On an IV of your favorite pleasure drug
I was thinking about the one percent again after hearing John Oliver cite experts for the proposition that 2% of vulnerable victims of Coronavirus, COVID19, die of the disease. A 2% death rate is not as bad as the 3.4% I heard just days ago, you have to like your odds of survival, but, still, you’re talking about millions of dead, potentially. Even at a 1% death rate poor management of the crisis would, in ordinary times, be a death sentence to a political leader who grossly bungles the serious duty under the pressure of actual emergency events.
Luckily for those in power, the vast majority of Americans, deadened by years of increasingly painful political malice and legislative deadlock, regard politics, even now, as a grim spectator sport they can keep track of on their phones. They are desperate not to find themselves living in a dictatorship, they are merely realistic about their options for having any actual say in actually avoiding it. They have no clue how to organize, how to militate, how to demand concessions from power by the sheer force of mass mobilization, power yielding nothing without a powerful demand [1].
The reasons authoritarians always rely on police power for social control is that when enough people are pushed to the point of desperation, anger builds. Dictators harness this anger and release it as police rage on fellow citizens. Works for the ruling few, if not for the teeming masses.
The essential skill everyone of us needs to figure out is how to organize with fellow citizens, how to gather our forces and discuss the best way forward, speaking to the powerful in a clear, strong voice. The only change worth fighting for is change worth fighting for, to state the obvious yet never stated. Is it worth fighting for a legal end to involuntary servitude that will go into effect one hundred years in the future? I think 1% would buy that idea.
Speaking of one percent, here’s a fun one. Put one billion in your calculator. Assume the least sophisticated billionaire in history, on a full-time IV of his favorite pleasure drug, has his money in a series of FDIC insured bank accounts making 1% interest. Tap those numbers in and you will see what even this drugged out idiot earns in simple interest in one year: $10,000,000. Almost a million a month, not bad for a complete dope! Of course, at 5% the annual earning would be $50,000,000, a significant sum by any reckoning, and at 10% a hefty and very livable $100,000,000 a year in interest, but, of course, those are just numbers. No reason to get excited.
[1] Frederick Douglass, genius and good twitter friend of @donaldjturnip
Lack of Parenting
When your parents are usually your bitter adversaries in a senseless, ongoing war, it is difficult to seek advice from them. I had a sudden reminder of this when I read this line in an article about Elizabeth Warren, about a proponent of integration who excepted his own children from the school integration policy he fought for.
His story — as the idealistic father who moves his own children out of urban schools — was chronicled in J. Anthony Lukas’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning book, “Common Ground.’’
I suddenly recalled my idealistic, liberal, pro-integration parents’ desperation when, during my two years in Junior High School, the local school zoning was changed (to increase racial diversity) and my local High School was no longer nearby highly rated Jamaica High but predominantly black Andrew Jackson High (talk about ironies, naming that school after rabid racist slaveholder and Trump favorite Old Hickory…) located squarely in a black area a few miles from where we lived. Students could opt out of the rezoning plan by pursuing majors at Jamaica not offered at Jackson, I recall metallurgy was one such major, or by getting into one of the specialized schools that required passing an entrance exam.
I took the exam and passed. It was my first inkling that I had a distinct talent for doing well on meaningless high-stakes tests [1]. My choice, as winner of this lottery, was between the nerd-filled Bronx High School of Science (where I’d travelled to take the entrance exam, as I recall) or much closer, much cooler, Stuyvesant High School, a school, as I learned much later, with a long reputation as a liberal arts high school. My sister went there two years later and had the great Frank McCourt, later author of Angela’s Ashes, as her English teacher. She loved Frank, as most of his students apparently did.
From Stuyvesant, then located in Manhattan’s hippyish East Village, students could walk to Chinatown to eat. The trip to school was about 45 minutes by bus and subway from where we grew up in Queens. A good friend of mine to this day went to Stuyvesant and had a fine time there.
Science, by contrast, was more than twice that distance from home. It was located on a tundra, bitterly frozen in the winter where arctic winds off the reservoir would lacerate you on the long walk from the Grand Concourse. It was not located near any place anyone would want to go. Most of my classmates, outside of a few smart misfit friends of mine who happened to live in the Bronx (including the only musical genius I have ever met), were future engineers, computer geeks, physicists, chemists, mathematicians, quants, Nobel prize winners and so forth.
Because I never had a real discussion about any of this, and had no guidance from my parents, a friend and I basically flipped a coin and chose Science. As I recall we never thought about the length of the commute, what we were interested in by way of curriculum or any other factor. To make the deal even more meaningful, we had little contact in High School, after a semester of taking the bus and subway there together I don’t even recall seeing the guy there.
I wound up setting the Bronx High School of Science record for lateness by a student, a growing record of incorrigible tardiness bitterly pointed out to me by a series of red-faced deans of discipline. I was late to class virtually every morning. The alternative to lateness was being up by 6:30 or so and out the door not long past 7:15 a.m. I had few classes there worth my time, little of any interest at all. The English department handed out vocabulary sheets containing dozens of fancy, unfamiliar words we were required to learn every week. I applaud this practice, which instilled a lifelong habit of learning the meaning of every unknown word I encounter. Outside of that, I recall little else academically from my three years of strife there.
One day in High School I ran into a girl I knew from the neighborhood, a cute girl I’d always liked. She was going to Andrew Jackson and told me it was great. She wound up graduating at sixteen, because the classes were apparently so easy there that she aced everything and was able to do her three years of high school in a little over two. I promptly cut school and took the bus with her to Jackson. I recall spending a very nice day there, meeting her bright, politically active friends, hanging out. I remember standing on the steps of the school smoking a joint with her and some of her friends as classes went on inside. I recall not a single menacing black kid hassling any minority white kid, the ultimate fear of liberal parents.
At the highly competitive Bronx Science, my 83 average put me at the bottom of my class. As I recall I was somewhere in the 800s out of a graduating class of almost 1,000. The same amount of work (those diligent, angry last minute hours I spent every year cramming for the New York State Regents) would have put me at the top of the class at Jackson, probably put me in line for many a college scholarship.
I write these words with no bitterness, I really regret none of it. I merely point out that had my parents been capable of real parenting, as opposed to what they actually did, I might have had a chance of thinking through the some of the things I realize now so clearly. I would have learned to think through a choice and make the best decision for myself, instead of flipping a coin with a friend equally clueless about such things. The travel time alone should have been a decisive factor in my decision of where to commute to high school.
I’ve had to become my own parents, a process that no doubt set me back quite a few years, and cost me a ton of hard work. It was good work, and I certainly don’t regret it, in fact, I recommend it for everyone who feels the need for good parenting, but, seriously, man, what the fuck?
[1] Years later I’d score in the top percentile in the National Teaching Exam. I also got a perfect score on the exam for Census Supervisor, a test score that was later unaccountably erased along with my application. I also passed a variety of high school subjects I had not studied by bitterly cramming, often in a day or two, for a series of Regents’ Exams. I averaged very high scores on these predictable tests of subject matter that could be quickly learned merely by taking a series of past tests. My scores would rise from an initial 20%, to the 85 or 90% I’d score on the last test I’d take on my sleep-deprived subway ride to school to take the actual exam.
Biden Derangement Syndrome during a Pandemic
Would I rather have Joe Biden in the White House right now instead of Donald Trump? Absolutely, you bet your life. Biden believes in science, and funding things like the Center for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health, he’d have agencies up and running full-steam ahead to deal with this possible pandemic in a way that someone who doesn’t believe in science, or facts, or anything else is incapable of.
Trump right now has a 29 year-old vetting everyone in government for personal loyalty to Trump. Trump recently appointed his loyal poodle, a religious extremist whose greatest previous achievement was trying to “cure” young people of homosexuality, as the man in charge of controlling the spread of a potentially mass killing disease. Way to go, for a dictator in waiting, though few Americans seem reassured to have Mike Pence as the Pandemic Czar.
That said, would I rather have Joe Biden in the White House in 2020 than Elizabeth Warren, or Julian Castro, or Kamala Harris, or Bernie Sanders or Stacey Abrams or any number of other progressive Democrats? Absolutely not. Biden is the corporate candidate of the status quo, the smiling centrist deal-maker who worked closely with former segregationists and gets along with everybody. Biden’s legacy is working cheerfully with the right, cooperating in hideous policies, like pushing for Cheney’s war in Iraq, like humiliating Anita Hill when he was the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee (and having the gall to “apologize” to Hill decades later, telling her “I wish there was more I could have done…”).
Where does the myth of Biden’s “electability” come from? Recall that in his 1984 and 1988 presidential runs the famous gaffe machine totaled (combining 1984 and 1988 delegate numbers) less than one percent. 0.008%. to be exact. And he’s more than thirty years older and even less nimble on his clumsy feet now. Trump, who only has to refrain from actually shitting on the debate stage to “win”, will mop the floor with the confident moderate dotard who insists he will beat Trump “like a drum.” Hey, Biden already proved he’s a winner, garnering almost one percent in those two primary runs…
Speaking of one percent, here’s a fun one. Put one billion in your calculator. Assume the least sophisticated billionaire in history, on a full-time IV of his favorite pleasure drug, has his money in a series of FDIC insured bank accounts making 1% interest. Tap those numbers in and you will see what even this idiot earns in simple interest in one year: $10,000,000. Almost a million a month, not bad for a complete dope! Of course, at 5% the annual earning would be $50,000,000 and at 10% a neat $100,000,000, but, of course, those are just numbers. No reason to get excited.
Well, that’s about it for me today. Biden Derangement Syndrome has got me down, even as I’m very glad the smarter version of Trump is out of the race, only $500,000,000 down. Of course, that piece of garbage, Mayor Mike, is now throwing his vast wealth behind Biden, and why wouldn’t he? Biden will make everything like it was under the golden age of his black best friend Barack Obama — hopeful, and changey-ish, if you don’t look too closely at either of those things, and best for you if you are a very high roller.
Democrats are one of two American corporately funded parties, bought and paid for by big donors. The Democratic establishment is so terrified of what most Americans want that they will do anything to avoid having a candidate committed to long-overdue institutional change. No reason to begin correcting fundamental injustice in our nation, no reason to highlight solving the escalating climate crisis that is already well underway.
A “moderate” Democrat like Biden will make sure the big things stay the same, maximum privileges for the already privileged and whatever trickles down to the “takers,” the rest of us, who feel so entitled to the generous handouts we get from a government that needs to be restrained from viciously coercing the “makers”. The corporate Democrats require a candidate who will not lead a discussion of what justice, public health, public safety, democracy, the rule of law, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness actually looks like.
We are a nation of passive spectators, consumers, doomed to vote for whoever the corporations approve, whichever candidate is best branded, rebranded (in the case of Biden) and most expertly marketed. [1] Not the way we were all taught about democracy, which is always a struggle.
[1] Again, I was surprised and relieved that the best ad campaign $500,000,000 can buy didn’t convince many people to vote for the autocratic Mike Bloomberg, whose hideous leadership we already saw in action when he was NYC mayor, when he bent the law to maintain power for an illegal third term. Good for that sad, ruthless fuck, and the good people of American Samoa, who voted him five delegates (more than Biden had in either 1984 or 1988).
The Corporate Brain
First thing to understand– they’ve got the whole world, in their hands. Corporations. We live in a global corporatocracy [1], whatever else is also going on.
There are rules we must understand, living under the rule of “persons” accountable only to shareholder profits. One is to know the kind of “person” a corporation is: a psychopath — incapable of empathy, remorse, or moral reflection. The corporate “person” has one legal interest: the bottom line, increasing stock value for its shareholders. A corporate person will only do the right thing (like paying to remediate its own negligence, or even intentional defiance of existing laws) if targeted by law enforcement and, after exhausting every legal appeal, being ordered to comply by a court of law. Since corporations spend a fortune on armies of lawyers and lobbyists to influence the drafting of every law that could have an impact on their profits, good luck there, Charlie.
Two is to understand the nature of the corporate brain — it is purposefully segmented into as many unrelated subdivisions as needed to shield the larger organism from harm. This is a deliberate device to protect the corporation, in part by exhausting the consumer, who must often speak to many unrelated segments of the corporate brain to try to get a reasonable answer, or redress of any kind. I provide two examples from my recent, ongoing experiences with two random corporations.
Brand new Dell computer does not perform an essential function, seeing my cellphone as a hotspot. It sees other nearby hotspots and wireless networks, but it cannot find the only network I can use to connect to the internet. The computer is under warranty so correcting this defect should not be a major problem.
Except that Dell has compiled a legally unassailable list of specific exemptions from their limited warranty. They have me run all the diagnostic tests on the brand new computer and, after an hour or so, tell me that there is no problem with the computer’s hardware, and that therefore the problem, which appears to be a software configuration error, is “out of warranty.” Not to worry, they tell me, Dell has a paid service that can fix the problem for me.
As is typical in corporations, “Warranty” has no way of communicating with “Out of Warranty”, and therefore has no way of informing a customer that 3 years of “out of warranty” service costs $239, plus tax, a more limited version of this “premium” support goes for $169 and a one-time fix will set you back $129. The customer can only learn these prices after another long wait on hold. The customer must listen to a loop of ads for wonderful Dell products and services, while waiting to learn the price, and submit to being thanked over and over for how important their business is to Dell.
Enough reason never to deal with this particular corporate motherfucker ever again, but at the same time, Dell is merely on the vanguard of maximizing profits through express warranty limitations. Corporations can make a lot more money by making customers pay to fix built in problems than by covering their repair for free. They hire legal geniuses like now-Justice John Roberts, creator of the arbitration clause, to exclude the most expensive repairs, even of Dell’s own design flaws, from the limited warranty. “What don’t you understand about the word ‘limited’, sir? All of the limitations are explicitly set forth in the thousands of words of our warranty, which we will send you for free.”
The beauty is, there is nothing you can do. It’s all legal and ironclad. Put the computer back in the box, scrawl “FUCK DELL” on top and bring it back to the store. (I would advise not scrawling “FUCK DELL” on top, it could void the return and force you to pay at least $129 to be able to use the brand new computer). Caveat emptor, asshole.
Healthfirst, the corporation I pay for health insurance, told me, on January 22, and again on January 24 (after their internal “appeal”), that my insurance had been terminated for my failure to pay a “binder” payment during a once-a-year ten day “grace period.” They also informed me that under the law they had no obligation to inform me of this “grace period” before terminating my policy. Then, on January 28, another department in Healthfirst called to tell me that my insurance had never been terminated and apologized for their “mistake.”
Since then I have been trying to find out what the law actually is. No state or federal agency has any idea why I was cut off and why I was reinstated. Nobody can point me to the section of the law that made Healthfirst reverse its unappealable termination. None can confirm which of the various complaints I submitted resulted in the overturning of Healthfirst’s original determination.
Finding and publicizing the short answer would provide a valuable service for my fellow citizens, screwed by the thousands exactly as I was. To put it simply: what protections against termination without notice do patients have under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Obamacare? You know, the federal law the right wing has been rabidly trying to abolish since it went into effect? [2]
I finally got a letter of explanation from Healthfirst, in an envelope marked “Grievance and Appeals”. It was entitled “Notice of Grievance Resolution”, as though on February 14 I had contested Healthfirst’s decision to restore my health insurance after terminating it weeks earlier. The notice states that my insurance was properly terminated for my failure to pay the binder during the ten-day grace period. It states that my insurance had never been terminated, as confirmed by the call I received on January 28 apologizing for Healthfirst’s “mistake”.
Why this corporate change of “heart”? That, sir, is nobody’s goddamned business. Please continue to hold, your business is very important to us.
[1] Wikipedia:
Corporatocracy is a recent term used to refer to an economic and political system controlled by corporations or corporate interests. The concept has been used in explanations of bank bailouts, excessive pay for CEOs as well as complaints such as the exploitation of national treasuries, people and natural resources. Wikipedia
[2] The law itself is now finally under reconsideration by the Supreme Court, in light of a federal court striking down the “mandate” that was upheld by one vote when John Roberts found this requirement of Obamacare constitutional. Keep your helmets on, my fellow hostages.
A Note on Joe Biden
With his impressive “firewall”, support from black voters in the South Carolina primary, Joe Biden won his first primary as a presidential candidate, by a large margin over second place finisher Bernie Sanders. Moderates Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg both dropped out of the race and threw their support to Biden, as did Beto O’Rourke and other high profile Democrats. [1]
Comedian Jimmy Kimmel noted last night that Biden’s South Carolina victory was his first primary win, ever. I recall Biden had received scant support in his previous presidential runs, in 1984 and 1988. I looked it up.
At the 1984 Democratic National Convention Biden got one delegate, 0.03% (three hundredths of a percent) of the necessary delegates.
In 1988, Biden doubled the number of delegates to two, 0.05% (five hundredths of a percent) of the delegates he needed for the nomination.
Just sayin’…
I know everyone in the moderate, establishment wing of the Democratic Party is united in its determination to keep Bernie Sanders from being their candidate (that applies to a lesser extent to Elizabeth Warren, who I have always loved), because America, although on the brink of a second civil war, is considered not ready for bold changes and most Americans are said to hate Socialists of all kinds, and many don’t like Jews either, but… Biden? Really, man? Joe can’t even remember the deadpan punchline to “we hold these truths to be self-evident” … “that all men and women (as Biden added) are… you know the rest…”
Seriously?
[1] Meanwhile, billionaire Republican Mike Bloomberg has already outspent his remaining Democratic rivals 10:1 on advertising alone, passing the half billion dollar mark recently. He is almost up to having spent 1% of his fortune to become the Democratic presidential candidate. He will probably spend up to 5% of his personal wealth ($3,400,000,000.00) for his dream job.
For the Love of God, America
After a funeral yesterday we all sat in a restaurant having lunch. The gentle fellow across from me reported how easy it was to deal with Medicare, one simple statement, everything pretty straightforward. I asked if he thought it a good idea to have a similar health care system for people before they reached sixty-five. He said he did, but how are we going to pay for it? A second later he began excoriating Sanders and Warren and I saw that we were nearing the end of a real conversation. At this Sanders/Warren prompt there was a chorus of nearby voices stating how imperative it is we vote Trump out in 2020 (that chorus was joined by a Trump 2016 voter.)
As far as the current health insurance regime for millions, Obamacare, my interlocutor agreed it was absurd to be given a menu without prices and to be billed six weeks later, as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act allows providers and insurers to do.
The buffet most of us were having cost $49 per person, as the waitress readily told us. Imagine if no price was given and our host simply had to wait six to eight weeks to be billed and learn that the price was $400 per person, and there was no recourse. That’s the price, deadbeat. If you have premium level buffet insurance, the price will be $49 per person, but, sadly, you did not take precautions. Caveat emptor, bitches.
On January 8 I had the first of four endovenous ablations in my legs. It had been deemed medically necessary and insurance had approved the procedures. There was, of course, no way to know the price in advance, as per the impressively opaque 906 page Patient Protection Act. On January 22 I was informed by Healthfirst, the company that I pay for my ACA insurance, that my insurance had been terminated. This meant I’d be responsible for the full, non-insured price of the first treatment, whatever it turned out to be. Several days later I managed, by very hard, stressful work and sheer luck, to get the unappealable termination of my insurance overturned. Insurance would pay after all.
My sickening fight with the insurance company, with every state, local and federal agency, the stonewalling at every turn, another story for another day. It is ongoing and seemingly will never have an end, until I arbitrarily give up. The citizen has, according to everyone, no right to know the exact provision of the Patient Protection Act that protects him from the unappealable acts of a health insurance company that are later deemed “mistakes” regarding a wrongful termination of insurance. OK, I guess that’s some form of democracy, if you’re lucky enough not to be violently sodomized by it. [1]
Anyway, the other day I got the Explanation of Benefits for the first of four ablation treatments. The full, retail price: $5,460. The Allowed Amount: $1,572. My copayment, already paid: $25. Multiply this hefty sum by four and you will understand that the insurance company had thousands of compelling reasons to terminate my policy, if given the chance. Without insurance, the cauterization of those two leg veins would have cost over $21,000. That’s why all Americans need health insurance, to be protected against bankruptcy if one survives the medical challenges themselves.
Which is why, of course, Mr. Trump, who promised better, cheaper, universal health care for all Americans back in 2016 has fought so hard to bring us Trumpcare. Cheaper, better, covering all Americans, brought to us all by Mr. Trump (born American and college graduate, unlike Obama!) and the incorruptible, unconquerable wall of Republican Senators and a vast army of lobbyists and “donors”. USA! USA!!!
[1] I am always pointing out to the reps I am appealing to for help that I support the ACA, voted for Obama twice, realize Obamacare is a halting, but significant, step forward and that the tweaks needed to make it work better — like every other large government program got in its first few years of administration as problems were discovered– were all prevented by a partisan lynch mob working with a klanlike zeal to prevent the n-word president from having a second term and then making sure he was able to accomplish nothing in his second term but the divisive election of a White Supremacist successor who would do his damnedest to wipe Obama’s record from history. I get all that, but still.
CBS delivers free, powerful informercial to Trump 2020. USA! USA!!!!
The clips of Democratic candidates shouting over each other during their recent South Carolina debate, seemingly deranged, divided and unable to even listen to each other’s positions, was delivered by CBS to the Trump 2020 campaign. That the live-TV fiasco was the failure of CBS to properly moderate the debate? Whoopsie-daisy! It’s not that we like Trump, don’t assume we like him, it’s just that he’s so goddamn good for our bottom line!
Les Moonves, forced to resign from his job as head of CBS when multiple sexual abuse allegations against led to the determination that he is a fucking pig, famously said the networks were not giving Trump all this free airtime because they liked him. He raises ratings. Advertisers like him because audiences love him, and that makes CBS coffers fatter. “He may not be good for America, but he sure is good for our shareholders!” or something like that was Les’s comment. A year or two later Les had to make due with a smaller exit package, as his $120,000,000 golden parachute was clawed back by CBS since Moonves was fired “for cause.” (I was unable to find out what happened with his attempt to get it back through arbitration)
Meanwhile, CBS appears to have set no rules for its candidate debate, issued no warnings for repeated interruptions, did not cut the mic of anyone who persisted in shouting down and talking over somebody else> The result: plenty of footage of unruly candidates, forced to jealously vie for air time, snapping at each other. The footage provides a valuable free campaign bonanza for Mr. Trump’s billion dollar advertising, media and disinformation teams.
And God bless these United Shayssssh…
Perspective on Unlimited Campaign Money and (self-funded) Billionaire Presidential Campaigns
Just to make this one perplexing fact about our political system a bit more clear.
One billion dollars is a thousand million dollars. It looks like this: $1,000,000,000.00.
Mike Bloomberg, for example, has about this amount of money: $60,000,000,000.00.
He plans to boldly spend at least $500,000,000.00 in paid campaigning by “Super Tuesday” when more than a dozen states are simultaneously in play, along with 33.8% of delegates nationwide.. He is already closing in on that half billion number, having passed $350,000,000.00 already. Take out your calculator.
If candidate Bloomberg spends $500,000,000.00 for ads and staff to help him win maximum delegates toward the Democratic presidential nomination on Super Tuesday, what percentage of his fortune does he spend?
To divide those numbers, first move the 5 of $500,000,000 over five places. You can see at once what an insignificant fraction that half billion actually is to someone with sixty billion. If it was $600,000,000, we could see at a glance the percentage of sixty billion would be about 1%.
Placing the numbers into a calculator gives us our mathematical answer: .0083% One half a billion dollars equals .0083% of Mike Bloomberg’s personal fortune. That’s a shade under 1%. If he felt like spending a billion, that would be 1.66% of his personal fortune. An unprecedented $5,000,000,000.00 presidential campaign expenditure would be 8.3% of his wealth.
For the equivalent for the “average” citizen, with $10,000 in savings, that $500,000,000 Bloomberg expenditure is $83. Chump change by any calculation. If you have $1,000 the equivalent amount would be $8.30 — it would hardly break the bank. On a personal fortune of $100 it would cost you 83 cents.
As far as the rest of the story on Mike Bloomberg, a man who bought a third NYC mayoral term after being blocked by term limits, I will return here eventually for a full treatment of Mike Bloomberg, a vicious, smooth-talking, weasel-dicked motherfucker. As for what Bloomberg will do as president, I can confidently tell you he’d be basically Trump with a brain.
American history master Robert Caro observed that the only accurate way to tell what somebody would do if they had power is to watch them exercise power when they actually have it. LBJ had all of his segregationist buddies fooled for all those years, during his climb, as he built his national Senate majority, when the time came he betrayed them all by signing legislation to once again enforce century-old constitutional rights for Coloreds. LBJ paid a big price, politically and personally, but, as Caro points out, signing that equality and expansion of the New Deal legislation was what he wanted to do all along, if he ever got the power to do it. The proof is that, in spite of the tremendous forces against it, he actually did it when he had the power to. Politicians will do and say almost anything to get votes and campaign funds, it’s what they do in power that tells you what you really need to know before you cast a ballot. We have a fat book here in New York City on Mike as mayor of New York City, pretty much a piece of shit from start to finish. I have a few details that I’d like to have more well-known (and will do in coming days).
I heard a pundit say, correctly, that this longtime Republican, Bloomberg, should be spending his vast fortune to secure the Republican nomination against Trump. Mayor Mike knows that would not be possible in the fearful cult of Trump that is currently the Republican party. So he runs as a Democrat, with the advantages of a demoralized, terrified Democratic electorate, a compliant mass media squelching meaningful public discussion of social and environmental justice during the presidential campaign, a desperate, willing DNC (one that won’t even allow the candidates to debate the best ways to deal with the escalating climate crisis) and unlimited funds, from his own money that he made entirely by himself, with no help from anybody.
Realpolitik, baby, the name of Mike Bloomberg’s sickening game. The practical art of attaining and wielding power divorced from moral, ethical, ideological or any other consideration, outside of gaining and maintaining power. Only in 2020 America, kids. Where the 1% can spend less than 1% to become a serious contender for heavyweight champion of the world.
This is Just the Way it is
Things are just the way they are. Most people believe that since we’re largely helpless to change even the most oppressive things about our lives, particularly the gigantic ones well beyond our influence, it’s best to simply develop a stoic attitude. It’s one thing to imagine a better world, it is a much harder thing to figure out how to bring about positive change to bring us closer to that imagined better world. Best to accept that this is just the way it is, we are powerless to change anything, however ugly and unjust some of the details of it might be. The best we can do is develop the serenity not to be tortured by injustice, we are taught.
Would the life of the average American be much more secure if nobody had to worry, on top of the fear over a life-threatening health challenge, about going bankrupt and becoming homeless if they get cancer or are grievously injured in a car crash? Sure, but IT’S SO COMPLICATED! Jobs lost, destroying lives, gigantic private companies out of business, almost two million jobs for health insurance middlemen and middlewomen lost forever… what if you like your doctor and a socialist death panel doesn’t allow you to see her? How will socialized medicine work? Who will decide? Won’t millions still die while waiting to see a doctor? Isn’t socialized medicine a disaster everywhere else in the world? I don’t want to die. I have good private health insurance, why should I jeopardize that, etc?
I don’t minimize any of these complications. Those two million people will have to be retrained, and paid while they learn new job skills. Some could probably be employed by the government administering the program that will be replacing their jobs. How to make the transition to a better health care system is a real discussion, it will take some hard work to find workable solutions to real problems. Is it unimaginable to live in a country where nobody has to make the unthinkable choice between losing their home and seeking treatment for a deadly disease? I don’t think so. Particularly since every other wealthy nation has that kind of system already.
I tend to put much of America’s pessimism about positive change down to the billions spent in the corporate media to convince us that the way things are is simply the inevitable result of freedom in a democracy. We are influenced by the often pernicious myths we are fed every day, in ads, in the way news stories are presented (what facts and voices are excluded from the conversation), by a skilled group of well-paid talking heads, speaking persuasively over corporate media, telling us how things actually are.
Listening to this stream of persuasion we come to believe things, Most of us succumb to this wall of inevitability that is presented to us. Things like: it is inevitable, of course, that the boldest and the brightest, if they work hard enough, will succeed. That the accident of your birth will be a huge factor in whether this is true or not will not be mentioned. Though there is, by objective measure, less social mobility here in the USA than in most other wealthy nations (born poor die poor and born rich die rich are pretty much the rule, with notable famous exceptions that can be cited to “disprove” this rule) we all prefer to believe that the American Dream is attainable by anyone who works hard enough. You can work very hard at McDonald’s, but the rewards will not be as great as if you are working very hard (or even hardly working) as the youngest executive at your dad’s billion dollar company. [1] That’s simply the way it is, the way it has always been, grow up and get over it, loser.
This quickly heating frog soup water we are all marinating in is, to a large extent, the result of irrefutable corporate logic. Corporations have armies of lawyers and lobbyists, as well as public relations geniuses, making sure that the law favors their profit-driven activities, for reasons the public can understand as philanthropic. If there is a regulation that will cost a corporation millions to comply with, a team of top shelf lawyers is sent to court to fight its enforcement. I have a friend who spent his legal career dutifully, and skillfully, fighting this army of lawyers in case after case in federal court. He went to court over and over to get a judge to order a US government agency to enforce its own laws, in each specific case he was forced to argue.
There was a regulation that stated that a corporation could not engage in this practice (that was destroying a habitat, dumping toxic waste, whatever) without first doing these other things that ensured certain protections for the rest of us. The corporation had not done these things, the facts made clear. The law was clear. So, at the end of litigation, were the loopholes uncovered by the army of corporate lawyers who’d proceed to drive the bulldozers through those loopholes.
We learn, because corporations, unlike us, have no feelings, no conscience, are incapable of moral judgments about anything outside of the best way to increase profits for shareholders, that it is futile to fight these monsters. Those of us who persist in these kind of draining, one-sided battles, insisting on our “rights” (the express limitations of which are, after all, excruciatingly spelled out in the corporately drawn contracts we are forced to accept) are considered by many to be masochists madly tilting at windmills. The corporation will almost always win. Getting the benefit of your bargain with them, if they are intent on shortchanging you, will require superhuman patience and resilience. Best to avoid! Take your screwing, go have a nice dinner, go watch a comedy.
The alternative? The new computer you bought does not perform one essential function? Call the company, speak to polite men in India, have them run the diagnostic tests on your computer. Wait for them to tell you that your computer has passed all the required diagnostics. The problem is not from the “hardware”, it is a “software configuration” problem that is expressly excluded from the warranty. They will provide a paid service to fix it, if you’d like to be placed on hold to learn more about this service. You can’t be told the price, because the corporation does not let the technicians at the “out of warranty” department communicate that information to the warranty department. Why is this feature out of warranty? We will send you the warranty, sir, you can read its 15,000 tiny words for yourself. Believe us, sir, we’d like to help, if we could. And as to the paid service, don’t worry, the paid service is “take it or leave it”, you needn’t pay anything if you don’t like the price.
If you are willing to endure however many hours will be required to solve the problem with your otherwise nifty new computer, you can learn, eventually, that the company was misstating their warranty policy for a brand new computer. As one would hope, everything about the computer, including the configuration of the original software, is under warranty for a certain period. No need to pay the $239 for premium out of warranty service, $169 for premium limited out of warranty service or even the $129 for a one-time fix. Not your financial responsibility to pay the company for fixing a bug that came loaded on to their brand new machine. No need to endure a long, aggravating hold to learn the fixed prices for this service!
Of course, the psychic price you will generally be asked to pay to learn this may be unreasonably high for most people. I wound up screaming in uncontrollable anguish near the end of an entire frustrating day, mostly on hold, listening either to an annoying loop of upbeat muzak or to endlessly repeated ads for the computer company. My life was temporarily ruined by my exertions yesterday, in a real sense. Sekhnet is not talking to so far me today. Even though the last call of the day came with good news. My complaint had been escalated, the computer will be fixed free of charge, nobody should have been put through what I was yesterday and the night before. Apologies all around.
Of course, I had to remember and deploy the word “escalate” before reaching this resolution. The last supervisor I spoke to, while empathetic and apologetic, was unable to really do anything for me. She regretted this and apologized again for her inability to be more helpful. Until I reached into my expanding corporate lexicon and pulled out the magic word “escalate”. Yes, that was something she could do, she would escalate my complaint. Shortly after my issue was “escalated” I got a call back from someone who could actually solve the problem. Like magic, after only a handful of hours of frustration. Just the way it is.
[1] My grandparents arrived in America twenty years before the Nazis wiped out everyone else in their families. Jared Kushner’s grandparents were in Europe during those nightmarish Nazi years and managed to survive and reach America. My grandparents worked very hard, every day. Jared’s grandparents also worked very hard every day. It would be impossible to say which couple worked harder. Jared’s grandparents started with two dollars between them, the unlikely story goes. A generation later: billionaire owners of a real estate empire. My grandparents, who I assume came with more than two dollars between them, died owning a one-bedroom apartment in Miami Beach and not much else. C’est la vie, baby.
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