I said nearly as much in response to Abby Ohlheiser's brief and tautly reasoned “Ginsburg's Passionate 35-Page Dessent of Hobby Lobby Decision,” part of my daily email from Reader Supported News. Six
days later,my suspicions intensified by many hours of research, what
began as an embittered comment-thread remark had become the key passage
of this column:
Assuming
the correctness of Justice Ginsburg's dissent, the impact of the Hobby
Lobby decision is far more devastating than we are being told by
mainstream media.
The devastation is inherent in the fact at least 90 percent of U.S. business is “closely held.”
Hobby
Lobby thus allows the imposition of theocratic restrictions on most of
the U.S. workplace. Not only does this abolish the reproductive freedom
of most of the workforce; it is also a giant step toward replacing
constitutional governance with Biblical law – a subversive goal lavishly
funded by the One Percent as the ultimate means of subjugating the
Working Class.
Meanwhile,
imposition of theocracy via the private sector has become a standard
Christian tactic. The takeover of the nation's health care facilities by
the Roman Catholic Church is already, wherever it occurs, prohibiting
access to all forms of contraception.
Financially,
Hobby Lobby's main beneficiaries are the insurance barons. By making
birth control unobtainable, the ruling further maximizes Affordable Care
Act profits. Mandatory insurance generates obscene windfall profits
even as prohibitively expensive co-pays and deductibles radically limit
the public's ability to actually obtain care. Hobby Lobby furthers this
process, minimizing cost by eliminating birth control from ACA coverage.
Given the lies and treachery by which we are now ruled, who can doubt this atrocity was carefully scripted in advance?
Though
the president's sycophants will loudly denounce any such notion as
unthinkable, U.S. history proves otherwise. Legislation at all levels –
federal, state and local – is invariably peddled as an essential
solution to some pressing crisis. But many such measures are sneakily
written to perpetuate the very grievances they falsely claim to redress.
By legalistic sleight-of-hand and other devious means – especially
alleged “benefits” that on closer inspection turn out to be nonexistent –
they defeat the democratic will of the people and impose instead the
tyrannical goals and objectives of Ruling Class politicians and
bureaucrats. Under the direction of their One Percent masters, these
functionaries have honed the strategy and tactics of deliberate
deception to sadistic perfection at every level of government – federal,
state or local – inside the United States and its possessions.
The
associated methodology is obviously a Machiavellian variant of the
marketing practices by which the capitalists routinely dupe us into
buying defective products. In the marketplace it is infuriating. In its
political application – with all its heightened expectation of
collective socioeconomic improvement and its subsequent plunge into
defeat and disillusionment – it is perhaps the most injurious
psychological warfare weapon in the Ruling Class arsenal. Not only does
it foster alienation and despair; it subverts democracy and undermines
even the hope of democracy by convincing us the entire democratic
processes is a sham.
An
ultimate example of this sort of deception is the New Deal. By
ameliorating the morally imbecilic savagery of capitalism, it co-opted,
demobilized and eventually dispersed a definitively revolutionary
majority coalition of Communists, other socialists, Progressives and
Left Democrats. But it (deliberately) preserved the irresistible power
of the One Percent and thereby ensured its own eventual death. It also
facilitated – chiefly by temporarily disguising the predatory nature of
capitalism – the re-emergence of capitalism's unapologetic malevolence.
Another
example is Medicare, which is funded by a combination of payroll taxes
and mandatory premiums. It is touted as a European-style program that
provides health care to all the nation's citizens age 65 and over and to
recipients of Social Security Disability Insurance stipends as well.
Though Medicare is widely believed to signal the government's
endorsement of the principle that health care is a human right, in truth
it does nothing of the kind. It covers only “about 48 percent” of an individual's authorized health-care costs
– far less if the non-reimbursed costs of vision, hearing and dental
services are included in the calculations. The remainder, 52 percent of
the approved expenses plus the full price of everything else that is not
covered – eye glasses, hearing aids, dental care, many other services –
comes out of the so-called beneficiary's pocket.
“No
part of Medicare,” states the reference linked in the preceding
paragraph, “pays for all of a beneficiary's covered medical costs, and
many costs are not covered at all.” For the average recipient, the
necessary co-payments and deductibles are too often prohibitive.
This means innumerable Medicare recipients, though saddled with the
mandatory premiums deducted from their Social Security pensions, are
chronically unable to obtain adequate health care. They are locked out
of the system by its additional fees. And the little Medicare does cover
is under constant attack by Republicans and Democrats alike –
one of the many ways the two Ruling Class parties demonstrate their
absolute fealty to the One Percenters, who now make no secret of the
fact they regard humanitarian expenditures as wasted money. The only
people genuinely served by Medicare are thus the wealthy, for whom it is
merely another bonus on a seemingly endless list of taxpayer-funded
subsidies.
Medicare's
functions are therefore actually fourfold. (1)-Medicare rewards the
wealthy. (2)-It punishes – and sometimes exterminates – the poor. (3)-It
locks into place the U.S. definition of health care as a privilege of
wealth rather than a human right. (The definition's perpetuity is
achieved by a system so impossibly complex, no group of citizens can
change it without the intervention of politicians and bureaucrats –
which means the citizens' efforts are invariably betrayed.) (4)-By its
opacity, Medicare enables the U.S. to promulgate the Big Lie – within
and without – that it offers some of its citizens a genuine universal
health-care program.
Obamacare
serves exactly the same functions in precisely the same ways. It is
mandatory. The premiums it extracts are providing the health insurance
cartel with the largest, most obscene windfall profits in its history –
another of the president's innumerable gifts to his Wall Street masters.
Yet Obamacare's deductibles and co-pays discourage and/or prohibit most
of its alleged beneficiaries from fulfilling their medical needs. Like
Medicare, its complexities make it incomprehensible save by politicians
and bureaucrats, which further cements into permanence the U.S.
definition of health care as a privilege of wealth. And, again like
Medicare, it enables U.S. propaganda to disseminate another Big Lie
intended to disguise the deadly barbarism of its Ayn Rand economics.
Such
are the ways of capitalist governance – absolute power and unlimited
profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for everyone else. Such
too is the unmitigated deception that is the operational context of all
U.S. health care.
It
is in this same context Obamacare's triumphant claim “being female is
no longer a pre-existing condition” emerges as yet another Big Lie.
(Readers who are unfamiliar with the for-profit U.S. medical system
should note that until the advent of the so-called Affordable Care Act,
the health insurance barons charged radically higher premiums
for insuring reproductive-age females.) Obama the Orator repeatedly
assured the voters such discrimination would soon be ended. But after he
won the presidency, he shape-shifted into Barack the Betrayer. In that
persona, he almost certainly guaranteed the insurance barons they would
soon regain their ability to exploit female genitalia as a profit
center. Even if he did not, it is beyond belief he and his
insurance-cartel henchmen – armed as they were with all their market
research and secret-police surveillance data – did not foresee the Hobby
Lobby lawsuit or some other action that would yield the same result.
In
any case, it is increasingly obvious the Hobby Lobby decision has now
permanently rescinded what women regarded as the most compelling aspect
of the ACA. As the Associated Press reported the day after the decision
– “The Supreme Court has left in place lower court rulings in favor of
businesses that object to covering all methods of government-approved
contraception...not just the four pregnancy prevention methods and
devices that the court considered in its ruling.” Since then, at least 82 more companies have indicated they intend to cancel their employees' birth-control coverage.
Nor
is there any recourse. The fund-raising claims of several women's
organizations notwithstanding, Congressional remedies are impossible.
The aggressively reactionary, vindictively theocratic Republican
majority in the House has been gerrymandered into unbeatable permanence.
And as reported above, the president – whose theocratic leanings are so obvious they are provoking secularist protests – will not grant Hobby Lobby's growing roster of victims any other remedy.
Long
term, the Hobby Lobby ruling will probably enable employers and
insurers to force nearly all U.S. women to pay out of pocket for their
birth control. But these expenses, like Medicare and ACA co-pays and
deductibles, will be brutally prohibitive. Capitalism has downsized
nearly half the population's paychecks to poverty or lower-income levels.
As Justice Ginsberg noted in her epic dissent, the cost of a single
inter-uterine device or IUD “is nearly equivalent to a month's full-time
pay for workers earning the minimum wage." For women who cannot afford
the aristocratic privilege of self-financed contraception, the only
alternative is total surrender to misogyny: re-learning to despise their
own bodies – to fear their own sensuality, sexuality and fertility –
precisely as demanded by Christian doctrine and its regime of mandatory
chastity. Theocrats everywhere are gloating.
All
of which again underscores the fact that in the United States, health
care is a privilege of wealth and will remain so forever – that is,
until the nation as we know it is no more.
The Hobby-Lobby case also demonstrates the ever-more-terrifying likelihood biblical-law Christian theocracy will eventually replace Constitutional governance in the U.S homeland. Not only has the Supreme Court endorsed Jesus as the national deity; the forcible Christianization of the imperial military machine
has already produced legions of troops trained in theocratic
surveillance and oppression. The high command is now marching these
latter-day Inquisitors and Crusaders into place.
Unfortunately, only a few Cassandra columnists,
of whom I am surely one, dare write constantly and at length about the
inherent malevolence of the fanatical U.S. Christians and their schemes
for imposing a Christian version of Middle Eastern theocracy (complete
with public torture-executions for
rebellious women, homosexuals and all other so-called “heretics”). And
though we have been exposing these threats for years, our warnings are
often belittled or suppressed. The above linked piece by Chris Hedges,
for example, was suppressed by every major publication in the nation –
never mind his stature as a mainstream writer.
Meanwhile, the ever-more-emboldened theocrats now openly denounce all women who use contraception
as “creatures...who cannot control their libido.” Such malicious
slanders resurrect the bigoted dogmas of Abrahamic religion – Judaism,
Christianity, Islam – that all women are like the biblical Eve,
ruinously sinful, ready recruits for the Devil and therefore a seductive threat to every devout male. But as Truthout's William Rivers Pitt aptly puts it, the U.S. seemingly remains the “land of the free” – unless you're a woman.
Though
Pitt seems to carefully avoid such possibilities, it's impossible to
overlook that someday in this increasingly downtrodden nation, women's
cumulative anger might light the proverbial fuse. That's what happened
in Paris on 14 July 1789, likewise in Petrograd on International Women's
Day, 8 March 1917, 23 February by the old Tsarist calendar. The events
in Paris – first the city's wives and mothers provoked to riotous rage
by impossibly expensive bread, then the storming of the Bastille – are
well known, but what obtained in Petrograd has been obscured by distance
and anti-Russian propaganda, so I'll tell it once again: the
flint-hearted bosses of the massive Lesnoy Textile Works sacked five
women for trying to organize a union, and the women's 5,000 workplace
sisters boiled into the streets in furious protest. Within just a few
hours, their demonstration had exploded into the Russian Revolution.
LB/6 June 2014
-30-
(Note: this week's OAN omited “Agitation Elsewhere” to better focus on the unfolding Hobby Lobby story.)
