were against the “mongrelization” of our country that would be caused by equal civil rights for all citizens and the likely “race mixing” that would result.  The Birchers were the ultimate anti-communists during a period of anti-communist hysteria.  The John Birch Society was a lunatic fringe group, considered nut jobs by most Democrats and Republicans of their time.   Now they are basically running the United States of America in the form of the current lockstep Republican party led by Mr. Trump, Mitch McConnell and their plutocrat sponsors.

Of course, I have skipped a few steps.  One of the first political campaigns Charles and David Koch undertook was an anti-integration campaign in North Carolina. They used some of their vast wealth to get their candidates on the school board and implemented policies that allowed white parents “school choice.”    This school board was able to immediately re-segregate the district’s schools and did considerable damage to the educational opportunity in the poorest, blackest schools before it was voted out.   This tells you a lot about the agenda of guys like the Koch boys.

They spent millions nationwide fighting minimum wage laws.  They spent tens of millions on influence machines from “think tanks” that informed and later dominated public debate on every issue (think “climate skepticism”) to colleges and universities who took their donations in exchange for promoting their ideology. They funded the campaigns of anti-union politicians.   They supported laws restricting voting in state after state, in order to increase their chances of victory for wildly unpopular anti-government policies.   They were big funders of the Federalist Society, a national legal fraternity dedicated to creating a cadre of solid, right wing federal judges to rule in favor of industry, deregulation, curtailment of underclass voting rights, protecting the rights of employers, landlords and fetuses and other issues important to protecting the privileges of the wealthy and powerful.  Why millions of the powerless go along with this agenda is a perplexing mystery.  The chance to vent their anger and hatred, and feel superior to others in comradeship with fellow travelers, seems to explain some of it.

A lifetime ago I enrolled, briefly, in a PhD program in history with a concentration on the Nazi regime.  I wanted to understand how an ignorant, violently opinionated sociopath could take over a famously civilized nation and order the murder of, among millions, my entire family.   I took it somewhat personally, I admit.  I quickly got into a fight with a professor about who supported the Nazis.  I’d read about the wealthy reactionaries and aristocrats who, early or late in the Weimar Republic, threw their support behind the regime that would protect them from Marxism, provide some of them with slave labor (Bayer among them) and the rest of them with generous protection of their privileges.  

The professor, an American who retained a bit of his German Jewish accent, a somber and well-read historian, told me dismissively that I sounded like Hugh Trevor-Roper, a freewheeling, acerbic British historian who shared my view, apparently, to great controversy [1].  I understood that this was a sophisticated way of calling me an unlearned, wildly opinionated crackpot.   I surmise that the professor was offended by Trevor-Roper, as apparently other Jewish historians were [2].  During my semester as a PhD candidate I quickly came to understand the role of politics in the writing of history, and began to read it differently.  I had to concede to the outraged professor that perhaps many of the wealthy did not throw their support behind Hitler until he was Fuhrer, which I thought was fair enough.   

You don’t need an active conspiracy to have a world of shared goals with like-minded people, if you have overriding interests in common.   The segregationist, anti-minimum wage, anti-union, anti-regulation, voting rights suppressing Kochtopus (they control dozens of influential institutions, Charles Koch’s favorite is called The Institute for Humane Studies) has a lot of very wealthy fellow travelers who are not specifically on board with all of their anti-humane, anti-democratic policies.  

You have very wealthy people who might be considered socially liberal, someone like Jeff “Democracy Dies in Darkness” Bezos, who are on board with many of the core reactionary beliefs of many of his fellow billionaires, primarily that he has a absolute right to every penny he can put into his portfolio.   Unions, hated by the Kochs and their ilk, are forbidden in Bezos operations.    Bill Gates, Bezos’s fellow billionaire philanthropist and smartest man in any room, like Michael Bloomberg, share many of the features of the Koch belief system — fighting for monopoly control of their industries, promoting chosen projects they can throw vast sums of money into (for Gates “charter schools” was one) to create a good, philanthropic public name, and when in power, having cops throw random black kids against the wall (Bloomberg) as a way of “fighting crime.” 

It’s easy to hate people who wake up every day burning to increase fortunes they already could not spend if they lived to be 1,000 years old.  I find it easy, anyway.  But when they promote policies that ensure that the poor will stay poor, and die in numbers as large as necessary to preserve the status quo that advantages the super-privileged, and spend millions to convince the credulous that there is something in this grotesque arrangement for them too, well, in my book these fucks, regardless of their well publicized “philanthropy”, are straight up evil.   Nazis, if you will.

 

[1]  Trevor-Roper’s most widely read and financially rewarding book was titled The Last Days of Hitler (1947). It emerged from his assignment as a British intelligence officer in 1945 to discover what happened in the last days of Hitler‘s bunker. From his interviews with a range of witnesses and study of surviving documents he demonstrated that Hitler was dead and had not escaped from Berlin. He also showed that Hitler’s dictatorship was not an efficient unified machine but a hodge-podge of overlapping rivalries.  

source

Echo of history with Mr. Trump’s hodge-podge of overlapping rivalries.  Pence and Kushner, for example, vie for control of the “response” to the plague currently killing many Americans.

[2] The American historian Lucy Dawidowicz in The Holocaust and Historians (1981) delivered what the British historian David Cesarani called an “ad hominem attack”, writing that Trevor-Roper in his writings on Nazi Germany was indifferent to Nazi antisemitism, because she believed that he was a snobbish antisemite, who was apathetic about the murder of six million Jews.[28] Cesarani wrote that Dawidowicz was wrong to accuse Trevor-Roper of antisemitism but argued that there was an element of truth to her critique in that the Shoah was a blind-spot for Trevor-Roper.[29]

source

FUN FACT from Homo Sapiens History

We don’t question things like the American president dropping the largest conventional bomb in history on a remote area of the Middle East, as Trump did, to applause from the US media for being “presidential”.   U.S. presidents must sometimes project power on the world stage by being violent, we all understand.  It’s something every red-blooded American can get behind.  Remember social justice advocate Van Jones gushing on CNN that Trump was finally “presidential” when he unleashed fifty or a hundred million dollars worth of our greatest missiles against a Syrian airfield to show that America would not tolerate the Syrian dictator using poison gas on his own people?

In light of the impressive irrationality of our species, today’s fun fact should come as no surprise, though it is nonetheless also cool and noteworthy.   The Spanish Flu, the deadly strain of influenza that killed more than 50,000,000 worldwide toward the end and right after the First World War, did not originate in Spain!   It was no more prevalent in Spain than anywhere else.  Spain was merely publicizing the spread of the deadly disease, those traitorous fucks.

I heard an interview about the last pandemic (and lessons, and hope, we can draw from it) with Jeremy Brown, a doctor who wrote a book about the 1918 Flu Pandemic [1].   Seems Spain, neutral during WWI, was the only country whose newspapers reported on the plague that was spreading (largely among the filthy and undernourished troops returning from trenches and weakened populations hungry and dirty from wartime deprivation).   All the belligerents had a tacit agreement to keep the news on the back pages, for fear of hurting the war effort [2].  So, obviously: The Spanish Flu.  Homo sapiens: the wise ape!

Because of this deliberate underreporting about the spread of this highly contagious and deadly disease, millions more died than might have had the information been put out there earlier and had appropriate steps been taken by governments.  Until the mass media sounds the alarm, and the president takes decisive and effective action, people continue going about their business, largely unaware of the deadly plague spreading wildly in their midst.

Echoes of history.   The Spanish Flu is a fitting name that could have been pulled directly out of the Trump playbook — the Nazi mass-murders of the last century?   The Poisonous Jew Rebellion.  And, you know, not many people know this, but, there were some very fine people on both sides, on both sides — and, by the way, did you see my ratings?   Like Monday Night Kristalnacht numbers!

 

[1]

BROWN: I’m an emergency physician, and I’m the author of the book “Influenza: The Hundred Year Hunt To Cure The Deadliest Disease In History.” And I also work at the National Institutes of Health, where I am the director of the Office of Emergency Care Research.

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/821597079

[2] 

BROWN: No. The Spanish flu certainly did not originate in Spain. So why was it, and sometimes to this day – why was it called the Spanish flu? And the answer is this. It was widely reported in newspapers in Spain, and that’s where the first stories broke of this disease. Why wasn’t it reported perhaps in other newspapers in the U.S. or in Europe or in Great Britain? The answer is this. There was a tacit agreement between the governments of the Western powers and the newspaper editors not to report bad news.

ARABLOUEI: Wow.

BROWN: Certainly, there were reports of influenza, but they were generally small and often relegated to the back pages. And what we have, therefore, is an underreporting of influenza in the newspapers. Spain, to remind everybody – Spain was a neutral country in World War I. It did not have, therefore, this tacit agreement between its newspaper editors and its government not to report influenza. And so the first reports of influenza being widespread came out of Spain.

Nazis are always on point

It is a challenge to get a coherent and reasonable view of the whole sickening death spiral most of us, and all other living things on the planet, are up against.  If we can’t see it, how do we take action?   We are all soaking in this perilous status quo solution because a few people, determined to have everything at any cost, wake up on fire to get more every day, no matter what the price to the most vulnerable among us.  Nazis and klansmen are always on point, ready to serve their masters.   They know exactly who they want to kill at every moment, in a way that ordinary people don’t.

We are so well marinated in this corporate/fascist moment (where mass death of our most vulnerable “losers” is vastly preferable to even a momentary loss of profits for the most successful winners among us) that it’s impossible for most of our fellow frogs to even see what we are neck deep in or to even imagine that there are alternatives to it.  

So effective has Rugged Individualist advertising/propaganda been that even very intelligent and politically progressive friends have come to feel (notice “feel”, not reason or decide) that doddering compromiser Joe Biden is our best hope against Trump/Bolsinaro/Putin et al.    Frustrating.   The Democratic party has sold out to corporatism to the extent that a gif of a saucy Nancy Pelosi snarkily wagging her finger at an uncheckable Hitler-wannabe seems to be the best we can hope for.

We live by corporate rules, and many more millions will die worldwide because of it.   We cannot escape the merciless logic of these rules.  Random example:

I’ve been resisting doing the update on my phone for months, hating every update I’ve been forced to do over the years.  Yesterday and today the corporation that made my phone  began disabling my phone randomly, middle of a call– screen black, $800 device rendered useless.   They just did it four or five consecutive times as Sekhnet called to verify that my phone, set to ring at top volume, no longer rings when she calls me.  Sekhnet urges me to just do the update for my phone while I scream about Korean fucking fascists (Samsung) and the perfect unbeatable BIRD WINS mindfuck of surveillance capitalism.

How do we get out of this almost boiling pot when the vast majority of our fellow sodomized citizens can’t even see the problem?  How do we fucking organize to fight back?  Any ideas?  You, in the back…