Inspection, Police Atrocities, Unhealthy Care, Iraq, Guns

THE INSPECTION THAT prompted me to pen a genuine rant last week is now behind me, and of course I passed – I always do – but the physical cost of preparing for two inspections in three weeks is such that my normal 24/7 pain has doubled.

This comes from various long-ago injuries inflamed by geriatric osteoarthritis, and its normal 2-3 range has doubled to a relentless 4-6 I can only hope will eventually abate.

The numbers refer to the medical profession's 1-to-10 discomfort scale, with my 10 – since as a male I have obviously never experienced childbirth – a wisdom tooth that simultaneously impacted and abscessed on a Friday at the beginning of a seemingly endless four-day holiday weekend, which meant no treatment was available until the following Tuesday. The pain was so intense that when I finally got to a dentist, I was lapsing in and out of unconsciousness.

Meanwhile, back in the present, the time these accursed inspections have stolen from my life – essentially 14 days counting preparation and aftermath – has effectively killed OAN for another week.

So again there will be no Cassandra column today, as I was once more too limited by opportunity and energy to do anything more than respond to other writers' work. Goddess grant by next week I'll be recovered enough to again do some original writing.

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In Case You Missed It: Outside Agitation Elsewhere

The Associated Press reported the angry response of an oppressed urban citizenry that for the past four years has been targeted by some of the most murderously brazen police brutality in the USian imperial homeland. Reader Supported News aptly headlined the AP story “Albuquerque Protesters Put Police Chief 'On Trial'.” I used its comment thread to reveal one of my darker suspicions – that the national epidemic of atrocities being inflicted on us by our federalized, militarized, Gestapo-ized local police is a top-level, One Percent-mandated experiment in which we the people are the lab rats – its purpose to determine how much we will suffer before our obedience and submission turns to rebellion.

This entire sequence of events – the police violence, the federal response – needs to be understood in its probable context:

(1)-Some federal agency or agencies responsible for the defense of capitalism – that is, the suppression of the Working Class – wondered how far the USian public can be pushed before it will revolt.

(2)-The federally militarized police were therefore ordered to behave in Albuquerque as an army of occupation.

(3)-After years of murderous brutality, the people rose up.

 

(4)-The federal government ordered an investigation.

(5)-The killing (maybe) stopped, not because the federal government stands for justice (just ask Edward Snowden), but because the feds now have a laboratory-tested yardstick of the intensity of oppression at which rebellion becomes likely.

Such is life – and death – under capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for everyone else.

 

Such is capitalism itself: infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – the morally imbecilic rejection of every humanitarian precept our species ever set forth.

Such is our Ayn Rand future: posh, impregnable palaces for the One Percenters and their politicians, bureaucrats, military officers and police commanders; for all of us, the slave world of the electronic concentration camp and the darkest Dark Age our species has ever known.

Wake up, people: Cassandra columnists like Chris Hedges are speaking naught but the hideous truth.

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Tara Culp-Ressler of ThinkProgress bared some nauseating facts about the one industrialized nation on this dying planet in which health care remains a privilege of wealth, a genocidal condition intentionally perpetuated by Barack the Betrayer's so-called “Affordable Care Act,” the name of which is itself a Big Lie so outrageous it would make Josef Goebbels proud. Culp-Ressler's damning report, “The US Has the Most Expensive and Least Effective Health Care in the Developed World,” thus prompted a good deal of applause and agreement, some of which was mine:

Absolutely. The health-care difference between the civilized world and the United States is that in the civilized world, health care is intended to genuinely care for the people. But in the U.S., what is deceptively labeled “health care” actually has an antithetical purpose. It exists (A)-to make the obscenely wealthy aristocracy wealthier and (B)-to exterminate lower-income people by defining health care as a privilege of wealth rather than a basic human right.

Moreover, the Affordable Care Act – so-called “Obamacare” – does nothing to change the U.S. system's genocidal Ayn Rand dynamics. In fact it locks them in place forever.

By making health insurance mandatory, it enables USian propagandists to generate the Big Lie of near-universal insurance. But its profit-boosting co-pays and deductibles still make health care prohibitively expensive. Hence its victims – and that is precisely what we are – are now forced to pay for insurance we can never afford to use. The result is the huge windfall with which Barack the Betrayer gifted the insurance barons.

It is also a classic example of the miasma of lies, disinformation and murder by which capitalism perpetuates its bottomless evil – infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – the morally imbecilic rejection of every humanitarian precept our species has ever expressed.

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Apropos health care and capitalism, a Crosscut piece entitled “Is the NW a breeding ground for a new kind of capitalism?” prompted a discussion-thread that enabled me to protest how upper management is converting my beloved Group Health Cooperative into a personal profit center for predatory business-school graduates:

(T)hough (Group Health) remains officially a cooperative, nearly all the old socialist spirit that back in the '70s prompted me to become a permanent voting member of the co-op has been extinguished.

Meanwhile the greed of its MBA-brandishing, Ayn-Rand-minded management is methodically revising Group Health's policies to make it indistinguishable from any for-profit insurance company, and it is apparently up-scaling (gentrifying) its customer base accordingly.

Given the moral imbecility at the core of the MBA ethos, such focus on managerial profiteering is now as likely to occur in allegedly “non-profit” contexts as it is in conventional capitalism.

Thus to boost revenues Group Health has done what only a few years ago would have been unthinkable. It has suppressed its members' reproductive and end-of-life rights by subcontracting with the viciously theocratic Franciscan (Roman Catholic) Health System for lowest-bid hospital care.

While the Franciscan arrangement is objectionable for many reasons, its significance here is its proof that boosting revenues, which is essential to boost managerial compensation packages, has taken precedence over patients' physical and emotional wellbeing.

Predictably, as if to declare its new pro-managerial orientation, a recent Group Health document, “Patient Financial Responsibility ('Rev. Date 2014112'),” omits the term “cooperative” entirely and describes the organization as “your insurance company.”

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What is destroying Group Health is of course capitalism:

Even camouflaged by euphemisms and lies, the core value of capitalism is infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue. Capitalism is therefore, exactly as described by its disciple Ayn Rand, the morally imbecilic rejection of every humanitarian precept our species ever put forth – human history's closest approximation to absolute evil.

 

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Anyone who seeks to understand what is happening in Iraq should read “Who Are Iraq's Sunni Arabs and What Did We Do to Them?,” a superb backgrounder by Juan Cole of Informed Comment. My contribution to the comment thread thus appropriately started with an expression of gratitude:

Thank you, RSN and Mr. Cole, for this vital background.

But then I focused on what – perhaps even more than petroleum lust – I'm sure prompted the folly of what will no doubt soon be known as the First Iraq War:

As to what truly motivated Bush and still motivates his henchmen (including John Kerry and Hillary Clinton), Mr. Cole's last paragraph says it all:

“Sunni Iraqis had been in the 20th century cosmopolitan and often modernists. Many were liberals yearning for democracy. From 1968 they turned to more of a Soviet model, a strongly secular one.”

Thus again we witness the bottomless savagery of USian imperialism – In Vietnam, “we had to destroy the village to save it” (from Communism). Now it's the destruction of a whole nation to “save” it from Communist influences. Next will be the entire planet.

Such is the absolute evil of capitalism – infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – the violently malicious rejection of every humanitarian precept our species ever set forth.

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Unfinished Dirty Business: Antivenin for an Anti-Gun Snakebite

Scatterbrained and hurting as I was with the preparation for the quarterly premises inspection, I failed to notice how a poster who hides behind the screen-name Billy Bob had slandered me in the comment-thread hissy provoked by a significant truth – that Civil Rights Movement non-violence was empowered by armed African-American citizens – a definitive reality the forcible-disarmament fanatics have been desperately trying to flush down the Orwell hole for six decades.

As I noted last week, Charles E. Cobb Jr.'s forthcoming book boldly defies the USian Left's rabid, froth-at-the-mouth hatred of firearms and firearms owners, a cultoid malice so hysterically envenomed, its disciples reflexively damn gun-owning progressives as “Nazis” – yes, literally. Reader Supported News published Cobb's important essay about the book, but some RSN editor (deliberately?) omitted its title, perhaps expressing the very hatefulness I just cited. Thus I had to ferret out the title for myself. It's a long one – too long for any competent editor to accidentally overlook: This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (Basic Books: 2014).

Meanwhile, Billy Bob's antagonism toward me had shown that where firearms are concerned, the Left – at least the pseudo-Left that won't rest until the Working Class is totally disarmed – has its own equivalent of the Hard Right's corps of Big Liars and Ku Klux demagogues.

I replied appropriately:

Billy: I'm sorry I was too preoccupied with the demands of survival to note earlier the personal venomousness of your response.

If you'd bothered to learn anything about me, you'd know I'm a 74-year-old semi-retired journalist, a former Civil Rights, Anti-Vietnam-War, back-to-the-land, alternative-press and Occupy activist. A declared socialist, I currently serve on a 15 Now organizing committee.

Hence for you to try – as you did above – to maliciously equate me with the Republican Sharron Angle (whose name you misspelled), merely puts you at one with those fanatically anti-gun Democrats and anti-union “progressives” who hysterically slander all supporters of the Second Amendment as “Nazis.”

I thank you for that disclosure. I will keep it in mind anytime I read anything else of yours – if indeed I bother. I will also remember the craven cowardice of hiding behind screen-name anonymity to insult a person who posts under his or her own name.

 

That said, never in my life have I advocated political violence. Nor will I. Though the death of the Soviet Union has forever doomed non-violent resistance to capitalism – that's why “hope” is idiocy rather than “audacity” – I have also glimpsed the face of war, and that alone mandates my lifelong commitment to political non-violence.

Meanwhile your nasty effort to associate me with “Second Amendment remedies” is surely reminiscent of the defining tactics of agents-provocateur.

LB/22 June 2014

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